Articulations of Aspen

Things are different in the weeks that follow the visit from your guests from the south. You sense it in the way Steven moves through the halls—with more watchfulness than before, less the heedless animal force that once hurled him at everything in reach and more the measured, circumspect tread of a man who has recognized, possibly for the first time, the possibility of losing some part of his world.

He wakes you each morning with the same relentless heat, the same demanding hands and cock, but sometimes in the small moments after—when his breath has slowed and your bodies are still tied together by what he’s poured into you—he watches you as though trying to decipher a language only you two share, and that he’s afraid to find his own words missing.

He fills his days with a new kind of purpose, stalking the battlements at dusk, making careful inventory of the armory, drilling the younger men himself, relentless and all-consuming. He is building something, you think; you are watching him fortify what he loves, even if he cannot say so aloud.

It changes things between the two of you, this awareness—a tension not of violence or even sex, but of something almost—fragile. It surfaces in the way he sometimes laces his fingers with yours, as if idly, but never breaks the hold first. Or in the way his hand will pause at your back, hovering as though it wants to support you, but cannot quite allow itself the indulgence of tenderness outright. You feel it when he watches you from across the hall during mealtimes, and in how he discusses matters of the court with you, less dismissive, more—what is it, respect?—than before.

You’d imagined, once, that the longer you stayed here, the more invisible you might become. That a queen, even one captured and bartered for as you were, would eventually be more statue than person, a vessel for tradition and dynasty, not for selfhood. But the opposite has happened. Your days are full—helping Ursa plan the planting festivals, overseeing repairs to the winter-damaged barns, learning which of Helga’s cryptic warnings to heed and which to ignore. Even the village children know you now, trailing after your skirt-hems, bringing you bits of amber and sea glass as trophies.

You do not yet know all your position will be nor what your marriage is, but it has grown in ways you did not expect.

Today the itch comes before the noon hour but you try to ignore it—try to keep occupied, try to let your hands and mind be so full of tasks that they might crowd out the throb in your thighs, the heat curling low in your belly. You visit the kitchens, where the steam and spitting fat makes you lightheaded; you walk the length of the halls. Nothing works. The ache is stubborn, eager, and it turns every thought toward Steven and the way he sometimes bends you over the windowsill, or pins you against the wall, or drags you across the floor, or—most especially, most humiliatingly—the way he simply looks at you from across the room and makes you want to drop to your knees and beg for him.

It’s the wanting that undoes you.

So you go to him.

You find Steven in the council room, hunched over a parchment at the long pine table. Two of his advisors—Lorens with his pinched mouth and restless fingers, and Samuel with his strong jaw—lean in, voices serious as the men confer. The fire is banked low, providing warmth in the chill of late winter, some light still making itself available at the end of the afternoon.

Steven glances up before the others notice you, as if summoned by the heat of your gaze. His eyes meet yours and for a fraction of a second the animal in him flares out from behind his eyes—hungry, sharp, but now tempered by something that almost looks like pride. Then his face flickers back to impassiveness, the steel mask that serves him so well.

You linger at the edge of the room, weighing whether to approach, and Steven’s head tips a fraction—an order: come here.

You cross the stone flags, your steps soft in the hush, and though both advisors shoot glances your way, neither wavers in their discourse with their king. Steven’s attention swings fully your way. “What is your need?” he asks, tone flat, but his eyes flick down your body in a way that indicates he has a suspicion.

You feel the heat rise up your neck, but you meet his gaze with steadiness. “May I have a moment alone with my husband?” you ask, glancing at the two counselors, but then back to Steven, who holds the power to determine.

Steven doesn’t bother with the pretense of courtesy or debate. “You are both dismissed,” he says, without looking away from you.

Lorens rises first, shuffling his papers together, darting you a glance that slides away as soon as it lands. Samuel lingers a moment, still watching Steven, then bows and retreats. The door closes and the hush in the room is absolute.

He shifts his weight back, squares his shoulders and leans into the chair in a way that makes you aware, acutely, of the span of his thighs and the space he commands even at rest.

You cross the distance with measured dignity, careful not to let your pace betray the heat burning in the marrow of your bones, and stand just close enough that you can feel the warmth radiating from him, like a sun behind a cloud. He is silent, letting you name your need, or your shame, whichever will come first.

Steven watches you for a long moment, eyes keenly narrowed, the muscle in his jaw tight. He says nothing.

For a moment, you don’t know where to begin. Everything seems both urgent and trivial in the presence of his attention, so you choose the truth. “There are things I want,” you say, boldness tripping up over the lump in your throat.

He lets the silence hang there, sharp as a blade, before allowing himself the faintest lift of a brow. “Then take them.” He speaks with the same ruthless clarity he brings to every command, but there’s no mockery in it. He means it, means for you to have whatever you dare to name.

You do. The table is long, but you are bold; you slide one knee onto the bench beside Steven, the movement deliberate, and then sit on his lap, straddling him there in the firelit hush.

His hands go immediately to your hips, holding you hard but not to control—just to steady you. You feel the heat of him, not just between your thighs, but burning clean through the linen of his shirt, through the wool of your own bodice. He stares up at you, face hungry.

You stare at him, daring him to make the next move. He doesn’t. His hands rest at your hips, heavy and expectant. The fire at your back, the muscle and heat of him before you—everything about Steven in this instant screams that he is ready to be the instrument of whatever you wish, but will not move first. Not on this.

“Is that an order, my king?” you ask, your voice breathier than you wish it to be.

He tilts his head, considering you with that odd, deep tenderness that you’ve begun to learn is not softness, not in the way you once recognized, but a fiercer kind of loyalty. “If you want it to be,” he says. “If you find that easier.”

You shake your head slowly, hands coming up to splay over the breadth of his chest, flattening your palms against him. Your center rocks forward, brushing over the bulge beneath his breeches, his cock hard and already straining, and your knees nearly give out at the contact.

You move your hips again, slow at first, feeling the thick heat of him grow even harder through the layers of cloth. His hands tighten at your waist, fingers digging in, but he still does not guide, does not take—just lets you rut against him, lets you chase the friction, lets you lose yourself in the animal want while the firelight flickers on his jaw and shadow.

You know what you want. You want to make him want, want to crack this composure, want to see him desperate and raw for you in the way that matches the heat that drove you here, the appetite he’s shown so consistently for you night and day. You grind down, seeking the angle that brings his cock flush against your throbbing center. Steven’s hands tighten with every pass, and his breathing grows shallow, the tips of his ears red with the effort it costs him to hold back.

You slide your hands to his face—beard rough against your palms—and force him to look at you, really look. “I want you to fuck me,” you say, and the baldness of the word makes you pulse with shame and thrill both. “Here. Now.” The echo of that word clings in the air, lurid, and the last filter between you and your want is gone.

Steven’s mouth doesn’t twitch with a smirk, but his eyes—blue, hungry and dark—crinkle at the corners in a way that says everything. His hand moves, slow as a glacier but infinitely more dangerous, sliding beneath the folds of your skirt, up the naked curve of your thigh. The callused pads of his fingers ignite a trail of prickling heat as he climbs, relentless. He finds you already slick, sodden with want, and his thumb strokes the seam of your cunt with a firm, approving press.

“Good,” he murmurs, voice soft but thick with command, “you’re already soaked for me.” There is no pretense, no veneer of gentleness—he takes pride in your need. He sinks the tip of his finger into you, just a knuckle, then deeper, testing your readiness, your greed.

He pulls out, coats his thumb in your arousal, and draws lazy, humiliating circles over your clit. Every nerve is strung to that spot, never letting you retreat from the pleasure he wrings from you. You clutch at his shoulders as the world narrows to the relentless, masterful pressure of his hand, the delicious grind of your hips against his, and the raw, unslakable need that’s driven you across half the castle to tremble on his lap like a supplicant at an altar.

He toys with you like this until you’re panting, biting your own lip to keep from sobbing with how close you are, how much you need more—him, inside you, every inch. Steven keeps you there, strung out on the edge, until you think you’ll break apart from the wanting. He waits, and he watches, the blue eyes locked on yours as if daring you to beg.

You do, in the end. “Please,” you whisper, and the word is so thin and desperate it hardly sounds like your voice, but it gets the reaction you want. He withdraws his hand entirely, leaving you gasping and empty, eager.

His voice is a rough thread as he says, “Up. Bend.”

Your legs shake as you climb off him, but you obey instantly, turning to face the table and propping yourself on your elbows, the rough grain cool beneath your cheek. You hear him behind you, the scrape of his chair across the stone as he moves to stand. The weight of his hand at your back is both warning and anchor as he flips your skirts up and over your waist and exposing your bare flesh to the chill of the council room. The air is cold, but his hands are a brand, searing every inch they touch.

He grinds up behind you, the heavy, swollen head of his cock lining up with your slick, clenching entrance, and you are so hungry that you try to wriggle back to catch him, but his other hand clamps to your hip, holding you in place.

Steven bends low, beard scratch and all, and growls into your ear, “You want to be claimed, little queen? You want to prove who you belong to?” The timber of his voice, the brutal edge of the words, makes your knees go to water. The answer is obvious. The answer is him. Always, always, always him.

You nod, but it isn’t enough for Steven. He wants words, he wants confession, he wants you to submit to this truth with clarity. “Say it,” he snarls, and the hand at your hip shifts to wrap around your throat, not hard, but with promise of force.

“I belong to you,” you say, the words the admission to usher in the next movement. You feel the hot slide of the broad head of Steven’s cock dragging slow and deliberate through your folds—soaking it in the mess he’s just made of you, teasing as though there is any possibility you would not take him instantly and whole. He rubs the slick head up and down, slow, then lingers at your entrance, not yet breaching, just savoring the helpless flex and pulse of your body trying to draw him in, refusing you the fullness you crave.

“You’re so desperate, you will let me fuck you right here on the war table,” he mutters, voice raw. The hand at your throat tightens slightly, making you shiver. “Would you let the entire kingdom see their queen bred by her king?”

You whimper, the shameful thrill of his words tightening every muscle in your core. “Yes. I would.” The fibers in your throat burn with the confession, but Steven’s hand at your nape releases just enough to let you gasp in relief. He’s proud of you—can feel it in the pulse of his cock, straining now, that he has made you need him so absolutely in this place and in this way.

Then there’s the sharp, deliberate press of his body crowding your ass, the hard and heavy heat of his cock settling between your cheeks, threatening the softest, tightest part of you. He bends down, mouth at your ear, and you feel the scrape of his beard and the thrum of his voice as he says, “Hold still.”

You do.

You pulse with anticipation, with nerves, with a need that borders on terror. Steven spits into his hand—loud, crude, and the sound goes straight to your clit—and then he smears the spit over the head of his cock, and over you, and then the push comes, blunt and inexorable, at the forbidden ring of muscle. It is too much, always, but you want it, you want the proof of his hunger, the rawness of being taken where only he has ever claimed.

The stretch is a fire in your bones. You dig your fingers into the edge of the table, desperate to ground yourself as Steven pushes past every last shred of resistance. It is agony and rapture, the full width of him splitting you, and for a moment you go blind, dizzy from the stretch and the heat and the sheer, obscene fullness of him forcing its way inside you.

He doesn’t take you all at once. He works you open, withdrawing and then pressing back in, a little deeper with every rut until you shake beneath him, gasping for air, sobbing around the thickness of him. Sweat beads along your spine, and you are aware only of the way the rough grain of the table digs into your cheek and the way his voice is a rasp of praise washing over you as he speaks.

“You take it,” he says, a kind of awe in the echoing hollowness of the council chamber. “You take me so well, little wife.”

Once fully sheathed, he holds you there, impaled, the hand on your neck now a bracing anchor, his hips flush to your ass. His other hand splays over your lower back, holding you steady and open, thumbs digging in just above the curve of your hips. You feel the tremble in his thighs, the fight he wages to keep from just rutting you through the table; you feel, too, the seething pride in how willing—how eager—you are to take whatever he gives, no matter how intense.

Slowly, Steven withdraws, the drag of his cock raw against the tight, trembling ring. He spits another mouthful into his palm, adds more lube to your now-aching hole, and sets a rhythm that is measured, deliberate. The sound of it—his hips meeting your flesh, the wet suction, the low, rough praise in his voice—is a percussion that underlines every brutal stroke. You crave the violence of it, the way he fucks you open with single-minded focus, and still, still, you want more.

“Steven,” you gasp, not knowing what you’re begging for, only that you want every inch, every ounce of him, even in the places that ache and pulse and maybe cannot take more. He answers with a groan, a hand moving from your hip to your clit, grinding over the little bundle of nerves with all the wicked skill he’s refined over months of your fucking.

The overwhelming friction, the fullness, the throb—is unbearable, and you come, hard, so hard it borders on violence. Your body clamps around him, the spasm nearly paralyzing you as your limbs weaken, every muscle in your core pulsing and throbbing around the invasive, overwhelming width of your king. The edges of your vision blur and the sound you make is animal, wordless, but Steven answers, driving you through the crest of your climax, sinking into you with a force that obliterates all thought.

He fucks you through it, relentless and victorious, hands huge and hard at your hips, jerking you back to claim every last inch until you’re sobbing with how full, how impossibly stuffed you are. Each thrust pushes you flat to the table, and you are only vaguely aware of the smears of spit and slick and sweat pooling at the join of your bodies, the way it soaks through your thighs, leaving you wrecked and open for him.

He’s not finished with you, not by a long shot. Steven’s cock withdraws from your ass with a slow, wrenching drag, leaving you shuddering and empty, all your muscles fluttering and your face hot against the cold grain of the table. You sob, a little, at the loss, and you can feel the slick mess of your own juices and his spit running down your thighs, the burn at your rim pulsing in time with your heartbeat.

But then his hands are gentler—one at your hip, one braced at your shoulder as he lines himself up again, this time pressing the heavy, hot tip of his cock between your thighs, seeking the place you are already swollen and desperate for him. You whimper, still spent and oversensitive from your first climax, but even so, you arch your hips, eager for the fullness only he gives.

He slides in, not slow but not cruel, just driving every inch into your aching, greedy cunt. You keen, desperate, not even caring that your voice is a needy, broken thing in the echoing hush of the council chamber.

Steven’s mouth finds your ear, “Every man at court, every lord, every advisor—every last one knows you are mine, but I want it ringing in their ears forever as I breed you.”

With every stroke, Steven’s cock brushes the most sensitive part inside you, your battered and wet cunt spasming around him, milking him for all he can give. You feel every vein, every ridge, every pulse of his cock as it spears you open, and it’s so much, so good, you come again, harder this time, a rush that’s almost terror but made only of pleasure, pure and shattering.

Your cunt pulses around him, hungry and slick, wringing him, wringing you, until there is nothing left in your head but the need to come again—and the way Steven makes you do it, every time, with just a fuck and a promise and the weight of his whole body pressing you down. You arch your back, desperate to take him deeper, and the hand at your shoulder pins you flat to the table, holding you still as he braces and thrusts, making you quiver and moan, making you mindless for him.

The pace now is punishing, but you crave it. Each time your hips threaten to buck off the wood he keeps you pinned down, rutting into you as if you’re a thing made only for his taking. The itch in your belly blooms to wildfire, sharp and wild, and the overstimulation is edged with a pleasure so beautiful you could scream for it, could cry for the way it rips you open and fills in every last corner of your wanting, and so you do.

