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When Key was ten years old his father bade him No more killing. And though killing was all he knew, there was elation in submitting to the stricture. Every time his ruined hands itched to do what they were made to do, the thought of his father stayed him. On days when he felt especially unmoored he would lurk in alleys and doorways to watch the fat satisfied guildsmen who treated Key and his father as less than dirt, and then the sheer exertion of exercising restraint would nearly fell him. He obeyed, of course.
It was the most sublime feeling. It was a pity Key had never been charged to adjure food or drink or air.
:::
He found himself whistling on the way to the kitchens. It was one of the songs Lady Rahela sang in the bath, and while he could never catch the nonsensical words the tune had stayed with him. It was a bright spot in his day, this daily errand. He palmed a knife from his sleeve and tossed it in the air as he strode along. Time to turn his villainous skillset to making his lady deliriously happy.
Normally, to secure hot water for Rahela’s bath, he had to terrorize both the scullery maid who brought it and the cook who would have to contrive without it. He had been doing it for weeks and it was possible that if he stopped intimating bodily harm the water would still arrive piping hot, but 1) he would not risk even the merest morsel of Rahela’s displeasure, and 2) he quite enjoyed threatening people at knifepoint.
“Oh, it’s you,” said the cook without looking up from the pot she was stirring.
Key sidled up, dipped a ladle in the pot, and tasted it. “Who are you serving this to, the inmates of the dungeon?”
“Heard that’s where your mistress’s new quarters have been reapportioned.”
A knife appeared beside the cook’s spleen.
She ignored it, reaching for a pinch of herbs to scatter over the pot. “Yes, yes, keep her name out of my mouth. Say, why don’t you go threaten the laundresses for hot water instead?”
If she continued in this vein he was going to suffer a blow to his professional pride. “Do you understand the consequences if you contribute in any way to my lady’s displeasure?”
“I understand you are her misbegotten cur, and you’ve bigger fish than me to fry. I just work here. Now run along and go bother Daisy, and don’t insult my stew! It’s a big hit with the lords and ladies.”
Key stalked away in a thoughtful mood. He could not decide whether to be miffed by the cook’s attitude or chuffed because “misbegotten cur” had a nice ring to it. It was true Key had never cared for the flavor of food, or considered it anything other than fuel, neither when his father lived nor while he lived under the merchant’s roof. What had mattered was whether his belly was empty or full. Since the advent of his lady, however, he had noted Rahela’s propensity to seek second helpings when there were exotic spices in her fare. She would be disappointed at the blandness of today’s stew.
He wondered how long it would take him to become a passable cook. Then he dismissed the thought since it was not possible to both guard Rahela and prepare her meals, given that people kept trying to kill her. Might be he could invent a device that heated up water instead.
Daisy, as it turned out, was gone to visit a sick mother. The new scullery maid, being uninured to Key’s charms, spilled the first bucket of hot water in a frenzy of terrified compliance. By the time Key completed his errand all the candles were lit in Lady Rahela’s chambers.
In this windowless underground tomb the candles were always lit. You couldn’t see shit otherwise. But Rahela always made a particular effort to arrange the candles in a cozy circle around the hearth for what she called Villain Book Club. This evening Emer had been dispatched on an errand and it was only Key and his lady.
She stood up and the train of her dress rippled in the firelight. Some days it was all he could do to keep his own hands from reaching for the impossible taper of her waist. His arms burned from resisting the impulse. It was a good burn.
“You’re back!” she squealed. “Look what I found.” She tapped a single red-tipped nail against a thick roll of parchment. “Well, the Cobra found it for me, but now we can spare the parchment to practice your letters.” She patted the cushion beside her, and he sank down, grateful. Key never really let his guard down—he sat now between Rahela and the door—but when she watched him scrawling in his “workbook” and petted his wild mane with a lazy hand, there were muscles in his back he didn’t even know he had that relaxed a trifle. He wished she would tell him a story but she said it would interfere with his concentration.
“What’s the plan here? Are you teaching me to write so I can pen a rousing tale for your amusement?”
Her laugh was no ladylike trill but all brazen promise, and to hear it was sweeter than the silence of a slit throat. “I do love murder and mayhem.”
