What the Heart Answers

It was the first moment of true silence they had found all day, but the room still felt loud with tension. Titan heat clung to the stone walls, soaking into uniforms and tempers alike.

Mòrag stood by the entrance, watching as Niall moved deeper into the room, not toward the comfort of the sofas, but to the desk that was already drowning in paperwork. Reports, sealed scrolls, and petitions lay in chaotic drifts. And on top of the highest stack, visible from the doorway, lay the neat, hateful rectangle of parchment the council had forced into his hand.

Mor Ardain’s future, they had called it. Dynastic security. Suitable matches.

It looked like a threat.

Niall didn’t sit. He paced the length of the rug, jacket unbuttoned, tie hanging crooked, his usually immaculate hair knocked a little off-centre. The perfect Emperor silhouette had finally cracked at the edges, leaving just a tired young man in its wake.

“They talk about ‘stability’,” he burst out, dragging a hand through his hair, “as if you can just bolt a stranger to the throne and call it secure.”

“They are frightened,” Mòrag offered, her voice calm, though she felt the same heat prickling under her collar. “Frightened men cling to rituals. A marriage alliance is the oldest ritual they know.”

“It’s not a ritual to me,” Niall countered, turning sharply. “It’s a life sentence. Look at this.”

He stopped at the desk, two fingers tapping the folded list with a little too much force.

“A catalogue,” he said, the word dripping with disdain. “Faces, bloodlines, dowries. I’m supposed to... pick one. Like I’m choosing a new flagship.”

“It is the burden of the crown,” Mòrag said, though the words tasted like ash. “To marry for the state.”

“Is it?” Niall asked. He picked up the parchment, not opening it, just weighing it in his hand. “They want me to trust my life—and my heirs—to a woman I have never met. To share my bed with a stranger because her father owns the right trade routes.”

He looked up at her then, his eyes searching, desperate for something more than a soldier’s platitude.

“How am I supposed to do that, Mòrag? How do I let someone in who doesn’t know... anything? Who doesn’t know me?”

Mòrag stiffened slightly. “She will learn to know you, Niall. In time.”

“Will she?” He dropped the list back onto the desk. It landed with a soft, final slap. “Or will she only ever see the Emperor?”

His mouth twisted. For a moment he stared down at the parchment as if sheer will might make it vanish. Then his gaze flicked sideways, catching on her, and held there a fraction too long.

“All of them are names on paper,” he said quietly, the fight draining out of him to leave something rawer behind. “Not one of them anything like you.”

The last words came out heavier than the rest. He heard them as he said them; so did she.

Silence landed between them, sudden and thick. The word you hung in the air, wrapped clumsily in like and still naked.

Niall’s eyes widened a fraction. Colour climbed up his throat, flushing across his cheeks. He looked away too late, fumbling at the already-crooked papers as if they might save him.

“...I mean,” he amended, voice stumbling, “not one of them I actually... know. Not really. Not the way I... trust you.”

Mòrag felt her shoulders go just a little too straight. A warm prickle touched the tips of her ears; she snuffed it out ruthlessly.

“Your Majesty is exhausted,” she said, smoothing her tone into something cool and formal, something safe. “You have heard nothing but argument and flattery all day. Of course the council’s list will seem... intolerable.”

She did not touch the like you at all. That omission was its own answer.

His shoulders slumped a little, some of the fight going out of him. He looked younger like that, tie askew, hair mussed, the lines of strain around his eyes too deep for his years.

She turned toward the door, then paused, gloved hand meeting bare fingers on the handle. Her voice, when it came, was quieter.

“The council can draft as many lists as it pleases,” she said, half-turned, looking at the wood rather than at him. “In the end, you are the one who must live with the choice.”

A beat. She allowed herself one small, dangerous truth.

“Don’t let them decide what only your own heart can answer, Niall.”

His head came up at the sound of his name. She didn’t look back to see it.

“Rest,” she added, the armour snapping back into place over the crack. “Things will look different in the morning. Good night, Your Majesty.”

She left a little too quickly for someone untouched by the conversation.

Behind her, the study settled into hot, paper-littered quiet. The bride list sat where he had left it, glinting dully on the desk. In his ears, her voice echoed: Don’t let them decide what only your own heart can answer, Niall.

The horrid realisation that his heart already had an answer—and that it had just walked out of the room—landed like a stone.

***

The door to her own chambers closed with a soft click.

Mòrag stood there for a heartbeat with both palms flat against the wood, breathing as if she had just come off a battlefield rather than a council session. Her reflection in the small wall mirror looked back at her: hair too tight, eyes too bright, mouth set in a line that was supposed to be composure and felt more like a crack.

“Stupid boy,” she muttered under her breath. “Stupid feelings.”

The room was dim, lit only by the reddish Titan glow through the high window and a single low lantern by her desk. The usual quiet blue shimmer from Brighid’s core was absent; the corner chair where Brighid often sat reading was bare.

Earlier, on the way back from the council, Brighid had inclined her head and said something about “consulting the archives until late, if you have no further need of me tonight.”

“Very well,” Mòrag had replied, brittle with fatigue. “Don’t let me keep you from your books.”

Now, with the silence pressing in and no steady presence at her shoulder, she regretted it. Brighid’s absence yawned like a gap: no cool voice, no wry remark to drag her thoughts somewhere safer.

On her own desk lay her copy of the day’s agenda and resolutions. The section headings stared up at her: Dynastic security. Alliance candidates. Fertility projections. Heir contingencies.

She snatched the sheaf up, stared until the ink blurred, then crumpled the top page in her fist and threw it back down.

“Idiot,” she said again, sharper. “Letting them talk about you like a mere breeding stud.”

She undid her coat with jerky motions, the leather heavy and stifling. She tugged the high collar loose, fingers fumbling over the clasps. The Titan’s heat and the council’s words felt like they had soaked through the fabric, turning her skin too tight for her body.

She tried to be sensible. She poured herself water and drank it in measured sips, the glass cool against her palm. She tried to read a brief. The letters crawled uselessly across the page.

She sat on the edge of the bed, intending to unlace her boots; instead she ended up staring at the far wall, one hand gripping the edge of the mattress until her knuckles turned white, replaying the scene in the study.

Not one of them anything like you.

Ridiculous, she told herself. He was tired. He has always been too quick to speak his heart. He did not mean—

The treacherous whisper in her mind did not bother finishing the sentence. It didn’t need to. The way his voice had cracked on you had said enough.

“Pathetic,” she told the empty room, as much at herself as at him. “You are the Empire’s blade, not some girl sighing over her Emperor.”

She lay back stiffly across the bed, intending to sleep, to force the day into oblivion. But the tension in her body wasn’t just mental; it was a physical coil, tight and hot and persistent low in her belly. It was an ache she recognised from long campaigns, usually solved with the same grim efficiency as sharpening a blade.

With a sharp exhale of frustration, her hand slid down.

It was utilitarian, she told herself. A soldier’s fix. Just a way to purge the adrenaline and the heat so she could sleep. She didn’t undo her belt, just loosened the fastenings enough to slide her hand inside her trousers.

The shock of her own slickness against her fingers made the air catch in her throat. Her body had betrayed her long before her mind had caught up.

Just get it over with.

She moved with clinical, practiced friction, staring blindly at the ceiling. She tried to focus on the sensation alone—the drag of skin, the pressure, the simple mechanics of release. She tried to summon the blank white noise of duty that usually drowned everything else out.

But the release refused to come.

Instead of blankness, her mind betrayed her. It replayed the way his hair had fallen over his forehead in the study. The way his hands had gripped the desk, knuckles white. The desperate, naked look in his eyes when he’d said you.

Her hips bucked involuntarily, a traitorous spike of pleasure shooting through her at the image. Her breath came jagged and loud in the quiet room. Her fingers moved faster, harsher, abandoning the clinical rhythm for something desperate, trying to chase the feeling out, to force the climax before the thought could fully form.

Niall.

The name slipped through her thoughts, hot and heavy, and the shame of it burned hotter than the arousal.

She froze, hand still pressed against herself, heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird.

“Stop it,” she hissed, withdrawing her hand as if burned.

She rolled onto her side, curling in on herself, leaving the ache unresolved and throbbing between her legs.

“You absolute fool of a boy.”

She lay there in the dim light, uniform half-undone, staring at the wall until the lines blurred. The ache did not ease. The tightness in her throat did not fade.

It is just stress, she told herself. It is the council, and the heat, and the day. You will sleep. In the morning this will all seem... manageable.

Sleep, stubbornly, did not come.

***

Across the palace, in his own rooms, Niall had given up pretending.

He lay on top of his covers in simple night-clothes—soft dark trousers, a loose linen shirt. His formal jacket drooped over a chair like a discarded skin, the gold braid glinting dully in the low light. On the small table by the bed, the bride list sat folded once, the council’s wax seal already cracked and broken.

The room was half-dark, lit by a single low lamp that cast long, uneasy shadows against the walls. Outside, the Titan groaned faintly, a deep vibration in the floor that Niall usually found comforting. Tonight, it felt like the world shifting under him.

Inside, all he could hear was his own heartbeat and the echo of too many voices.

Councillors, droning in his skull with suffocating weight: Alliances. Heirs. Stability. Suitable matches.

And then Mòrag, cutting through the noise in the study: The council can draft as many lists as it pleases. In the end, you are the one who must live with the choice.

He shut his eyes, trying to block out the room, but that only brought her into sharper focus.

He saw her as he had always seen her: Standing half a step behind him at audiences, the quiet weight of a gloved hand at his shoulder, a presence as constant as the ground beneath his feet. She was the first person to call him Niall in private after he took the throne, when everyone else drowned him in Your Majesty.

For most of his life, she had been his coordinate points. Something like an older sister. Something like a commander. Something like a wall between him and the world that wanted to consume him.

And God, he knew what it had cost her to become that wall.

He knew the history that some in the council liked to gloss over: that Mòrag had been prepared to sit where he sat now. She had been raised to be Empress, drilled in statecraft and duty before he was born and then burden fell to him instead.

She had stepped aside without a single word of bitterness. She had traded the crown she was ready for to pick up a sword instead, turning herself into the Special Inquisitor just to ensure he survived the throne she had forsaken.

She had spent a decade bowing to the kid who took her place, defending him with a ferocity that terrified the very men who now tried to manage his life.

He could not quite pinpoint when looking at her had stopped feeling purely safe.

Perhaps it was when the warmth of her hand on his shoulder had started to sink deeper into his skin, lingering after she let go. Perhaps it was when the sight of her loosening her hair at the end of the day—just a brief glimpse of the woman beneath the soldier—had made his chest feel too hot and tight to breathe.

You are not supposed to think of her like this, he told himself, cheeks burning in the dark. She is older. She is your cousin. Your officer. She gave up her life to be your shield, not your—

Not your lover. Not your wife.

But the harder he pushed the thoughts down, the sharper they got, fueled by the terrifying prospect of the list on his table. Mòrag beside him on the throne, not behind it. Mòrag in his bed, the sternness of the Inquisitor gone soft and unravelled at the edges. Mòrag with a child on her hip who had her eyes and his mouth.

His stomach flipped. His heart felt too big for his ribs, battering against the cage of propriety he’d built for himself.

If this is wrong, he thought, the idea forming cold and clear, then I need her to tell me so. Not the council. Not a list. Her.

His gaze drifted to the folded bride list. It sat there like a dare. Like a tombstone for the life he actually wanted.

If she can’t... if she won’t... then I’ll ask her to choose one for me, he thought, bleak and stubborn at once. If I have to marry a stranger, let it be someone she thinks will be kind. Someone she can bear to see at my side, since I will have to spend the rest of my life looking at her.