He fucks you through the aftershocks, fucking every last spasm of pleasure from your body, fucking you until you’re hoarse and sobbing and barely conscious with the white-hot pleasure and the raw bruise of being so completely, so thoroughly used. You know you will wear the marks of this for days—on your throat, on your hips, at the tight, spent holes still drooling spit and slick and sweat down your thighs.

Steven comes at last with a roar, hips slamming into you so hard the edge of the table cuts the breath from your lungs, and the twitch and pulse of his cock fills you, flooding you in one final, conquering pulse. The heat of him, the quantity of him, is unspeakable—you feel it sear a path to your womb, a brutal, claiming flood that fills you so full the excess is forced out around his cock, further slicking your thighs, sticking your skin to the wood.

The hand at your nape strokes the ridge of your spine, his breath crashing against your back, and you realize he is fighting himself, struggling to corral the violent tenderness now threatening to shatter him from the inside out.

For a long while, neither of you move. The only sound is the ragged thrum of your breaths and the wild, feral stammer of his heart as it tries to slow. Your legs are boneless, splayed wide, and he keeps you pressed to the table, still impaled, as if even a breath’s space could risk losing what he’s just staked his soul on.

Finally, Steven eases back, hands gentle as he scoops you from the table—your limbs limp, trembling, useless in the aftermath—and cradles your whole body against his chest. He gathers your legs up as he moves back and reclaims his earlier seat, settling you in his lap, bundled and shattered against the heat of his skin. He strokes your hair, your back, mauling you close as if afraid you might dissolve into the air if not caged to him. His cock softens inside you, but he cannot let you go, not yet; he just clutches you tighter, your spent body rocked gently soothed, a motion at odds with the violence of minutes before.

When you can finally catch your breath, you turn slightly more into him and you press your cheek to the hollow of his throat. You listen to the tide of his pulse, the desperate hunt of his lungs for air. Somewhere outside, the world carries on—voices, firewood splitting, kids shrieking down the corridor—but here, in this carved-out moment, you are the only two who exist.

Steven is the one to speak first, rough and low in your ear. “I want—” He breaks off, his voice rough and strangely weak, so unlike the man who just ruined you over a council table you hardly know how to answer it. The man who has ruined you so many times. You lift your head to meet his gaze. The fires in his eyes are guttering now, but not cold—they burn with a different fuel, something almost like desperation.

“I want you to want it,” he says, the words torn from some engine deeper than pride, deeper than need. “Not just because I am your king. Not because it is owed. I want it because you choose it.”

The statement lands in the hollow between your ribs like a fist. You don’t know how to answer except to touch your lips to his, gentle, a whisper of a kiss where violent need reigned just minutes before. You press your mouth to the corner of his, then to the sharp line of his jaw, then the hollow beneath. “I do,” you say, and it’s a word so small it could barely crack a window in the cold stone of the Kongsgård, but you see the effect it has. His grip on you shifts, softer now, and he lets his forehead fall to yours, breaking into a long, shaky exhale. In this way you know that you have power, too—a different kind than you ever imagined, but no less absolute.

You stay like this, bodies twined, until the fire in the hearth burns low and the sweat on your skin cools to a chill. Every inch of you aches in the most delicious, dangerous ways. Your cunt is tender, the ring of your ass still pulsing with the memory of how he split you open and left you gaping. You ought to feel shame, but all you feel is a molten pride that you can take everything Steven gives and still want more.

You let him hold you until your breathing matches his, until your own hands find the strength to fist in the linen at his collar. His sweat cools in the hollow between your bodies, and you let your head rest heavy against his chest, the salt of his skin mixing with your own. Neither of you moves for a long while. When you finally slide off his lap, legs watery as river clay, Steven follows you, only a half-step behind, as if the gravity between your bodies is too constant to fully break.

You should return to your duties. Somewhere you are most certainly needed. But when Steven cups your chin and tilts your face up, his thumb grazing the corner of your mouth, every reason to leave the room vanishes. His lips devour you, slow and thorough, as if he wants to memorize this, encode it in every cell, until no part of you is untouched by the taste of this moment.

You break apart only when the need for air forces you to, but the hunger in it lingers. His hand cups the nape of your neck, thumb stroking slow over the vein that jumps there, and he rests his forehead to yours like a man newly landed from a voyage half the world wide. “You have unmade me,” he says, and it is a confession, not a complaint.

You laugh, shaky and soft, pressing your nose to his. “You did all the unmaking yourself.” The words are true, and you let them settle between you. He grins, the wolfish flash of his teeth just visible, and with it the tension diffuses, neither of you quite knowing what to do with so much tenderness made raw.

You gather yourself, smoothing your wrinkled skirt down over sticky thighs, but Steven is not finished. He crosses to the door, and opens it to speak with the attendant there. He instructs that a meal to be sent up to the royal chamber, and for a bath to be drawn, hot as the hearth can offer. The servant, catching the devastation in your overall appearance and the almost drunken glaze to Steven’s eyes, bows with a speed rarely seen and disappears before the king can clarify any further.

Steven’s attention returns to you. “I do not believe we are fit for anything but to retire for the rest of the day.”

For a moment, you feel like a maiden caught in mischief, but then Steven’s eyes drop to your mouth and you remember you are not a maiden, you are a queen, his queen, and whatever want burns in your blood is not merely allowed, but expected, demanded, starved for. His. Deeply his. And you feel anchored in that surety now.

Are we in a happily ever after yet? No. But things are certainly changing.

Please reblog if you enjoyed this/enjoy this series. My blog got marked as explicit permanently by dumblr, which means that my posts no longer show up in the public tags, so people honestly won't find it unless it's gets passed along by your reblogs now. 🥺 I'm wavering on how much longer it may or may not be worth it to post here if the point is being able to share it with others.

Main Masterlist | Aspen's Ask Box | Field Guide to the Forest

Of course, there are so many layers to it, beyond just physical craving. The way it develops between them, how it adds to that fire in Reader's heart (and between her thighs) - you capture it so perfectly!

It's the slowest of burns, that started from a dark place, but with each part of their story you show that no darkness is absolute. There are lights Reader never imagined existing. Perhaps not fairytale bright, or the sunny sky shining freedom, but a row of candles producing dimmed light that's surprisingly warming and steady.

I started marking passages I wanted to quote as my favourite, but it quickly became obvious I'd be copying half of the fic ❤️

So many beautiful lines, so many sentences built into masterpieces piercing right through the heart. I love and appreciate each for different value - composition, emotional vulnerability, punch of feels, absolute raw hotness 🔥

Ah, I can't help myself, I have to quote at least a few:

he watches you as though trying to decipher a language only you two share, and that he’s afraid to find his own words missing.

He is building something, you think; you are watching him fortify what he loves, even if he cannot say so aloud.

His hand moves, slow as a glacier but infinitely more dangerous

you gasp, not knowing what you’re begging for, only that you want every inch, every ounce of him, even in the places that ache and pulse and maybe cannot take more

In this way you know that you have power, too—a different kind than you ever imagined, but no less absolute.

And yes, the fucking part was raw and hot, leaving me a mess 🥵 I was 😳 at him taking her ass so crudely AND then switching back to breed her pussy 😳😳😳

Things are different in the weeks that follow the visit from your guests from the south. You sense it in the way Steven moves through the halls—with more watchfulness than before, less the heedless animal force that once hurled him at everything in reach and more the measured, circumspect tread of a man who has recognized, possibly for the first time, the possibility of losing some part of his world.

He wakes you each morning with the same relentless heat, the same demanding hands and cock, but sometimes in the small moments after—when his breath has slowed and your bodies are still tied together by what he’s poured into you—he watches you as though trying to decipher a language only you two share, and that he’s afraid to find his own words missing.

He fills his days with a new kind of purpose, stalking the battlements at dusk, making careful inventory of the armory, drilling the younger men himself, relentless and all-consuming. He is building something, you think; you are watching him fortify what he loves, even if he cannot say so aloud.

It changes things between the two of you, this awareness—a tension not of violence or even sex, but of something almost—fragile. It surfaces in the way he sometimes laces his fingers with yours, as if idly, but never breaks the hold first. Or in the way his hand will pause at your back, hovering as though it wants to support you, but cannot quite allow itself the indulgence of tenderness outright. You feel it when he watches you from across the hall during mealtimes, and in how he discusses matters of the court with you, less dismissive, more—what is it, respect?—than before.

You’d imagined, once, that the longer you stayed here, the more invisible you might become. That a queen, even one captured and bartered for as you were, would eventually be more statue than person, a vessel for tradition and dynasty, not for selfhood. But the opposite has happened. Your days are full—helping Ursa plan the planting festivals, overseeing repairs to the winter-damaged barns, learning which of Helga’s cryptic warnings to heed and which to ignore. Even the village children know you now, trailing after your skirt-hems, bringing you bits of amber and sea glass as trophies.

You do not yet know all your position will be nor what your marriage is, but it has grown in ways you did not expect.

Today the itch comes before the noon hour but you try to ignore it—try to keep occupied, try to let your hands and mind be so full of tasks that they might crowd out the throb in your thighs, the heat curling low in your belly. You visit the kitchens, where the steam and spitting fat makes you lightheaded; you walk the length of the halls. Nothing works. The ache is stubborn, eager, and it turns every thought toward Steven and the way he sometimes bends you over the windowsill, or pins you against the wall, or drags you across the floor, or—most especially, most humiliatingly—the way he simply looks at you from across the room and makes you want to drop to your knees and beg for him.

It’s the wanting that undoes you.

So you go to him.

You find Steven in the council room, hunched over a parchment at the long pine table. Two of his advisors—Lorens with his pinched mouth and restless fingers, and Samuel with his strong jaw—lean in, voices serious as the men confer. The fire is banked low, providing warmth in the chill of late winter, some light still making itself available at the end of the afternoon.

Steven glances up before the others notice you, as if summoned by the heat of your gaze. His eyes meet yours and for a fraction of a second the animal in him flares out from behind his eyes—hungry, sharp, but now tempered by something that almost looks like pride. Then his face flickers back to impassiveness, the steel mask that serves him so well.

You linger at the edge of the room, weighing whether to approach, and Steven’s head tips a fraction—an order: come here.

You cross the stone flags, your steps soft in the hush, and though both advisors shoot glances your way, neither wavers in their discourse with their king. Steven’s attention swings fully your way. “What is your need?” he asks, tone flat, but his eyes flick down your body in a way that indicates he has a suspicion.

You feel the heat rise up your neck, but you meet his gaze with steadiness. “May I have a moment alone with my husband?” you ask, glancing at the two counselors, but then back to Steven, who holds the power to determine.

Steven doesn’t bother with the pretense of courtesy or debate. “You are both dismissed,” he says, without looking away from you.

Lorens rises first, shuffling his papers together, darting you a glance that slides away as soon as it lands. Samuel lingers a moment, still watching Steven, then bows and retreats. The door closes and the hush in the room is absolute.

He shifts his weight back, squares his shoulders and leans into the chair in a way that makes you aware, acutely, of the span of his thighs and the space he commands even at rest.

You cross the distance with measured dignity, careful not to let your pace betray the heat burning in the marrow of your bones, and stand just close enough that you can feel the warmth radiating from him, like a sun behind a cloud. He is silent, letting you name your need, or your shame, whichever will come first.

Steven watches you for a long moment, eyes keenly narrowed, the muscle in his jaw tight. He says nothing.

For a moment, you don’t know where to begin. Everything seems both urgent and trivial in the presence of his attention, so you choose the truth. “There are things I want,” you say, boldness tripping up over the lump in your throat.

He lets the silence hang there, sharp as a blade, before allowing himself the faintest lift of a brow. “Then take them.” He speaks with the same ruthless clarity he brings to every command, but there’s no mockery in it. He means it, means for you to have whatever you dare to name.

You do. The table is long, but you are bold; you slide one knee onto the bench beside Steven, the movement deliberate, and then sit on his lap, straddling him there in the firelit hush.

His hands go immediately to your hips, holding you hard but not to control—just to steady you. You feel the heat of him, not just between your thighs, but burning clean through the linen of his shirt, through the wool of your own bodice. He stares up at you, face hungry.

You stare at him, daring him to make the next move. He doesn’t. His hands rest at your hips, heavy and expectant. The fire at your back, the muscle and heat of him before you—everything about Steven in this instant screams that he is ready to be the instrument of whatever you wish, but will not move first. Not on this.

“Is that an order, my king?” you ask, your voice breathier than you wish it to be.

He tilts his head, considering you with that odd, deep tenderness that you’ve begun to learn is not softness, not in the way you once recognized, but a fiercer kind of loyalty. “If you want it to be,” he says. “If you find that easier.”

You shake your head slowly, hands coming up to splay over the breadth of his chest, flattening your palms against him. Your center rocks forward, brushing over the bulge beneath his breeches, his cock hard and already straining, and your knees nearly give out at the contact.

You move your hips again, slow at first, feeling the thick heat of him grow even harder through the layers of cloth. His hands tighten at your waist, fingers digging in, but he still does not guide, does not take—just lets you rut against him, lets you chase the friction, lets you lose yourself in the animal want while the firelight flickers on his jaw and shadow.

You know what you want. You want to make him want, want to crack this composure, want to see him desperate and raw for you in the way that matches the heat that drove you here, the appetite he’s shown so consistently for you night and day. You grind down, seeking the angle that brings his cock flush against your throbbing center. Steven’s hands tighten with every pass, and his breathing grows shallow, the tips of his ears red with the effort it costs him to hold back.

You slide your hands to his face—beard rough against your palms—and force him to look at you, really look. “I want you to fuck me,” you say, and the baldness of the word makes you pulse with shame and thrill both. “Here. Now.” The echo of that word clings in the air, lurid, and the last filter between you and your want is gone.

Steven’s mouth doesn’t twitch with a smirk, but his eyes—blue, hungry and dark—crinkle at the corners in a way that says everything. His hand moves, slow as a glacier but infinitely more dangerous, sliding beneath the folds of your skirt, up the naked curve of your thigh. The callused pads of his fingers ignite a trail of prickling heat as he climbs, relentless. He finds you already slick, sodden with want, and his thumb strokes the seam of your cunt with a firm, approving press.

“Good,” he murmurs, voice soft but thick with command, “you’re already soaked for me.” There is no pretense, no veneer of gentleness—he takes pride in your need. He sinks the tip of his finger into you, just a knuckle, then deeper, testing your readiness, your greed.

He pulls out, coats his thumb in your arousal, and draws lazy, humiliating circles over your clit. Every nerve is strung to that spot, never letting you retreat from the pleasure he wrings from you. You clutch at his shoulders as the world narrows to the relentless, masterful pressure of his hand, the delicious grind of your hips against his, and the raw, unslakable need that’s driven you across half the castle to tremble on his lap like a supplicant at an altar.

He toys with you like this until you’re panting, biting your own lip to keep from sobbing with how close you are, how much you need more—him, inside you, every inch. Steven keeps you there, strung out on the edge, until you think you’ll break apart from the wanting. He waits, and he watches, the blue eyes locked on yours as if daring you to beg.

You do, in the end. “Please,” you whisper, and the word is so thin and desperate it hardly sounds like your voice, but it gets the reaction you want. He withdraws his hand entirely, leaving you gasping and empty, eager.

His voice is a rough thread as he says, “Up. Bend.”