He gripped the quill a little tighter. “That’s why you love the emperor.” His heart leapt into his throat while he waited for her to deny it, which she didn’t. She never did, and he had given her ample opportunity. She looked pensive. Rahela might not like or respect or much enjoy the king’s company, but every last one of her villainous schemes revolved around him. His was the brightest filament in her universe.
“I love the emperor because he’s loyal beyond death. Beyond sense. He goes full berserker when he loses his beloved.” She sighed dreamily. “I’m totally here for it.”
This description did not at all match the petulant toddler whose favor waffled daily between Lady Rahela and Lady Lia, but Key could in theory appreciate Rahela’s allegiance to such a man.
“You’re a soft touch, Boss.”
She threw him a wink. “That’s why I have you to watch my back.”
Something roiled in his belly.
After the penmanship lesson Rahela regaled him with the tale of a harpist who descended into the abyss to retrieve his wife. Key was bewildered by that one. “If he had just kept faith. If he hadn’t looked over his shoulder…”
“That’s not how stories work,” explained an exasperated Rahela. “There are rules, you know! If there’s something the hero is warned not to do then of course he has to go and do it, just to see what happens.”
He crossed his arms over his chest and glowered. “It were me, I’d have killed everyone in the room and carried her home.”
Rahela’s mouth curved upward fondly; her eyes lingered a little overlong on the muscles of his arms. “Thank you for the reminder that your love language is assassination.”
He sketched her a mocking bow. Then he fished a candied pear from his jerkin and handed it to her. “Swiped it from the kitchens.”
She rolled her eyes. “You know they’d give it to you if you just asked? I’m not the favorite but I’m still a lady-in-waiting, I’m not meant to starve.”
“Yes, Boss, but how else would I demonstrate my undying devotion?”
Her expression softened. She held the pear out to him. “Go ahead, take a bite. I know you test all my food for poison.”
She was sharp as well as witty. Of course she had noticed.
They passed the pear back and forth between them, and by the time they had it down to the core his head was resting easily in her lap, and then the maid entered with the bathwater. Rahela ran her fingers one last time through the riot of his hair. “No scheming without me!” she warned before disappearing behind the screen.
Usually while she took her bath he took his knives out. She was going to be awhile. He’d never seen a woman who liked to bathe so much. Of course, he had grown up in the gutter, but even by palace standards Rahela’s bathing was excessive. He could keep his back to the screen, he could cultivate a policy of strictly no peeking, he could do all that and yet his mind would not be disciplined as readily as his body. Rahela would move about and sing and splash, and he’d grit his teeth and remember it was not his place to have opinions on how long she soaked in the tub.
Today he reached for the ruby she had given him. He tended not to take it out when Emer was about because she gave him no end of grief for his sentimentality. Lost god’s teeth! It’s an earring, not a promise ring. Key knew that full well. He remembered how Rahela had kissed it cheekily before she tossed the bauble at him. It was an afterthought. He was an afterthought. Everyone kept telling him so. Everyone except his lady, who had hesitated not at all before stripping the jewel-encrusted dress off her body to buy his father’s tombstone.
Key was her misbegotten cur, and there was no role better suited for him between sky and abyss.
Much sooner than was her wont Rahela emerged from the bath. He heard her approach, yet some impulse thwarted him from concealing the ruby.
She stopped when she saw it. He expected amusement, or consternation, but there was only curiosity when she said, “You haven’t pawned it.”
“It’s a mark of my lady’s favor.” Sometimes, when he was desperate, he held it between his teeth while he took himself in hand.
Rahela’s wet hair was dripping on stone, drip-drip-drip-drip. He thought about what other parts of her might be dripping, and then he clenched his fingers around the ruby to choke off that line of inquiry.
“You haven’t kissed me since the night I gave you that.” Here a note of recrimination crept in.
He had kissed her a thousand times in his dreams and it never ended well; served him right for the colossal presumption. He croaked, “My lady forgets what happened on the battlements.”
“Uh-uh-uh.” She wagged a finger. “I kissed you that time. You never kiss me. Even though you definitely want to.” She brought one delicate white wrist up to brush his bottom lip with the same finger. Her wrist, unadorned by the heavy gold coils of the snake bracelet that denoted the king’s favorite, seemed extraordinarily fragile.
