The door clicked shut. The music died mid-phrase — a harp string cut, the laughter of four hundred guests swallowed whole — and then there was only the hiss of candle flames and her own breath loud in her ears.

His hands found her waist before she could turn. He spun her, quick and certain, so that her palms hit the carved cedar and her cheek followed, the wood warm and faintly tacky under her fingers where someone had polished it that morning. The silver of her gown whispered against the door. She heard him behind her — the shift of his weight, the catch of his breath — and then his mouth was on the side of her throat, open and hot, and she felt the scrape of his teeth.

“You said my name,” he murmured against her skin. “At the altar. You said it like you were already mine.”

“I am.” The words came out wrong — too fast, too raw — and she felt her face burn against the wood.

He laughed, low, and the sound traveled down her spine and settled somewhere low in her belly. His hand slid up her ribs, over the silk, and closed around her breast. He squeezed once, deliberate, thumb dragging across the fabric until he found her nipple and pressed. She arched into the door, a small helpless sound escaping her, and behind her he made a rougher noise, half growl, half breath.

His other hand went to her hip. He pulled her back against him, and she felt him — the whole length of him, hard and heavy against the small of her back, the heat of him through his tunic and her gown. His thigh pushed between her legs, parting her, and the silk rode up her thighs in a slow rush. Cool air on her skin. Then his leg, pressing up. She ground down against it before she could stop herself, and the friction made her eyes water.

“Glorfindel—”

He turned her face with two fingers under her chin and kissed her. Honeyed wine from the ceremony still on his tongue, and beneath it something darker, salt and heat, the taste of a man who had been holding himself back for hours and had just stopped. She kissed him back with her whole body, fingers twisting into the front of his tunic, pulling him closer even as he pressed her harder against the door.

He broke the kiss. His forehead rested against hers for one breath. She could feel his pulse in his jaw.

“Turn around,” he said.

She didn’t move. Not because she didn’t want to — because she wanted him to make her. Something flickered across his face, gold eyes going dark, and he understood. His hand closed on the back of her neck, not hard, just there — a claim — and he turned her himself, slow, until her cheek was against the wood again and her hands were flat on either side of her head.

His mouth found the nape of her neck. He bit down, just enough to make her gasp, and then his hands were at her hips, gathering the silver silk, dragging it up her thighs in fistfuls. The gown bunched at her waist. Cool air moved across her bare legs, across the backs of her knees, and then higher, and she felt her own wetness cool on her inner thighs where it had been gathering since the ceremony, since the first time he’d looked at her across the hall and she’d known exactly what he was thinking about.

His hands stopped at her hips. For a moment he just stood there behind her, breathing, and she could feel his gaze on her — on the backs of her thighs, on the curve of her ass, on whatever he could see of her between them. She pressed her forehead into the door and waited. The waiting was its own kind of touch.

“You’re dripping,” he said quietly. Not a question.

“Yes.”

“Say it.”

“I’m—” She swallowed. Her voice came out thin. “I’m wet. For you. Since the vows.”

The sound he made was not quite a word. Then he dropped.

She felt him go — the loss of his body behind her, the shift of the air — and then his knees hit the cedar floor with a thud that traveled up through the door into her hands. His breath was on the back of her thigh. Then his mouth. He kissed the inside of her knee, slow and open, and worked his way up — the soft skin behind her knee, the hollow of her thigh, the crease where her leg met her hip — and each kiss was wetter than the last, each one closer, and she was trembling before he had even reached her.

His nose brushed her cunt through the last of the silk. She heard him inhale — long, deliberate, like a man breathing in the first air after a storm — and then his hands were on her ass, thumbs spreading her, and his tongue was there.

Flat. Hot. From her clit all the way up, slow, one long stroke that made her whole body jerk against the door. She cried out — a sound she didn’t recognize as hers — and her hands scrabbled on the wood, nails catching on the carving, looking for something to hold. There was nothing. Just the door and him.

He did it again. Slower this time, like he was learning her, and she felt every ridge of his tongue, every degree of the heat of his mouth, and somewhere behind her the candle flames must have moved because the light through the silk shifted and dimmed and brightened and she couldn’t tell if her eyes were open.

“Glorfindel—fuck—”

He hummed against her. The vibration went through her clit and up into her belly and she bucked back against his face, shameless, and he took it, letting her grind against his mouth while his tongue worked her in steady circles, then flat, then pointed, then circles again. His hands on her ass held her open. His thumbs pressed into the crease of her, not entering, just there, just pressure, and she felt every nerve in her body draw tight like a bowstring.

He pulled his mouth away. She made a sound — a real one, a protest — and he laughed against her thigh.

“Look at you,” he said. His voice was wrecked already, rough as gravel. “Four hundred years, Ellanor. Four hundred years I’ve waited to taste you, and you’re going to come on my tongue before I’ve had a chance to enjoy it.”

“Then enjoy it,” she managed. “I’m not going anywhere.”

He laughed again — and then his mouth was back, and this time there was no learning in it. His tongue found her clit and stayed there, working it with a rhythm that was somehow both patient and merciless, and two of his fingers slid up between her legs and pressed into her.

She sobbed. There was no other word for the sound. The stretch of his fingers — callused, thick, wet from her own slick — was so exactly what she needed that her knees nearly went out from under her. He curled them inside her, found the place that made her vision white at the edges, and pressed, and kept pressing, while his tongue never stopped.

“Please,” she heard herself say. “Please, please—”

He pulled his fingers out and pushed them back in, slow, and she felt every knuckle. His tongue flicked faster. His other hand left her ass and slid up her spine under the silk, palm flat against her back, holding her steady against the door while his mouth took her apart.

She came with his name in her mouth.

It rolled up through her from somewhere below her hips — a long, deep clench that pulled his fingers in and held them, her whole body bowing against the door, her forehead grinding into the wood, her thighs clamping around his ears. He didn’t stop. He worked her through it, tongue easing, fingers still curled inside her, until the last shudder ran out of her and her legs gave and she sagged against the door with her cheek on the cedar and her breath coming in torn pieces.

His mouth gentled. He kissed her — soft, closed-mouthed — on the inside of her thigh, and then on the other, and then he pulled his fingers out of her slowly and she felt the wet drag of them, and heard him put them in his mouth.

She turned her head against the door, just enough to look down. He was still on his knees on the cedar floor, his tunic dark with sweat at the collar, his black hair falling into his face, his gold eyes fixed up at her from below. His mouth was wet. His chin was wet. He looked like a man who had just been given something he had spent a very long time wanting, and was not yet finished being grateful for it.

“Come here,” she whispered.

He didn’t move. He stayed there, looking up at her, and something in his face shifted — not hunger, exactly. Something quieter and more dangerous. His hand closed around her ankle, thumb resting on the bone, and he held her there against the door like she was something he had caught and intended to keep.

The candlelight moved on the silk. Somewhere past the door, muffled by cedar and stone, the harp had started up again — a different tune, slower, and the sound of it was so far away it might have been another life. Her own heartbeat was still loud in her ears. Her thighs were slick and trembling. The cedar under her feet was warm from where he’d been kneeling, and she could feel the heat of it through the soles of her slippers.

He still hadn’t said anything.

“Glorfindel,” she said. Her voice came out steadier than she expected. “What are you doing?”

He kissed the inside of her ankle. Then he let go, and rose.

He rose the way a tide comes in — no hurry in it, no wasted motion. His knees cracked once, soft against the cedar, and then he was standing, and she had forgotten how much taller he was, how he could blot the candlelight just by stepping close. His hands found her hips and turned her again, gently this time, until her back met the door and her face was to him and the whole length of the room lay behind his shoulders, red and gold and flickering.

Up close she could see what she'd done to him. His jaw was wet. A strand of black hair clung to his cheekbone where her slick had dried. His tunic was dark down the front where he'd leaned into her, and there was a shine on the collar of it, and she understood with a slow, hot drop in her stomach that he had not touched himself once — that all of it, every mark on him, was her.

“You asked what I'm doing,” he said. His voice had gone quiet, which was worse than the gravel. “I'm looking at my wife.”