Your legs shake as you climb off him, but you obey instantly, turning to face the table and propping yourself on your elbows, the rough grain cool beneath your cheek. You hear him behind you, the scrape of his chair across the stone as he moves to stand. The weight of his hand at your back is both warning and anchor as he flips your skirts up and over your waist and exposing your bare flesh to the chill of the council room. The air is cold, but his hands are a brand, searing every inch they touch.

He grinds up behind you, the heavy, swollen head of his cock lining up with your slick, clenching entrance, and you are so hungry that you try to wriggle back to catch him, but his other hand clamps to your hip, holding you in place.

Steven bends low, beard scratch and all, and growls into your ear, “You want to be claimed, little queen? You want to prove who you belong to?” The timber of his voice, the brutal edge of the words, makes your knees go to water. The answer is obvious. The answer is him. Always, always, always him.

You nod, but it isn’t enough for Steven. He wants words, he wants confession, he wants you to submit to this truth with clarity. “Say it,” he snarls, and the hand at your hip shifts to wrap around your throat, not hard, but with promise of force.

“I belong to you,” you say, the words the admission to usher in the next movement. You feel the hot slide of the broad head of Steven’s cock dragging slow and deliberate through your folds—soaking it in the mess he’s just made of you, teasing as though there is any possibility you would not take him instantly and whole. He rubs the slick head up and down, slow, then lingers at your entrance, not yet breaching, just savoring the helpless flex and pulse of your body trying to draw him in, refusing you the fullness you crave.

“You’re so desperate, you will let me fuck you right here on the war table,” he mutters, voice raw. The hand at your throat tightens slightly, making you shiver. “Would you let the entire kingdom see their queen bred by her king?”

You whimper, the shameful thrill of his words tightening every muscle in your core. “Yes. I would.” The fibers in your throat burn with the confession, but Steven’s hand at your nape releases just enough to let you gasp in relief. He’s proud of you—can feel it in the pulse of his cock, straining now, that he has made you need him so absolutely in this place and in this way.

Then there’s the sharp, deliberate press of his body crowding your ass, the hard and heavy heat of his cock settling between your cheeks, threatening the softest, tightest part of you. He bends down, mouth at your ear, and you feel the scrape of his beard and the thrum of his voice as he says, “Hold still.”

You do.

You pulse with anticipation, with nerves, with a need that borders on terror. Steven spits into his hand—loud, crude, and the sound goes straight to your clit—and then he smears the spit over the head of his cock, and over you, and then the push comes, blunt and inexorable, at the forbidden ring of muscle. It is too much, always, but you want it, you want the proof of his hunger, the rawness of being taken where only he has ever claimed.

The stretch is a fire in your bones. You dig your fingers into the edge of the table, desperate to ground yourself as Steven pushes past every last shred of resistance. It is agony and rapture, the full width of him splitting you, and for a moment you go blind, dizzy from the stretch and the heat and the sheer, obscene fullness of him forcing its way inside you.

He doesn’t take you all at once. He works you open, withdrawing and then pressing back in, a little deeper with every rut until you shake beneath him, gasping for air, sobbing around the thickness of him. Sweat beads along your spine, and you are aware only of the way the rough grain of the table digs into your cheek and the way his voice is a rasp of praise washing over you as he speaks.

“You take it,” he says, a kind of awe in the echoing hollowness of the council chamber. “You take me so well, little wife.”

Once fully sheathed, he holds you there, impaled, the hand on your neck now a bracing anchor, his hips flush to your ass. His other hand splays over your lower back, holding you steady and open, thumbs digging in just above the curve of your hips. You feel the tremble in his thighs, the fight he wages to keep from just rutting you through the table; you feel, too, the seething pride in how willing—how eager—you are to take whatever he gives, no matter how intense.

Slowly, Steven withdraws, the drag of his cock raw against the tight, trembling ring. He spits another mouthful into his palm, adds more lube to your now-aching hole, and sets a rhythm that is measured, deliberate. The sound of it—his hips meeting your flesh, the wet suction, the low, rough praise in his voice—is a percussion that underlines every brutal stroke. You crave the violence of it, the way he fucks you open with single-minded focus, and still, still, you want more.

“Steven,” you gasp, not knowing what you’re begging for, only that you want every inch, every ounce of him, even in the places that ache and pulse and maybe cannot take more. He answers with a groan, a hand moving from your hip to your clit, grinding over the little bundle of nerves with all the wicked skill he’s refined over months of your fucking.

The overwhelming friction, the fullness, the throb—is unbearable, and you come, hard, so hard it borders on violence. Your body clamps around him, the spasm nearly paralyzing you as your limbs weaken, every muscle in your core pulsing and throbbing around the invasive, overwhelming width of your king. The edges of your vision blur and the sound you make is animal, wordless, but Steven answers, driving you through the crest of your climax, sinking into you with a force that obliterates all thought.

He fucks you through it, relentless and victorious, hands huge and hard at your hips, jerking you back to claim every last inch until you’re sobbing with how full, how impossibly stuffed you are. Each thrust pushes you flat to the table, and you are only vaguely aware of the smears of spit and slick and sweat pooling at the join of your bodies, the way it soaks through your thighs, leaving you wrecked and open for him.

He’s not finished with you, not by a long shot. Steven’s cock withdraws from your ass with a slow, wrenching drag, leaving you shuddering and empty, all your muscles fluttering and your face hot against the cold grain of the table. You sob, a little, at the loss, and you can feel the slick mess of your own juices and his spit running down your thighs, the burn at your rim pulsing in time with your heartbeat.

But then his hands are gentler—one at your hip, one braced at your shoulder as he lines himself up again, this time pressing the heavy, hot tip of his cock between your thighs, seeking the place you are already swollen and desperate for him. You whimper, still spent and oversensitive from your first climax, but even so, you arch your hips, eager for the fullness only he gives.

He slides in, not slow but not cruel, just driving every inch into your aching, greedy cunt. You keen, desperate, not even caring that your voice is a needy, broken thing in the echoing hush of the council chamber.

Steven’s mouth finds your ear, “Every man at court, every lord, every advisor—every last one knows you are mine, but I want it ringing in their ears forever as I breed you.”

With every stroke, Steven’s cock brushes the most sensitive part inside you, your battered and wet cunt spasming around him, milking him for all he can give. You feel every vein, every ridge, every pulse of his cock as it spears you open, and it’s so much, so good, you come again, harder this time, a rush that’s almost terror but made only of pleasure, pure and shattering.

Your cunt pulses around him, hungry and slick, wringing him, wringing you, until there is nothing left in your head but the need to come again—and the way Steven makes you do it, every time, with just a fuck and a promise and the weight of his whole body pressing you down. You arch your back, desperate to take him deeper, and the hand at your shoulder pins you flat to the table, holding you still as he braces and thrusts, making you quiver and moan, making you mindless for him.

The pace now is punishing, but you crave it. Each time your hips threaten to buck off the wood he keeps you pinned down, rutting into you as if you’re a thing made only for his taking. The itch in your belly blooms to wildfire, sharp and wild, and the overstimulation is edged with a pleasure so beautiful you could scream for it, could cry for the way it rips you open and fills in every last corner of your wanting, and so you do.

He fucks you through the aftershocks, fucking every last spasm of pleasure from your body, fucking you until you’re hoarse and sobbing and barely conscious with the white-hot pleasure and the raw bruise of being so completely, so thoroughly used. You know you will wear the marks of this for days—on your throat, on your hips, at the tight, spent holes still drooling spit and slick and sweat down your thighs.

Steven comes at last with a roar, hips slamming into you so hard the edge of the table cuts the breath from your lungs, and the twitch and pulse of his cock fills you, flooding you in one final, conquering pulse. The heat of him, the quantity of him, is unspeakable—you feel it sear a path to your womb, a brutal, claiming flood that fills you so full the excess is forced out around his cock, further slicking your thighs, sticking your skin to the wood.

The hand at your nape strokes the ridge of your spine, his breath crashing against your back, and you realize he is fighting himself, struggling to corral the violent tenderness now threatening to shatter him from the inside out.

For a long while, neither of you move. The only sound is the ragged thrum of your breaths and the wild, feral stammer of his heart as it tries to slow. Your legs are boneless, splayed wide, and he keeps you pressed to the table, still impaled, as if even a breath’s space could risk losing what he’s just staked his soul on.

Finally, Steven eases back, hands gentle as he scoops you from the table—your limbs limp, trembling, useless in the aftermath—and cradles your whole body against his chest. He gathers your legs up as he moves back and reclaims his earlier seat, settling you in his lap, bundled and shattered against the heat of his skin. He strokes your hair, your back, mauling you close as if afraid you might dissolve into the air if not caged to him. His cock softens inside you, but he cannot let you go, not yet; he just clutches you tighter, your spent body rocked gently soothed, a motion at odds with the violence of minutes before.

When you can finally catch your breath, you turn slightly more into him and you press your cheek to the hollow of his throat. You listen to the tide of his pulse, the desperate hunt of his lungs for air. Somewhere outside, the world carries on—voices, firewood splitting, kids shrieking down the corridor—but here, in this carved-out moment, you are the only two who exist.

Steven is the one to speak first, rough and low in your ear. “I want—” He breaks off, his voice rough and strangely weak, so unlike the man who just ruined you over a council table you hardly know how to answer it. The man who has ruined you so many times. You lift your head to meet his gaze. The fires in his eyes are guttering now, but not cold—they burn with a different fuel, something almost like desperation.

“I want you to want it,” he says, the words torn from some engine deeper than pride, deeper than need. “Not just because I am your king. Not because it is owed. I want it because you choose it.”

The statement lands in the hollow between your ribs like a fist. You don’t know how to answer except to touch your lips to his, gentle, a whisper of a kiss where violent need reigned just minutes before. You press your mouth to the corner of his, then to the sharp line of his jaw, then the hollow beneath. “I do,” you say, and it’s a word so small it could barely crack a window in the cold stone of the Kongsgård, but you see the effect it has. His grip on you shifts, softer now, and he lets his forehead fall to yours, breaking into a long, shaky exhale. In this way you know that you have power, too—a different kind than you ever imagined, but no less absolute.

You stay like this, bodies twined, until the fire in the hearth burns low and the sweat on your skin cools to a chill. Every inch of you aches in the most delicious, dangerous ways. Your cunt is tender, the ring of your ass still pulsing with the memory of how he split you open and left you gaping. You ought to feel shame, but all you feel is a molten pride that you can take everything Steven gives and still want more.

You let him hold you until your breathing matches his, until your own hands find the strength to fist in the linen at his collar. His sweat cools in the hollow between your bodies, and you let your head rest heavy against his chest, the salt of his skin mixing with your own. Neither of you moves for a long while. When you finally slide off his lap, legs watery as river clay, Steven follows you, only a half-step behind, as if the gravity between your bodies is too constant to fully break.

You should return to your duties. Somewhere you are most certainly needed. But when Steven cups your chin and tilts your face up, his thumb grazing the corner of your mouth, every reason to leave the room vanishes. His lips devour you, slow and thorough, as if he wants to memorize this, encode it in every cell, until no part of you is untouched by the taste of this moment.

You break apart only when the need for air forces you to, but the hunger in it lingers. His hand cups the nape of your neck, thumb stroking slow over the vein that jumps there, and he rests his forehead to yours like a man newly landed from a voyage half the world wide. “You have unmade me,” he says, and it is a confession, not a complaint.

You laugh, shaky and soft, pressing your nose to his. “You did all the unmaking yourself.” The words are true, and you let them settle between you. He grins, the wolfish flash of his teeth just visible, and with it the tension diffuses, neither of you quite knowing what to do with so much tenderness made raw.

You gather yourself, smoothing your wrinkled skirt down over sticky thighs, but Steven is not finished. He crosses to the door, and opens it to speak with the attendant there. He instructs that a meal to be sent up to the royal chamber, and for a bath to be drawn, hot as the hearth can offer. The servant, catching the devastation in your overall appearance and the almost drunken glaze to Steven’s eyes, bows with a speed rarely seen and disappears before the king can clarify any further.

Steven’s attention returns to you. “I do not believe we are fit for anything but to retire for the rest of the day.”

For a moment, you feel like a maiden caught in mischief, but then Steven’s eyes drop to your mouth and you remember you are not a maiden, you are a queen, his queen, and whatever want burns in your blood is not merely allowed, but expected, demanded, starved for. His. Deeply his. And you feel anchored in that surety now.

Are we in a happily ever after yet? No. But things are certainly changing.

Please reblog if you enjoyed this/enjoy this series. My blog got marked as explicit permanently by dumblr, which means that my posts no longer show up in the public tags, so people honestly won't find it unless it's gets passed along by your reblogs now. 🥺 I'm wavering on how much longer it may or may not be worth it to post here if the point is being able to share it with others.

Main Masterlist | Aspen's Ask Box | Field Guide to the Forest

Things are different in the weeks that follow the visit from your guests from the south. You sense it in the way Steven moves through the halls—with more watchfulness than before, less the heedless animal force that once hurled him at everything in reach and more the measured, circumspect tread of a man who has recognized, possibly for the first time, the possibility of losing some part of his world.

He wakes you each morning with the same relentless heat, the same demanding hands and cock, but sometimes in the small moments after—when his breath has slowed and your bodies are still tied together by what he’s poured into you—he watches you as though trying to decipher a language only you two share, and that he’s afraid to find his own words missing.

He fills his days with a new kind of purpose, stalking the battlements at dusk, making careful inventory of the armory, drilling the younger men himself, relentless and all-consuming. He is building something, you think; you are watching him fortify what he loves, even if he cannot say so aloud.

It changes things between the two of you, this awareness—a tension not of violence or even sex, but of something almost—fragile. It surfaces in the way he sometimes laces his fingers with yours, as if idly, but never breaks the hold first. Or in the way his hand will pause at your back, hovering as though it wants to support you, but cannot quite allow itself the indulgence of tenderness outright. You feel it when he watches you from across the hall during mealtimes, and in how he discusses matters of the court with you, less dismissive, more—what is it, respect?—than before.

You’d imagined, once, that the longer you stayed here, the more invisible you might become. That a queen, even one captured and bartered for as you were, would eventually be more statue than person, a vessel for tradition and dynasty, not for selfhood. But the opposite has happened. Your days are full—helping Ursa plan the planting festivals, overseeing repairs to the winter-damaged barns, learning which of Helga’s cryptic warnings to heed and which to ignore. Even the village children know you now, trailing after your skirt-hems, bringing you bits of amber and sea glass as trophies.

You do not yet know all your position will be nor what your marriage is, but it has grown in ways you did not expect.

Today the itch comes before the noon hour but you try to ignore it—try to keep occupied, try to let your hands and mind be so full of tasks that they might crowd out the throb in your thighs, the heat curling low in your belly. You visit the kitchens, where the steam and spitting fat makes you lightheaded; you walk the length of the halls. Nothing works. The ache is stubborn, eager, and it turns every thought toward Steven and the way he sometimes bends you over the windowsill, or pins you against the wall, or drags you across the floor, or—most especially, most humiliatingly—the way he simply looks at you from across the room and makes you want to drop to your knees and beg for him.

It’s the wanting that undoes you.

So you go to him.

You find Steven in the council room, hunched over a parchment at the long pine table. Two of his advisors—Lorens with his pinched mouth and restless fingers, and Samuel with his strong jaw—lean in, voices serious as the men confer. The fire is banked low, providing warmth in the chill of late winter, some light still making itself available at the end of the afternoon.