“If her servant has failed her…the punishment is my lady’s to decree.”
She eyed him sidelong. “On your knees, minion.”
His body obeyed before his mind even parsed the words. His body had always been more reliable that way. He gazed up at her, abject, adoring. If the gods had smote him down the next instant he would have gone whistling to his grave among the unloved dead. Her lashes gave a flutter of interest.
“They say I’m the most alluring woman alive. Is it true?”
“You know it is.”
Her thumb rested at the corner of his jaw. He remained motionless on his knees. “If it’s true, how can you keep your hands off me?”
“With difficulty,” admitted Key.
“Then you must think yourself ill-used. You must think me a harsh mistress.” She had begun by pretending to be wroth with him but this, here, was true dismay. Was she apologizing to him?
He enunciated his next words with care. “Every day I serve my lady is a privilege. I want no other mistress.” Oh, how he longed to squeeze her hand for emphasis; the very hand that now caressed his jaw. But something was building between them, something too brittle to shift yet. He dare not move lest she bade him.
Rahela’s expression turned calculating. If she must treat him like a puzzle, then he would gladly let her dismantle him and examine the mangled pieces at leisure. “Are there ways you could…potentially better serve me?”
Were there ever! He nodded once, eyes steady upon her.
“Then I command you to pay me the homage I have been long denied.”
“You are sure,” he said.
In answer she shrugged her robe off.
He didn’t make her repeat the command. He dropped the ruby atop the fallen robe and bore her to the bed. She was warm and slippery from the bath. She was everywhere—in his arms, in his mouth, in his soul. There was no retreating behind a screen now.
He laid her carefully down and bent to tug his gloves off with his teeth, but she said, “No. Leave those on.”
So that was the way of it. His leather-clad palms stroked up and down her flanks, her bared thighs. A tremor ran through Rahela.
He said, “You don’t tremble like this when the king is near.”
“When the king is near, I want you more.” Her knees fell invitingly open. “I always, always want you.”
She was perfect. She was panting for him.
He couldn’t stop looking at her, was the problem. The way every particle of her attention was trained on him somehow went concurrently to his brain and his cock. Maybe he would just stare at the perfect swell of her breasts until he died of desire. It wouldn’t be a bad way to go.
Rahela was not having it. She hooked an ankle around his forearm. “To be clear I want you to debauch me, not to write poetry about me.”
He seized the ankle and pressed a thumb into the arch of the foot. “Thanks for the clarification, Boss.”
“Keyyyy,” she whined.
Airly he asked, “Would you have let me do this that night at the edge of the dread ravine?”
“I’d have let you do anything you wanted if we hadn’t been interrupted.” Ah, the drunken reveler who had killed the mood. Perhaps it was for the best. Then, Key had been playing. It had seemed a game, a flirtation, a way to pass the time. Now Rahela was the whole of his universe.
He stroked upward from the ankle, along the inside of her calves, to the softness behind her knees. “So it gets your blood up when I kill for you?”
Her scarlet lips parted.
Key leaned forward with interest. “I see. But wait. What kind of servant climbs into my lady’s bed armed to the teeth?” He considered. “Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to get rid of my knives, and I’m going to kiss you with the tip of each and every one. Stay still for me.”
She was well and caught. She went taut with anticipation.
He began with the one in his vambrace, because he frequently felt her gaze in idle moments linger upon his arms, and it had the intended effect. She was mesmerized. With the blade he traced a line from her collarbone, between the valley of her magnificent breasts, all the way down to the seam of her thighs. He made the journey as slow as he could stand it. Then he set the knife aside and reached for the one in his boot. She didn’t move, didn’t warn him to be careful not to draw blood. She hated blood. She trusted him. His breeches felt fit to burst.
After the fifth knife she said, “Jesus, how many more?”
He had been careful to kiss her only with cold steel. Nowhere else did he touch her. Now he drew back, twirled the knife hilt to blade, blade to hilt, hilt to blade, and she practically yowled with impatience. “Will you put that away!!”
“Is that an order?” He leaned back on his haunches in feigned confusion. “My lady wishes her servant to perform a different sort of homage?”
“Yes,” she hissed.
He lowered himself to his elbows and licked a stripe down her chest in the wake of the blade’s path.