It was a miserable fallback, a coward’s bargain, but at least it was still her hand guiding his future instead of theirs.

He lay there a moment longer, the Titan’s rumble under the palace vibrating in his bones. Her voice came back to him, unbidden: Don’t let them decide what only your own heart can answer.

“Decide,” he whispered to the empty room.

He exhaled sharply and swung his legs over the side of the bed. The stone floor was cool under his bare feet, grounding him. He glanced at his uniform jacket, then turned away.

He crossed to the door in his night-clothes, heart hammering a frantic rhythm against his sternum. His hand hovered on the latch, trembling slightly.

If she sends me away, he thought, swallowing the lump of fear in his throat, then she sends me away. At least I’ll know I asked.

He opened the door and stepped out into the quiet corridor. The silence of the palace at night was heavy, amplified by the soft hush of his linen shirt as he moved. He walked in his soft pyjama trousers and bare feet toward her rooms, the stone cold against his skin, every step feeling reckless and terrified and exactly, finally, honest.

***

Mòrag hadn’t moved from the bed. She couldn’t.

The release she had chased with such clinical desperation had turned into a fever she couldn’t break. Her earlier attempt to stop had failed; the silence of the room had only amplified the thudding of her pulse, and the image of his face had dragged her hand back down against her will.

She was sprawled on top of the covers, head thrown back against the pillow, coat shed and shirt pulled open. One hand was knotted in the sheets; the other was buried between her legs, moving with a rhythm that was less about pleasure and more about a frantic need to exorcise him from her system.

She was close—terrifyingly, humiliatingly close—when the sound came.

The handle turned.

There was no knock. Just the soft click of the latch lifting in the silence.

Mòrag flinched so violently her hips jerked off the mattress. Her heart slammed against her ribs, the sudden spike of adrenaline nearly painful in its intensity.

No. She hadn’t locked it. Saints above, she hadn’t locked it.

The door eased open. Light from the corridor spilled in, harsh and exposing.

Niall.

In soft pyjama trousers and a loose linen shirt. No cloak, no guard, no ceremony. His hair was mussed from bed, his feet bare on the cold stone.

He stopped dead. The door hit the wall with a soft thud.

He took in the scene in one wide-eyed sweep: Mòrag frozen on the bed, clothes in rough order but clearly dishevelled, cheeks flushed dark, chest heaving with breath she couldn’t seem to catch.

His first instinct wasn’t desire; it was worry.

“Mòrag?” he blurted, hand freezing on the doorframe. “I— I’m sorry, I... I needed to see you.”

Mòrag stayed seated—she didn’t trust her legs. Every muscle was still locked on that almost-release, coiled tight and screaming for what it was denied. Her thighs were clamped together; her fingers still burned with the phantom memory of exactly where they were a second ago. Her heart hammered so loudly she can barely hear him over the rush of blood in her ears.

She hauled her spine straight, pulling the front of her coat together with a hand that shook visibly. She tried to pin herself in place with posture alone, but the adrenaline was a live wire under her skin.

“Your Majesty cannot simply barge into a fair maiden’s quarters at this hour,” she said, her voice coming out too fast, too rough.

It was a desperate, mocking deflection, and it shattered the moment it left her mouth.

He froze in the doorway like a boy caught raiding the kitchens, then pushed it the rest of the way open with an effort and stepped inside.

“I— I apologise,” he stammered, face going crimson as the intimacy of the room hit him. The air was thick with heat and the scent of her own distress. “I didn’t mean to be rude. That is—”

He looked utterly wretched and absolutely determined.

“You should be in bed,” she cut in, the command brittle. “Alone. The day has been long and you have another council session in the morning.”

“I tried,” he said simply. “I couldn’t.”

He took a breath, as if he was about to dive into deep water, and stepped closer. His eyes dropped to her hands, white-knuckled where they gripped her coat.

“You’re shaking,” he said, the observation dropping into the quiet room like a stone. “Mòrag... did something happen?”

She could not let him see why she was shaking. She could not let him know that she was trembling because her body was still halfway to a climax he interrupted. She kept her gaze just off his face, staring at the wall behind him, fighting to keep her breathing even.

“What happened,” she said, her voice thin as wire, “is that you decided to invade my privacy without knocking.” She added, dry and bitter, “Even your Special Inquisitor deserves warning, Your Majesty.”

He flinched at the sarcasm, but he didn’t step back. He closed the door behind him instead, slow and careful. The soft click made her heart stutter in her chest.

He stopped by the side of her bed, hands hanging awkwardly at his sides, bare feet sinking into her rug. He was close enough now that she could smell the soap on his skin, close enough to see the exhaustion bruising the skin under his eyes.

“In the study,” he said, leaving the safe shallows of small talk behind, “you told me the council can make as many lists as they like... but I am the one who has to live with the choice.”

Her fingers curled tighter in the blanket. She remembered very clearly saying it, thinking herself detached and wise.

“Advice,” she said, reaching for dryness like a shield and finding it cracked, “I did not intend you to act on in the middle of the night. In your pyjamas.”

He glanced down at himself, cheeks colouring, then looked back up with that fragile stubbornness she knew too well.

“I tried to sleep,” he admitted. “I kept thinking. So I... listened. To my heart.”

“Niall.” Her voice came out lower than she meant, frayed at the edges. A warning and a plea in one.

He perched on the very edge of the mattress, leaving careful space between them. The mattress dipped under his weight, tilting her gravity inevitably toward him. Up close he could see how rigid she was, how her throat worked as she swallowed.

“I know it’s improper,” he said quietly. “You’re older. You’re my cousin. You’ve looked after me since I was small. The Empire expects me to choose a bride from a list and pretend I’m delighted.”

His hands knotted together in his lap, knuckles straining.

“I told myself that was all it was,” he went on, words tumbling now, faster, as if he feared stopping would mean never starting again. “That you were just... something like a big sister. A shield the Empire put at my side.”

She seized on that, fast, like a lifeline.

“That is what I am,” she cut in, desperate to put the barrier back up. “Your shield. Your sword. You are tired and under pressure, that is all. You’re mistaking gratitude for—”

“I’m not,” he said, too quickly to be anything but honest.

His eyes met hers. They were bright, terrified, and absolutely certain.

“When they talk about a wife,” he said, the word almost stumbling out, “or children, or the future... I don’t see any of those names on their list. I only ever see you. Standing next to me.” He swallowed hard. “I’ve tried to imagine someone else. I can’t.”

The words were clumsy, too big for him and entirely sincere. They landed like a physical blow.

Inside, Mòrag wanted to clap her hands over his mouth. Don’t say this. Don’t make it real.

Another, smaller, uglier part of her thrilled to hear it. She was ashamed of that part immediately.

He heard himself and flushed deeper, ducking his head. “I’m sorry,” he added, quietly. “I know I shouldn’t... put this on you. I just—” his fingers flexed helplessly. “I couldn’t lie there and pretend it wasn’t true. Not after what you said.”

She dragged in a breath that didn’t help. The air in the room felt too thin, consumed by the heat radiating off him, off her.

“You are lonely,” she said, forcing the words out level, though they shook. “You’ve had the council in your ears all day. Anyone would seize on the nearest familiar hand.”

It was half true, and they both knew it.

“In a week,” she tried again, desperation creeping in, “you will have forgotten this. You’ll be mortified you ever said such things to your Special Inquisitor.”

Please, she thought, sick with herself. Please let that be true. Let me be the only one who remembers this.

He only shook his head. “I’ve felt this way longer than a week,” he said simply. “I just finally heard myself admit it.”

There was nothing to parry in that, no clever angle to sidestep. Just a young man in night-clothes saying I love you without the word.

Shame burned in her throat—not at him, at herself. At the way her body had already answered his confession like a spark to tinder. At how badly she wanted, for one selfish moment, to forget every reason she should refuse.

“You are hopeless,” she murmured, because anything gentler would break her. “Utterly hopeless.”

But she didn’t tell him to go. She didn’t step back. She stayed where she was, flushed and humming and painfully aware of the tiny space between them.

He seemed to take that as the tiny mercy it was. His hand lifted, hesitant, and came to rest along her jaw. His thumb brushed the heat in her cheek; she drew in a sharp, jagged breath. The touch was electric, grounding and terrifying all at once.

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” he admitted, a shaky little huff that was half laugh. “But if I’m making a mistake, I’d rather make it with you than spend the rest of my life wondering.”

He leaned in, slowly, carefully—no speeches about stopping, no demands, just an offered closeness.

She could still pull back. She could tell herself she was only humouring him, only soothing a frightened boy.

What she actually did was tilt into his hands, eyes closing, surrender crashing over her like a wave.

This is wrong, she thought, shame curling low and hot. You are supposed to be better than this.

Out loud, she managed a whisper, rough with want. “...You really will be the ruin of me.”

And then she closed the distance.

The kiss shattered any hope of pretending this was sisterly. He made a small, startled sound when her mouth caught his, then melted into it with embarrassing ease.

There was nothing chaste in it; no polite brush of lips. He kissed her the way he spoke—openly, wholeheartedly, like the thing he’d been secretly building up to for years.

His hand at her jaw slid back into her hair, fingers tangling in the loose strands; the other settled at her waist, burning through the thin shirt. When she tilted forward, he instinctively wrapped his arm around her, pulling her closer, collapsing the distance until she was pressed flush against him.

Mòrag let herself go for a handful of heartbeats. The taste of him, warm and earnest. The solid, living line of his body pressed to hers. The way he followed her mouth when she deepened the kiss, answering every shift without hesitation.

Her mind was a tangle. This is wrong. This is the Emperor. This is the child you watched grow up.

...who is kissing you like a man who chose you as his.

He held her tighter when she swayed, one hand braced between her shoulder blades, the other anchoring her at the waist. For the first time in a long time, she wasn’t the one propping someone else up; she was the one being held.

The second, ruined wave inside her surged again just from that—his mouth, his arms, the low sound he let out when she dragged him closer. Her toes curled in her boots. Heat flared between her thighs like a brand, the ache she thought she could ignore roaring back to life.

They broke only when air absolutely forced the issue. Niall pulled back a fraction, still holding her—foreheads touching, noses brushing, his breath warm against her lips.

He looked dazed, a little shell-shocked, like he couldn’t quite believe he was allowed to have her in his arms.

Mòrag could feel every inch where they were pressed together. Her coat was skewed, belt loose, trousers uncomfortably tight and damp across her lap. The throbbing low in her belly had gone from “problem to be fixed” to something raw and insistent.

What are you doing, her training hissed. You are wrapping yourself around your Emperor in your half-undone uniform like a barracks girl. You’re a view of utter disgrace.

She made herself loosen her grip on his shirt. Just a little. Enough to pretend she was about to push him away.

Niall misread the shift. Or maybe he didn’t, and did something even more reckless.

His arms tightened in one last squeeze—an instinctive hug that crushed her against him—and then loosened. Before she could decide what to do with the space, he was already moving.

A press of lips against the corner of her mouth, almost apologetic. A second, fleeting brush at her jaw.

Then that warmth travelled lower, along the line of her throat.

She sucked in a breath. No. No, that is—

His mouth found the hollow at the base of her throat and everything inside her jumped.

He didn’t say anything. He didn’t ask. He just followed gravity and impulse: From her throat to the edge of her collar. From collar to the faint exposed strip of skin where her shirt has come loose. From there, down along the front of her, gentle at first, as if testing each point he touched just to see how she shivered.

By the time his weight shifted off the mattress, she realised where this was going.

He wouldn’t— He has no idea what he’s—

Niall slid off the bed, hands trailing down her sides as he went, until his knees touched the rug.