Steven glances up before the others notice you, as if summoned by the heat of your gaze. His eyes meet yours and for a fraction of a second the animal in him flares out from behind his eyes—hungry, sharp, but now tempered by something that almost looks like pride. Then his face flickers back to impassiveness, the steel mask that serves him so well.

You linger at the edge of the room, weighing whether to approach, and Steven’s head tips a fraction—an order: come here.

You cross the stone flags, your steps soft in the hush, and though both advisors shoot glances your way, neither wavers in their discourse with their king. Steven’s attention swings fully your way. “What is your need?” he asks, tone flat, but his eyes flick down your body in a way that indicates he has a suspicion.

You feel the heat rise up your neck, but you meet his gaze with steadiness. “May I have a moment alone with my husband?” you ask, glancing at the two counselors, but then back to Steven, who holds the power to determine.

Steven doesn’t bother with the pretense of courtesy or debate. “You are both dismissed,” he says, without looking away from you.

Lorens rises first, shuffling his papers together, darting you a glance that slides away as soon as it lands. Samuel lingers a moment, still watching Steven, then bows and retreats. The door closes and the hush in the room is absolute.

He shifts his weight back, squares his shoulders and leans into the chair in a way that makes you aware, acutely, of the span of his thighs and the space he commands even at rest.

You cross the distance with measured dignity, careful not to let your pace betray the heat burning in the marrow of your bones, and stand just close enough that you can feel the warmth radiating from him, like a sun behind a cloud. He is silent, letting you name your need, or your shame, whichever will come first.

Steven watches you for a long moment, eyes keenly narrowed, the muscle in his jaw tight. He says nothing.

For a moment, you don’t know where to begin. Everything seems both urgent and trivial in the presence of his attention, so you choose the truth. “There are things I want,” you say, boldness tripping up over the lump in your throat.

He lets the silence hang there, sharp as a blade, before allowing himself the faintest lift of a brow. “Then take them.” He speaks with the same ruthless clarity he brings to every command, but there’s no mockery in it. He means it, means for you to have whatever you dare to name.

You do. The table is long, but you are bold; you slide one knee onto the bench beside Steven, the movement deliberate, and then sit on his lap, straddling him there in the firelit hush.

His hands go immediately to your hips, holding you hard but not to control—just to steady you. You feel the heat of him, not just between your thighs, but burning clean through the linen of his shirt, through the wool of your own bodice. He stares up at you, face hungry.

You stare at him, daring him to make the next move. He doesn’t. His hands rest at your hips, heavy and expectant. The fire at your back, the muscle and heat of him before you—everything about Steven in this instant screams that he is ready to be the instrument of whatever you wish, but will not move first. Not on this.

“Is that an order, my king?” you ask, your voice breathier than you wish it to be.

He tilts his head, considering you with that odd, deep tenderness that you’ve begun to learn is not softness, not in the way you once recognized, but a fiercer kind of loyalty. “If you want it to be,” he says. “If you find that easier.”

You shake your head slowly, hands coming up to splay over the breadth of his chest, flattening your palms against him. Your center rocks forward, brushing over the bulge beneath his breeches, his cock hard and already straining, and your knees nearly give out at the contact.

You move your hips again, slow at first, feeling the thick heat of him grow even harder through the layers of cloth. His hands tighten at your waist, fingers digging in, but he still does not guide, does not take—just lets you rut against him, lets you chase the friction, lets you lose yourself in the animal want while the firelight flickers on his jaw and shadow.

You know what you want. You want to make him want, want to crack this composure, want to see him desperate and raw for you in the way that matches the heat that drove you here, the appetite he’s shown so consistently for you night and day. You grind down, seeking the angle that brings his cock flush against your throbbing center. Steven’s hands tighten with every pass, and his breathing grows shallow, the tips of his ears red with the effort it costs him to hold back.

You slide your hands to his face—beard rough against your palms—and force him to look at you, really look. “I want you to fuck me,” you say, and the baldness of the word makes you pulse with shame and thrill both. “Here. Now.” The echo of that word clings in the air, lurid, and the last filter between you and your want is gone.

Steven’s mouth doesn’t twitch with a smirk, but his eyes—blue, hungry and dark—crinkle at the corners in a way that says everything. His hand moves, slow as a glacier but infinitely more dangerous, sliding beneath the folds of your skirt, up the naked curve of your thigh. The callused pads of his fingers ignite a trail of prickling heat as he climbs, relentless. He finds you already slick, sodden with want, and his thumb strokes the seam of your cunt with a firm, approving press.

“Good,” he murmurs, voice soft but thick with command, “you’re already soaked for me.” There is no pretense, no veneer of gentleness—he takes pride in your need. He sinks the tip of his finger into you, just a knuckle, then deeper, testing your readiness, your greed.

He pulls out, coats his thumb in your arousal, and draws lazy, humiliating circles over your clit. Every nerve is strung to that spot, never letting you retreat from the pleasure he wrings from you. You clutch at his shoulders as the world narrows to the relentless, masterful pressure of his hand, the delicious grind of your hips against his, and the raw, unslakable need that’s driven you across half the castle to tremble on his lap like a supplicant at an altar.

He toys with you like this until you’re panting, biting your own lip to keep from sobbing with how close you are, how much you need more—him, inside you, every inch. Steven keeps you there, strung out on the edge, until you think you’ll break apart from the wanting. He waits, and he watches, the blue eyes locked on yours as if daring you to beg.

You do, in the end. “Please,” you whisper, and the word is so thin and desperate it hardly sounds like your voice, but it gets the reaction you want. He withdraws his hand entirely, leaving you gasping and empty, eager.

His voice is a rough thread as he says, “Up. Bend.”

Your legs shake as you climb off him, but you obey instantly, turning to face the table and propping yourself on your elbows, the rough grain cool beneath your cheek. You hear him behind you, the scrape of his chair across the stone as he moves to stand. The weight of his hand at your back is both warning and anchor as he flips your skirts up and over your waist and exposing your bare flesh to the chill of the council room. The air is cold, but his hands are a brand, searing every inch they touch.

He grinds up behind you, the heavy, swollen head of his cock lining up with your slick, clenching entrance, and you are so hungry that you try to wriggle back to catch him, but his other hand clamps to your hip, holding you in place.

Steven bends low, beard scratch and all, and growls into your ear, “You want to be claimed, little queen? You want to prove who you belong to?” The timber of his voice, the brutal edge of the words, makes your knees go to water. The answer is obvious. The answer is him. Always, always, always him.

You nod, but it isn’t enough for Steven. He wants words, he wants confession, he wants you to submit to this truth with clarity. “Say it,” he snarls, and the hand at your hip shifts to wrap around your throat, not hard, but with promise of force.

“I belong to you,” you say, the words the admission to usher in the next movement. You feel the hot slide of the broad head of Steven’s cock dragging slow and deliberate through your folds—soaking it in the mess he’s just made of you, teasing as though there is any possibility you would not take him instantly and whole. He rubs the slick head up and down, slow, then lingers at your entrance, not yet breaching, just savoring the helpless flex and pulse of your body trying to draw him in, refusing you the fullness you crave.

“You’re so desperate, you will let me fuck you right here on the war table,” he mutters, voice raw. The hand at your throat tightens slightly, making you shiver. “Would you let the entire kingdom see their queen bred by her king?”

You whimper, the shameful thrill of his words tightening every muscle in your core. “Yes. I would.” The fibers in your throat burn with the confession, but Steven’s hand at your nape releases just enough to let you gasp in relief. He’s proud of you—can feel it in the pulse of his cock, straining now, that he has made you need him so absolutely in this place and in this way.

Then there’s the sharp, deliberate press of his body crowding your ass, the hard and heavy heat of his cock settling between your cheeks, threatening the softest, tightest part of you. He bends down, mouth at your ear, and you feel the scrape of his beard and the thrum of his voice as he says, “Hold still.”

You do.

You pulse with anticipation, with nerves, with a need that borders on terror. Steven spits into his hand—loud, crude, and the sound goes straight to your clit—and then he smears the spit over the head of his cock, and over you, and then the push comes, blunt and inexorable, at the forbidden ring of muscle. It is too much, always, but you want it, you want the proof of his hunger, the rawness of being taken where only he has ever claimed.

The stretch is a fire in your bones. You dig your fingers into the edge of the table, desperate to ground yourself as Steven pushes past every last shred of resistance. It is agony and rapture, the full width of him splitting you, and for a moment you go blind, dizzy from the stretch and the heat and the sheer, obscene fullness of him forcing its way inside you.

He doesn’t take you all at once. He works you open, withdrawing and then pressing back in, a little deeper with every rut until you shake beneath him, gasping for air, sobbing around the thickness of him. Sweat beads along your spine, and you are aware only of the way the rough grain of the table digs into your cheek and the way his voice is a rasp of praise washing over you as he speaks.

“You take it,” he says, a kind of awe in the echoing hollowness of the council chamber. “You take me so well, little wife.”

Once fully sheathed, he holds you there, impaled, the hand on your neck now a bracing anchor, his hips flush to your ass. His other hand splays over your lower back, holding you steady and open, thumbs digging in just above the curve of your hips. You feel the tremble in his thighs, the fight he wages to keep from just rutting you through the table; you feel, too, the seething pride in how willing—how eager—you are to take whatever he gives, no matter how intense.

Slowly, Steven withdraws, the drag of his cock raw against the tight, trembling ring. He spits another mouthful into his palm, adds more lube to your now-aching hole, and sets a rhythm that is measured, deliberate. The sound of it—his hips meeting your flesh, the wet suction, the low, rough praise in his voice—is a percussion that underlines every brutal stroke. You crave the violence of it, the way he fucks you open with single-minded focus, and still, still, you want more.

“Steven,” you gasp, not knowing what you’re begging for, only that you want every inch, every ounce of him, even in the places that ache and pulse and maybe cannot take more. He answers with a groan, a hand moving from your hip to your clit, grinding over the little bundle of nerves with all the wicked skill he’s refined over months of your fucking.

The overwhelming friction, the fullness, the throb—is unbearable, and you come, hard, so hard it borders on violence. Your body clamps around him, the spasm nearly paralyzing you as your limbs weaken, every muscle in your core pulsing and throbbing around the invasive, overwhelming width of your king. The edges of your vision blur and the sound you make is animal, wordless, but Steven answers, driving you through the crest of your climax, sinking into you with a force that obliterates all thought.

He fucks you through it, relentless and victorious, hands huge and hard at your hips, jerking you back to claim every last inch until you’re sobbing with how full, how impossibly stuffed you are. Each thrust pushes you flat to the table, and you are only vaguely aware of the smears of spit and slick and sweat pooling at the join of your bodies, the way it soaks through your thighs, leaving you wrecked and open for him.

He’s not finished with you, not by a long shot. Steven’s cock withdraws from your ass with a slow, wrenching drag, leaving you shuddering and empty, all your muscles fluttering and your face hot against the cold grain of the table. You sob, a little, at the loss, and you can feel the slick mess of your own juices and his spit running down your thighs, the burn at your rim pulsing in time with your heartbeat.

But then his hands are gentler—one at your hip, one braced at your shoulder as he lines himself up again, this time pressing the heavy, hot tip of his cock between your thighs, seeking the place you are already swollen and desperate for him. You whimper, still spent and oversensitive from your first climax, but even so, you arch your hips, eager for the fullness only he gives.

He slides in, not slow but not cruel, just driving every inch into your aching, greedy cunt. You keen, desperate, not even caring that your voice is a needy, broken thing in the echoing hush of the council chamber.

Steven’s mouth finds your ear, “Every man at court, every lord, every advisor—every last one knows you are mine, but I want it ringing in their ears forever as I breed you.”

With every stroke, Steven’s cock brushes the most sensitive part inside you, your battered and wet cunt spasming around him, milking him for all he can give. You feel every vein, every ridge, every pulse of his cock as it spears you open, and it’s so much, so good, you come again, harder this time, a rush that’s almost terror but made only of pleasure, pure and shattering.

Your cunt pulses around him, hungry and slick, wringing him, wringing you, until there is nothing left in your head but the need to come again—and the way Steven makes you do it, every time, with just a fuck and a promise and the weight of his whole body pressing you down. You arch your back, desperate to take him deeper, and the hand at your shoulder pins you flat to the table, holding you still as he braces and thrusts, making you quiver and moan, making you mindless for him.

The pace now is punishing, but you crave it. Each time your hips threaten to buck off the wood he keeps you pinned down, rutting into you as if you’re a thing made only for his taking. The itch in your belly blooms to wildfire, sharp and wild, and the overstimulation is edged with a pleasure so beautiful you could scream for it, could cry for the way it rips you open and fills in every last corner of your wanting, and so you do.

He fucks you through the aftershocks, fucking every last spasm of pleasure from your body, fucking you until you’re hoarse and sobbing and barely conscious with the white-hot pleasure and the raw bruise of being so completely, so thoroughly used. You know you will wear the marks of this for days—on your throat, on your hips, at the tight, spent holes still drooling spit and slick and sweat down your thighs.

Steven comes at last with a roar, hips slamming into you so hard the edge of the table cuts the breath from your lungs, and the twitch and pulse of his cock fills you, flooding you in one final, conquering pulse. The heat of him, the quantity of him, is unspeakable—you feel it sear a path to your womb, a brutal, claiming flood that fills you so full the excess is forced out around his cock, further slicking your thighs, sticking your skin to the wood.

The hand at your nape strokes the ridge of your spine, his breath crashing against your back, and you realize he is fighting himself, struggling to corral the violent tenderness now threatening to shatter him from the inside out.

For a long while, neither of you move. The only sound is the ragged thrum of your breaths and the wild, feral stammer of his heart as it tries to slow. Your legs are boneless, splayed wide, and he keeps you pressed to the table, still impaled, as if even a breath’s space could risk losing what he’s just staked his soul on.

Finally, Steven eases back, hands gentle as he scoops you from the table—your limbs limp, trembling, useless in the aftermath—and cradles your whole body against his chest. He gathers your legs up as he moves back and reclaims his earlier seat, settling you in his lap, bundled and shattered against the heat of his skin. He strokes your hair, your back, mauling you close as if afraid you might dissolve into the air if not caged to him. His cock softens inside you, but he cannot let you go, not yet; he just clutches you tighter, your spent body rocked gently soothed, a motion at odds with the violence of minutes before.

When you can finally catch your breath, you turn slightly more into him and you press your cheek to the hollow of his throat. You listen to the tide of his pulse, the desperate hunt of his lungs for air. Somewhere outside, the world carries on—voices, firewood splitting, kids shrieking down the corridor—but here, in this carved-out moment, you are the only two who exist.

Steven is the one to speak first, rough and low in your ear. “I want—” He breaks off, his voice rough and strangely weak, so unlike the man who just ruined you over a council table you hardly know how to answer it. The man who has ruined you so many times. You lift your head to meet his gaze. The fires in his eyes are guttering now, but not cold—they burn with a different fuel, something almost like desperation.

“I want you to want it,” he says, the words torn from some engine deeper than pride, deeper than need. “Not just because I am your king. Not because it is owed. I want it because you choose it.”

The statement lands in the hollow between your ribs like a fist. You don’t know how to answer except to touch your lips to his, gentle, a whisper of a kiss where violent need reigned just minutes before. You press your mouth to the corner of his, then to the sharp line of his jaw, then the hollow beneath. “I do,” you say, and it’s a word so small it could barely crack a window in the cold stone of the Kongsgård, but you see the effect it has. His grip on you shifts, softer now, and he lets his forehead fall to yours, breaking into a long, shaky exhale. In this way you know that you have power, too—a different kind than you ever imagined, but no less absolute.

