Page 27 of Reckless Heir
He works me through it. Doesn't stop. His fingers ride the pulses of it, gentler now but still moving, still inside me, still pressing against that spot while the aftershocks roll through and my forehead drops to the cold altar stone and my breath comes in broken pieces.
When the last tremor fades, he withdraws his hand.
Slowly. Deliberately. He lifts his fingers — wet with me, glistening in the candelabra light — and brings them to his mouth. He tastes me, once, without breaking eye contact with the nearest Regent.
Then he reaches past me and picks up the iron brand.
He holds it in the candelabra fire and I watch it glow from silver to amber to a low, dangerous red, and the heat of what just happened is still inside me and the mark is coming and my breath, which had been steadying, stops entirely.
My whole body has gone very still.
"Aleksei."
"I won't scar you." His voice is quiet. The performance of the chapel is gone from it — this is the other voice, the one I've been cataloguing in the garage and the study and the pit lane corridor. "It will mark. It won't disfigure." He meets my eyes over my shoulder. "Do you trust me?"
"No."
"Sofia."
"I don't—" My voice is not holding. "I don't trust you. I don't want this. I?—"
"I know," he says. And theI knowis not a dismissal. It is an acknowledgment. He holds my eyes and saysI knowthe way you say it when you're asking someone to let you do the thing anyway, and the request is being made honestly, and there is no pretense in the room about what it is.
The Regents watch.
My heart is doing something very loud.
I close my eyes.
He presses the brand to the curve of my hip.
The heat is sharp and brief and specific — not the prolonged burn I'd been bracing for, but a single searing second that takes my breath and then releases it, leaving behind the specific ache of a thing that has been made permanent. I make a sound. Not a scream. Something smaller and more honest than a scream — a sharp exhale, bitten off, that costs me almost every piece of composure I have left.
His palm covers the mark immediately. Cool, flat, deliberate. Not the brand — just his hand, covering the hurt, and the gesture is so unexpectedly careful that I go very still in his arms.
"Breathe," he says against my hair.
I breathe.
"Yours," I say, when I can speak. My forehead is on the stone altar. My hands are flat against the cold surface. My whole body is shaking in the specific way of a thing that has been taken apart and hasn't been told how to put itself back yet. "Yours."
It costs me something to say it a second time. More than the first. The firstyourswas extracted. This one I give.
His hands arrange my dress. Careful, deliberate — smoothing the fabric back into place, slow and precise, like he's restoring something rather than covering something. He turns me from the altar. His thumb traces a tear I didn't notice I'd made, from the corner of my left eye, and he wipes it away without comment, which is its own kind of acknowledgment.
The Regents are dispersing from the choir stalls behind us, their masked faces retreating into shadow, and the curtain drops.
"Now they know," he says. Quiet. Only for me.
Now they know.
And so do I — but what I know and what he knows are, I suspect, two different things, and I don't have the resources right now to figure out what they are.
I know only the mark on my hip.
And the sound he made that wasn't for the Regents.
And his hand covering the hurt immediately after, with a care that didn't need to be there and was.