The word landed somewhere under her ribs. She'd heard it four hundred times tonight — from the celebrant, from the lords, from her own mouth at the altar — and it had never once sounded like this. Like a door being locked from the inside.

His thumb traced the line of her hipbone through the bunched silk. He did not push the gown down. He left it exactly where he'd dragged it, a silver rope at her waist, and the air moved against her bare thighs every time he breathed.

“You're cold,” he said.

“I'm not.”

“You're shaking.”

“That's not cold.”

Something moved behind his eyes — not a smile, but the country a smile comes from. He reached past her and lifted the heavy fur throw from the bench beside the door, and he wrapped it around her shoulders instead of covering her legs, which she understood a moment later was deliberate, because it left her thighs bare to the room and warm everywhere else, and the contrast made her skin feel like a struck bell.

“Better?”

“You did that on purpose.”

“I did everything on purpose,” he said. “I have been doing things on purpose since the moment I saw you in the receiving line, and if you had any sense you would have run for the coast.”

She laughed — a real laugh, startled out of her, too loud for the room — and his face changed when she did it. The gold went soft at the edges. He looked at her mouth like he was filing the sound away for a winter he intended to spend with her.

“Say the vow,” she said.

He went still.

“The last one. The one the celebrant made you repeat.” She pulled the fur tighter with one hand and slid the other flat against his chest, over the wet silk, over the heartbeat she could feel running under it like something hunted. “I want to hear it in this room. Not in front of them.”

For a long moment he only looked at her. Then he took her wrist — light, the way you take something breakable — and lifted her hand off his chest and pressed her palm flat against the door above her head, and held it there.

“I bound my body to yours,” he said. Low. Each word set down like a stone in a wall. “My house, my name, my sword, my years. All of it yours to spend.”

She tried to breathe and found the air had gone thick.

“And the rest.”

“There is no rest.”

“There is,” she said. “You know there is. You wrote it yourself — I saw the draft on your desk, the one you crossed out twice. Say that part.”

His hand tightened around her wrist. Not hard. Around it. She watched him decide.

“And my hunger,” he said at last, so quietly she felt it more than heard it, “I bind to yours. Where you go, it goes. What you want, it wants. It does not sleep, and it does not tire, and it does not belong to me anymore.”

The candle on the sill guttered and recovered. Somewhere far off, past two doors and a corridor of stone, the court was still dancing — she could feel the floor's faint tremor through her slippers, all those feet, all those people who had watched her say yes an hour ago without knowing what it meant.

“That's the one,” she said. Her voice had gone to almost nothing. “That's the one I wanted.”

He let go of her wrist. Her hand stayed where he'd put it, flat on the wood, without her deciding to leave it there, and she noticed that — noticed that her own body had stopped taking orders from her and started taking them from him — and the noticing sent a slow heat up the backs of her legs.

He stepped back. One pace. Then another, until he was at the middle of the little room where the light was best, and he stood there with his hands loose at his sides and looked at her from across the fur rug like she was a thing he had bought and paid for and was now, at his leisure, going to unwrap.

“Come here,” he said.

“You came to me before.”

“I did.” He didn't move. “And now I want to watch you walk.”

The fur slipped off one shoulder. She left it. She pushed off the door and crossed the room to him with her gown still roped at her waist and her thighs bared and her heart going like a bird in a sack, and every step was longer than the last, and he watched all of it — her feet, her knees, the sway of the silver at her waist, the loose fall of the fur — and when she was close enough to touch he still didn't touch her.

“Closer,” he said.

She stepped in until her breasts brushed his chest and her breath broke against his throat. He smelled of wine and sweat and the oil they'd used on his hair that morning, and under all of it, faint and unmistakable, her own taste still on his mouth.

“There,” he said. “Now you're in my reach, and you came on your own feet, and you can't say I took anything you didn't hand me.”

“I'm not going to say anything at all,” she said, and rose onto her toes, and kissed him.

He kissed her back like he'd been waiting for her to start it. One hand spread across the small of her back, pulling her up onto her toes, and the other went into her hair — not gentle now, fist against the base of her skull — and he tilted her head where he wanted it and took her mouth the way he'd taken everything else tonight. She tasted herself on his tongue. Salt and slick and something faintly sweet. She made a small, undignified noise into his mouth and he swallowed it.

Then he broke off, and grinned — a real grin, crooked on one side, the kind of grin that belonged to a man half his age and none of his rank. She had known him six months. She had never once seen that grin.

"Come here," he said, and bent, and scooped her off her feet.

She yelped. He ignored her. One arm under her knees, one behind her shoulders, the fur throw trailing off her shoulder and dragging along the floor behind them as he carried her across the chamber — past the door, past the bench, through a second, lower doorway she hadn't noticed, into a room gone soft and gold with steam.

The bath was cut into the stone itself, wide as a bed, and the water in it was still moving — ripples shivering out from some hidden inlet in the wall. Rose petals floated on the surface, dark red against the steam, and the whole room smelled of them, and of cedar, and of whatever they'd scented the water with that made her head go light. The floor here was tile, warm under her feet when he set her down — actually warm, heated from beneath, and she stood on it barefoot with her gown still roped at her waist and stared at the steam like it was a foreign country.

"When did you—"

"This morning." He was already unfastening his tunic. "Before the ceremony. I told the house steward I wanted the water hot at the eleventh bell and cold at the thirteenth, and if he got it wrong I would have him reassigned to the northern watch."

She laughed. "You did not."

"I did." The tunic came over his head, and she stopped laughing, because four hundred years of sword-work had been laid out in front of her and she had never actually seen all of it at once. The candlelight found the ridges under his skin — a long pale seam down his ribs, a knot of scar tissue above one hip that she wanted to put her mouth on without knowing why. "He got it right."

He stepped into the water first and turned, waist-deep, gold eyes going dark in the steam, and held his hand out to her.

She shed the fur. She worked the silver gown down over her hips and let it fall, and the silk made a sound on the tile like a held breath let go. Then she took his hand and stepped down into the heat, and the water climbed her legs, her thighs, her belly, and closed over her breasts, and every nerve in her body went quiet at once, the way a room goes quiet when the last guest leaves.

She hadn't known she was tired. She hadn't known she ached.

"There," he said.

"Don't say I told you so."

"I wasn't going to."

"You were."

"I was," he admitted, and reached past her for a cloth folded on the bath's stone lip.

He washed her. That was the thing she would keep — not the altar, not the door, not the floor of the chamber. This. He sat her on the submerged ledge and knelt in the water in front of her, and he took the cloth and worked it down one arm, around each finger, into the cup of her palm, and he did not hurry and he did not perform. He washed her throat, tilting her chin up with his thumb, and the hollow behind her ear, and the soft place under her jaw where her pulse was still running hard. He washed her breasts — one, then the other — and watched his own hands do it like a man reading a letter he'd been waiting years to open.

When the cloth moved down her belly, under the water, and his fingers followed it between her legs, she gasped and her knees came together on reflex and he made a low sound and pushed them apart again with his shoulder, unhurried, like it was simply where his shoulder belonged.

"Glorfindel."

"Mm."

"You're doing that on purpose."

"I'm washing my wife," he said. "If my wife would hold still."

She did not hold still. His fingers slid through the slick the water hadn't washed away, two of them, slow, found her clit and pressed, once, and her hips came off the ledge and the water sloshed against the stone and she heard herself make a sound that echoed off the tile ceiling and came back at her twice.

He smiled at her. Slow. Unhurried. And took his hand away.

"Bastard," she said.

"Yes," he agreed, and stood, and reached for a towel.

He dried her himself, which was worse than the bath. He started at her hair and worked down, and the towel was warm and rough and he used it the way he used everything — completely — and by the time he reached her ankles she was standing in the middle of the tiled floor with water still beading on her collarbones and her whole body humming like a plucked string. He wrapped her in a robe of pale grey silk, belted it at her waist, and kissed her forehead. Then he dressed himself in the same quiet rhythm — breeches, boots, a fresh tunic of deep green, and last the long formal cloak with its silver clasp.

She took the clasp from him before he could fasten it.