The sight nearly stopped her heart: Her Emperor, kneeling between her legs.

One of his hands braced on her thigh now, fingers hot through the fabric. His head level with her open coat, his breath already fanning over the rumpled line of her waistband.

Shock hit first. Her muscles locked, a soldier’s reflex. Stop him. Tell him to stand up. Tell him to go back to bed and forget this.

Her mouth opened.

“Niall—”

It came out nothing like a command. Not sharp, not cold—just her name for him wrapped around a thin thread of panic and want.

He glanced up at her face. Whatever he saw there isn’t rejection. Her pupils blown wide. Her lips parted, kiss-swollen. Colour burning high across her cheekbones.

His fingers flexed on her thigh. Then, very carefully, he eased her knees a fraction wider, just enough to give himself room.

You should close your legs, the rational part of her said. This is the moment. Close them and this stops.

Her body did the opposite. Her boots stayed where they were. The gap between her thighs didn’t narrow; if anything, it invited him closer.

He swallowed—she could hear it—and leaned in.

The first brush of his mouth through her loosened trousers was clumsy, almost tentative. Even so, it was like dropping a match into oil.

She jerked, a shocked sound tearing out of her. Every nerve that had been frozen on the brink of climax snapped back to life with a vengeance.

Oh Architect. No no no-...oh.

He pulled back a hair, startled by the way she reacted. Then, emboldened, did it again, more certain.

Any words she might have had evaporated. Her hand, acting on its own, found his hair and gripped.

“Don’t—” she gasped.

She never managed to add stop. Her fingers tightened instead of pushing him away.

Whatever inexperience he had, he made up in focus. Once he was sure he wasn’t being shoved off, he gave himself over to it completely, like everything else he did.

From her perspective, it was chaos. Heat surging where he was, sharp and unbearable. The missing second climax roaring back like it was only waiting for this trigger. Her own pulse thundering in her ears so loud she can barely hear the tiny, instinctive sounds he made.

Inside, the spiral tightened.

This is obscene. He is on his knees. For you. You are letting him. You are holding him there.

A fresh stab of shame hit. You were supposed to be better than this, Mòrag Ladair. You were supposed to steer him through council politics, not let him bury his head between your— Titans, that—

Her back arched. Her free hand clawed at the blankets. She tried to tell herself this was just... the last of her own pent-up need, nothing to do with him. The lie didn’t survive the next jolt of pleasure.

No. No one has ever— No one has ever wanted you like this.

That thought was worse than all the others, because it felt dangerously close to true. She heard herself making sounds she didn’t recognise: small, broken, bitten-off things that dragged out of her throat every time he hit the right rhythm.

You do not whine into your Emperor’s hair while he—

She choked off the word, even in her own head. It didn’t take long. It couldn’t. She was already wound so tight her body didn’t know what to do with itself. The pressure built fast, a reckless, climbing rush that made her toes curl and her vision blur.

Every time she thought it couldn’t get any sharper, he moved in a way that proved her wrong.

Stop him. Stop him before—before there is no way back from this. Please.

Her hand in his hair tightened. She hauled in a breath to say his name again, to order him, to beg him, she didn’t know which—

—and the wave broke.

All the energy that had locked in place when he opened the door finally crashed through her. Her hips jerked, helpless, against his mouth. A cry ripped out of her, raw and unguarded, the kind of sound she had never made for anyone.

For a few seconds, there was no council, no throne, no rank. Just white-hot release and the feeling of him, stubbornly, devotedly, holding on through it.

Unforgivable. You have crossed a line you can never uncross...and you would do it again.

For a few long seconds after it hit, Mòrag couldn’t move. Her body pulsed in aftershocks, thighs trembling around his shoulders, hands knotted in his hair and in the blankets. The room felt tilted, too small; the lamp light swam.

Slowly, the edges of the world came back into focus: the rasp of her own breathing, the Titan’s distant groan, the faint ache in her fingers from gripping too hard.

And Niall, still on his knees between her legs.

He eased back a little, hands still gentle on her thighs as if afraid she’d topple over. When he looked up, his face was flushed for a dozen reasons—but the first emotion in his eyes wasn’t triumph, it was worry.

“Are you?” he started, voice rough. He had to clear his throat. “Did I... I didn’t hurt you, did I?”

It was so very him that it almost made her laugh. She managed a hoarse sound that might be one.

“If that is your idea of harm,” she said, words uneven, “remind me to reassign our executioners.”

Her tone aimed for dry; the way it came out ruined it. There was too much shiver in it, too much honesty.

His shoulders loosened a fraction with relief. He looked absurdly grateful, like she’d just told him he didn’t disgrace the Empire.

She forced herself upright a little more, bracing on her elbows. Her uniform was half-open, belt loose, trousers visibly not as pristine as they were. She could feel the heat in her face, the damp cling of fabric, the way her body was still very aware of him.

That will not do.

She sucked in a steadier breath and reached for the only armour she has left: principle.

“You should not,” she said, more sharply than she intended, “do something like that lightly.”

His brows knit. “Like... that?” he echoed, because he honestly didn’t know what else to call it.

Her gaze skittered away, fixing somewhere over his head.

“That sort of... attention,” she said, each word weighed. “It is not a... casual favour. You should only ever do that to someone you love. Someone you mean to trust with your name. With your children.”

There. Put it in a box: duty, vows, future heirs. Make it bigger than the two of them panting in the half-dark.

In her head: Tell him it was a mistake. Tell him to forget it, to save that devotion for the woman he marries.

He didn’t flinch from the weight. He just held her eyes.

“I know,” he said quietly.

No hesitation. No backpedal. Just that.

She hadn’t realised she was holding her breath until she let it out, a little too fast.

“Do you?” she managed. “Because I shouldn’t be in your marriage list. You know that.”

“I do,” he said. “That’s why the list feels wrong.”

He shifted one hand from her knee, laid it flat over his own chest, like he was swearing an oath.

“I wouldn’t have... done this for anyone else on it,” he said, stumbling slightly on this because there isn’t a polite word for what just happened. “I wanted the first time I... did something like that to be for the person I already hoped would be the mother of my children.”

The phrasing was clumsy, earnest, utterly sincere. Her heart did something painful and traitorous in her chest. Stop it, she thought at herself. Do not melt because he’s bad at phrasing and good at meaning it.

Out loud, her voice came out thinner than she liked. “...You use that word very freely tonight,” she said. “Children.”

“The council uses it all day,” he replied. “At least I’m thinking of you when I say it.”

Spectacularly unfair. Also true. It landed in a place she didn’t have defences for. The worst of the aftershocks had faded; what was left was a muzzy warmth and a bone-deep sense that something irreversible has happened.

She looked down at him: hair mussed, knees on her carpet, her taste still on his mouth. He was trying so hard not to fidget under her scrutiny.

A thought surfaced, half defensive, half genuinely curious: “...Have you done this before?” she asked, words soft but edged. “Anything like it.”

His blush, somehow, deepened. He shook his head, quick and earnest. “No,” he said. “Never.”

She narrowed her eyes, watching for any sign of bravado. There isn’t any. Just a young man who decided tonight was the night he stopped being a boy and made sure it was with her.

Then that was... Saints preserve me.

An unhelpful part of her noted that for a first attempt, he was alarmingly good.

Heat licked under her skin again, humiliation and pride tangled together. She exhaled slowly, trying to find ground that wasn’t crumbling beneath her.

“You realise,” she said, aiming for stern and landing somewhere a little lower, “that curiosity is a dangerous thing in your position.”

He bit his lip, but didn’t apologise this time. “I’d be more afraid of it if you weren’t here,” he said. “To tell me when I’m being an idiot.”

That twist of the knife—putting the responsibility back in her hands—somehow made it easier to step forward instead of back. If she framed it as her decision, her indulgence, she could almost live with it.

Almost.

She looked down at herself: half-open coat, skewed shirt, belt undone, damp fabric clinging in ways that make her want to crawl out of her own skin. Then at him, still kneeling, still very much hers in this moment.

There was a path where she pulled herself together, sent him away, pretended this was a lapse brought on by stress. There was another where she let the council pick some politically convenient bride and spent the rest of her life remembering the feel of his mouth and nothing else.

And then there was this one.

Her shoulders dropped a fraction.

“...Very well,” she said, more to herself than to him. “I will indulge your curiosity. Once.”

His eyes widened; hope flickered there, bright and terrified. “Mòrag—”

She cut him off with a look. “Do not make me repeat that this is madness,” she said. “And do not imagine I will be so forgiving if you ever take advantage of anyone else like this.”

“I won’t,” he said immediately. “I—”

She lifted a hand, forestalling more vows. If he kept talking, she was going to lose her nerve.

With a soldier’s practicality, she swung her legs the rest of the way over the side of the bed and stood—carefully. Her knees still felt a little unsteady; she pretended it was nothing.

Niall rocked back on his heels to give her space, craning his neck to look up at her. There was awe there, and something softer. Not worship of a saint, but of a woman he was finally seeing all the way.

Her hands went to her own fastenings. Straighten coat. Unbuckle belt properly. Undo what’s left of the buttons she tore through in a panic. She paused, hands stilling on the leather.

She looked down at him, then at the bed, then back.

If she was going to do this—if she was going to let him cross this line all the way—she would not do it halfway.

“Turn around,” she murmured, the command soft but absolute.

He blinked, confusion warring with the heat in his gaze. “Mòrag?”

“I am not going to undress with you staring at me like a startled Ardun,” she said, a ghost of a smirk touching her mouth. “Turn around, Niall.”

He obeyed, shifting awkwardly until his back was to her, shoulders hunched with a tension that had nothing to do with fear. He made a small, strangled sound and looked away on instinct, turning his head to give her privacy in her own room after everything he’d just done.

That, perversely, made it easier to move. If he were staring, she’d freeze. With his gaze politely averted, she could try to pretend she was just stripping out of a ruined uniform after a long day.

Her fingers found her coat first. The leather felt clumsy under her hands. She shrugged it off her shoulders and let it slide onto the back of the chair, sudden cool air licking over the thin shirt beneath.

Then the buttons—some already half-torn free—one, two, the rest, her chest seizing slightly each time far more than the exertion warranted.

Underneath, she was not voluptuous, not soft. She had a soldier’s body: long, clean lines, a swordswoman’s shoulders, a narrow waist, muscle layered lean over bone. Pale skin marked with old training scars, a map of every time she drove herself past the point of good sense and got back up anyway.

Am I really doing this, she thought, faintly hysterical. Undressing for him. Like some dockside harlot with a taste for crowns.

She folded the shirt by habit and laid it on the table because the act of keeping it neat was the only thing that felt remotely sane.

When she straightened, she heard it: the sharp intake of his breath, despite his best effort to be respectful.

He was still kneeling on the rug, head turned, but his eyes flicked once—quick and helpless—over her bare torso before snapping guiltily away.

That single, stolen glance seared her.

He is enthralled, a nasty, shaky little voice in her head noted. By you. Like this.

Heat crawled up her throat. Standing over him like this just made her feel more exposed, not less. So she did the only thing that felt even slightly less insane: she moved back to the bed and sat.

The mattress dipped under her weight. She drew one knee up, then the other, arranging herself as decently as nudity allowed—back straight against the headboard, hair loose around her shoulders, long legs bare and drawn in, the very picture of a woman who had decided, against all better judgment, to let herself be seen.

When he finally dared to look fully, his eyes went wide. Awe, reverence, and something far more human flickered across his face. It made her want to both cover herself and arch into his gaze.

You really are a shameless woman, she thought, furious with herself. You’ve just made your Emperor kneel for you and now you’re posing on your own bed.

She swallowed that thought down, forced her voice into something like composure.