You stay like this, bodies twined, until the fire in the hearth burns low and the sweat on your skin cools to a chill. Every inch of you aches in the most delicious, dangerous ways. Your cunt is tender, the ring of your ass still pulsing with the memory of how he split you open and left you gaping. You ought to feel shame, but all you feel is a molten pride that you can take everything Steven gives and still want more.

You let him hold you until your breathing matches his, until your own hands find the strength to fist in the linen at his collar. His sweat cools in the hollow between your bodies, and you let your head rest heavy against his chest, the salt of his skin mixing with your own. Neither of you moves for a long while. When you finally slide off his lap, legs watery as river clay, Steven follows you, only a half-step behind, as if the gravity between your bodies is too constant to fully break.

You should return to your duties. Somewhere you are most certainly needed. But when Steven cups your chin and tilts your face up, his thumb grazing the corner of your mouth, every reason to leave the room vanishes. His lips devour you, slow and thorough, as if he wants to memorize this, encode it in every cell, until no part of you is untouched by the taste of this moment.

You break apart only when the need for air forces you to, but the hunger in it lingers. His hand cups the nape of your neck, thumb stroking slow over the vein that jumps there, and he rests his forehead to yours like a man newly landed from a voyage half the world wide. “You have unmade me,” he says, and it is a confession, not a complaint.

You laugh, shaky and soft, pressing your nose to his. “You did all the unmaking yourself.” The words are true, and you let them settle between you. He grins, the wolfish flash of his teeth just visible, and with it the tension diffuses, neither of you quite knowing what to do with so much tenderness made raw.

You gather yourself, smoothing your wrinkled skirt down over sticky thighs, but Steven is not finished. He crosses to the door, and opens it to speak with the attendant there. He instructs that a meal to be sent up to the royal chamber, and for a bath to be drawn, hot as the hearth can offer. The servant, catching the devastation in your overall appearance and the almost drunken glaze to Steven’s eyes, bows with a speed rarely seen and disappears before the king can clarify any further.

Steven’s attention returns to you. “I do not believe we are fit for anything but to retire for the rest of the day.”

For a moment, you feel like a maiden caught in mischief, but then Steven’s eyes drop to your mouth and you remember you are not a maiden, you are a queen, his queen, and whatever want burns in your blood is not merely allowed, but expected, demanded, starved for. His. Deeply his. And you feel anchored in that surety now.

Are we in a happily ever after yet? No. But things are certainly changing.

Please reblog if you enjoyed this/enjoy this series. My blog got marked as explicit permanently by dumblr, which means that my posts no longer show up in the public tags, so people honestly won't find it unless it's gets passed along by your reblogs now. 🥺 I'm wavering on how much longer it may or may not be worth it to post here if the point is being able to share it with others.

Main Masterlist | Aspen's Ask Box | Field Guide to the Forest

His eyes meet yours and for a fraction of a second the animal in him flares out from behind his eyes—hungry, sharp, but now tempered by something that almost looks like pride.

SWOONING AND FLUTTERING! And also:

“You have unmade me,” he says, and it is a confession, not a complaint.

DREAMY SIGH ON STEROIDS

God, I love them. This feels like such a good place for them 🥹 All the feels and desire running deeper and more 🥰

But also the filth. HOT DAYUM. I’d let him conquer all my holes too 🫠

Things are different in the weeks that follow the visit from your guests from the south. You sense it in the way Steven moves through the halls—with more watchfulness than before, less the heedless animal force that once hurled him at everything in reach and more the measured, circumspect tread of a man who has recognized, possibly for the first time, the possibility of losing some part of his world.

He wakes you each morning with the same relentless heat, the same demanding hands and cock, but sometimes in the small moments after—when his breath has slowed and your bodies are still tied together by what he’s poured into you—he watches you as though trying to decipher a language only you two share, and that he’s afraid to find his own words missing.

He fills his days with a new kind of purpose, stalking the battlements at dusk, making careful inventory of the armory, drilling the younger men himself, relentless and all-consuming. He is building something, you think; you are watching him fortify what he loves, even if he cannot say so aloud.

It changes things between the two of you, this awareness—a tension not of violence or even sex, but of something almost—fragile. It surfaces in the way he sometimes laces his fingers with yours, as if idly, but never breaks the hold first. Or in the way his hand will pause at your back, hovering as though it wants to support you, but cannot quite allow itself the indulgence of tenderness outright. You feel it when he watches you from across the hall during mealtimes, and in how he discusses matters of the court with you, less dismissive, more—what is it, respect?—than before.

You’d imagined, once, that the longer you stayed here, the more invisible you might become. That a queen, even one captured and bartered for as you were, would eventually be more statue than person, a vessel for tradition and dynasty, not for selfhood. But the opposite has happened. Your days are full—helping Ursa plan the planting festivals, overseeing repairs to the winter-damaged barns, learning which of Helga’s cryptic warnings to heed and which to ignore. Even the village children know you now, trailing after your skirt-hems, bringing you bits of amber and sea glass as trophies.

You do not yet know all your position will be nor what your marriage is, but it has grown in ways you did not expect.

Today the itch comes before the noon hour but you try to ignore it—try to keep occupied, try to let your hands and mind be so full of tasks that they might crowd out the throb in your thighs, the heat curling low in your belly. You visit the kitchens, where the steam and spitting fat makes you lightheaded; you walk the length of the halls. Nothing works. The ache is stubborn, eager, and it turns every thought toward Steven and the way he sometimes bends you over the windowsill, or pins you against the wall, or drags you across the floor, or—most especially, most humiliatingly—the way he simply looks at you from across the room and makes you want to drop to your knees and beg for him.

It’s the wanting that undoes you.

So you go to him.

You find Steven in the council room, hunched over a parchment at the long pine table. Two of his advisors—Lorens with his pinched mouth and restless fingers, and Samuel with his strong jaw—lean in, voices serious as the men confer. The fire is banked low, providing warmth in the chill of late winter, some light still making itself available at the end of the afternoon.

Steven glances up before the others notice you, as if summoned by the heat of your gaze. His eyes meet yours and for a fraction of a second the animal in him flares out from behind his eyes—hungry, sharp, but now tempered by something that almost looks like pride. Then his face flickers back to impassiveness, the steel mask that serves him so well.

You linger at the edge of the room, weighing whether to approach, and Steven’s head tips a fraction—an order: come here.

You cross the stone flags, your steps soft in the hush, and though both advisors shoot glances your way, neither wavers in their discourse with their king. Steven’s attention swings fully your way. “What is your need?” he asks, tone flat, but his eyes flick down your body in a way that indicates he has a suspicion.

You feel the heat rise up your neck, but you meet his gaze with steadiness. “May I have a moment alone with my husband?” you ask, glancing at the two counselors, but then back to Steven, who holds the power to determine.

Steven doesn’t bother with the pretense of courtesy or debate. “You are both dismissed,” he says, without looking away from you.

Lorens rises first, shuffling his papers together, darting you a glance that slides away as soon as it lands. Samuel lingers a moment, still watching Steven, then bows and retreats. The door closes and the hush in the room is absolute.

He shifts his weight back, squares his shoulders and leans into the chair in a way that makes you aware, acutely, of the span of his thighs and the space he commands even at rest.

You cross the distance with measured dignity, careful not to let your pace betray the heat burning in the marrow of your bones, and stand just close enough that you can feel the warmth radiating from him, like a sun behind a cloud. He is silent, letting you name your need, or your shame, whichever will come first.

Steven watches you for a long moment, eyes keenly narrowed, the muscle in his jaw tight. He says nothing.

For a moment, you don’t know where to begin. Everything seems both urgent and trivial in the presence of his attention, so you choose the truth. “There are things I want,” you say, boldness tripping up over the lump in your throat.

He lets the silence hang there, sharp as a blade, before allowing himself the faintest lift of a brow. “Then take them.” He speaks with the same ruthless clarity he brings to every command, but there’s no mockery in it. He means it, means for you to have whatever you dare to name.

You do. The table is long, but you are bold; you slide one knee onto the bench beside Steven, the movement deliberate, and then sit on his lap, straddling him there in the firelit hush.

His hands go immediately to your hips, holding you hard but not to control—just to steady you. You feel the heat of him, not just between your thighs, but burning clean through the linen of his shirt, through the wool of your own bodice. He stares up at you, face hungry.

You stare at him, daring him to make the next move. He doesn’t. His hands rest at your hips, heavy and expectant. The fire at your back, the muscle and heat of him before you—everything about Steven in this instant screams that he is ready to be the instrument of whatever you wish, but will not move first. Not on this.

“Is that an order, my king?” you ask, your voice breathier than you wish it to be.

He tilts his head, considering you with that odd, deep tenderness that you’ve begun to learn is not softness, not in the way you once recognized, but a fiercer kind of loyalty. “If you want it to be,” he says. “If you find that easier.”

You shake your head slowly, hands coming up to splay over the breadth of his chest, flattening your palms against him. Your center rocks forward, brushing over the bulge beneath his breeches, his cock hard and already straining, and your knees nearly give out at the contact.

You move your hips again, slow at first, feeling the thick heat of him grow even harder through the layers of cloth. His hands tighten at your waist, fingers digging in, but he still does not guide, does not take—just lets you rut against him, lets you chase the friction, lets you lose yourself in the animal want while the firelight flickers on his jaw and shadow.

You know what you want. You want to make him want, want to crack this composure, want to see him desperate and raw for you in the way that matches the heat that drove you here, the appetite he’s shown so consistently for you night and day. You grind down, seeking the angle that brings his cock flush against your throbbing center. Steven’s hands tighten with every pass, and his breathing grows shallow, the tips of his ears red with the effort it costs him to hold back.

You slide your hands to his face—beard rough against your palms—and force him to look at you, really look. “I want you to fuck me,” you say, and the baldness of the word makes you pulse with shame and thrill both. “Here. Now.” The echo of that word clings in the air, lurid, and the last filter between you and your want is gone.

Steven’s mouth doesn’t twitch with a smirk, but his eyes—blue, hungry and dark—crinkle at the corners in a way that says everything. His hand moves, slow as a glacier but infinitely more dangerous, sliding beneath the folds of your skirt, up the naked curve of your thigh. The callused pads of his fingers ignite a trail of prickling heat as he climbs, relentless. He finds you already slick, sodden with want, and his thumb strokes the seam of your cunt with a firm, approving press.

“Good,” he murmurs, voice soft but thick with command, “you’re already soaked for me.” There is no pretense, no veneer of gentleness—he takes pride in your need. He sinks the tip of his finger into you, just a knuckle, then deeper, testing your readiness, your greed.

He pulls out, coats his thumb in your arousal, and draws lazy, humiliating circles over your clit. Every nerve is strung to that spot, never letting you retreat from the pleasure he wrings from you. You clutch at his shoulders as the world narrows to the relentless, masterful pressure of his hand, the delicious grind of your hips against his, and the raw, unslakable need that’s driven you across half the castle to tremble on his lap like a supplicant at an altar.

He toys with you like this until you’re panting, biting your own lip to keep from sobbing with how close you are, how much you need more—him, inside you, every inch. Steven keeps you there, strung out on the edge, until you think you’ll break apart from the wanting. He waits, and he watches, the blue eyes locked on yours as if daring you to beg.

You do, in the end. “Please,” you whisper, and the word is so thin and desperate it hardly sounds like your voice, but it gets the reaction you want. He withdraws his hand entirely, leaving you gasping and empty, eager.

His voice is a rough thread as he says, “Up. Bend.”

Your legs shake as you climb off him, but you obey instantly, turning to face the table and propping yourself on your elbows, the rough grain cool beneath your cheek. You hear him behind you, the scrape of his chair across the stone as he moves to stand. The weight of his hand at your back is both warning and anchor as he flips your skirts up and over your waist and exposing your bare flesh to the chill of the council room. The air is cold, but his hands are a brand, searing every inch they touch.

He grinds up behind you, the heavy, swollen head of his cock lining up with your slick, clenching entrance, and you are so hungry that you try to wriggle back to catch him, but his other hand clamps to your hip, holding you in place.

Steven bends low, beard scratch and all, and growls into your ear, “You want to be claimed, little queen? You want to prove who you belong to?” The timber of his voice, the brutal edge of the words, makes your knees go to water. The answer is obvious. The answer is him. Always, always, always him.

You nod, but it isn’t enough for Steven. He wants words, he wants confession, he wants you to submit to this truth with clarity. “Say it,” he snarls, and the hand at your hip shifts to wrap around your throat, not hard, but with promise of force.

“I belong to you,” you say, the words the admission to usher in the next movement. You feel the hot slide of the broad head of Steven’s cock dragging slow and deliberate through your folds—soaking it in the mess he’s just made of you, teasing as though there is any possibility you would not take him instantly and whole. He rubs the slick head up and down, slow, then lingers at your entrance, not yet breaching, just savoring the helpless flex and pulse of your body trying to draw him in, refusing you the fullness you crave.

“You’re so desperate, you will let me fuck you right here on the war table,” he mutters, voice raw. The hand at your throat tightens slightly, making you shiver. “Would you let the entire kingdom see their queen bred by her king?”

You whimper, the shameful thrill of his words tightening every muscle in your core. “Yes. I would.” The fibers in your throat burn with the confession, but Steven’s hand at your nape releases just enough to let you gasp in relief. He’s proud of you—can feel it in the pulse of his cock, straining now, that he has made you need him so absolutely in this place and in this way.

Then there’s the sharp, deliberate press of his body crowding your ass, the hard and heavy heat of his cock settling between your cheeks, threatening the softest, tightest part of you. He bends down, mouth at your ear, and you feel the scrape of his beard and the thrum of his voice as he says, “Hold still.”

You do.

You pulse with anticipation, with nerves, with a need that borders on terror. Steven spits into his hand—loud, crude, and the sound goes straight to your clit—and then he smears the spit over the head of his cock, and over you, and then the push comes, blunt and inexorable, at the forbidden ring of muscle. It is too much, always, but you want it, you want the proof of his hunger, the rawness of being taken where only he has ever claimed.

The stretch is a fire in your bones. You dig your fingers into the edge of the table, desperate to ground yourself as Steven pushes past every last shred of resistance. It is agony and rapture, the full width of him splitting you, and for a moment you go blind, dizzy from the stretch and the heat and the sheer, obscene fullness of him forcing its way inside you.

He doesn’t take you all at once. He works you open, withdrawing and then pressing back in, a little deeper with every rut until you shake beneath him, gasping for air, sobbing around the thickness of him. Sweat beads along your spine, and you are aware only of the way the rough grain of the table digs into your cheek and the way his voice is a rasp of praise washing over you as he speaks.

“You take it,” he says, a kind of awe in the echoing hollowness of the council chamber. “You take me so well, little wife.”

Once fully sheathed, he holds you there, impaled, the hand on your neck now a bracing anchor, his hips flush to your ass. His other hand splays over your lower back, holding you steady and open, thumbs digging in just above the curve of your hips. You feel the tremble in his thighs, the fight he wages to keep from just rutting you through the table; you feel, too, the seething pride in how willing—how eager—you are to take whatever he gives, no matter how intense.

Slowly, Steven withdraws, the drag of his cock raw against the tight, trembling ring. He spits another mouthful into his palm, adds more lube to your now-aching hole, and sets a rhythm that is measured, deliberate. The sound of it—his hips meeting your flesh, the wet suction, the low, rough praise in his voice—is a percussion that underlines every brutal stroke. You crave the violence of it, the way he fucks you open with single-minded focus, and still, still, you want more.