Her fingers weren't steady. The pin was small and the catch was stiff, and she stood there in front of him at the hollow of his throat with her tongue between her teeth and worked it until it seated. She felt his breath go shallow under her hands, and when she looked up his eyes were fixed on her face and not the clasp at all.

His hands settled on her waist. Just that. Just the weight of them, through the robe, and she felt the heat of his palms print itself on her skin and everything below her ribs turned over and went still.

"The court is waiting," he said.

"Let them."

"They'll be waiting a long time."

"Good," she said, and he laughed, and kissed her once more — quick, closed, almost chaste — and then he took her hand and led her back through the low doorway and out into the corridor.

The harp was louder out there. The stone carried it, and under it the low tide-sound of four hundred people talking at once, and the smell of the hall reached them before the hall did — wine, beeswax, crushed petals underfoot, and the particular green smell of the fir boughs they'd hung along the walls that morning. She was aware of her own hair, still damp at the ends. She was aware of the robe under her gown, of the silk of the silver dress against her skin with nothing between it and her but that thin layer. She was aware of every step.

They came up the side passage and onto the dais, and the herald saw them and struck the floor twice with his staff, and the hall turned.

She had never been looked at like that. Not by one person, by hundreds — the whole court of Lindon, lords and ladies and the northern delegation and her own mother somewhere near the back, all of them turning at once, and the noise of the room folded down into a hush that had texture, that she could feel on the backs of her arms. The candles on the dais had been relit while they were gone. Their shadows went out across the floor, long and joined at the hip, and someone at the far table stood up to see better and was pulled back down by the sleeve.

Glorfindel's hand was at the small of her back. Flat. Warm. Not steering her — just there, a fixed point, the way a wall is there when you're walking a narrow ledge in the dark.

She got her breath back. She got her chin up.

At the head of the dais, on a low table beside the wedding cup, someone had set out a small silver vial with a wax stopper.

He picked it up. He held it out to her, balanced on his palm, and the candlelight moved in the glass.

"You know what this is," he said, quiet, under the level of the room.

"I know what they say it is."

"It won't hurt you." His thumb moved once across the vial's shoulder. "It takes the edge off pain, and it opens everything else. Touch. Sound. The floor under your feet. And it makes the wine taste better, which is not nothing."

"And if I don't want it."

"Then I put it back on the table," he said, "and we dance, and we go to bed, and I ask you again in the morning."

She looked at the vial. She looked at the hall — the faces, all of them, the ones who had watched her say yes and the ones who had come a long way to see what a four-hundred-year-old lord did with a bride of twenty-two. She looked at her own hand where it rested against the silver of her gown, and at the fine tremor in it that she could not seem to stop.

She took the vial and pulled the stopper and drank it.

It was cold going down. Then it was not.

The hall came up around her like a room with all the windows thrown open. The harp was not one sound anymore, it was string by string, each pluck a separate bright thing she could hold in her hand. The candle flames had edges. The silver of her gown against her nipples was a fact, a real and separate fact, and the seam of the robe underneath it, and the air moving across her throat, and the wax-smell and the wine-smell and the green smell of the fir, all of them arriving at once and all of them pleasant, all of them *hers*. Somewhere behind her someone set down a goblet and she heard the ring of it for a long time.

And Glorfindel's hand on her hip was not a hand anymore. It was a heat, a pressure, a five-pointed claim, and every place his fingers touched she could feel the whorls of his fingertips and the callus at the base of each one and the slight drag of skin on silk.

She turned to him.

He was watching her face. Not the hall, not the vial, not the assembled court — her. And when he saw whatever it was he saw there, something in him let go, and he kissed her in front of all of them.

It was not a ceremony kiss. It was the other thing. His tongue in her mouth and his hand fisted in the silk at her back and the whole room there to see it, and she heard the sound the court made — a long collective breath, a bench scraping, someone's wine spilling — and she did not care. She got her fingers into his hair and pulled and he groaned into her mouth and she felt it in her feet.

His hands went down her back, over the silver, and closed on her ass and pulled her in flush. There it was against her belly — the hard line of his cock through the cloak and the breeches, hot even through the layers. She rocked against it once before she could think, and he made a rough sound against her mouth and held her still with both hands.

"Easy," he said, against her lips. "We have an audience."

"Let them watch."

He pulled back far enough to look at her, and the gold in his eyes was almost entirely gone.

Then he went down.

He went down.

Not the slow descent of a man deliberating. He dropped — one knee, then the other, onto the dais boards, and the whole hall made a sound she felt in the soles of her feet, four hundred people drawing breath at once. The silver of her gown was still gathered in his fists from the kiss. He did not let go. He dragged it higher instead, up over her knees, over her thighs, and the silk whispered against her skin in a way she could hear string by string, every thread of it, until the hem sat at her hips and the cool air of the hall moved across her bare cunt like a hand.

Someone at the far table said something. A woman. The word did not reach her.

His breath came first — hot, wet, a long wash of it across her, and she felt every degree of the temperature drop when it passed. Then his mouth.

Flat. Wide. He laid his tongue on her and dragged it up, slow, from the wet seam of her to the swollen knot of her clit, and the pressure potion turned the single stroke into a hundred — each ridge of his tongue a separate instrument, each tastebud a small blunt thing pressing, and behind it the scrape of the stubble he had not shaved since morning. Her knees unlocked. She caught herself on his shoulders, both hands, and her nails dug into the green wool of his tunic and she heard herself cry out over the harp and did not care who heard it.

He did it again. Slower. He was not in a hurry and he wanted them to know it — his head tilted, his jaw working, his tongue finding her clit and circling it once before he pulled away and blew a thin stream of air across the wet he had left.

She jerked like a hooked fish.

"Glorfindel—"

He hummed against her. The vibration rolled up through her belly and into her ribs and she felt it in her teeth. His hands left her gown — it stayed where it was, hooked on her hips — and came up the backs of her thighs, thumbs pressing into the crease of her ass, spreading her open to the room. She felt the air on the parts of her she had never shown anyone, and she felt the eyes on those parts, and the two things together made her clench around nothing.

Then his fingers were there. Two of them, slicked through her own wet, sliding up between her folds to find her entrance and press — not in, just against, a promise with weight behind it.

"Look at me," he said against her.

She looked down. His gold eyes were up at her over the wet shine of his own mouth, and there was a strand of her slick strung from his lower lip to his chin, and he did not wipe it away.

"I want them to see your face when I put my fingers in you," he said.

And he did. Two knuckles, slow, and the stretch of it — the potion made every nerve in her walls wake up and report in, the drag of his calluses, the exact width of him, the way he curled once he was seated and found the place behind her clit that no one had ever touched with intent. Her mouth came open. Her eyes stayed on his, because he had told her to, and something about obeying him while he did that to her made her hips roll forward onto his hand.

He pulled them out to the first knuckle and pushed back in. Again. Again. A rhythm, steady as a heartbeat, and his tongue found her clit again and matched it, and the hall went away — the harp, the lords, her mother somewhere near the back, the northern delegation, all of it folded down to a single point of heat between her legs and a pair of gold eyes looking up at her while she came apart.

She came on his fingers first. She felt it build in the soles of her feet and climb, and she gripped his shoulders and ground down onto his hand and her whole body bowed over him, and the sound she made was not a word and not quite a scream, and the court heard every note of it. He did not stop. He worked her through it, tongue gentle now, fingers still deep, and when the last clench let go of him he pulled his mouth away and rested his forehead against her thigh and breathed.

"Fuck, Ellanor," he growled into her skin. His voice was wrecked — gravel and honey both. "I need to be inside you."

She was still shaking. She got one hand into his hair and pulled his face up to look at her, and the sight of him — mouth wet to the jaw, black hair plastered to his temple with her, gold eyes nearly black — did something to her that had nothing to do with the potion.

"Then do it," she said.

He stood. The hall made its sound again. He kissed her — hard, open, and she tasted herself on his tongue, salt and musk, and she made a small noise into his mouth and he swallowed it the way he swallowed everything she gave him. His hands went to the clasp at the shoulder of her gown, and he undid it without looking, one thumb, and the silver slid off her like water off a blade and pooled at her feet on the dais boards.