“Are you planning to stay on the floor all night, Your Majesty,” she asked, tone dry but low, “or do you mean to join me?”

It came out half challenge, half invitation. His throat worked as he swallowed, still kneeling at the edge of the rug, caught between the instinct to climb up beside her and the strangely natural fit of remaining at her feet.

He didn’t answer right away. For a moment he just knelt there at the edge of the rug, looking up at her on the bed—bare-backed against the headboard, legs drawn in, hair loose, very much not the armoured figure that stands beside his throne.

Then he swallowed, pushed himself to his feet. Up close like this, she was reminded how much shorter he was than her in uniform—and how that gap felt very different with her sitting and him standing, both of them stripped of rank and armour.

He hesitated, fingers catching in the hem of his shirt. “Mòrag,” he said, voice barely above a whisper. “May I... undress as well?”

The question hit her harder than the kiss did. Something in her ribs stuttered. Saints. He’s asking permission to undress for you.

She almost choked on her own breath.

“If you intend to share a bed with someone,” she managed, aiming for dry and landing somewhere smoky, “it is usually advisable not to do so fully clothed.”

It was as close to yes as she could bring herself to say. He took it.

The linen shirt came off first, tugged over his head in one unceremonious motion. Underneath, he was all narrow lines and lean definition—no soldier’s bulk like hers, but the wiry strength of someone who’s trained because she told him to. The faint scatter of old bruises and practice scars across his chest made something strange twist in her.

Her gaze dropped, unbidden, lower. The pyjama trousers were doing a very poor job of hiding how worked up he was. The soft fabric tented unmistakably at the front, the shape pressing against it with every tiny movement.

Of course, she thought wildly. Of course he would be... like that. After all of this.

Heat crawled up her neck. She dragged her eyes back up to his face. He was crimson, but he didn’t try to hide. His hands went to the waistband. There was the smallest hitch, as if he was giving her one last chance to say no.

She didn’t take it.

The trousers slid down.

For a heartbeat she couldn’t breathe.

He was... not enormous, not some exaggerated tavern story—but for all his youth and slight build, he was more than she expected. Fully hard, flushed, heavy in a way that made her mouth go dry.

That is... considerable, her mind supplied inanely. For his age. For anyone’s.

She realised she was staring and forced her eyes back up. It didn’t help; the image was burned in.

He shifted, suddenly self-conscious under the silence, hands hovering like he didn’t know what to do with them without pockets to cram them in. That nudged her out of it.

She extended a hand. “Come here,” she said.

He stepped closer until his shins touched the edge of the mattress. From this angle, he had to look slightly down to meet her eyes; she had to look slightly up to meet his. It felt unsettlingly equal.

Her gaze dropped, deliberate this time.

Up close, the reality of him was unavoidable. The soft fabric had been straining to contain him, and now there was nothing between her and the proof. He was flushed dark, veins standing faint beneath the skin, the weight of him resting heavy against his lower belly.

For the first time that night, she felt physically outmatched.

Saints, she thought, a little wild. That on a boy his age...? He’ll be a menace when he’s older. Could it be...

She realised she was staring and forced herself to move, to own it.

Her fingers closed around him.

He was hot, almost fever-warm, throbbing against her palm. There was more of him than she expected; her hand didn’t quite close all the way around without effort. The sheer size of him, the pulse under his skin, made something primitive in her tighten.

He sucked in a sharp breath, hips jerking before he reined them in.

“Mòrag—”

His voice broke on her name. It went straight through her.

She drew her hand along him in a slow, testing stroke, feeling the drag of skin, the way his whole body shivered. With her other hand she cupped the weight below, fingers spreading around the fullness there almost cautiously, as if testing the heft of a weapon she’s never handled.

He made a noise that was half gasp, half strangled groan, knees flexing as if they might give.

Children, her mind supplied unhelpfully, sudden and sharp. He keeps saying children.

The words from a few minutes ago unspooled in her head: “I wanted the first time I did something like that to be for the person I already hoped would be the mother of my children.”

Her thumb swept over the broad head of him and she could feel it now—the raw, uncomplicated potential in her hand. Not just desire. Seed. Future. All that talk of heirs and stability made intensely, frighteningly real in flesh and heat and weight.

If he meant it—if he wanted that with her—then tonight was not a harmless indulgence. It was a loaded decision. A single lost precaution and she could stagger out of this bed not just compromised, but carrying him.

A bolt of fear lanced through her... and something darker, lower, that isn’t fear at all.

You are sitting here, naked, weighing whether you mind walking out of this night with his child inside you.

Her grip tightened fractionally without meaning to. He groaned, hands bracing on either side of her on the mattress to stop himself from thrusting.

“Perhaps we should stop here,” she heard herself say, tone almost thoughtful, at odds with the slow, steady motion of her hand. “Let you calm down. Pretend we both had far more interesting evenings.”

His eyes flew open, panicked.

“Don’t,” he blurted, far too fast. Then, catching himself: “If you want to, I will. I swear. I just...” He swallowed, jaw clenched, clearly fighting his body to keep it still while she was touching him. “...I don’t want this to end with me walking away from you,” he finished, voice rough. “Not now. Not when I finally have you like this.”

The way he said have you made her insides knot all over again—half terror, half electric thrill.

She could still cut it off. She could let him go back to his bed aching and alone, and maybe both of them would wake up tomorrow able to pretend.

Instead, her thumb traced another slow circle over the tip, savouring the way his breathing stuttered and a drop of moisture beaded against her skin.

“Very well,” she said, and this time her voice wasn’t steady at all. “We won’t stop here.”

Inside, the thought came, cold and clear beneath the heat: If you really mean children, Niall... this may be the night you get your wish.

She didn’t let go.

For a moment she just held him, feeling the pulse under her hand, the way his breath kept stuttering like he was trying very hard not to move unless she told him to. Then she realised if she stayed sitting here like this she was going to lose her nerve in a different direction.

She eased back, letting her hand trail away from him as she shifted up the bed. The mattress dipped under her shoulders as she reclined, first on her elbows, then all the way down, hair spilling around her like a dark halo. Her legs drew up and then fell open again, not wide, but unmistakably for him.

Her voice, when it came, was quiet enough he had to lean in to hear it.

“Niall,” she asked, eyes on his face, “do you have any idea what you’re doing?”

His blush somehow deepened. “I—” He swallowed. “Not from experience.” A tiny, embarrassed grimace.

“There are books. Brighid insisted I... at least know the theory. In case of a political marriage.”

Of course she did. Mòrag could almost see Brighid’s arched brow, the way she would have delivered those lessons: clinical, thorough, all for the sake of duty.

And you chose to test that “theory” on me, she thought, heart twisting.

She forced a little air into her lungs.

“Then do your best to be... kind,” she said. It sounded almost flippant until the last word caught. “I have no wish for my first time to be a complete disaster.”

His mouth fell open a fraction. “Your... first...?” he echoed.

She almost rolled her eyes at herself. You’ve said it now, you fool. No taking it back.

She looked away, staring at some neutral point on the canopy. “Do not make me repeat that,” she said quickly. “It was never a priority. I had other duties. You know this.”

And you, she did not say, were always there, filling every spare inch of my days until there was no room left for anyone else.

You waited. Not consciously, not nobly, but you did. All those years guarding his back instead of taking a lover of your own. For what? For this? For him?

She dragged her gaze back to him. His expression had changed. There was a softness there now, something like awe, like stunned gratitude, layered over all the desire.

“Then I’ll... try to be worthy of that,” he said, voice husky. “Of you.”

The words shouldn’t have hit as hard as they did. Another hot, humiliating shiver slid down her spine.

She shifted against the sheets, drawing her knees a little wider, an unmistakable answer in the motion. Her hands flexed in the covers beside her hips, as if trying to decide whether to clutch or to reach.

“Come here, then,” she murmured. “Let us see how well you studied.”

She refused to dwell on that. If she hesitated now, she’d think herself into armour again and slam the door on her own fingers.

He moved.

Carefully, almost reverently, he climbed onto the bed, bracing one hand beside her shoulder, the other at her waist. The weight of him settled over her, warm and solid, pressing her into the mattress in a way that made every training bout, every formal bow, feel like a different lifetime.

Up this close, she could see the way his throat worked as he swallowed, the tiny quake in his arm as he held himself up, the naked hope and terror in his eyes.

“If I hurt you,” he started, “tell me. I’ll—”

She cut him off with a touch: one hand coming up to frame his face, thumb brushing his cheekbone.

“If you hurt me, I will live,” she said. “I am not made of glass.” Her lips twitched, a ghost of a smirk. “If you decide to be rough, I can take it. Do not let that be your excuse.”

It was bravado and truth in equal measure. She’d survived worse than any clumsy enthusiasm he could muster. What she wasn’t sure she could survive was the tenderness he kept showing her.

He huffed out a shaky breath that might be a laugh, might be a sob.

“I don’t want to be rough,” he said. “Not with you.”

Something in her chest twisted at that—fondness, frustration, fear. She exhaled, a small, helpless sound.

“You will ruin me either way,” she murmured. “Gentle or not.”

His eyes flicked up to hers, wide and stricken, as if he’d only just realised the truth of what they were doing. He shifted lower, between her thighs now, one hand sliding down to steady her hip. The world seemed to narrow to the few inches of air between them.

She felt him align himself, guided by touch and instinct and whatever those carefully chosen books told him. The blunt, undeniable promise of him found where she was already warm and aching, pressing just enough to make every nerve in her body spike.

This is it. This is where you stop being able to lie to yourself about what you’ve done.

Her fingers dug into his shoulders. Her heart was beating so hard it almost hurt. For a heartbeat everything held there: his breath, her courage, the last fragile chance to say no and mean it.

She didn’t take it.

“Niall,” she whispered, a prayer and a curse at once. “Do it.”

He did.

He pushed forward, a slow, steady invasion that stole her breath. He was thick, tight, and painfully real, stretching her in a way she wasn’t prepared for. She gasped, hips bucking instinctively, but he held firm, pressing deeper until he was fully, impossibly sheathed inside her.

The fullness was overwhelming. It felt like he’d taken up every inch of space she had, replacing her hollows with his own heat. For a moment, neither of them moved, just breathing in the ragged, impossible reality of being joined.

Then he began to move.

Their rhythm never really became graceful. It was all soft curses and uneven breathing, missed beats and sudden gasps when he hit some new angle by sheer accident and then desperately tried to find it again. The bed creaked under them; the headboard knocked dully against the wall.

He watched her like he did in the council chamber, like a battlefield—except now every flinch and shiver was a cue, not a threat. When she dragged in her breath, he slowed. When she bit back a sound, he chased it.

His hands, restless and seeking, slid up from her waist. They drifted over her ribs—feeling the muscle and bone beneath the skin—and settled, finally, over her breasts.

Mòrag stiffened slightly. She knew what he’d find: scarred skin, modest curves, nothing like the lush, spilling softness of the court ladies or the exaggerated proportions of Blades. She was built for armour, not for a lover’s hands.

“You are wasting your time,” she gasped out, the words jagged as he moved inside her. “You won’t find much comfort there. I am not... built for softness.”

Niall ignored her. He cupped the weight of her in his palms, fingers brushing over the nipples that were already hard and aching against the cool air.

“You’re beautiful,” he murmured, and lowered his head.

When his mouth closed over one peak, hot and wet and demanding, Mòrag’s back arched off the mattress. A bolt of pure sensation shot straight down to where he was buried in her, tightening her sheath around him.

Architect, she thought, head falling back against the headboard. He didn’t learn that from a book.

