She opened her eyes.
Still catching her breath, still warm and loose from everything that had come before, she looked up at me with the expression of someone who had just been thoroughly taken apart and was only now remembering that the night was not over.
"My turn," I said again.
Something flickered in her eyes. Not fear. Anticipation.
"What does that mean," she said.
"It means you have had your way," I said. "Now I have mine."
I took her by the hips and turned her.
She went without resistance, ending up on her hands and knees with her dark hair falling forward and her back a long pale line in the candlelight. I ran my hand from the base of her spine upward, slowly, feeling her shiver under the contact.
"Kael."
"I know what you want," I said. "But I decide the pace."
She made a sound that was somewhere between protest and agreement and pressed back toward me, which answered the question of whether she objected.
I gripped her hips and entered her again from behind, deeper than before, and she dropped her head and exhaled a long broken sound into the pillow beneath her.
I gave her a moment. One moment, enough to feel the difference, enough to adjust. Then I began to move.
The pace I set was not slow. Not the careful unhurried rhythm of before. This was something else, deliberate and driving, each thrust deep enough that she shifted forward and had to brace against the headboard. She did, her hands pressing flat against the wood, and the sound she made when I pulled her back by the hips to meet me was raw and completely unguarded.
"There," I said.
"Yes," she managed. "Yes, there, do not stop—"
I did not stop.
I reached forward and gathered her hair in one hand, not rough, just holding, tilting her head back enough that I could see the line of her throat and the way her mouth had fallen open. Her back arched. Her whole body was working with me now, pushing back to meet every thrust, her earlier composure so entirely gone that there was nothing left of it.
I gripped her breast with my free hand, her skin warm and soft, and she cried out at that, a short desperate sound that she did not try to muffle.
"Louder than that," I said.
She was. She could not help it.
I drove into her without mercy and without pause, my hands on her hips pulling her back to meet me, the sound of skin against skin filling the room.
She had stopped forming words. Just sounds now, each one pulled out of her by each thrust, her knuckles white against the headboard, her whole body trembling with the effort of holding herself upright.
I felt her tighten around me.
"Not yet," I said.
"I cannot—" she gasped. "I cannot stop it—"
"Then hold it."
A sound that was almost a sob. Her body shook. She held it, barely, her breathing ragged, her hands pressing hard against the headboard.
I leaned forward, my lips close to her ear.
"Now," I said.
She came apart like something breaking cleanly, a single long cry and then her whole body convulsing around me, her arms giving out, her face dropping to the pillow, the orgasm moving through her in waves she had no control over whatsoever.
I did not stop. I drove through every wave of it, her body gripping me with a pressure that pulled a sound from my own throat, my hands locked on her hips, the heat of her and the tightness of her and the sounds she was still making all of it building toward something that had been inevitable since the moment she had walked upstairs and told me to follow.
I buried myself deep and came hard, her name in my chest rather than my throat, the release moving through me in a long hot rush that left me shaking and still and entirely present.
Neither of us moved for a moment.
Then I pulled her down with me onto the bed and she collapsed against my side without a word, her breathing wrecked, her hand finding my chest and resting there with the boneless weight of someone who had nothing left.
***
The candle was almost gone.
Mira lay with her eyes closed and her hair tangled and her expression the most peaceful I had ever seen it, which was saying something for a woman who carried herself with the steady self-possession of someone who had learned long ago to want nothing she could not provide for herself.
She had wanted this. She had come upstairs and asked for it and taken what she needed and given what she had and now she was asleep against my side with one hand over my heart as if checking that it was still there.
I looked at the ceiling.
The Devotion Map showed her thread bright and close, warmer than it had ever been, the bond between us something settled and certain that had moved past the shape of a first connection into something with more weight.
Outside Varenfall was quiet. Tomorrow I would walk to the Governor's hall and meet Lady Calla Drent for the first time and begin whatever that chapter was going to be.
But that was tomorrow.
Tonight the room was warm and the candle guttered out and Mira breathed slow and even against my side, and I closed my eyes and let the dark take me.
First Bond: fully established.
She is yours and she chose to be.