The robe underneath came open at his tug. He pushed it off her shoulders and it fell too, pale grey on the silver, and then she was standing in front of four hundred people in nothing but her own skin and the candlelight, and the potion made the air on her nipples a fact she could hold in her hand.

She did not cover herself. She reached for him instead.

His cloak came off first — she found the clasp she had fastened an hour ago and undid it, and it slid from his shoulders and hit the boards with a weight she felt. Then the tunic, over his head, and the candlelight found the long pale seam down his ribs and the knot of scar above his hip, and she put her mouth on the knot without deciding to, and he made a sound above her that she felt in her own chest. The breeches went next. He kicked out of his boots and stepped free of them and then he was naked in front of the court, and his cock came up thick and heavy against his belly, dark with blood, slick at the tip, and she looked at it and her mouth went wet.

She reached for it before he could stop her.

Her fingers closed around the shaft. Hot — hotter than his skin anywhere else — and the pulse under her palm was a separate living thing, and she stroked once from root to tip and felt the ridge of the head slide under her thumb and the wet at the slit smear across her knuckle.

He groaned. His hips jerked into her fist, once, helpless, and his hand came down over hers and stilled it.

"You're killing me," he rasped. His forehead came down to hers. "Not yet. I want to be inside you when I spend."

His hands went under her arms and he lifted her — off her feet, up, and the hall tilted — and set her down on the furs at the edge of the dais, the ones the wedding party had sat on for the toasts, still warm from the bodies that had left them. Her back came down onto the soft pile, the world furs and candlelight and the shadow of him above her. His knees pressed her thighs wide, the air moved across her cunt, and she felt how wet she was, dripping down into the fur under her.

He settled between her thighs. The head of his cock found her entrance and nudged — once, twice, a tease with real weight behind it — and she reached down and took him in her hand again and guided him, because she was done waiting, because the potion had turned every second of waiting into a small bright agony.

"Glorfindel," she said. "Now."

He pushed inside.

Slow. Deep. Every inch of it deliberate, and she felt all of it — the stretch of her walls opening around him, the drag of his cock over the place his fingers had found, the way he filled her so completely that her breath stopped halfway up her throat. He went to the hilt and then he stayed there, hips flush against her, and she felt him pulse inside her, and she felt his thighs trembling against the backs of hers, and she knew he was holding himself still by nothing but will.

"There," he said. His voice was almost gone. "There you are."

She wrapped her legs around his hips and locked her ankles and pulled him in deeper. He made a sound like a man wounded and began to move.

Slow at first. Long strokes, all the way out and all the way back in, and the potion turned each one into a small event — the wet drag of him leaving her, the slap of his hips against her ass on the return, the precise place where the head of his cock pressed as he bottomed out. She heard the sound of it in the hall, wet and rhythmic, and she heard the court hearing it, and she did not stop.

He kissed her. His tongue found her mouth and matched the rhythm of his hips, in and out, and she sucked on it the way she wanted to suck on him, and he groaned into her and his strokes went harder.

"Fuck," she breathed against his mouth. "Fuck, harder—"

He gave her harder. His hand went under her ass and lifted her, tilting her hips up so he could drive down into her at a new angle, and the new angle found something the old one hadn't. Her vision went white at the edges; she clawed at his back and left marks in him that she could feel under her nails.

She came again. Her pussy clenched around him hard — hard enough that he cursed and lost his rhythm and had to brace himself on both arms above her to keep from following her over. She felt every wave of it, the potion stretching the pleasure out like taffy, and she rode it with her heels dug into his ass and his name in her mouth over and over, and the court heard every syllable.

He held back. She felt him do it — the shudder that went through his whole body, the way his jaw locked, the way he pulled out to the tip and stayed there for a long breath with his eyes shut and his forehead pressed to hers. Then he opened his eyes and looked at her.

"Again," he said. "I want you to come on me again."

"I can't—"

"You can." He pushed back in, slow, all the way, and ground against her clit on the way. "The draught will let you. Trust me."

She trusted him. He took her through it — a third time, then a fourth, each one slower and longer than the last, each one pulled out of her by a different angle, a different rhythm, a different use of his thumb on her clit or his teeth on her throat. By the fourth she was a mess of sweat and slick on the furs, hair plastered to her face, thighs shaking so badly she could barely keep her ankles locked, and she could not have said her own name if the celebrant had asked her.

Only then did he let himself go.

He pulled out to the head and thrust back in to the hilt one last time, and she felt him come — the pulse of his cock inside her, the hot spill of it against her walls, the way his whole body locked above her and his head dropped to her shoulder and the sound he made was not a word but something older. He pulsed again. Again. His release ran out of her around the base of him and dripped down onto the furs, and he held himself there, buried to the root, while the last of it emptied into her.

He did not move for a long time. His weight came down onto her, chest to chest, and his breathing was ragged against her throat, and she could feel his heartbeat going through his ribs into hers like two drums tuned to the same note.

She got her hand into his hair. She held his head where it was.

Above them, the hall was very quiet. Somewhere a goblet was set down. The harp had stopped altogether.

He lifted his head. His eyes were still half-lidded, gold under the sweat-dark fall of his hair, and he looked at her from an inch away with the whole court behind him and no one else in it.

"Mine," he murmured against her lips.

"Yours," she agreed.

She said it against his mouth and he took it the way he took everything — like it was his to keep. He kissed her once more, slow, tasting himself on her now, and then he rolled them both onto their sides in the furs without ever pulling out, and she made a small sound at the way he shifted inside her, the wet drag of it.

"Still hard," she whispered, and it came out more surprised than she meant.

"I told you." His hand came up and pushed the hair off her face, thumb dragging her lower lip down and letting it spring back. "Four hundred years, Ellanor. I've been patient a long time. I'm done being patient."

He moved. Slow, from behind and inside her at once, one arm under her head and the other hand flat on her belly, holding her against him. His mouth found the back of her neck and stayed there — wet and open, tongue and teeth, not kissing so much as feeding. She arched her throat back into it and he hummed against her skin like a man drinking after a long ride.

"The whole court is watching," she said. Her voice came out unsteady.

"Let them."

His hips picked up. Long, deep strokes that pushed her forward into his hand on her belly and then pulled her back onto him, and the furs under her cheek smelled of wine and cedar and the two of them. She got a hand back into his hair and turned her face enough to find his mouth and he gave it to her — open, filthy, tongue sliding against her tongue while he fucked her from behind, and the wet sound of it carried out into the quiet hall like a drumbeat nobody had the nerve to interrupt.

She came on him like that. Quietly, this time — just a long shudder that started in her thighs and rolled up through her ribs, and her cunt gripping him in slow waves, and she bit down on his bottom lip to keep the sound in and he groaned into her mouth at the bite.

"Again," he said when the last wave let go. "Not done."

He pulled out of her — she felt every inch of the withdrawal, the cold air where he'd been, the wet running out of her onto the furs — and turned her onto her back. He knelt over her, cock still slick and hard and shining, and looked down at her, hair in his eyes, chest heaving, something in his face she had no name for.

"Look at you," he said. "Full of me already."

He put two fingers into her and scooped, and held them up where she could see — white and thick, hers and his mixed together, strung between his knuckles.

"Open."

She opened her mouth and he pushed his fingers in and she sucked them clean, watching his face the whole time, and the sound he made was low and wounded. Then he kissed her again so he could taste it too, tongue sweeping the inside of her mouth, and she laughed against his lips — giddy, wrecked, four hundred years of court protocol burned off her like fog.

"Get on top of me," he said. Not a question.

She climbed over him. Her thighs were shaking and her cunt was dripping down the inside of her legs and she did not care. She straddled his hips, reached down, and put him back inside herself with her own hand — one slow push, watching his jaw lock as she took him to the root.

"Fuck," he breathed. "Fuck, Ellanor."

She rode him. Slow at first, learning the angle, her palms flat on his chest and his scars under her fingers, and then harder, hips snapping down onto him, and he watched her the whole time with his hands on her waist — not guiding, just holding, letting her take what she wanted. She leaned back and put her hands on his thighs behind her and changed the angle and found the spot herself, and the sound she made when she found it was not polite.