“Oh my god.” She sank her nails into his shoulder, her other hand slipping toward his belt. He swatted it away.
Rahela made a wounded sound. “I love seeing you in my bed.”
This nugget he stowed away with as much care as the ruby she had given him.
“Oh?” he mumbled around the nipple in his mouth. He laved his tongue over it until he had teased it to a stiff peak, then went to pay tribute to the other nipple. She swallowed a moan and he paused his work long enough to chide her, “None of that. Let me hear you.”
“When you were hurt,” she gasped, breaths coming in labored huffs, “and recovering.....mmmm…..in my bed. Was my fault you got hurt but all it did was …ohhh….give me an excuse to look at you.”
If his balls were heavy before they were as lead now. “You need no excuse. Everything I am is yours.”
“You’re so intense,” and her grin was wide and giddy. Her gaze swept meaningfully up and down his clothed form. He hadn’t even removed his boots. “Everything?” she asked brightly. He could smell the sticky sweet mess of arousal between her folds.
“Patience,” he murmured, still stroking, still rubbing. “My lady commanded me to worship her.”
She frowned. “We don’t have all day. If Emer returns—“
“—she’ll find you being ravished by your loyal guardsman,” he finished smoothly, and drew her wrist to his lips to press a kiss to the palm. In response her hips behaved as if they wanted to cant themselves directly into his mouth.
Chagrinned, she threw a hand up to hide her face. “How did I know you were a dirty talker.”
He smirked. “Been thinking on it often?”
“Key,” she wailed.
He remembered how wonton she had been at the top of the ravine. How she liked to dance on the knife’s edge of impossibility. “If the court could see you now…” He waited for her hungry eyes to snap to his mouth. “The king would throw you in the dungeon. You’d be ruined.”
“So ruin me,” she urged.
He dove for her cunt and found her wet and wanting. She tasted like light. He had no notion how he’d held back as long as he did. He slipped a finger into her and she swallowed it greedily, begged for another, and another. The noises of encouragement he was coaxing from her would have shattered any man’s resolve. The feeling of her fluttering around him…
When he had had women before it had been to satisfy his own need. He had not been exquisitely attuned to their every thought, bent his mind to realize their every whim. Then, too, he had always found the pleasures of the flesh less interesting than its destruction. Now nothing could surpass his interest in Rahela. He was not fool enough to think he could possess her: she was a jewel beyond his ken. He was merely a courtier doing his duty. He was deficient in so many ways but if there was one ability he was confident in it was the power to please his lady. That, and vanquish her enemies.
When he finally drove her to her peak, the sound of his name in her mouth made his blood sing. He ignored his own considerable need in favor of memorizing every angle and aspect of her ecstasy. So this was happiness.
With an obscene pop he withdrew three fingers from the slick clenching heat of her. The leather of his glove was dripping with her juices. He brought his hand up, sucked his fingers dry and made sure Rahela saw him doing it.
“Holy shit,” she said in wonderment.
Key drank in her dishevelment, the dazed revelation in her eyes. Then he reached for the knives he had laid aside and began to resheathe them. “I’m going to slit the king’s throat.”
“Wait, what?!” she yelped. Her breasts jiggled distractingly when she sat up too fast. She shook out her hair and Key could have wept at how exquisite she was.
“The king’s never done that for you,” he said. He knew it with a black flood of certainty. He knew Rahela.
“Whew. Okay. Let me get this straight. You’re not mad that he had me before you. You’re mad that he never went down on me?”
There was a fever upon him, a tempest of violence and ardor. His cock was throbbing and he needed to stab something. For the king to have attended so little to Rahela’s desires was intolerable.
“Come here,” she said softly. She melted into his arms—lost gods, how was she was so soft—and kissed a line of heat down his neck. She fondled the painfully hard, leaking length of him. Her voice went smoky and low. “I need you to fuck me now.”
“Yes, Boss.” He palmed one of her generous breasts and ran a callused thumb back and forth over the nipple, drawing forth a shiver from her.
She purred into his ear, “Such a good minion.” Here she gave his earlobe a little tug with her teeth.
Key grinned at her. “I’m good at my job.”
“The best,” agreed Lady Rahela.
He could always kill the king later. She had not, after all, told him not to.