He lavished attention on her, licking, sucking, nipping lightly with a hunger that belied his gentle words. He treated her small breasts like they were the most fascinating things he had ever touched, worshipping them with a devotion that made her face burn.

“Niall,” she warned, voice wrecked.

He lifted his head, lips slick, eyes dark and blown wide. “Beautiful,” he said again, stubborn. “Perfect.”

He drove into her then, harder than before, and the compliment died in her throat as a gasp.

He was big. It wasn’t just the width of him stretching her open; it was the length. With every thrust, he bottomed out, hitting a spot so deep inside her it felt like he was knocking on the very door of her womb.

Thud.

Her chest seized. It was a heavy, visceral sensation—bordering on pain, but drowning in pleasure. It felt less like sex and more like possession. Like he was physically staking out the territory he claimed earlier.

He really means to put a child there, the thought flashed through her mind, wild and terrifying. He is deep enough to do it. He is right there.

“Too deep,” she choked out, fingers digging into his shoulders. “Niall, you are—”

“Am I hurting you?” he panted, pulling back an inch, worry warring with the glaze of lust in his eyes.

“No,” she admitted, because she cannot lie to him now. “You are just... entirely too much of everything.”

He took that as encouragement. He didn’t shallow his strokes; he deepened them. He ground forward, hips snapping against hers, forcing her to take every inch of him.

How is he doing this? she wondered dizzily, the room spinning. How is this the quiet child who hid behind my coat?

He was unmaking her. With every deep, rhythmic stroke, he was stripping away the Special Inquisitor and leaving only a woman, pinned and panting and desperate. She felt herself loosening under him, something inside her uncoiling with each thrust.

There were still flashes of you shouldn’t and this is madness—but they dissolved under the heat of it, under the way her body kept answering him.

Her legs ended up wrapped high around his hips, ankles locked at his back to pull him even closer, erasing the last fraction of distance. Every time he moved, it rocked her whole body, shoulder blades rubbing against the headboard, sheets twisting under her.

At some point her neat braid had half-fallen out; strands of hair stuck to her temples with sweat. His too-long fringe kept falling into his eyes; she shoved it back and dragged him down for another kiss, swallowing the sound he made.

The slip happened when they were both teetering.

He shifted, found that deep, terrifying angle again that made her cry out, sharp and unguarded. Her nails raked down his back; his hand slammed against the wall by her head to steady himself.

“Niall—!”

He choked on a sound of his own, eyes squeezing shut, and the word tore out of him, raw and from far too many years of seeing her at his side:

“Sister—”

He heard it instantly, face going scarlet even as his hips keep driving forward.

“I mean Mòrag—” he stammered, horror and pleasure tangling.

The damage was already done. The taboo taste of it hit her like a spark. He’s not her brother; she knows that, knows it—but the word punched straight through the last of her reserve. All those years of standing half a step behind him, of being treated like something older and steadier and safe—turned on their head in one breath, while he was inside her.

Humiliation and arousal crashed together. A long, broken moan ripped out of her, louder than anything she’s let herself make so far. Her hips rolled up to meet him with an abandon she didn’t know she had.

You wretched boy, she thought, dizzy. Calling me that now of all times—

If she had air to spare, she’d reprimand him. She didn’t. She just clung harder, legs tightening, dragging him in deeper with every shudder.

He tried to apologise and lost the words halfway. The rhythm went ragged. He was trembling now, all over, strung tight in her arms, every muscle in his back taut under her hands.

“Mòrag,” he gasped, voice breaking. “Mòrag, please, I—”

She felt it in him: the way his control frayed, the way each thrust got shorter, more desperate, his breath coming in harsh, helpless bursts. It should frighten her, given everything she’d been thinking about. Instead, it sent another hot coil of anticipation spiralling through her.

At the peak of it, he clutched her hard enough to bruise, burying his face in her neck.

The words tumbled out of him, unprepared and absolutely true:

“Mòrag... marry me. Be my wife. Bear my children. Please.”

The titles hit harder than any movement. Wife. Children. Not as abstractions in a council chamber, but as something he wanted from her, here, now, body to body. Her whole body seized around him as if he’d reached into her and gripped something much deeper than muscle.

The plea tore a climax out of her so hard her vision blanked at the edges. She heard herself cry out against his mouth, broken and unguarded, everything inside her clenching down around him.

Somewhere inside that white-out, he went with her.

She was distantly aware of his rhythm shattering, of his hips jerking in short, helpless thrusts as the last of his control broke. A raw, startled sound ripped from his throat—half her name, half a ragged cry—as he drove as deep as he could and held there, every line of him straining, pouring himself into her.

Every shudder of his body sent another wave through hers, aftershocks tumbling over each other until she didn’t know where her ending stopped and his began.

Her legs tightened of their own accord, ankles locking hard at the small of his back, keeping him exactly where he was even as some horrified, sane part of her screamed that she should be pulling him away.

You absolute fool, that voice hissed. You’re clinging to him. You’re inviting every consequence he begged for.

She couldn’t seem to care. All she could feel was the fierce, pulsing sense of being claimed and claiming in return, of having him all the way to the hilt in every possible sense. The world shrank to heat and weight and the wild, shared stuttering of their breathing.

Little by little, the intensity ebbed. The iron grip in her muscles loosened into shivers; his spine untensed under her hands. He slumped forward with a low groan, forehead dropping to her shoulder, arms wrapping around her as if he was afraid she’d vanish if he let go.

He was heavy on her, chest heaving against her own. Her heart was still racing, pounding a counterpoint to his. They lay there tangled, their bodies stubbornly joined, the air thick with sweat and Titan heat and the coppery tang of spent adrenaline.

Idiot, she thought, dizzy, as the meaning of his words caught up to her. You don’t propose like that.

Whatever no she might have managed had been drowned in her own cries and the way she dragged him closer at the last, in the way she was still holding him now.

He pressed an unsteady kiss to the damp skin at her neck. She felt, rather than saw, the unguarded happiness in him—the quiet, stunned certainty that he’d laid his heart bare and hasn’t been thrown off the bed for it.

Her legs were still looped around him, crossed firmly at his back. She was acutely aware of that, of the way she was pinning him in place, not relaxing her hold even now.

You really are a shameless woman, she told herself, half-mad with exhaustion. Wrapped around him like this. Acting exactly like the wife he begged for before you ever gave him an answer.

There was a wild, complex tangle in her chest: triumph and terror, tenderness and the faint, unnerving sense of a role closing around her like a set of unseen fingers.

He didn’t know what he’d done with that plea—not fully. He just knew that in the single most vulnerable moment of his life, he wanted her as wife and mother and everything, and he said so. And now he was lying on top of her, inside her, breathing her name like a promise.

Eventually she turned her head, found his mouth, and kissed him once more—slow, almost dazed. When she pulled back, she kept her forehead resting against his, her voice a rough whisper.

“You,” she told him, “have the worst sense of timing in all of Mor Ardain.”

He huffed a breath that ghosted over her lips, half-laugh, half-flinch.

For a moment he just lay there, pressed deep and heavy inside her, chest heaving against her own. Then he swallowed.

“Is it...” His voice came out rough, shy. “Is it okay if we... keep going?”

It took her a heartbeat to parse it.

Keep... going?

She could still feel him inside her—solid, present, unchanged by the shuddering climax they just shared. There was a tremor in him that wasn’t just aftermath; under the exhaustion, the heat hadn’t ebbed.

He was still hard for her. Still wanting.

Shock flashed through her, sharp and incredulous.

You ridiculous boy. You’re ready to go at me again? After that?

On some distant, sane level, she knew she ought to be insisting he sleep. Pushing him off. Re-establishing boundaries before his youth and stamina ground them—and her judgement—to dust.

Her body answered first.

Her hips rolled up in a tiny, treacherous arc, drawing him fractionally deeper.

The movement pulled a strangled sound from him and sent a new, shivery jolt through her own oversensitive nerves. She swallowed, heat licking up her spine and something colder tightening low in her belly.

If he stays like this— if we keep doing this—there won’t be any “almost” about it. You are going to walk out of this bed with his child inside you.

“...You wouldn’t dare stop now,” she breathed.

She meant it as a scold, something to take the edge off his plea, but it didn’t land that way. Not with her legs still hooked around his waist. Not with the way her fingers flexed at his back, holding him close instead of pushing him away.

He pulled back just enough to see her face. Whatever he read there—flushed skin, wrecked composure, the faint, unwilling curve at the corner of her mouth—was answer enough.

Something in his expression shifted. The wide-eyed awe didn’t vanish, but it steadied. Firmed. The hand braced by her head curled against the headboard; the one at her hip tightened, testing how she yielded under his grip.

“All right,” he said, voice low. “Then I won’t.”

Her heart kicked hard at that.

There it is…You really are going to let him do this again. And again. And again. Would you not?

Her mouth opened on what might have been a warning, a condition, something about being careful—but he moved first, a slow, deliberate roll of his hips that made words impossible. Her protest dissolved in a sharp gasp; her nails bit into his shoulders, dragging him closer instead of pushing him away. Whatever she meant to say drowned there.

At first, training reasserted itself. Old habits die hard. She was the one guiding him: hands on his hips, adjusting his angle, murmuring rough instructions against his ear when he fumbled. He listened with the same intensity he brought to council briefings—every correction taken, every tiny catch in her breath logged and chased. When she breathed a little sharper, he repeated what caused it. When she went quiet, he tried something else.

It should have been reassuring, being able to direct him like this. It didn’t feel that way for long.

Youth and sheer, terrified devotion are a powerful mix. Each time they dragged themselves back up toward that edge, he found a little more surety. The hesitant touches from earlier gained weight, direction.

“Like this?” became a quiet “Let me,” and then he was the one shifting her thigh higher, the one rolling his hips to see which sound that pulled from her.

At some point, without quite meaning to, he caught her wrists and pinned them above her head, fingers threaded through hers as he leaned his weight into her and drove them both shamelessly toward another shuddering peak. She realised it only when she tried to reach for him and found she couldn’t—not without his say-so.

So this is what you grow into… No wonder the council wants heirs out of you.

The thought should have alarmed her more than it did. In the moment, all she could manage was a hoarse laugh that turned into a whimper when he took it for encouragement and redoubled his efforts.

Her pride rallied more than once—enough, stop this, you’ve gone too far—but every attempt at restraint was swallowed by the simple, brutal fact of how much she wanted him. By the way her treacherous body kept answering each new push, each new angle, even as some cooler part of her counted all the ways this could come back to haunt them.

At some point in the blur of the night, she had to admit there’s nothing “indulgent” or “curious” about what they’re doing anymore. It wasn’t a favour she was granting him, or a single mistake to be boxed up and buried.

It was surrender—plain and simple—to the boy who walked to her door in his nightclothes and was now moving inside her with all the stubbornness he once reserved for defying his council.

By the time the lamps had burned low and the Titan’s groans outside had faded into a kind of background lull, she was aching in muscles she didn’t know she had, slick with sweat, hair a wild snarl against the pillow. Every part of her felt used, claimed, thoroughly made aware of his existence.

He, for once, had finally run himself out. Whatever reserves he drew on through the night were spent. He ended up half-draped over her, one arm slung heavy around her waist, the other tucked under his head on the pillow beside hers. His breathing had evened out, but his grip hadn’t loosened; even in sleep, his fingers flexed against her skin, as if checking she was still there.

She could feel him, warm and slack with exhaustion, tucked in against her in a way that made it very clear he didn’t just follow her lead—somewhere along the way, he took it.

He murmured something in his sleep, lips moving against her shoulder. It took her a moment to make it out.

“...Mòrag...”

Soft, reverent, like a prayer he’d been repeating for years and only now been allowed to give shape.