He sat up under her. Chest to chest, face to face, his arms wrapping her in, and he took over the rhythm from underneath — short, hard thrusts up into her, one hand fisted in her hair and the other spread wide on her ass, pulling her down onto every stroke. She wrapped her arms around his neck and held on and he kissed her throat, her jaw, the corner of her mouth, the soft place under her ear, and kept kissing it while he fucked up into her, teeth dragging on her pulse, tongue flat against her skin.

"Say my name," he said into her neck.

"Glorfindel."

"Again."

"Glorfindel—"

He came. She felt it — the sudden lock of his whole body, the pulse of his cock deep inside her, and then the flood of it, hot and heavy against her walls, more than the first time, so much that it pushed past his cock and ran down onto his balls and the furs beneath them. He kept moving through it, slow grinds that pushed his own spend deeper, and she felt every throb of him emptying into her like a second heartbeat.

"There," he said when it was done, hoarse. "That's two."

She pulled off him and looked down and saw it — the white dripping out of her onto his belly, the mess of them both, and something in her chest went tight and hot at the same time.

"Two," she repeated. The potion had turned her voice into something low and unfamiliar. "You said six."

His eyes went gold and narrow. "You were counting."

"I was."

He flipped her. One arm across her back, one hand on her hip, and she was face-down in the furs with her ass up before she had time to laugh, and he was behind her with his knees between hers, spreading her wide with both thumbs.

"Hold still," he said.

She felt his tongue first — flat and hot, dragging up her cunt from her clit to the place where his own spend was still leaking out of her, and she made a sound into the fur that was not a word. He licked her clean. Slow, thorough, unhurried, tongue curling into her and pulling his own release out and swallowing it down, and then coming back for more, and the wet sound of his mouth on her was louder than the harp had ever been.

"Glorfindel, please—"

He pushed two fingers into her and kept licking. She ground her face into the furs and her hips back onto his hand, and he worked her like that until she was shaking, thighs trembling, cunt clenching around his knuckles. Then he pulled his mouth away and she heard him spit — wet, deliberate — and felt it land where his tongue had been.

He pushed in. Her whole body took him, slick and open and ready, and the angle from behind put the head of his cock somewhere new. She cried out and did not care who heard.

"Harder."

He gave her harder. Hand fisted in her hair, other hand gripping her hip, driving into her with a rhythm that moved the furs under her knees, and every stroke came with a wet slap of his hips on her ass and a low rough noise out of his chest. She got a hand under herself and found her clit and rubbed it in time with him and came almost immediately — a hard, wrenching one that made her whole body bow and her cunt squeeze him like a fist.

He did not stop. He fucked her through it, kept going while she sobbed into the fur, and when her clenching eased he pulled out, flipped her onto her back, pushed back in, and started over.

Time went strange after that. The candles on the dais guttered and were relit by somebody — she never saw who — and the hall stayed quiet except for the two of them, and Glorfindel did not tire. His cock stayed hard in her hand every time she reached for it. He took her with her legs over his shoulders, slow and deep, kissing her ankles and the inside of her knee. He took her on her side with her top leg hooked over his hip and his hand spread over her heart. He took her sitting up, her back to his chest, his mouth on her neck, one hand on her breast and the other between her legs, and told her to watch — watch what he was doing to her, watch his fingers sinking into her cunt while his cock moved in her, and she watched, and came so hard she lost the thread of her own name.

He came inside her a third time with her bent over the edge of the dais, her feet on the boards and her face in the furs and the whole court behind her, and a fourth with her on top of him again, riding him slow with her hands braced on his chest, watching his face come apart under her. A fifth with her legs locked around his waist and her back against one of the carved posts at the corner of the stage, his thrusts short and brutal and his mouth never leaving her throat. A sixth — the last one — with her in his lap, both of them kneeling, her arms around his neck and his hands cupping her ass, and he kissed her through it, deep and slow, tongue in her mouth the whole time he spilled into her, and she felt every pulse of it like a separate small gift.

When he finally softened and slipped out of her, the furs under them were ruined. She lay on her back in the wreck of them, hair everywhere, come running out of her and down between her thighs in a slow line, and she could not have lifted her own arm if the hall had caught fire.

Glorfindel lay down beside her and pulled her against his chest. His heart was still going fast. His hand came up and pushed the wet hair off her forehead and he looked at her for a long moment without saying anything.

Then he kissed her. Soft this time — soft and slow and thorough, the way he had kissed her at the altar, like the vows were still being made. His tongue slid against hers and she gave it back to him. His hand cupped her jaw and tilted her face up so he could kiss her deeper, and the two of them lay there in front of four hundred silent elves and kissed like nobody was watching at all.

He pulled back just enough to breathe. His lips found her jaw, then the soft place behind her ear, then her throat — and he stayed there, mouth open against her pulse, licking and kissing and dragging his teeth over the skin until she shivered and turned her face into his hair.

"Again," she whispered. She did not know where it came from. She only knew that the potion was still humming in her blood and his mouth was on her throat and she wanted more.

He laughed — low, rough, surprised. "You'll kill me."

"You said four hundred years." She got a hand into his hair and pulled his mouth back to hers. "You can manage one more."

He could. He rolled her onto her back and settled over her one last time, and this time he went slow — so slow she could feel every inch of him entering her, the head of his cock pushing through the mess he'd already made, the wet give of her around him. He kissed her while he moved. He kissed her mouth and her throat and her collarbone and came back to her mouth, and his hand slid down between their bodies and found her clit and rubbed it in slow circles while he thrust, and she came one more time with his tongue in her mouth and his fingers on her and his cock buried deep, and he followed her over with a groan that she felt in her own chest.

After, he did not pull out. He stayed inside her, softening, forehead against hers, breathing hard, and she wrapped her legs around his hips and held him there.

Above them, someone in the hall finally cleared their throat. A chair scraped. The harpist picked up her instrument and put it down again without playing.

Glorfindel lifted his head. He looked down at Ellanor with his hair in his eyes and sweat on his temples and the whole ruined length of her beneath him, and he smiled — a real one, the kind she had never seen on him before, young and crooked and entirely without ceremony.

"Well," he said. "That's the wedding done."

He didn't move. That was the first thing she noticed, in the ringing quiet — that Glorfindel, who had spent the night taking exactly what he wanted the moment he wanted it, was now doing nothing at all. Still inside her. Still heavy. His breath going slow and even against her temple like a man who had finally, after four hundred years, run out of somewhere to be.

Around them the hall began, shyly, to come back to life. A bench leg scraped stone. Someone coughed into a sleeve. The harpist tried a single string and thought better of it and put her hand flat on the wood to still it. Ellanor heard all of it from very far away, the way you hear rain when you're half under.

"They're waiting for us to leave," she said.

"Mm."

"Glorfindel. We're on the dais."

"I know where we are." His hand moved up her spine, slow, the flat of it dragging sweat into her hair. "Let them wait. They came a long way to watch. They can watch the last part."

She laughed — a small, wrecked sound — and the laugh moved her around him, and he made a low noise against her throat and shifted his hips an inch deeper without meaning to, and she felt it all the way up behind her ribs. She was so full of him. She had been full of him for what felt like hours, and his spend had gone cool and tacky where it had run out of her onto the furs, and still she did not want him to move.

Somewhere near the back, her mother's voice — she was almost sure it was her mother's voice — said something short to someone and got no answer.

Glorfindel lifted his head and looked out over her shoulder at the hall, and whatever was on his face was enough, because the noise of the room changed. Chairs pushed back. A wave of feet. The northern delegation gathered themselves and stood and bowed, all together, and the bow had a pause in it that was meant as a compliment, and Ellanor watched them do it from underneath her husband with her hair in her mouth.

"They're bowing," she whispered.

"They should." He kissed the corner of her jaw. "Their lord just claimed his bride in front of them. That's the whole point of a wedding."

"That's not the whole point of a wedding."

"It is in Lindon." He was smiling against her skin; she could feel it. "You should have read the older histories. This is the tame version."

She turned her face into the furs and laughed until her eyes stung, and he held her through it, and the laughter moved him inside her in small slow waves that neither of them tried to stop.