“Steven,” you gasp, not knowing what you’re begging for, only that you want every inch, every ounce of him, even in the places that ache and pulse and maybe cannot take more. He answers with a groan, a hand moving from your hip to your clit, grinding over the little bundle of nerves with all the wicked skill he’s refined over months of your fucking.

The overwhelming friction, the fullness, the throb—is unbearable, and you come, hard, so hard it borders on violence. Your body clamps around him, the spasm nearly paralyzing you as your limbs weaken, every muscle in your core pulsing and throbbing around the invasive, overwhelming width of your king. The edges of your vision blur and the sound you make is animal, wordless, but Steven answers, driving you through the crest of your climax, sinking into you with a force that obliterates all thought.

He fucks you through it, relentless and victorious, hands huge and hard at your hips, jerking you back to claim every last inch until you’re sobbing with how full, how impossibly stuffed you are. Each thrust pushes you flat to the table, and you are only vaguely aware of the smears of spit and slick and sweat pooling at the join of your bodies, the way it soaks through your thighs, leaving you wrecked and open for him.

He’s not finished with you, not by a long shot. Steven’s cock withdraws from your ass with a slow, wrenching drag, leaving you shuddering and empty, all your muscles fluttering and your face hot against the cold grain of the table. You sob, a little, at the loss, and you can feel the slick mess of your own juices and his spit running down your thighs, the burn at your rim pulsing in time with your heartbeat.

But then his hands are gentler—one at your hip, one braced at your shoulder as he lines himself up again, this time pressing the heavy, hot tip of his cock between your thighs, seeking the place you are already swollen and desperate for him. You whimper, still spent and oversensitive from your first climax, but even so, you arch your hips, eager for the fullness only he gives.

He slides in, not slow but not cruel, just driving every inch into your aching, greedy cunt. You keen, desperate, not even caring that your voice is a needy, broken thing in the echoing hush of the council chamber.

Steven’s mouth finds your ear, “Every man at court, every lord, every advisor—every last one knows you are mine, but I want it ringing in their ears forever as I breed you.”

With every stroke, Steven’s cock brushes the most sensitive part inside you, your battered and wet cunt spasming around him, milking him for all he can give. You feel every vein, every ridge, every pulse of his cock as it spears you open, and it’s so much, so good, you come again, harder this time, a rush that’s almost terror but made only of pleasure, pure and shattering.

Your cunt pulses around him, hungry and slick, wringing him, wringing you, until there is nothing left in your head but the need to come again—and the way Steven makes you do it, every time, with just a fuck and a promise and the weight of his whole body pressing you down. You arch your back, desperate to take him deeper, and the hand at your shoulder pins you flat to the table, holding you still as he braces and thrusts, making you quiver and moan, making you mindless for him.

The pace now is punishing, but you crave it. Each time your hips threaten to buck off the wood he keeps you pinned down, rutting into you as if you’re a thing made only for his taking. The itch in your belly blooms to wildfire, sharp and wild, and the overstimulation is edged with a pleasure so beautiful you could scream for it, could cry for the way it rips you open and fills in every last corner of your wanting, and so you do.

He fucks you through the aftershocks, fucking every last spasm of pleasure from your body, fucking you until you’re hoarse and sobbing and barely conscious with the white-hot pleasure and the raw bruise of being so completely, so thoroughly used. You know you will wear the marks of this for days—on your throat, on your hips, at the tight, spent holes still drooling spit and slick and sweat down your thighs.

Steven comes at last with a roar, hips slamming into you so hard the edge of the table cuts the breath from your lungs, and the twitch and pulse of his cock fills you, flooding you in one final, conquering pulse. The heat of him, the quantity of him, is unspeakable—you feel it sear a path to your womb, a brutal, claiming flood that fills you so full the excess is forced out around his cock, further slicking your thighs, sticking your skin to the wood.

The hand at your nape strokes the ridge of your spine, his breath crashing against your back, and you realize he is fighting himself, struggling to corral the violent tenderness now threatening to shatter him from the inside out.

For a long while, neither of you move. The only sound is the ragged thrum of your breaths and the wild, feral stammer of his heart as it tries to slow. Your legs are boneless, splayed wide, and he keeps you pressed to the table, still impaled, as if even a breath’s space could risk losing what he’s just staked his soul on.

Finally, Steven eases back, hands gentle as he scoops you from the table—your limbs limp, trembling, useless in the aftermath—and cradles your whole body against his chest. He gathers your legs up as he moves back and reclaims his earlier seat, settling you in his lap, bundled and shattered against the heat of his skin. He strokes your hair, your back, mauling you close as if afraid you might dissolve into the air if not caged to him. His cock softens inside you, but he cannot let you go, not yet; he just clutches you tighter, your spent body rocked gently soothed, a motion at odds with the violence of minutes before.

When you can finally catch your breath, you turn slightly more into him and you press your cheek to the hollow of his throat. You listen to the tide of his pulse, the desperate hunt of his lungs for air. Somewhere outside, the world carries on—voices, firewood splitting, kids shrieking down the corridor—but here, in this carved-out moment, you are the only two who exist.

Steven is the one to speak first, rough and low in your ear. “I want—” He breaks off, his voice rough and strangely weak, so unlike the man who just ruined you over a council table you hardly know how to answer it. The man who has ruined you so many times. You lift your head to meet his gaze. The fires in his eyes are guttering now, but not cold—they burn with a different fuel, something almost like desperation.

“I want you to want it,” he says, the words torn from some engine deeper than pride, deeper than need. “Not just because I am your king. Not because it is owed. I want it because you choose it.”

The statement lands in the hollow between your ribs like a fist. You don’t know how to answer except to touch your lips to his, gentle, a whisper of a kiss where violent need reigned just minutes before. You press your mouth to the corner of his, then to the sharp line of his jaw, then the hollow beneath. “I do,” you say, and it’s a word so small it could barely crack a window in the cold stone of the Kongsgård, but you see the effect it has. His grip on you shifts, softer now, and he lets his forehead fall to yours, breaking into a long, shaky exhale. In this way you know that you have power, too—a different kind than you ever imagined, but no less absolute.

You stay like this, bodies twined, until the fire in the hearth burns low and the sweat on your skin cools to a chill. Every inch of you aches in the most delicious, dangerous ways. Your cunt is tender, the ring of your ass still pulsing with the memory of how he split you open and left you gaping. You ought to feel shame, but all you feel is a molten pride that you can take everything Steven gives and still want more.

You let him hold you until your breathing matches his, until your own hands find the strength to fist in the linen at his collar. His sweat cools in the hollow between your bodies, and you let your head rest heavy against his chest, the salt of his skin mixing with your own. Neither of you moves for a long while. When you finally slide off his lap, legs watery as river clay, Steven follows you, only a half-step behind, as if the gravity between your bodies is too constant to fully break.

You should return to your duties. Somewhere you are most certainly needed. But when Steven cups your chin and tilts your face up, his thumb grazing the corner of your mouth, every reason to leave the room vanishes. His lips devour you, slow and thorough, as if he wants to memorize this, encode it in every cell, until no part of you is untouched by the taste of this moment.

You break apart only when the need for air forces you to, but the hunger in it lingers. His hand cups the nape of your neck, thumb stroking slow over the vein that jumps there, and he rests his forehead to yours like a man newly landed from a voyage half the world wide. “You have unmade me,” he says, and it is a confession, not a complaint.

You laugh, shaky and soft, pressing your nose to his. “You did all the unmaking yourself.” The words are true, and you let them settle between you. He grins, the wolfish flash of his teeth just visible, and with it the tension diffuses, neither of you quite knowing what to do with so much tenderness made raw.

You gather yourself, smoothing your wrinkled skirt down over sticky thighs, but Steven is not finished. He crosses to the door, and opens it to speak with the attendant there. He instructs that a meal to be sent up to the royal chamber, and for a bath to be drawn, hot as the hearth can offer. The servant, catching the devastation in your overall appearance and the almost drunken glaze to Steven’s eyes, bows with a speed rarely seen and disappears before the king can clarify any further.

Steven’s attention returns to you. “I do not believe we are fit for anything but to retire for the rest of the day.”

For a moment, you feel like a maiden caught in mischief, but then Steven’s eyes drop to your mouth and you remember you are not a maiden, you are a queen, his queen, and whatever want burns in your blood is not merely allowed, but expected, demanded, starved for. His. Deeply his. And you feel anchored in that surety now.

Are we in a happily ever after yet? No. But things are certainly changing.

Please reblog if you enjoyed this/enjoy this series. My blog got marked as explicit permanently by dumblr, which means that my posts no longer show up in the public tags, so people honestly won't find it unless it's gets passed along by your reblogs now. 🥺 I'm wavering on how much longer it may or may not be worth it to post here if the point is being able to share it with others.

Main Masterlist | Aspen's Ask Box | Field Guide to the Forest

Things are different in the weeks that follow the visit from your guests from the south. You sense it in the way Steven moves through the halls—with more watchfulness than before, less the heedless animal force that once hurled him at everything in reach and more the measured, circumspect tread of a man who has recognized, possibly for the first time, the possibility of losing some part of his world.

He wakes you each morning with the same relentless heat, the same demanding hands and cock, but sometimes in the small moments after—when his breath has slowed and your bodies are still tied together by what he’s poured into you—he watches you as though trying to decipher a language only you two share, and that he’s afraid to find his own words missing.

He fills his days with a new kind of purpose, stalking the battlements at dusk, making careful inventory of the armory, drilling the younger men himself, relentless and all-consuming. He is building something, you think; you are watching him fortify what he loves, even if he cannot say so aloud.

It changes things between the two of you, this awareness—a tension not of violence or even sex, but of something almost—fragile. It surfaces in the way he sometimes laces his fingers with yours, as if idly, but never breaks the hold first. Or in the way his hand will pause at your back, hovering as though it wants to support you, but cannot quite allow itself the indulgence of tenderness outright. You feel it when he watches you from across the hall during mealtimes, and in how he discusses matters of the court with you, less dismissive, more—what is it, respect?—than before.

You’d imagined, once, that the longer you stayed here, the more invisible you might become. That a queen, even one captured and bartered for as you were, would eventually be more statue than person, a vessel for tradition and dynasty, not for selfhood. But the opposite has happened. Your days are full—helping Ursa plan the planting festivals, overseeing repairs to the winter-damaged barns, learning which of Helga’s cryptic warnings to heed and which to ignore. Even the village children know you now, trailing after your skirt-hems, bringing you bits of amber and sea glass as trophies.

You do not yet know all your position will be nor what your marriage is, but it has grown in ways you did not expect.

Today the itch comes before the noon hour but you try to ignore it—try to keep occupied, try to let your hands and mind be so full of tasks that they might crowd out the throb in your thighs, the heat curling low in your belly. You visit the kitchens, where the steam and spitting fat makes you lightheaded; you walk the length of the halls. Nothing works. The ache is stubborn, eager, and it turns every thought toward Steven and the way he sometimes bends you over the windowsill, or pins you against the wall, or drags you across the floor, or—most especially, most humiliatingly—the way he simply looks at you from across the room and makes you want to drop to your knees and beg for him.

It’s the wanting that undoes you.

So you go to him.

You find Steven in the council room, hunched over a parchment at the long pine table. Two of his advisors—Lorens with his pinched mouth and restless fingers, and Samuel with his strong jaw—lean in, voices serious as the men confer. The fire is banked low, providing warmth in the chill of late winter, some light still making itself available at the end of the afternoon.

Steven glances up before the others notice you, as if summoned by the heat of your gaze. His eyes meet yours and for a fraction of a second the animal in him flares out from behind his eyes—hungry, sharp, but now tempered by something that almost looks like pride. Then his face flickers back to impassiveness, the steel mask that serves him so well.

You linger at the edge of the room, weighing whether to approach, and Steven’s head tips a fraction—an order: come here.

You cross the stone flags, your steps soft in the hush, and though both advisors shoot glances your way, neither wavers in their discourse with their king. Steven’s attention swings fully your way. “What is your need?” he asks, tone flat, but his eyes flick down your body in a way that indicates he has a suspicion.

You feel the heat rise up your neck, but you meet his gaze with steadiness. “May I have a moment alone with my husband?” you ask, glancing at the two counselors, but then back to Steven, who holds the power to determine.

Steven doesn’t bother with the pretense of courtesy or debate. “You are both dismissed,” he says, without looking away from you.

Lorens rises first, shuffling his papers together, darting you a glance that slides away as soon as it lands. Samuel lingers a moment, still watching Steven, then bows and retreats. The door closes and the hush in the room is absolute.

He shifts his weight back, squares his shoulders and leans into the chair in a way that makes you aware, acutely, of the span of his thighs and the space he commands even at rest.

You cross the distance with measured dignity, careful not to let your pace betray the heat burning in the marrow of your bones, and stand just close enough that you can feel the warmth radiating from him, like a sun behind a cloud. He is silent, letting you name your need, or your shame, whichever will come first.

Steven watches you for a long moment, eyes keenly narrowed, the muscle in his jaw tight. He says nothing.

For a moment, you don’t know where to begin. Everything seems both urgent and trivial in the presence of his attention, so you choose the truth. “There are things I want,” you say, boldness tripping up over the lump in your throat.

He lets the silence hang there, sharp as a blade, before allowing himself the faintest lift of a brow. “Then take them.” He speaks with the same ruthless clarity he brings to every command, but there’s no mockery in it. He means it, means for you to have whatever you dare to name.

You do. The table is long, but you are bold; you slide one knee onto the bench beside Steven, the movement deliberate, and then sit on his lap, straddling him there in the firelit hush.

His hands go immediately to your hips, holding you hard but not to control—just to steady you. You feel the heat of him, not just between your thighs, but burning clean through the linen of his shirt, through the wool of your own bodice. He stares up at you, face hungry.

You stare at him, daring him to make the next move. He doesn’t. His hands rest at your hips, heavy and expectant. The fire at your back, the muscle and heat of him before you—everything about Steven in this instant screams that he is ready to be the instrument of whatever you wish, but will not move first. Not on this.

“Is that an order, my king?” you ask, your voice breathier than you wish it to be.

He tilts his head, considering you with that odd, deep tenderness that you’ve begun to learn is not softness, not in the way you once recognized, but a fiercer kind of loyalty. “If you want it to be,” he says. “If you find that easier.”

You shake your head slowly, hands coming up to splay over the breadth of his chest, flattening your palms against him. Your center rocks forward, brushing over the bulge beneath his breeches, his cock hard and already straining, and your knees nearly give out at the contact.

You move your hips again, slow at first, feeling the thick heat of him grow even harder through the layers of cloth. His hands tighten at your waist, fingers digging in, but he still does not guide, does not take—just lets you rut against him, lets you chase the friction, lets you lose yourself in the animal want while the firelight flickers on his jaw and shadow.

You know what you want. You want to make him want, want to crack this composure, want to see him desperate and raw for you in the way that matches the heat that drove you here, the appetite he’s shown so consistently for you night and day. You grind down, seeking the angle that brings his cock flush against your throbbing center. Steven’s hands tighten with every pass, and his breathing grows shallow, the tips of his ears red with the effort it costs him to hold back.