She lay awake a little longer, staring at the ceiling, feeling the weight of him and the imprint of every way he moved her during the night. The kid who’d come to her room for guidance somehow ended up leading her across a line she’d never meant to cross—and staying there, firmly, holding her hand on the other side.

Stupid boy, she thought, not without a wash of worn-out affection. You really have ruined me.

Her arms tightened around him instead of pushing him away.

***

Hours earlier...

Brighid had come first.

She stood by Mòrag’s door with her usual perfect posture, hands folded under her breasts, eyes forward. There was nothing outwardly different about her stance—except for the way her cheeks had gone faintly pink.

From inside, muffled through thick metal, titan hum and even heavier protocol, came a sound she had never in her long life heard from her Driver.

A choked cry. Mòrag’s voice, stripped of rank and control.

Brighid did not move. She did not knock. She simply... listened, because pretending not to would have been an insult to both of them.

Footsteps approached, measured and familiar. A moment later Aegaeon rounded the corner, eyes widening slightly when he saw her at the door.

“Brighid,” he said quietly. “The Emperor never returned to his own chambers. I thought perhaps—”

Another sound slipped under the door: a low, breathless gasp, followed by a voice that was unmistakably Niall’s, pleading her name like a supplicant.

Aegaeon went very still.

Brighid lifted one hand, not touching the door but hovering a bare inch from it, as if to reassure herself it was still there.

“He is accounted for,” she said, voice as calm as ever. “And in no immediate danger.”

Colour rose along Aegaeon’s face, an almost human flush beneath the markings.

“...Ah,” he said.

For a man who seemed to be carved by centuries, he suddenly didn’t seem to know where to put his eyes. They settled, eventually, on some neutral point over Brighid’s shoulder.

Another broken little sound from inside made the tips of his ears twitch. He cleared his throat.

“This borders on... an invasion of privacy,” he murmured. “We should not be listening.”

Brighid’s mouth curved, the smallest, wickedest quirk of her lips. “Then stop listening,” she replied mildly.

He opened his mouth, closed it again. The next muffled moan strangled whatever argument he’d been about to make.

Brighid took pity on him—slightly.

“Our Emperor is not a child any longer,” she said. “And neither is she.”

From within, the rhythm of the sounds shifted—less frantic now, deeper, a cadence that spoke of two people who had stopped fumbling and started knowing each other.

“Besides,” she added, tone gone almost fond, “you have to admit: this is far preferable to watching them quietly destroy themselves for the sake of appearances.”

Aegaeon inclined his head, conceding the point. His gaze settled on the door with something like solemnity, as if witnessing a vow he had never been formally invited to.

“Will you stand here all night?” he asked after a moment. “Listening to every... decision they make?”

Brighid snapped her fan shut again. “No,” she said. “I will stand nearby all night. To ensure no one disturbs them.”

The distinction was hair-thin and entirely deliberate. She stepped away from the door at last, taking up a post a little further down the hall. Aegaeon joined her, the two Blades falling into a silent guard, backs to the wall, eyes on the empty corridor.

Brighid heard one last breathless cry—Mòrag’s, breaking on Niall’s name—and allowed herself a single, private thought: About time.

Then she schooled her face back into perfect calm...and watched the corridor until long after dawn came.

***

The council chamber felt exactly as it always did.

Hot with Titan breath, smelling of ink and oil and too many old men who refused to retire. The same heavy table. The same ranked banners. The same voices, already raised and circling the same tired arguments they’d been gnawing on for months.

Only Mòrag was different.

She stood at her usual place behind Niall’s chair, spine straight in full uniform, hat perfectly level, gloves immaculate. From a distance, she was the very picture of the Special Inquisitor: composed, severe, untouchable.

From the inside, nothing felt steady at all.

Her body still remembered the night. There was a faint, traitorous ache in the muscles of her thighs when she shifted her weight; the inside of her uniform collar felt rougher than usual where his mouth had dragged over her skin. Every now and then, without warning, she would feel a phantom pressure low in her belly and have to clamp down hard on her own imagination.

She fixed her gaze on the far wall and tried to listen.

“...the treaties with Uraya must be reaffirmed,” one councillor was saying for the third time. “In these unstable times, our alliances—”

“—are only as strong as the bonds between rulers,” another cut in. “Which is why the matter of His Majesty’s marriage cannot be delayed indefinitely.”

There it was. The old refrain.

Mòrag drew a slow breath through her nose and let it out, quiet. She had heard this argument so many times she could have spoken it herself, from any seat at the table. Names, Houses, advantages. A neat, bloodless dissection of Niall’s body and future, as if he were nothing more than a piece on a board.

She should have been able to let it wash over her, the way she always had. Instead, the word marriage sent a hot pulse through her, a sharp flicker of last night’s voice in her ear:

Marry me. Be my wife. Bear my children. Please.

Her jaw tightened. She kept her eyes on the wall.

Niall sat very still in the high-backed Emperor’s chair, hands folded on the table. From the corner of her eye, she could see that he was bright-eyed this morning, almost unnervingly awake for someone who had definitely not slept enough.

He glowed. There was no better word for it. A quiet, new steadiness in the set of his shoulders; a calm that didn’t come from resignation this time, but from having decided something and accepted the weight of it.

Mòrag’s treacherous mind supplied an image: those same shoulders braced above her, that same mouth losing its careful composure against her skin.

Heat surged in her face. She strangled it.

“...we have presented you with several suitable candidates, Your Majesty,” the Chancellor was saying. “Daughters of noble Houses, alliances with Uraya, with Tantal, even with the Indoline Praetorium—”

He gestured to the neatly stacked lists at the edge of the table. Copies of the same names she had once thrown down in her chambers, hating them all.

Niall’s fingers tightened on the armrest. Mòrag’s stomach gave a small, traitorous swoop. She remembered those same fingers laced with hers, pinning her wrists to the headboard.

Not now, she told herself. Saints, not here.

The old men began their circling again. Uraya for military strength. Tantal for stability. Praetorium for faith and influence. Each name was weighed, measured, praised, critiqued, set against the others like fine horses at auction.

Mòrag listened with half an ear. The other half was busy counting breaths and reviewing the last twenty-four hours in a cold, clinical loop: You let him in. You let him touch you. You took him into your bed, into your body. You let him stay. You let him say wife and children while you clung to him and you did not stop him.

The Chancellor’s voice cut through her inventory: “...and of course, there is still the question of timing. The people are restless. They will want to see stability made manifest. An engagement announced soon would—”

Niall stood up.

He did it quietly, without a scrape of chair legs or a bang of hands on the table. One moment he was seated; the next he was on his feet, shoulders squared, eyes steady. The movement drew every gaze in the room like iron filings to a magnet.

Brighid, at his right, went very still. Aegaeon, at his left, folded his arms across his chest, watching.

“Your Majesty?” the Chancellor prompted, mildly alarmed.

Niall’s hands were shaking, Mòrag saw. Not badly—just a faint tremor at his fingertips where they rested on the tabletop. But his voice, when he spoke, was clear.

“I appreciate your concern for Mor Ardain’s stability,” he said. “And for my future.”

A small breath around the table. This was the part where he usually faltered, where he let them herd him back into their prepared lines.

He didn’t.

“But last night,” he went on, “I was reminded that I am the one who has to live with the consequences of these decisions.”

Mòrag’s stomach dropped. Her own words, from the study, thrown back into the chamber like a gauntlet.

“In matters of state, I will always hear your counsel,” he continued. “In this matter, you will hear my choice.”

The Chancellor’s mouth tightened. “Your Majesty,” he began carefully, “no one here seeks to deny you a say. We simply recommend—”

“I have chosen already,” Niall said.

The room snapped silent. Mòrag felt her pulse jump, a cold line running down her spine.

Niall. Do not—

He let that hang for a heartbeat, then turned—not to the lists, but to the woman standing behind his chair.

“Lady Mòrag Ladair,” he said, every syllable formal and deliberate, “will be my wife and my Empress. She will bear my heirs. And she alone will stand at my side.”

The words hit her in layers.

Will be my wife.

My Empress.

Bear my heirs.

She alone.

For an instant, the chamber blurred. Her knees went weak. Somewhere in the back of her mind, her body remembered the way he’d clutched her in the dark, the way his plea had torn her apart and remade her in the same breath. The phantom echo of him filling her when he begged that same future flared hot and undeniable low in her belly.

You said yes, that traitorous inner voice whispered. Not in words. But you did.

Around the table, councillors stared, mouths opening and closing like fish. A half-dozen protests broke over each other:

“The Special Inquisitor is—”

“—their relationship—”

“—Her position—”

“—utterly inappropriate—”

All eyes turned to her.

The Inquisitor inside her reacted first. Every instinct screamed to deny it. To rise, to bow, to say coldly: His Majesty is tired. His Majesty misspoke. His Majesty is—

Her throat closed around the lie.

She could do it. If she wanted to, she could throw him a line; the council would gratefully pretend this never happened. They would blame his youth, their Emperor’s momentary indiscretion, and gently manoeuvre him back toward one of the “suitable” candidates.

That was her job, wasn’t it? To fix his mistakes. To guard him from himself.

Her gaze flicked, unbidden, to Brighid. Brighid was already watching her. There was the faintest curve at the corner of her lips, a warmth in her eyes Mòrag rarely saw except in the quietest, most private moments. And then, so small it might have been a trick of the light, Brighid gave a single, almost imperceptible nod.

Not permissive. Not you must. But the kind of nod she’d once given an untried cadet before their first real battle. If you go, you won’t go alone.

The corner of Brighid’s mouth ticked up just a fraction more, like a secret joke at the council’s expense: Well? You made your bed, dear. Are you going to lie in it properly?

Mòrag’s chest hurt.

She looked back at Niall. He stood utterly still in front of the throne, jaw tight, hands at his sides. She could see the fear there, under the new-forged steel: the boy who’d come to her room half-dressed and shaking. The man who had moved over her with aching care. The Emperor who had just thrown himself—and her—into the political fire without flinching.

He wasn’t taking it back. He would stand there and let them tear him apart before he did.

Her lips parted. For a heartbeat, nothing came out. All those other words—this is improper, I am not fit for that role, choose someone else—scrambled up her throat and then fell away, useless.

Her knees moved before the rest of her caught up.

Metal armour creaked as she stepped out from behind his chair. The councillors shrank back in their seats like she was still carrying a drawn sword instead of just the weight of her decision.

She stopped in front of him.

For a heartbeat, she simply stood there, looking up at the boy—the man—who had claimed her with all the subtlety of a battlefield charge.

Then Mòrag Ladair, Special Inquisitor of Mor Ardain, dropped to one knee in full armour.

The clang of metal on metal rang through the chamber like the stroke of a bell. Gasps hissed in from the edges of the room. Someone actually choked.

Mòrag bowed her head, but not in shame. One gloved fist pressed against her breastplate in salute; the other she set deliberately on her thigh, palm up, an old gesture from older, simpler days—a warrior offering their hand to be taken, their fate to be claimed.

When she spoke, her voice carried to every corner of the room.

“I submit to my Emperor,” she said. “My duty is his, in all things.”

A murmur swept through the councillors. She lifted her head just enough to meet Niall’s eyes.

“If it is His Majesty’s will that I serve as Empress,” she added, a slight emphasis on serve, “then I will do so. Freely. And without regret.”

That last was a lie, of course. She had plenty of regrets already piling up like paperwork on her desk. But in that moment, with her knee pressed into the metal floor and the phantom ache of last night still humming through her body, she found she didn’t regret this.

Niall’s breath left him in a soft, stunned sound that might once have been a boyish oh.