Eventually he did move. He pulled out of her — slow, all the way, and she felt every inch of the leaving, the cold air rushing in where he'd been, the wet sound of it, the long line of come that followed him out and ran down her thigh onto the fur. Then he was up on one knee, and then standing, and he reached down and lifted her off the dais like she weighed nothing, one arm under her knees and one behind her shoulders, the way he'd carried her to the bath.

The hall saw her bare. She made no move to hide, and he made no move to hide her. He turned her in his arms so her face was over his shoulder and she looked back once at the wreck of the furs — the dark soaked patch where she'd been, the silver gown still pooled on the boards, the fur throw she'd lost somewhere near the low doorway — and then he carried her down the side steps and out through the passage, and the court's bow held until they were gone.

The corridor was cold after the hall. Candle-sconces every ten paces, and their light going past in slow stripes across his shoulder, across her cheek, across nothing at all. Her hair had come loose entirely and hung in wet ropes down his arm. She could hear his heartbeat through his chest against her ear and it was still going too fast for a man who had just been lying still for a quarter of an hour.

"Where are you taking me," she said into his collarbone.

"To bed."

"We were just—"

"That was the hall." His voice had gone back to gravel somewhere on the stairs. "This is bed."

She should have argued. She thought about it, got as far as opening her mouth, and then he shifted her weight in his arms and his spend ran out of her onto his wrist, and she shut her mouth and put her face back against his throat and let him walk.

Their chambers were at the west end, past the long gallery and up a half-flight, and he shouldered the door open without setting her down. The room beyond was dark except for the banked coals in the brazier and one candle somebody had left burning on the chest by the window. The bed was turned down — someone had turned it down, she noticed, which meant someone had been in here while they were in the hall, which meant every servant in the keep knew exactly what the furs had looked like — and the sheets were white and cold and smelled of cedar and lavender.

He laid her in the middle of them. She sank into the cold and gasped. He came down over her and pulled the blankets up over both of them, and the cold went away in a rush of shared heat. Then it was just the two of them in the dark under the covers, the candle guttering by the window, his body a wall along her back.

His arm went under her head. His other hand came across her belly and pulled her in against him, and she felt him settle behind her — the whole long length of him, chest to her spine, knees tucked behind her knees, cock resting soft and heavy against the small of her back where it had been slick and hard an hour ago.

She waited for him to start again. She was braced for it — the hand sliding down, the knee pushing between her thighs, the low command in her ear. She wanted it. Her body had not stopped wanting it since the vial.

Nothing happened.

His hand stayed flat on her belly. His breathing evened out against her hair. Outside the window, somewhere down in the city, a bell struck the hour and the sound came in thin and silver through the glass, and he did not move.

"Glorfindel."

"Mm."

"Are you—" She stopped. She did not know how to ask it.

He understood anyway. He always understood. His hand spread wider on her belly and pressed, once, just enough to remind her of the weight of him, and then went still again.

"Not tonight," he said. "Tonight I want to feel what I did."

"That's—"

"I mean it." His mouth found the back of her neck, and it was not a kiss so much as a resting. "You're full of me, Ellanor. I can feel it against my hip. I want to sleep like this and wake up like this and know that every hour I was asleep, I was still inside the woman I married."

She lay very still. The candle by the window leaned and spat and steadied. His hand on her belly was warm and heavy and did not move.

"That's obscene," she said finally.

"Yes."

"You're going to be inside me all night."

"All night."

"You'll—" She turned her head just enough to find his jaw with her mouth. "You'll get hard again."

"Probably." He kissed her temple. "And I'll stay where I am."

"That's worse."

"That's the point."

She did not have an answer for that. She lay in his arms with his heartbeat against her shoulder blades and the wet between her thighs going slowly cool against the sheets, and she thought about the vial, and about the four hundred years, and about the way he had said mine over her on the dais with the whole court listening, and somewhere in the middle of the thinking she fell asleep with her hand curled around his forearm like a rope she meant to hold onto.

She woke once in the night. The candle had burned out. His arm was still under her head, his hand still on her belly, and he was hard against her back — hard, and still, and he had not moved. She lay there in the dark a long time listening to him breathe and feeling the shape of him against her, then pressed back against him deliberately, just to see, just to feel the whole length of him shift against the small of her back. He made a low sound in his sleep, pulled her tighter, and did not wake.

She smiled into the dark and went back to sleep.

When she woke the second time, it was grey light through the window and the coals had gone to ash and the whole room smelled of cold cedar and the two of them. She was on her back. He was over her — not on top of her, not yet, just propped on one elbow above her with his hand flat on her sternum and his hair falling in her face, and he was looking at her the way he had looked at her in the middle of the floor last night, like she was a thing he had bought and paid for and was now, at his leisure, going to unwrap.

"Morning," he said.

"Morning."

"I have been awake for an hour."

"Doing what."

"Watching you." His hand slid down from her sternum to her breast, cupped it, thumb finding the nipple and dragging across it once, and she arched up into his palm before she could stop herself. "You talk in your sleep."

"I do not."

"You said my name."

"Everyone says your name. You're the lord of the valley."

"You said it differently." He bent and put his mouth where his thumb had been, and she got a hand into his hair and held him there. "You said it like a question."

His knee pushed between her thighs and she let it. The sheets were cold around her shoulders and his body was hot against her front and the two temperatures together made her skin feel like a struck bell. His hand slid back down the length of her, over her belly, and stopped at her hip and stayed there for a moment — a question of its own — and she answered it by lifting her hips off the mattress and pressing up against his palm.

He did not need a second invitation.

His fingers found her wet — she was still wet, she had never stopped being wet, the whole night had been one long slow slick between her thighs — and slid through it, up and back, and she heard her own breath go ragged in the cold room. He pushed two fingers into her, slow, and the mess he'd left in her the night before came out around them, and he made a rough sound against her throat and curled them once and pressed.

"You're still full of me," he said. "I can feel it."

"You—"

"I told you I would." He pulled his fingers out and held them up between them in the grey light, and they were slick and white, and he looked at them and then at her, and then he put them in his own mouth and sucked them clean and did not look away from her face the whole time. "Come here."

He rolled onto his back and pulled her over him. She went — thighs straddling his hips, hands flat on his chest, hair hanging down around both their faces. His cock lay hard against his belly, dark and thick and still shining with the night. She reached down and took it in her hand and felt the pulse under her palm like a separate small animal.

She guided him to her entrance and sat down on him.

Slow. She took him an inch at a time, watching his jaw lock, watching his hands come up to grip her thighs, and the stretch of him opening her up again after the whole night of being open was its own separate pleasure, dull and deep and almost too much. She got him to the root and stopped there, hips flat against his, and breathed.

"Fuck," he said. His voice was wrecked already, first thing in the morning, gravel and honey both. "Fuck, Ellanor."

"You said you wanted to feel what you did." She rolled her hips once, small, and watched his eyes go dark. "There it is."

He laughed — surprised, rough — and got a hand into her hair and pulled her mouth down to his. He kissed her while she started to move. Slow at first, long strokes up and down his cock, and the wet sound of it in the cold room was obscene and neither of them cared. His hands went from her thighs to her ass and gripped, pulling her down onto every stroke. She leaned back, put her hands on his thighs behind her, changed the angle and found the place herself, and the sound she made when she found it was not polite.

"There," he said. "There it is. That's the one."

"Shut up."

"No." He sat up under her, chest to chest, one arm wrapping her in and the other hand sliding down between them to find her clit, and he rubbed it in slow circles while she rode him, and she wrapped her arms around his neck and put her forehead against his and stopped trying to be quiet. "Say it."

"Say what."

"You know what."

"Glorfindel—"

"Not that."

She knew what he wanted. She had known since the altar. She looked at him — grey light on the long pale seam down his ribs, his hair in his eyes, his mouth open and his breath coming hard, and the whole world outside this room gone quiet and far away — and she gave it to him.

"Yours."