You slide your hands to his face—beard rough against your palms—and force him to look at you, really look. “I want you to fuck me,” you say, and the baldness of the word makes you pulse with shame and thrill both. “Here. Now.” The echo of that word clings in the air, lurid, and the last filter between you and your want is gone.

Steven’s mouth doesn’t twitch with a smirk, but his eyes—blue, hungry and dark—crinkle at the corners in a way that says everything. His hand moves, slow as a glacier but infinitely more dangerous, sliding beneath the folds of your skirt, up the naked curve of your thigh. The callused pads of his fingers ignite a trail of prickling heat as he climbs, relentless. He finds you already slick, sodden with want, and his thumb strokes the seam of your cunt with a firm, approving press.

“Good,” he murmurs, voice soft but thick with command, “you’re already soaked for me.” There is no pretense, no veneer of gentleness—he takes pride in your need. He sinks the tip of his finger into you, just a knuckle, then deeper, testing your readiness, your greed.

He pulls out, coats his thumb in your arousal, and draws lazy, humiliating circles over your clit. Every nerve is strung to that spot, never letting you retreat from the pleasure he wrings from you. You clutch at his shoulders as the world narrows to the relentless, masterful pressure of his hand, the delicious grind of your hips against his, and the raw, unslakable need that’s driven you across half the castle to tremble on his lap like a supplicant at an altar.

He toys with you like this until you’re panting, biting your own lip to keep from sobbing with how close you are, how much you need more—him, inside you, every inch. Steven keeps you there, strung out on the edge, until you think you’ll break apart from the wanting. He waits, and he watches, the blue eyes locked on yours as if daring you to beg.

You do, in the end. “Please,” you whisper, and the word is so thin and desperate it hardly sounds like your voice, but it gets the reaction you want. He withdraws his hand entirely, leaving you gasping and empty, eager.

His voice is a rough thread as he says, “Up. Bend.”

Your legs shake as you climb off him, but you obey instantly, turning to face the table and propping yourself on your elbows, the rough grain cool beneath your cheek. You hear him behind you, the scrape of his chair across the stone as he moves to stand. The weight of his hand at your back is both warning and anchor as he flips your skirts up and over your waist and exposing your bare flesh to the chill of the council room. The air is cold, but his hands are a brand, searing every inch they touch.

He grinds up behind you, the heavy, swollen head of his cock lining up with your slick, clenching entrance, and you are so hungry that you try to wriggle back to catch him, but his other hand clamps to your hip, holding you in place.

Steven bends low, beard scratch and all, and growls into your ear, “You want to be claimed, little queen? You want to prove who you belong to?” The timber of his voice, the brutal edge of the words, makes your knees go to water. The answer is obvious. The answer is him. Always, always, always him.

You nod, but it isn’t enough for Steven. He wants words, he wants confession, he wants you to submit to this truth with clarity. “Say it,” he snarls, and the hand at your hip shifts to wrap around your throat, not hard, but with promise of force.

“I belong to you,” you say, the words the admission to usher in the next movement. You feel the hot slide of the broad head of Steven’s cock dragging slow and deliberate through your folds—soaking it in the mess he’s just made of you, teasing as though there is any possibility you would not take him instantly and whole. He rubs the slick head up and down, slow, then lingers at your entrance, not yet breaching, just savoring the helpless flex and pulse of your body trying to draw him in, refusing you the fullness you crave.

“You’re so desperate, you will let me fuck you right here on the war table,” he mutters, voice raw. The hand at your throat tightens slightly, making you shiver. “Would you let the entire kingdom see their queen bred by her king?”

You whimper, the shameful thrill of his words tightening every muscle in your core. “Yes. I would.” The fibers in your throat burn with the confession, but Steven’s hand at your nape releases just enough to let you gasp in relief. He’s proud of you—can feel it in the pulse of his cock, straining now, that he has made you need him so absolutely in this place and in this way.

Then there’s the sharp, deliberate press of his body crowding your ass, the hard and heavy heat of his cock settling between your cheeks, threatening the softest, tightest part of you. He bends down, mouth at your ear, and you feel the scrape of his beard and the thrum of his voice as he says, “Hold still.”

You do.

You pulse with anticipation, with nerves, with a need that borders on terror. Steven spits into his hand—loud, crude, and the sound goes straight to your clit—and then he smears the spit over the head of his cock, and over you, and then the push comes, blunt and inexorable, at the forbidden ring of muscle. It is too much, always, but you want it, you want the proof of his hunger, the rawness of being taken where only he has ever claimed.

The stretch is a fire in your bones. You dig your fingers into the edge of the table, desperate to ground yourself as Steven pushes past every last shred of resistance. It is agony and rapture, the full width of him splitting you, and for a moment you go blind, dizzy from the stretch and the heat and the sheer, obscene fullness of him forcing its way inside you.

He doesn’t take you all at once. He works you open, withdrawing and then pressing back in, a little deeper with every rut until you shake beneath him, gasping for air, sobbing around the thickness of him. Sweat beads along your spine, and you are aware only of the way the rough grain of the table digs into your cheek and the way his voice is a rasp of praise washing over you as he speaks.

“You take it,” he says, a kind of awe in the echoing hollowness of the council chamber. “You take me so well, little wife.”

Once fully sheathed, he holds you there, impaled, the hand on your neck now a bracing anchor, his hips flush to your ass. His other hand splays over your lower back, holding you steady and open, thumbs digging in just above the curve of your hips. You feel the tremble in his thighs, the fight he wages to keep from just rutting you through the table; you feel, too, the seething pride in how willing—how eager—you are to take whatever he gives, no matter how intense.

Slowly, Steven withdraws, the drag of his cock raw against the tight, trembling ring. He spits another mouthful into his palm, adds more lube to your now-aching hole, and sets a rhythm that is measured, deliberate. The sound of it—his hips meeting your flesh, the wet suction, the low, rough praise in his voice—is a percussion that underlines every brutal stroke. You crave the violence of it, the way he fucks you open with single-minded focus, and still, still, you want more.

“Steven,” you gasp, not knowing what you’re begging for, only that you want every inch, every ounce of him, even in the places that ache and pulse and maybe cannot take more. He answers with a groan, a hand moving from your hip to your clit, grinding over the little bundle of nerves with all the wicked skill he’s refined over months of your fucking.

The overwhelming friction, the fullness, the throb—is unbearable, and you come, hard, so hard it borders on violence. Your body clamps around him, the spasm nearly paralyzing you as your limbs weaken, every muscle in your core pulsing and throbbing around the invasive, overwhelming width of your king. The edges of your vision blur and the sound you make is animal, wordless, but Steven answers, driving you through the crest of your climax, sinking into you with a force that obliterates all thought.

He fucks you through it, relentless and victorious, hands huge and hard at your hips, jerking you back to claim every last inch until you’re sobbing with how full, how impossibly stuffed you are. Each thrust pushes you flat to the table, and you are only vaguely aware of the smears of spit and slick and sweat pooling at the join of your bodies, the way it soaks through your thighs, leaving you wrecked and open for him.

He’s not finished with you, not by a long shot. Steven’s cock withdraws from your ass with a slow, wrenching drag, leaving you shuddering and empty, all your muscles fluttering and your face hot against the cold grain of the table. You sob, a little, at the loss, and you can feel the slick mess of your own juices and his spit running down your thighs, the burn at your rim pulsing in time with your heartbeat.

But then his hands are gentler—one at your hip, one braced at your shoulder as he lines himself up again, this time pressing the heavy, hot tip of his cock between your thighs, seeking the place you are already swollen and desperate for him. You whimper, still spent and oversensitive from your first climax, but even so, you arch your hips, eager for the fullness only he gives.

He slides in, not slow but not cruel, just driving every inch into your aching, greedy cunt. You keen, desperate, not even caring that your voice is a needy, broken thing in the echoing hush of the council chamber.

Steven’s mouth finds your ear, “Every man at court, every lord, every advisor—every last one knows you are mine, but I want it ringing in their ears forever as I breed you.”

With every stroke, Steven’s cock brushes the most sensitive part inside you, your battered and wet cunt spasming around him, milking him for all he can give. You feel every vein, every ridge, every pulse of his cock as it spears you open, and it’s so much, so good, you come again, harder this time, a rush that’s almost terror but made only of pleasure, pure and shattering.

Your cunt pulses around him, hungry and slick, wringing him, wringing you, until there is nothing left in your head but the need to come again—and the way Steven makes you do it, every time, with just a fuck and a promise and the weight of his whole body pressing you down. You arch your back, desperate to take him deeper, and the hand at your shoulder pins you flat to the table, holding you still as he braces and thrusts, making you quiver and moan, making you mindless for him.

The pace now is punishing, but you crave it. Each time your hips threaten to buck off the wood he keeps you pinned down, rutting into you as if you’re a thing made only for his taking. The itch in your belly blooms to wildfire, sharp and wild, and the overstimulation is edged with a pleasure so beautiful you could scream for it, could cry for the way it rips you open and fills in every last corner of your wanting, and so you do.

He fucks you through the aftershocks, fucking every last spasm of pleasure from your body, fucking you until you’re hoarse and sobbing and barely conscious with the white-hot pleasure and the raw bruise of being so completely, so thoroughly used. You know you will wear the marks of this for days—on your throat, on your hips, at the tight, spent holes still drooling spit and slick and sweat down your thighs.

Steven comes at last with a roar, hips slamming into you so hard the edge of the table cuts the breath from your lungs, and the twitch and pulse of his cock fills you, flooding you in one final, conquering pulse. The heat of him, the quantity of him, is unspeakable—you feel it sear a path to your womb, a brutal, claiming flood that fills you so full the excess is forced out around his cock, further slicking your thighs, sticking your skin to the wood.

The hand at your nape strokes the ridge of your spine, his breath crashing against your back, and you realize he is fighting himself, struggling to corral the violent tenderness now threatening to shatter him from the inside out.

For a long while, neither of you move. The only sound is the ragged thrum of your breaths and the wild, feral stammer of his heart as it tries to slow. Your legs are boneless, splayed wide, and he keeps you pressed to the table, still impaled, as if even a breath’s space could risk losing what he’s just staked his soul on.

Finally, Steven eases back, hands gentle as he scoops you from the table—your limbs limp, trembling, useless in the aftermath—and cradles your whole body against his chest. He gathers your legs up as he moves back and reclaims his earlier seat, settling you in his lap, bundled and shattered against the heat of his skin. He strokes your hair, your back, mauling you close as if afraid you might dissolve into the air if not caged to him. His cock softens inside you, but he cannot let you go, not yet; he just clutches you tighter, your spent body rocked gently soothed, a motion at odds with the violence of minutes before.

When you can finally catch your breath, you turn slightly more into him and you press your cheek to the hollow of his throat. You listen to the tide of his pulse, the desperate hunt of his lungs for air. Somewhere outside, the world carries on—voices, firewood splitting, kids shrieking down the corridor—but here, in this carved-out moment, you are the only two who exist.

Steven is the one to speak first, rough and low in your ear. “I want—” He breaks off, his voice rough and strangely weak, so unlike the man who just ruined you over a council table you hardly know how to answer it. The man who has ruined you so many times. You lift your head to meet his gaze. The fires in his eyes are guttering now, but not cold—they burn with a different fuel, something almost like desperation.

“I want you to want it,” he says, the words torn from some engine deeper than pride, deeper than need. “Not just because I am your king. Not because it is owed. I want it because you choose it.”

The statement lands in the hollow between your ribs like a fist. You don’t know how to answer except to touch your lips to his, gentle, a whisper of a kiss where violent need reigned just minutes before. You press your mouth to the corner of his, then to the sharp line of his jaw, then the hollow beneath. “I do,” you say, and it’s a word so small it could barely crack a window in the cold stone of the Kongsgård, but you see the effect it has. His grip on you shifts, softer now, and he lets his forehead fall to yours, breaking into a long, shaky exhale. In this way you know that you have power, too—a different kind than you ever imagined, but no less absolute.

You stay like this, bodies twined, until the fire in the hearth burns low and the sweat on your skin cools to a chill. Every inch of you aches in the most delicious, dangerous ways. Your cunt is tender, the ring of your ass still pulsing with the memory of how he split you open and left you gaping. You ought to feel shame, but all you feel is a molten pride that you can take everything Steven gives and still want more.

You let him hold you until your breathing matches his, until your own hands find the strength to fist in the linen at his collar. His sweat cools in the hollow between your bodies, and you let your head rest heavy against his chest, the salt of his skin mixing with your own. Neither of you moves for a long while. When you finally slide off his lap, legs watery as river clay, Steven follows you, only a half-step behind, as if the gravity between your bodies is too constant to fully break.

You should return to your duties. Somewhere you are most certainly needed. But when Steven cups your chin and tilts your face up, his thumb grazing the corner of your mouth, every reason to leave the room vanishes. His lips devour you, slow and thorough, as if he wants to memorize this, encode it in every cell, until no part of you is untouched by the taste of this moment.

You break apart only when the need for air forces you to, but the hunger in it lingers. His hand cups the nape of your neck, thumb stroking slow over the vein that jumps there, and he rests his forehead to yours like a man newly landed from a voyage half the world wide. “You have unmade me,” he says, and it is a confession, not a complaint.

You laugh, shaky and soft, pressing your nose to his. “You did all the unmaking yourself.” The words are true, and you let them settle between you. He grins, the wolfish flash of his teeth just visible, and with it the tension diffuses, neither of you quite knowing what to do with so much tenderness made raw.

You gather yourself, smoothing your wrinkled skirt down over sticky thighs, but Steven is not finished. He crosses to the door, and opens it to speak with the attendant there. He instructs that a meal to be sent up to the royal chamber, and for a bath to be drawn, hot as the hearth can offer. The servant, catching the devastation in your overall appearance and the almost drunken glaze to Steven’s eyes, bows with a speed rarely seen and disappears before the king can clarify any further.

Steven’s attention returns to you. “I do not believe we are fit for anything but to retire for the rest of the day.”

For a moment, you feel like a maiden caught in mischief, but then Steven’s eyes drop to your mouth and you remember you are not a maiden, you are a queen, his queen, and whatever want burns in your blood is not merely allowed, but expected, demanded, starved for. His. Deeply his. And you feel anchored in that surety now.

Are we in a happily ever after yet? No. But things are certainly changing.

Please reblog if you enjoyed this/enjoy this series. My blog got marked as explicit permanently by dumblr, which means that my posts no longer show up in the public tags, so people honestly won't find it unless it's gets passed along by your reblogs now. 🥺 I'm wavering on how much longer it may or may not be worth it to post here if the point is being able to share it with others.

Main Masterlist | Aspen's Ask Box | Field Guide to the Forest

Things are different in the weeks that follow the visit from your guests from the south. You sense it in the way Steven moves through the halls—with more watchfulness than before, less the heedless animal force that once hurled him at everything in reach and more the measured, circumspect tread of a man who has recognized, possibly for the first time, the possibility of losing some part of his world.

He wakes you each morning with the same relentless heat, the same demanding hands and cock, but sometimes in the small moments after—when his breath has slowed and your bodies are still tied together by what he’s poured into you—he watches you as though trying to decipher a language only you two share, and that he’s afraid to find his own words missing.

He fills his days with a new kind of purpose, stalking the battlements at dusk, making careful inventory of the armory, drilling the younger men himself, relentless and all-consuming. He is building something, you think; you are watching him fortify what he loves, even if he cannot say so aloud.