He stepped down from the dais, the way he had when he was younger and too small for the throne, and came to stand in front of her. Formalities warred with instincts in his posture, then broke. He reached out and set his hand in hers.

Warm. Callused. Trembling a little, but steady where it mattered.

“The council’s lists are noted,” he said, not taking his eyes off Mòrag. His voice had gone smooth and cool in that way she’d only ever heard when he was truly resolved. “Your recommendations are appreciated.” He squeezed her fingers. “But the Emperor has chosen,” Niall finished.

“Mor Ardain will stand on that, or not at all.”

Silence crashed down over the chamber.

Somewhere behind him, Aegaeon exhaled, slow and satisfied, as if a weight he’d been braced under had finally landed properly. Brighid’s expression shifted by a hair. Her eyes cooled, but not toward Niall. When she looked at the councillors, there was a new edge there—sharp, faintly amused, the look of someone who has finally watched an inevitability arrive.

“You heard His Majesty,” she said, voice silk over tempered steel. “Unless someone intends to challenge the Emperor’s right to decide his own marriage, perhaps we should discuss how to support that decision rather than undermine it.”

Several of the old men flinched as if they’d been singed. The Chancellor cleared his throat, suddenly looking his age.

“...No one here seeks to challenge His Majesty’s right,” he said. “We were merely... surprised. If this is indeed the settled will of the Emperor and Lady Mòrag, then the council will, of course, begin the necessary arrangements.”

His eyes darted to Mòrag, as if hoping she might yet revoke it. She met his gaze levelly from her knees and gave him nothing.

“There will be contracts to draft,” another councillor put in, trying to sound brisk rather than rattled. “Announcements to prepare. Time for... consideration.”

Time to see if we both come to our senses, Mòrag translated silently, dry.

Niall did not release her hand. “You have your time,” he said. “I have given you my answer.”

That was, in Mor Ardain terms, a royal that is all.

It took a few more minutes for the chamber to remember how to breathe. Questions were muttered about precedence, ceremony, the logistics of elevating an Inquisitor to Empress; Niall nodded in the right places, gave noncommittal approvals where needed. Eventually, with much scraping of chairs and stiff bows, the council dispersed like a scattered flock—shaken, but not in outright revolt.

Only when the last pair of footsteps had faded down the corridor did Mòrag become acutely aware that she was still on her knees. Her joints complained as sensation caught up to her. The metal floor was far less forgiving than her mattress.

She shifted, tried—discreetly—to brace a hand to stand. Niall moved first. He tightened his grip on her fingers and stepped in closer, offering his other hand without thinking about how it might look. For a horrible second she considered refusing on pride alone. Her legs chose for her.

She let him pull her up. Armour creaked; something in the back of her thighs twinged in ways that had absolutely nothing to do with combat training. She had to catch herself with a palm briefly on his shoulder, and his eyes widened just a fraction at the contact. He didn’t comment. For which she was grateful. By the time she straightened fully, her face was schooled back into neutrality.

She took her place behind his chair again for the last, perfunctory scraps of business: dates for announcements, symbolic concessions to the nobles who had just lost their breeding prize. She heard almost none of it. She stood like a statue at his back, feeling the lingering tremble in her own knees, the remembered heat in her body, and the new, solid line of his spine under her gaze.

Eventually, the session adjourned. The doors closed with a heavy thud behind the last councillor. Silence fell.

For a moment, neither of them moved. Aegaeon remained by the far wall, hands folded; Brighid lingered nearer the dais, hands loosely clasped behind her back, watching them both with unhidden interest.

Niall turned away from the empty seats and looked up at Mòrag.

The Emperor who had just defied his council stood there for a heartbeat. Then, all at once, he looked more like the boy who had come to her door in his nightclothes.

“I...” he began, then stopped, swallowing. Up close she could see the flush still high on his cheekbones. “I didn’t overstep, did I?”

Her stomach did an unhelpful flip.

“I only...” he continued, rubbing the back of his neck with his free hand in an old, nervous gesture, “said what we agreed last night.”

Mòrag froze. For a split second she wanted to demand, When did we agree? She hadn’t given him some clear, signed statement. There had been no solemn vows. Just his body over hers, his voice in her ear, the wreckage of her self-control and—

Her memory obligingly supplied the missing moment: her own arms locked around him, her legs cinched at his back, the helpless little sound she’d made right as he had begged: Marry me. Be my wife. Bear my children. Please.

She had not said the word yes. She had simply dragged him in as deep as he could go and fallen apart on it.

Heat surged through her so fast it almost made her sway. Her thighs tightened involuntarily, as if her muscles remembered the angle, the stretch, the way he had—

She cut the thought off at the knees. Her mouth felt strangely dry.

“...Hopeless fool,” she muttered, looking away, voice coming out shakier than she would have liked.

It was not an answer. It was very much not a no.

Niall’s shoulders relaxed by a fraction anyway. The corners of his mouth tipped up, shy and crooked.

“Then...” he said, a little breathless, “shouldn’t we celebrate?”

It was so guileless she almost laughed in his face. Outrage and arousal collided in her chest. Celebrate? As if the last night and morning hadn’t already been one long act of madness. As if she were not currently standing in full armour, secretly sore in places no battlefield would ever touch, while her newly self-appointed husband suggested they... celebrate.

Somewhere to her right, someone actually did laugh.

Brighid.

It was a low, delighted sound, quickly smoothed over when Mòrag’s head snapped around, but the amusement on her lips stayed.

“I see you’ve both rested long enough,” Brighid observed, tone dry as old wine. “And His Majesty’s schedule is... remarkably clear today.”

Mòrag narrowed her eyes. “Brighid.”

Brighid tilted her head, all innocence that fooled exactly no one. “I merely meant that, as there will no doubt be... extensive preparations for the engagement announcement, it would be wise for the two of you to coordinate your approach,” she said.

“Privately.” Her gaze flicked to Aegaeon and back, then lingered on Mòrag a shade too knowingly.

“Particularly,” she added, a faint, wicked lilt in her voice, “where heirs are concerned. It would be a shame to let last night’s enthusiasm go to waste.”

Mòrag went rigid. Heat flooded her face so fast it made her lightheaded. For a second she didn’t even understand what Brighid meant. Then her own memory obliged.

Not the first, careful round, or the awkward fumbling after. Much later—when she’d stopped trying to swallow every sound, when the room had narrowed to heat and weight and the relentless rise of pleasure—he’d begged again and again against her ear. Not Emperor to subject, but boy to woman, all his hope hanging on her. And that time, she had answered. Not with silence. Not just with the way she clung to him.

She heard it now, horribly clear in her own mind: her voice, wrecked and breathless, snapping on, “Then... make me—” before the rest fell out in shuddering pieces.

Make me yours. Make me your wife. Make me the one who gives you those children you keep begging for.

His name, those words, and children all tangled together into one shameless, desperate rush she could never pretend she hadn’t given him.

Her thighs clenched involuntarily at the remembered moment; her fingers twitched in his hand.

“I...” she managed, but it came out thin and strangled, aimed as much at herself as at Niall.

Brighid’s smile sharpened by a hair, thoroughly enjoying herself. “Don’t worry, Special Inquisitor,” she said, the title turned into a gentle tease. “From what reached the corridor, the two of you already sound very... aligned on the subject of children.”

Niall made a strangled noise somewhere between a cough and a squeak, his ears going bright red. “You— you were outside the—”

“Guarding,” Brighid said smoothly. “As is my duty.” Her eyes glittered. “Not that you left much doubt as to your... intentions.”

Niall looked like he wanted to sink through the floor. Mòrag honestly wasn’t sure whether she wanted to follow him or drag him back up by the collar.

Brighid relented. Slightly.

“In any case,” she went on, more brisk now, “Aegaeon and I will see to it that no one disturbs you. Again.” Her glance flicked pointedly to the doors, as if daring anyone on the other side to try.

Aegaeon gave them one last, grave nod that somehow managed to be both respectful and quietly approving. “We will be close,” he said. “If you require anything.”

Brighid’s mouth twitched. “Anything else, that is.”

Mòrag’s ears burned. “Brighid,” she warned, low.

“Yes, yes,” Brighid said, utterly unrepentant. “I’m going.”

She turned to go, long steps carrying her toward the chamber exit with her usual grace. As she reached the doors, she glanced back over her shoulder one last time, meeting Mòrag’s eyes with a look that said, as plainly as words: You chose this. Own it.

The heavy metal doors swung shut behind Brighid and Aegaeon with a dull, final thump.

Silence. The empty council table. The Emperor. And his Inquisitor-who-wasn’t-just-that-anymore.

Mòrag realised she was still holding Niall’s hand. He seemed to realise it at the same time. His fingers flexed around hers, then stayed. For once, he didn’t immediately retreat behind titles.

“Mòrag...” His voice had dropped back into the private register she knew from late briefings and, now, from her bed. “I didn’t... trap you, did I?”

She blinked. He wet his lips, pushing on before she could answer.

“My declaration,” he said. “In front of them. It was... more than I’d planned to say.” A breathy, self-conscious huff escaped him. “I don’t want you to feel you were pushed. Into this. Into me. If you woke up this morning and...”

“Niall.”

She cut him off. He shut his mouth, eyes searching her face.

“You stood before the council,” she said evenly, “and told the entire Empire you would have me as wife, after spending an entire night—” Her mind supplied the phrase burying yourself in me; she strangled it. “—proving your persistence,” she amended, jaw tight. “It is a little late for second thoughts, don’t you think?”

Colour climbed his throat. “That’s not — I don’t want second thoughts,” he said quickly. “I just don’t want you to look back and think you had no choice.”

Her chest did that aggravating twist again.

“I am overwhelmed,” she said, softer. “I am... very afraid of what comes next.” His fingers tightened around hers, reflexive. “But I am not trapped,” she finished. “Not by you.”

He let out a breath that sounded like it had been lodged in him since the council started.

“...All right,” he said, voice rough. “If that ever changes—even a little—throw your tea at me.”

“Wasting good tea would be the real crime,” she muttered.

He laughed, small and startled, and the sound made something warm uncurl low in her belly. She withdrew her hand. Not to step away. To reach for the buckles of her armour.

He went still. “M-Mòrag?” His voice jumped, then stumbled back down. “What are you—”

“If I’m to be Empress,” she said, fingers working a strap loose with practiced ease, “I should become properly acquainted with the throne.”

The breastplate came off with a dull creak. She set it down carefully beside the dais. The padded underlayer followed, leaving the lean, honed lines of her body under the simple shirt beneath. Her scars caught the light; so did the faint flush still high on her chest.

“It might as well be today,” she added.

He watched, frozen, as if any sudden movement would break the spell.

Piece by piece, she stripped down—not with coyness, but with the same unhurried efficiency she used to ready for battle. Each discarded layer felt like another rank laid aside. Inside, her thoughts were much less composed.

It only took him one night, she told herself acidly, and now you’re undressing in the council chamber. To sit on his throne. Have some shame, woman.

Her hands didn’t stop.

When there was nothing left to shed, she turned and faced the seat she’d stood behind for most of her life. For a long breath, she simply looked at it. Then she stepped up, turned, and lowered herself into it. The metal was cool against the backs of her thighs; the high back framed her shoulders. She felt very bare and very tall at the same time, armour pooled at her feet like the husk of someone else’s life.

“You realise,” Niall said, a little hoarse, “this is technically treason.”

She arched a brow. “Is it.”

“That seat is reserved for the Emperor,” he went on, attempting for severe and landing somewhere closer to dazed. “I may have to have you arrested for attempting to steal it.”

The corner of her mouth twitched despite everything. “Then claim it back,” she said, settling deeper into the throne, letting her knees ease apart by a fraction. “If you can.”