He came. She felt it — the sudden lock of his whole body under her, the pulse of his cock deep inside her, the hot spill of it against her walls, more than she expected even now, so much that it pushed past his cock and ran down onto his balls and the sheets beneath them. He kept moving through it, slow grinds that pushed his own spend deeper, and she felt every throb of him emptying into her like a second heartbeat. She came with him — a long, deep clench that started in her thighs and rolled up through her ribs — and she buried her face in his neck and bit down on his shoulder and rode it out against him.

After, neither of them moved. He stayed inside her, softening, forehead against hers, breathing hard, and she wrapped her legs around his hips and held him there the way she had held him on the dais.

"You're going to be late," she said eventually.

"Late for what."

"Everything. There's a feast. There's the northern delegation. There's—"

"There's nothing." He kissed her. "There is nothing today. I told the steward. I told the whole hall last night, they just didn't know it yet."

She laughed against his mouth. His hands came up her back, slow, the flat of them dragging the last of the night off her skin, and she felt him twitch inside her — still there, still not leaving — and she understood, with a slow hot drop in her stomach, that he had meant what he said in the dark. All night. And now all morning. And whatever came after that.

She pulled back far enough to look at him. Grey light, cold room, the two of them wound together in the middle of a bed that belonged to the lord of the valley, and on his face the same crooked, boy's grin she had seen for the first time last night and would, she suspected, be seeing for the rest of her life.

"Again," she said.

He rolled her onto her back without pulling out.

She felt him roll her onto her back, and the weight of him settled over her like a roof. He was still inside her, half-hard, and when he pushed himself up on his forearms she could see the grey light catching the sweat on his shoulders, the long pale seam of the scar down his ribs, the mess of black hair falling into his eyes.

"Again," he repeated, and the word came out almost gentle. Then his hand slid down between them and he found her clit with two callused fingers and pressed, and his voice dropped into something lower, something that scraped against her spine. "You're going to sit on my cock until you can't remember your own name, and then I'm going to fill you up again, and then we're going to start over."

She made a sound that wasn't a word. His fingers kept moving, slow circles, and he watched her face the whole time, those molten gold eyes pinned to hers like he was reading something written there.

"You like that," he said. Not a question. "You like knowing I'm not done with you. You like knowing I'm going to keep you here until you're dripping down your thighs and begging me to stop."

"I don't—"

"You do." He pressed harder, and her hips bucked off the mattress. "You begged me last night. You begged me in front of the whole court. You were so wet on that dais that I could smell you from the moment I knelt down, and you think I forgot?"

She couldn't answer. His fingers were doing something obscene, rubbing her in tight circles while his thumb pressed at the top, and the pleasure was building fast and hot and she could feel herself clenching around the half-hard weight of him inside her.

"I could feel you dripping down my chin," he said, and his voice was rough now, almost wrecked. "I could taste you for hours after. I walked through that hall with your cunt on my tongue and every single elf in that room knew it."

"Glorfindel—"

"Say my name again." His fingers sped up. "Say it while you come on my hand and I'll tell you what I'm going to do to you after."

She came. It tore out of her, a sharp and sudden thing, her spine bowing off the bed, her hands scrabbling at his shoulders. He didn't stop. He worked her through it, slow and merciless, until she was shaking and gasping and the orgasm had wrung her out like a cloth.

"Good girl," he said, and the praise hit her somewhere deep and unexpected. "Now listen."

He pulled his hand away and brought it to his mouth, and she watched him lick her off his fingers, those golden eyes never leaving hers.

"I'm going to fuck you until you forget every name you've ever known," he said. "And then I'm going to pull out and I'm going to watch my come run out of you, and then I'm going to put it back in."

"You—"

"I'm going to keep it in you all day." He shifted his weight, and she felt him thicken inside her, felt the pulse of him growing hard again in the wet mess of her. "You're going to walk around that hall with my come dripping down your thighs and you're going to have to look every single elf in the eye and pretend you don't feel it."

Her breath caught. The image hit her like a physical blow, hot and shameful and unbearably arousing.

"You want that," he said. "I can feel how much you want that. You're clenching around me like you're trying to swallow me whole."

"I'm not—"

"You are." He pulled back, just enough, and then pushed in slow, all the way to the root, and she felt every inch of him drag against her walls. "You're so fucking tight. You've been tight all night. I've been inside you for hours and you still grip me like it's the first time."

He set a rhythm. Slow, deep, grinding strokes that pushed against her cervix and made her see white at the edges of her vision. His hands were on her hips, holding her still, and he was watching her face like he was memorizing every expression she made.

"Look at you," he murmured. "Look at your mouth. You're biting your lip so hard you're going to draw blood."

She hadn't realized. She loosened her jaw and his thumb came up and traced her bottom lip, and then he pushed it into her mouth and she sucked on it without thinking.

"That's it," he said. "Suck. You're going to have something bigger in your mouth before the day is out."

She moaned around his thumb. He pulled it out and replaced it with his mouth, kissing her deep and slow while his hips kept moving, that relentless grinding rhythm that had her toes curling against the sheets.

"I'm going to come in your mouth," he said against her lips. "I'm going to hold your head and fuck your throat until you choke on it, and then I'm going to kiss you and make you taste it."

She whimpered. His hand slid down her body, over her belly, between her legs, and he found her clit again, wet and swollen, and rubbed it in slow circles while he kept thrusting.

"And then I'm going to turn you over," he said. "I'm going to bend you over the side of this bed and fuck you from behind, and I'm going to watch my cock slide in and out of that perfect ass, and I'm going to slap it until it's pink."

"Glorfindel." His name came out as a plea, a prayer, a warning she didn't mean.

"And you're going to beg for it." His voice dropped to a whisper, hot against her ear. "You're going to say please, my lord, please fuck me, and I'm going to make you say it until you mean it."

She was close again. She could feel it building, a second wave cresting, and he knew it — she could see it in the way his eyes went dark, the way his thrusts got harder, the way his fingers pressed down on her clit with just the right amount of pressure.

"Come for me," he said. "Come on my cock and I'll give you what you want."

"What—" She couldn't finish the question.

"I'll let you ride me again." His voice was wrecked, raw. "I'll let you take me as deep as you want and I'll hold still and let you use me, and I'll watch you come apart on top of me."

She came. It crashed over her like a wave, her whole body clenching, her cunt gripping him so hard she felt him shudder above her. He kept thrusting through it, slow and deep, drawing it out until she was limp beneath him, gasping.

"That's my girl," he said. "That's my perfect girl."

He pulled out. The loss of him made her whimper, empty and aching, and she watched him sit back on his heels between her thighs, his cock dark and thick and slick with her, and she saw him wrap his hand around it and stroke once, slow.

"You're so fucking beautiful like this," he said. "Spread open for me. Dripping. You look like I made you."

She should have been embarrassed. She wasn't. She was something else entirely, something raw and open and greedy, and she reached down and took his cock in her hand and guided him back to her entrance.

"No," he said, and his hand closed over hers, stilling her. "Not yet."

"Why not."

"Because I want to watch you beg."

The words landed like a spark in dry grass. She stared at him, and he stared back, and she saw the possessive fire burning in those golden eyes, the same fire that had been there on the dais, the same fire that had been there for four hundred years.

"Please," she said.

"Please what."

"Please fuck me."

"Say it properly."

She swallowed. "Please, my lord. Please fuck me."

His mouth curved into that crooked, boy's grin, and he pushed her hand away and settled between her thighs and pushed into her in one slow, endless stroke.

"That's it," he breathed. "That's my girl. You're going to say that every time, aren't you. You're going to beg me every single time, and I'm going to give it to you every single time, and we're going to do this until we're both too old to move."

"Four hundred years," she managed.

"Four hundred more." He thrust deep and held there, grinding against her cervix, and she saw stars. "I'm going to spend four hundred more years inside you, Ellanor. I'm going to fill you up every night and watch you swell with my heirs and I'm going to worship this cunt until the day the world ends."

She came again. It was a small, sharp thing, a ripple that rolled through her and made her gasp, and he laughed — low and rough — and kissed her.

"Good girl," he said. "Now I'm going to come in you. I'm going to fill you up so full that you feel it when you walk, and then I'm going to do it again."

His thrusts got harder, faster. She wrapped her legs around his hips and pulled him deeper, and he groaned against her throat, his rhythm turning ragged, desperate.