His eyes dropped, then snapped back up to her face so fast she almost laughed.

“You realise,” he managed, voice a little rough, “you look very comfortable there for someone who spent years insisting she’d never sit in it.”

“Blame the idiot who dragged me up onto it,” she said. “I was perfectly content behind it before last night.”

It only took him one night and now you’re naked on his throne. Have some shame.

“You don’t have to—” he started, reflexively.

“I know,” she cut in. “That is, inconveniently, the entire problem.”

She let her head tilt, studying him from the Emperor’s vantage for the first time.

“Tell me, Niall,” she went on, voice gone lazy-dangerous, “do you truly think that if I had not meant my answer last night—” Heat flickered up her neck at the memory of exactly what she’d said while he was buried in her; she ploughed through it anyway. “—or my vow this morning...” Her gaze dragged slowly down his still-buttoned shirt, then lower. “...I would be sitting here like this,” she finished, “waiting for my Emperor to finish undressing and attend to his duties?”

Girl, what a blatant lie.

“Mòrag,” he said, and there was nothing of rulership in it at all.

Whatever hesitation was left in his eyes cracked then—not disappearing, but melting into something steadier and hotter. Concern shifted into intention.

He reached for his buttons. The first one slipped; he swore under his breath, then huffed an embarrassed laugh. “Stop staring,” he muttered.

“No,” she said.

A startled smile tugged at his mouth. “You’re supposed to say something reassuring.”

“I have used up my quota of reassuring behaviour for the day.”

Layers hit the floor in a less dignified pile than her neatly stacked armour, but the chaos of it pleased some petty, proprietary corner of her. This was not the careful undressing of a formal wedding night; it was the boy from her bed stripping down in the room he’d just set on fire for her.

When he finally stood bare in front of the dais, breathing a little quicker, he padded up the steps and stepped between her knees. His eyes dropped, then snapped back up to her face so fast she almost laughed.

“You know,” he said softly, a crooked, almost shy edge to it, “if the council could see their Special Inquisitor sitting on my throne like this, they’d stop wondering why I refused every other bride.”

Her face went hot enough to melt the throne. “You are insufferable,” she said.

“You didn’t look like you minded last night,” he murmured back. “Or when you were kneeling for me ten minutes ago.”

You chose an arrogant one, her inner voice said, half hysterical. You did this to yourself.

He braced his hands on the arms of the throne, caging her in without quite touching. From this angle she felt acutely aware of every inch of herself, of how open she was, of how easy it would be for him to—

“You’re certain?” he asked, but it wasn’t the old, anxious Do you want this? It was softer, more knowing, as if he already had his answer and just liked hearing her give it.

She thought of the night. Of her own ragged voice begging him to make her his, of the way she’d wrapped around him when he’d asked for a future and not just an evening. Of the council, of the way she had gone to her knee for him with the entire Empire watching.

“No,” she said, because honesty was a vicious habit. “I am not certain at all.”

His hands twitched on the throne.

“But I want it,” she added, and the words felt like stepping off a ledge. “I want you.”

That was all it took. Whatever restraint was left in him burned clean. The new confidence he’d shown in the council poured back into his body; his fingers curled more firmly around the carved arms, boxing her in, his weight a warm, solid reality leaning over her.

“I’m glad,” he said, and the simple word sent a shiver down her spine. “Because I’m not planning to forget any of this.”

He bent to kiss her. It was not hurried. It was deep and thorough and embarrassingly sure, the kind of kiss that said: I know exactly who I’m doing this with, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise in the morning.

Her hands came up almost helplessly, fingers biting into his shoulders to drag him closer. His palms slid from the throne to her waist, thumbs pressing into the hollows above her hips like he meant to memorise the feel of her there, in his seat.

One night, that dry internal voice observed as she opened for him, and now you’re letting him lean over you on the Emperor’s throne. Truly, your discipline is legendary.

She kissed him harder, if only to shut herself up.

His body fitted against hers like it had been waiting for this height, this angle, this ridiculous piece of furniture. The cool metal beneath her, the echo of the council’s shock, the knowledge that anyone walking in would see their entire new order laid out in one obscene tableau—all of it blurred at the edges.

After that, talking stopped being possible for a while. It wasn’t the wild, half-panicked tumble of the night before; it was slower and somehow more dangerous for it. No excuses, no surprise—just two people who knew exactly what they were doing now, and did it anyway.

He learned the lines of the throne as well as he’d learned the lines of her body; how far he could ease her back into it before she arched, how close he could bring his mouth to her ear before her voice dropped into that wrecked register that still somehow found room for his name.

Every time she gasped he chased the sound, adjusting, testing, committing each little shiver to memory like it was part of some sacred briefing.

He lifted her slightly, hips aligning with a deliberate precision that stole her breath. When he entered her, it wasn’t tentative. He sank into her with a heavy, claiming slowness that filled her completely, pressing her back against the unforgiving metal of the seat.

“Mine,” he whispered against her mouth, a shudder running through him.

“Yours,” she gasped, unable to deny it.

She discovered, to her mingled horror and delight, that she had very few objections to being “claimed back” this way. The cool bite of worked metal under her shoulders, the solid weight of him above, the obscene knowledge of where they were doing this—it all wound tighter and tighter around something in her that had never been allowed to loosen.

At some point he drew her forward off the high back and down, hands firm at her waist, guiding rather than asking. One moment she was seated like a monarch, the next she was half-sprawled along the throne, fingers digging into his shoulders as he followed her down, moving with that new, stubborn certainty he’d brought into the council chamber.

He didn’t rush. If anything, the opposite; each time he felt her crest he pulled back just enough to keep her there, circling the edge with a focus that would have made any instructor proud.

It was infuriating. It was unbearable. It was... effective.

“Sadist,” she managed to breathe against his throat at one point, and felt him laugh, low and shaky, before he drove into her with a sudden, sharp depth that turned the word into a broken sound with no edges at all.

She lost track of how many times she came undone under him. The room narrowed to heat and rhythm and the hoarse way he said her name whenever she dragged him closer and refused to let go.

Once, when she tried to regain the upper hand and push him back into the seat, he actually let her, settling onto the throne with a surprised, helpless little exhale as she climbed after him.

That was how they ended: not with her pinned to the metal like a conquered thing, but with him sitting in his own seat, legs braced, with Mòrag straddling his lap, using him, riding out the last shuddering waves while he clung to her as if the world outside the chamber had ceased to exist.

At some hazy, breathless point, thought started trickling back in. She was half-curled against him, skin slick, heartbeat hammering against his chest, still astride his lap on the Emperor’s throne. His arms were banded around her waist like a belt, holding her there as if the idea of letting her off the seat—or away from him—hadn’t yet occurred to him.

She drew in a slow breath, trying to remember what thinking felt like.

“Which,” she managed, voice rougher than she meant it to be, “brings me to a matter of state.”

He blinked, dazed, as if he’d honestly forgotten the word state existed.

“A... matter of state,” he echoed, hands still settled very firmly on her hips. “Now?”

“When else?” she said, because if she didn’t lean on her own absurdity she’d start screaming. She shifted on his lap, just enough to remind them both how close they still were. “If I am to be Empress, I am entitled to clarity.”

He swallowed. “Clarity... on what?” he asked, wary and fascinated at once.

“On this,” she said, letting her hand slide up his chest, feeling the hard thud of his heart under her palm. “Just how many heirs does my Emperor intend for me to bear?”

The question landed like a thrown knife.

His mouth opened. Closed. For a second he looked entirely out of his depth, as if she’d asked him to recite tax codes. Then the thought behind all his reckless declarations finally caught up with him.

“Ah— I...” His face went crimson. “I hadn’t really —”

He had, of course. Just not in numbers. She raised a brow, waiting. The first figure that reached his tongue clearly came straight from some foolish, boyish part of him that wanted the answer to be as big as the feeling.

“F-five,” he blurted. “Five.”

Her eyes actually widened before she could stop them.

Five?

For the briefest moment, genuine awe flickered through the embarrassment. There was something so gloriously, stupidly Ardainian about it—no careful two, no tidy succession plan. Just: five. As if he’d looked at her and the future and thought more.

Then her composure slid back into place, softer around the edges now, warmed by something hopelessly fond.

“Five,” she repeated, letting the word roll over her tongue. “Your Majesty is ambitious.”

He made a small, strangled noise. “We can revise that down if you—”

She cut him off with a small snort. “Oh, I have no intention of revising it down,” she said. “If you intend to continue taking such... thorough care of your Empress, I suspect five will be only the beginning.”

He went still. Whatever he’d been about to say dissolved.

She let her fingers trace lightly along his collarbone, eyes narrowing just a little. “However,” she added, tone suddenly cool as a drawn blade, “I should make one point of policy very clear.”

He tensed instinctively. “Policy?”

“There will be no concubines,” she said. “No ‘necessary’ arrangements. No conveniently placed noble daughters doing the Empire a favour in your bed while I smile from the sidelines.”

His eyes went wide. “I— Mòrag, I never—”

“I know,” she said, and she did. It wasn’t that she thought he wanted them; it was that the council would assume he should have them. “But our dear Chancellor will bring it up sooner or later. ‘For stability’.” Her mouth curled, sharp and a little dangerous. “If you want five heirs, Niall, you will get them from me,” she finished. “And only me. Is that understood?”

His answer was immediate, fierce. “Yes,” he said. “Of course. I don’t want anyone else.”

The raw certainty in his voice made something melt and knot inside her all at once.

There, her inner voice said faintly. Now you’ve staked your claim like a jealous girl half your age, on top of everything else. Truly, your reputation is done for.

Out loud, she allowed herself a small, crooked smile.

“Good,” she said. “Then we’re agreed on our… projected output.”

“Mòrag,” he groaned, half laughing. “You can’t call our children ‘output’.”

She arched a brow and let her hand slide lower, closing around him with slow, deliberate certainty. His breath hitched; his hips twitched helplessly into her grip.

“Why not?” she murmured. “In front of the council they’ll be ‘heirs to Mor Ardain’.”

Her thumb stroked along him, lazy and proprietary.

“Here,” she went on, voice dropping, “they’re just the consequences of our appalling lack of self-control.”

Colour flooded his face; his fingers dug into her hips.

“Mòrag—”

She squeezed, just enough to make his protest break apart. “You wanted five, Niall,” she added, almost prim. “You don’t get to complain when your bride-to-be sets herself a target to hit.”

He huffed out a laugh that broke halfway, turning into a rough sound when she shifted her weight and dragged him deeper.

Her thumb brushed his jaw, gentler than her words. “And given your current… performance,” she breathed, “I am entirely confident I’ll be carrying your first before the month is out.”

“Saints,” he managed, wrecked. “You can’t say things like that and expect me to remember how months work.”

“That is not my area of concern at present,” she said, lips curving. Her hand tightened on him, guiding his next thrust. “My focus is strictly on… results.”

He choked on something between a laugh and a moan.

“You’re going to kill me,” he muttered against her skin.

“No,” she corrected, amusement threading through the heat. “I’m going to let you marry me, wreck my calendar and my figure, and then make you hold every noisy, hungry consequence you’ve earned yourself.”

Her teeth caught his earlobe in a brief, sharp nip. “Now concentrate, Emperor. You’ve made promises. I expect you to keep them.”

He pulled back enough to see her face, eyes dark, pupils blown wide. Whatever restraint he’d been clinging to frayed almost audibly.

“Empress’ orders?” he asked, voice unsteady.

Her mouth brushed his, a breath away from a kiss.

“Empress’ orders,” she confirmed. Her fingers dug into his shoulders, drawing him closer, setting the pace. “Now get back to work, Your Majesty.”

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