"I'm close," he said. "Tell me you want it. Tell me you want me to fill you up."

"I want it." She was barely coherent. "I want you to fill me up, I want to feel it dripping out of me, I want—"

He came. She felt it, the hot pulse of him emptying into her, so much that it seemed impossible, and she clenched around him and drew it out, milking him until he collapsed on top of her, shaking.

For a long moment neither of them moved. His face was buried in her neck, his breath hot and ragged, and she could feel his heart hammering against her ribs. She could feel him still inside her, softening, and she could feel the wet heat of his come seeping out around him, running down between her thighs.

"You're going to be late," she whispered.

"Late for what."

"Everything."

He laughed against her skin. "There is nothing. I told you. There is nothing today but this."

He pulled out slowly, and she felt the loss like a small death, and then she felt his hand between her legs, pressing his spend back inside her, pushing it deep with two fingers.

"Stay like that," he said. "I want to watch it hold."

She lay there, spread open and full and raw, and he looked at her like she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. And she thought, I am going to spend the rest of my life with this man. I am going to spend the rest of my life being looked at like this.

"You're thinking too loud," he said.

"I'm not."

"You're thinking about forever." He kissed her, slow and sweet, and she tasted herself on his lips and the salt of his sweat and something darker, something that tasted like the beginning of everything. "Good. So am I."

"Forever," she repeated, the word strange on her tongue now that he'd given it weight. She'd said it in her vows hours ago, in front of the court, in front of the witnesses, but here—with his come cooling between her thighs and his hand still pressed against her, holding it in—the word meant something different. It meant this. It meant him, still half-hard inside her, refusing to let her go.

"Say it again." His fingers pressed deeper, two of them curled inside her, and she felt the slick heat of his spend pushing against her walls. "I want to hear you say it while you're full of me."

"Forever." The word came out broken, a gasp, because his thumb had found her clit again and was drawing slow, lazy circles through the mess of them.

"That's right." He leaned down and kissed the hollow of her throat, then the soft skin beneath her ear. "You're going to be full of me for the rest of your life, Ellanor. Every night. Every morning. I'm going to wake you up with my cock inside you and I'm going to fall asleep with it still buried in that tight little cunt, and you're going to take all of it."

She whimpered. His fingers were moving now, slow and deliberate, pushing his own spend deeper into her, and she could feel herself getting wet again around them, could feel the slick slide of his come mixing with her own arousal.

"You like that," he said against her ear, his voice a low rumble that vibrated through her skull. "You like the thought of being so full of me that you can't think straight. You like the thought of walking into that hall with my come dripping down your thighs and knowing every single elf can smell it on you."

"They can't—"

"They can." He bit her earlobe, sharp and sudden, and she gasped. "They can smell you on me too. I walked out of that dais with your cunt on my beard and your slick on my tongue and every single one of them knew exactly what I'd been doing to you. I wanted them to know."

His fingers curled inside her, finding the spot that made her see white, and he pressed there, relentless, while his thumb worked her clit.

"I wanted them to watch me kneel in front of you," he said, his voice dropping to a whisper, filthy and intimate. "I wanted them to see me put my mouth on you. I wanted them to see the way you came apart for me, the way you screamed my name, the way you clawed at my hair like you were trying to keep me there forever."

"Glorfindel—"

"I wanted them to know you're mine." His teeth grazed her throat. "Every inch of you. This cunt is mine. This pretty mouth is mine. These tits are mine. I'm going to spend the next four hundred years making sure every single elf in this kingdom knows exactly whose you are."

She was trembling. His fingers were still working her, slow and deep, and she could feel another orgasm building, rising like a tide she couldn't stop.

"You're close again." Not a question. "I can feel it. You're clenching around my fingers like you're trying to suck them deeper. You want to come again, don't you."

"Yes." The word was barely a breath.

"Yes what."

"Yes, my lord."

His laugh was dark, satisfied. "That's my girl. You're learning." He pulled his fingers out slowly, and she felt the loss like a wound, felt his come starting to seep out of her, and then he pushed them back in, pressing it deep again. "But I'm not going to let you come yet."

"Please—"

"I said not yet." He shifted, settling between her thighs again, and she felt the head of his cock nudge at her entrance, already hard again, impossibly hard. "I'm going to fuck you slow this time. So slow you can feel every inch. And I'm going to make you tell me exactly what you want me to do to you."

He pushed in. A fraction. Just the head, stretching her, and she whimpered at the burn, at the fullness, at the way his come slicked the way for him.

"Tell me," he said. "Tell me what you want me to do to that perfect little cunt."

"I want—" She couldn't breathe. He was so thick, so deep, and he wasn't moving, just holding there, letting her feel the weight of him pressing against her walls. "I want you to fuck me."

"I am fucking you." He pushed in another inch. "Be more specific."

"I want you to fuck me hard."

"Hard." He pulled out almost all the way, then pushed back in, slow and deep, and she gasped. "Like this?"

"Yes—"

"No." He did it again, the same slow, grinding stroke. "Not yet. I want you to beg for it properly. I want you to tell me how much you need it. I want you to tell me what it does to you when I'm inside you."

She was going to die. She was going to die right here, on this bed, with his cock buried inside her and his voice in her ear, and she was going to die happy.

"Please," she said. "Please, my lord. Please fuck me hard. Please fuck me until I can't walk. Please make me come on your cock and then fill me up again and make me do it all over."

His eyes went dark. "There she is." He pulled out and slammed back in, hard enough to make her cry out, and then he set a rhythm that was brutal and perfect and exactly what she'd begged for. "That's my girl. That's my perfect, filthy girl. You're going to come on my cock and you're going to scream my name and the whole court is going to hear it."

She was already close. The pleasure was a live thing inside her, coiling and building, and every thrust pushed her higher.

"I can feel you," he said, his voice ragged. "I can feel you squeezing me. You're so fucking tight, Ellanor. You feel like you were made for me. This cunt was made for my cock, wasn't it."

"Yes."

"Say it."

"This cunt was made for your cock." The words were a sob, a prayer, a confession.

"Good girl." He thrust deeper, grinding against her, and she saw stars. "Now come. Come on my cock and let me feel you. Let me feel that tight little cunt milk me dry."

She came. It ripped through her like lightning, her whole body arching off the bed, her cunt clenching around him so hard she felt him shudder. He kept thrusting through it, slow and deep, drawing it out until she was sobbing, shaking, completely undone.

"That's it," he breathed. "That's my girl. You're so beautiful when you come. I'm going to make you come like that every single day for the rest of our lives."

He pulled out. She whimpered at the loss, but he was already moving, rolling her onto her stomach, pulling her hips up until she was on her knees, her face pressed into the pillows.

"I told you I was going to fuck you from behind," he said, and she felt the head of his cock pressing against her entrance again, slick with her. "I told you I was going to watch my cock slide into that perfect ass."

She felt his thumb press against her other hole, slick with her own wetness, and she gasped.

"But not yet," he said. "First I'm going to fill this cunt up one more time. And then I'm going to watch it leak out of you. And then I'm going to put it in your ass and fuck you until you forget your own name."

He pushed in. The angle was different, deeper, and she cried out, her fingers clawing at the sheets. He set a rhythm, hard and fast, his hands on her hips holding her still, and she could feel every inch of him dragging against her walls.

"Look at you," he said, his voice rough with need. "Look at that beautiful ass bouncing against me. You're going to be so full when I'm done with you. I'm going to fill you up in both holes and then I'm going to carry you back to that hall and make you sit through the feast with my come running down your thighs."

She was close again. She could feel it building, a fourth wave cresting, and he knew it—she could feel his hand slide around her hip, find her clit, and press.

She came. It wrecked her, a full-body orgasm that left her shaking and gasping, and she felt him follow her over the edge, felt him bury himself to the hilt and come with a groan, felt the hot pulse of him emptying into her for the second time.

He collapsed on top of her, his weight pressing her into the mattress, and for a long moment neither of them moved. She could feel him still inside her, softening, and she could feel his come seeping out around him, running down her thighs.

"Stay like that," he murmured against her neck. "I want to watch it hold."