It changes things between the two of you, this awareness—a tension not of violence or even sex, but of something almost—fragile. It surfaces in the way he sometimes laces his fingers with yours, as if idly, but never breaks the hold first. Or in the way his hand will pause at your back, hovering as though it wants to support you, but cannot quite allow itself the indulgence of tenderness outright. You feel it when he watches you from across the hall during mealtimes, and in how he discusses matters of the court with you, less dismissive, more—what is it, respect?—than before.

You’d imagined, once, that the longer you stayed here, the more invisible you might become. That a queen, even one captured and bartered for as you were, would eventually be more statue than person, a vessel for tradition and dynasty, not for selfhood. But the opposite has happened. Your days are full—helping Ursa plan the planting festivals, overseeing repairs to the winter-damaged barns, learning which of Helga’s cryptic warnings to heed and which to ignore. Even the village children know you now, trailing after your skirt-hems, bringing you bits of amber and sea glass as trophies.

You do not yet know all your position will be nor what your marriage is, but it has grown in ways you did not expect.

Today the itch comes before the noon hour but you try to ignore it—try to keep occupied, try to let your hands and mind be so full of tasks that they might crowd out the throb in your thighs, the heat curling low in your belly. You visit the kitchens, where the steam and spitting fat makes you lightheaded; you walk the length of the halls. Nothing works. The ache is stubborn, eager, and it turns every thought toward Steven and the way he sometimes bends you over the windowsill, or pins you against the wall, or drags you across the floor, or—most especially, most humiliatingly—the way he simply looks at you from across the room and makes you want to drop to your knees and beg for him.

It’s the wanting that undoes you.

So you go to him.

You find Steven in the council room, hunched over a parchment at the long pine table. Two of his advisors—Lorens with his pinched mouth and restless fingers, and Samuel with his strong jaw—lean in, voices serious as the men confer. The fire is banked low, providing warmth in the chill of late winter, some light still making itself available at the end of the afternoon.

Steven glances up before the others notice you, as if summoned by the heat of your gaze. His eyes meet yours and for a fraction of a second the animal in him flares out from behind his eyes—hungry, sharp, but now tempered by something that almost looks like pride. Then his face flickers back to impassiveness, the steel mask that serves him so well.

You linger at the edge of the room, weighing whether to approach, and Steven’s head tips a fraction—an order: come here.

You cross the stone flags, your steps soft in the hush, and though both advisors shoot glances your way, neither wavers in their discourse with their king. Steven’s attention swings fully your way. “What is your need?” he asks, tone flat, but his eyes flick down your body in a way that indicates he has a suspicion.

You feel the heat rise up your neck, but you meet his gaze with steadiness. “May I have a moment alone with my husband?” you ask, glancing at the two counselors, but then back to Steven, who holds the power to determine.

Steven doesn’t bother with the pretense of courtesy or debate. “You are both dismissed,” he says, without looking away from you.

Lorens rises first, shuffling his papers together, darting you a glance that slides away as soon as it lands. Samuel lingers a moment, still watching Steven, then bows and retreats. The door closes and the hush in the room is absolute.

He shifts his weight back, squares his shoulders and leans into the chair in a way that makes you aware, acutely, of the span of his thighs and the space he commands even at rest.

You cross the distance with measured dignity, careful not to let your pace betray the heat burning in the marrow of your bones, and stand just close enough that you can feel the warmth radiating from him, like a sun behind a cloud. He is silent, letting you name your need, or your shame, whichever will come first.

Steven watches you for a long moment, eyes keenly narrowed, the muscle in his jaw tight. He says nothing.

For a moment, you don’t know where to begin. Everything seems both urgent and trivial in the presence of his attention, so you choose the truth. “There are things I want,” you say, boldness tripping up over the lump in your throat.

He lets the silence hang there, sharp as a blade, before allowing himself the faintest lift of a brow. “Then take them.” He speaks with the same ruthless clarity he brings to every command, but there’s no mockery in it. He means it, means for you to have whatever you dare to name.

You do. The table is long, but you are bold; you slide one knee onto the bench beside Steven, the movement deliberate, and then sit on his lap, straddling him there in the firelit hush.

His hands go immediately to your hips, holding you hard but not to control—just to steady you. You feel the heat of him, not just between your thighs, but burning clean through the linen of his shirt, through the wool of your own bodice. He stares up at you, face hungry.

You stare at him, daring him to make the next move. He doesn’t. His hands rest at your hips, heavy and expectant. The fire at your back, the muscle and heat of him before you—everything about Steven in this instant screams that he is ready to be the instrument of whatever you wish, but will not move first. Not on this.

“Is that an order, my king?” you ask, your voice breathier than you wish it to be.

He tilts his head, considering you with that odd, deep tenderness that you’ve begun to learn is not softness, not in the way you once recognized, but a fiercer kind of loyalty. “If you want it to be,” he says. “If you find that easier.”

You shake your head slowly, hands coming up to splay over the breadth of his chest, flattening your palms against him. Your center rocks forward, brushing over the bulge beneath his breeches, his cock hard and already straining, and your knees nearly give out at the contact.

You move your hips again, slow at first, feeling the thick heat of him grow even harder through the layers of cloth. His hands tighten at your waist, fingers digging in, but he still does not guide, does not take—just lets you rut against him, lets you chase the friction, lets you lose yourself in the animal want while the firelight flickers on his jaw and shadow.

You know what you want. You want to make him want, want to crack this composure, want to see him desperate and raw for you in the way that matches the heat that drove you here, the appetite he’s shown so consistently for you night and day. You grind down, seeking the angle that brings his cock flush against your throbbing center. Steven’s hands tighten with every pass, and his breathing grows shallow, the tips of his ears red with the effort it costs him to hold back.

You slide your hands to his face—beard rough against your palms—and force him to look at you, really look. “I want you to fuck me,” you say, and the baldness of the word makes you pulse with shame and thrill both. “Here. Now.” The echo of that word clings in the air, lurid, and the last filter between you and your want is gone.

Steven’s mouth doesn’t twitch with a smirk, but his eyes—blue, hungry and dark—crinkle at the corners in a way that says everything. His hand moves, slow as a glacier but infinitely more dangerous, sliding beneath the folds of your skirt, up the naked curve of your thigh. The callused pads of his fingers ignite a trail of prickling heat as he climbs, relentless. He finds you already slick, sodden with want, and his thumb strokes the seam of your cunt with a firm, approving press.

“Good,” he murmurs, voice soft but thick with command, “you’re already soaked for me.” There is no pretense, no veneer of gentleness—he takes pride in your need. He sinks the tip of his finger into you, just a knuckle, then deeper, testing your readiness, your greed.

He pulls out, coats his thumb in your arousal, and draws lazy, humiliating circles over your clit. Every nerve is strung to that spot, never letting you retreat from the pleasure he wrings from you. You clutch at his shoulders as the world narrows to the relentless, masterful pressure of his hand, the delicious grind of your hips against his, and the raw, unslakable need that’s driven you across half the castle to tremble on his lap like a supplicant at an altar.

He toys with you like this until you’re panting, biting your own lip to keep from sobbing with how close you are, how much you need more—him, inside you, every inch. Steven keeps you there, strung out on the edge, until you think you’ll break apart from the wanting. He waits, and he watches, the blue eyes locked on yours as if daring you to beg.

You do, in the end. “Please,” you whisper, and the word is so thin and desperate it hardly sounds like your voice, but it gets the reaction you want. He withdraws his hand entirely, leaving you gasping and empty, eager.

His voice is a rough thread as he says, “Up. Bend.”

Your legs shake as you climb off him, but you obey instantly, turning to face the table and propping yourself on your elbows, the rough grain cool beneath your cheek. You hear him behind you, the scrape of his chair across the stone as he moves to stand. The weight of his hand at your back is both warning and anchor as he flips your skirts up and over your waist and exposing your bare flesh to the chill of the council room. The air is cold, but his hands are a brand, searing every inch they touch.

He grinds up behind you, the heavy, swollen head of his cock lining up with your slick, clenching entrance, and you are so hungry that you try to wriggle back to catch him, but his other hand clamps to your hip, holding you in place.

Steven bends low, beard scratch and all, and growls into your ear, “You want to be claimed, little queen? You want to prove who you belong to?” The timber of his voice, the brutal edge of the words, makes your knees go to water. The answer is obvious. The answer is him. Always, always, always him.

You nod, but it isn’t enough for Steven. He wants words, he wants confession, he wants you to submit to this truth with clarity. “Say it,” he snarls, and the hand at your hip shifts to wrap around your throat, not hard, but with promise of force.

“I belong to you,” you say, the words the admission to usher in the next movement. You feel the hot slide of the broad head of Steven’s cock dragging slow and deliberate through your folds—soaking it in the mess he’s just made of you, teasing as though there is any possibility you would not take him instantly and whole. He rubs the slick head up and down, slow, then lingers at your entrance, not yet breaching, just savoring the helpless flex and pulse of your body trying to draw him in, refusing you the fullness you crave.

“You’re so desperate, you will let me fuck you right here on the war table,” he mutters, voice raw. The hand at your throat tightens slightly, making you shiver. “Would you let the entire kingdom see their queen bred by her king?”

You whimper, the shameful thrill of his words tightening every muscle in your core. “Yes. I would.” The fibers in your throat burn with the confession, but Steven’s hand at your nape releases just enough to let you gasp in relief. He’s proud of you—can feel it in the pulse of his cock, straining now, that he has made you need him so absolutely in this place and in this way.

Then there’s the sharp, deliberate press of his body crowding your ass, the hard and heavy heat of his cock settling between your cheeks, threatening the softest, tightest part of you. He bends down, mouth at your ear, and you feel the scrape of his beard and the thrum of his voice as he says, “Hold still.”

You do.

You pulse with anticipation, with nerves, with a need that borders on terror. Steven spits into his hand—loud, crude, and the sound goes straight to your clit—and then he smears the spit over the head of his cock, and over you, and then the push comes, blunt and inexorable, at the forbidden ring of muscle. It is too much, always, but you want it, you want the proof of his hunger, the rawness of being taken where only he has ever claimed.

The stretch is a fire in your bones. You dig your fingers into the edge of the table, desperate to ground yourself as Steven pushes past every last shred of resistance. It is agony and rapture, the full width of him splitting you, and for a moment you go blind, dizzy from the stretch and the heat and the sheer, obscene fullness of him forcing its way inside you.

He doesn’t take you all at once. He works you open, withdrawing and then pressing back in, a little deeper with every rut until you shake beneath him, gasping for air, sobbing around the thickness of him. Sweat beads along your spine, and you are aware only of the way the rough grain of the table digs into your cheek and the way his voice is a rasp of praise washing over you as he speaks.

“You take it,” he says, a kind of awe in the echoing hollowness of the council chamber. “You take me so well, little wife.”

Once fully sheathed, he holds you there, impaled, the hand on your neck now a bracing anchor, his hips flush to your ass. His other hand splays over your lower back, holding you steady and open, thumbs digging in just above the curve of your hips. You feel the tremble in his thighs, the fight he wages to keep from just rutting you through the table; you feel, too, the seething pride in how willing—how eager—you are to take whatever he gives, no matter how intense.

Slowly, Steven withdraws, the drag of his cock raw against the tight, trembling ring. He spits another mouthful into his palm, adds more lube to your now-aching hole, and sets a rhythm that is measured, deliberate. The sound of it—his hips meeting your flesh, the wet suction, the low, rough praise in his voice—is a percussion that underlines every brutal stroke. You crave the violence of it, the way he fucks you open with single-minded focus, and still, still, you want more.

“Steven,” you gasp, not knowing what you’re begging for, only that you want every inch, every ounce of him, even in the places that ache and pulse and maybe cannot take more. He answers with a groan, a hand moving from your hip to your clit, grinding over the little bundle of nerves with all the wicked skill he’s refined over months of your fucking.

The overwhelming friction, the fullness, the throb—is unbearable, and you come, hard, so hard it borders on violence. Your body clamps around him, the spasm nearly paralyzing you as your limbs weaken, every muscle in your core pulsing and throbbing around the invasive, overwhelming width of your king. The edges of your vision blur and the sound you make is animal, wordless, but Steven answers, driving you through the crest of your climax, sinking into you with a force that obliterates all thought.

He fucks you through it, relentless and victorious, hands huge and hard at your hips, jerking you back to claim every last inch until you’re sobbing with how full, how impossibly stuffed you are. Each thrust pushes you flat to the table, and you are only vaguely aware of the smears of spit and slick and sweat pooling at the join of your bodies, the way it soaks through your thighs, leaving you wrecked and open for him.

He’s not finished with you, not by a long shot. Steven’s cock withdraws from your ass with a slow, wrenching drag, leaving you shuddering and empty, all your muscles fluttering and your face hot against the cold grain of the table. You sob, a little, at the loss, and you can feel the slick mess of your own juices and his spit running down your thighs, the burn at your rim pulsing in time with your heartbeat.

But then his hands are gentler—one at your hip, one braced at your shoulder as he lines himself up again, this time pressing the heavy, hot tip of his cock between your thighs, seeking the place you are already swollen and desperate for him. You whimper, still spent and oversensitive from your first climax, but even so, you arch your hips, eager for the fullness only he gives.

He slides in, not slow but not cruel, just driving every inch into your aching, greedy cunt. You keen, desperate, not even caring that your voice is a needy, broken thing in the echoing hush of the council chamber.

Steven’s mouth finds your ear, “Every man at court, every lord, every advisor—every last one knows you are mine, but I want it ringing in their ears forever as I breed you.”

With every stroke, Steven’s cock brushes the most sensitive part inside you, your battered and wet cunt spasming around him, milking him for all he can give. You feel every vein, every ridge, every pulse of his cock as it spears you open, and it’s so much, so good, you come again, harder this time, a rush that’s almost terror but made only of pleasure, pure and shattering.

Your cunt pulses around him, hungry and slick, wringing him, wringing you, until there is nothing left in your head but the need to come again—and the way Steven makes you do it, every time, with just a fuck and a promise and the weight of his whole body pressing you down. You arch your back, desperate to take him deeper, and the hand at your shoulder pins you flat to the table, holding you still as he braces and thrusts, making you quiver and moan, making you mindless for him.

The pace now is punishing, but you crave it. Each time your hips threaten to buck off the wood he keeps you pinned down, rutting into you as if you’re a thing made only for his taking. The itch in your belly blooms to wildfire, sharp and wild, and the overstimulation is edged with a pleasure so beautiful you could scream for it, could cry for the way it rips you open and fills in every last corner of your wanting, and so you do.

He fucks you through the aftershocks, fucking every last spasm of pleasure from your body, fucking you until you’re hoarse and sobbing and barely conscious with the white-hot pleasure and the raw bruise of being so completely, so thoroughly used. You know you will wear the marks of this for days—on your throat, on your hips, at the tight, spent holes still drooling spit and slick and sweat down your thighs.

Steven comes at last with a roar, hips slamming into you so hard the edge of the table cuts the breath from your lungs, and the twitch and pulse of his cock fills you, flooding you in one final, conquering pulse. The heat of him, the quantity of him, is unspeakable—you feel it sear a path to your womb, a brutal, claiming flood that fills you so full the excess is forced out around his cock, further slicking your thighs, sticking your skin to the wood.

The hand at your nape strokes the ridge of your spine, his breath crashing against your back, and you realize he is fighting himself, struggling to corral the violent tenderness now threatening to shatter him from the inside out.

For a long while, neither of you move. The only sound is the ragged thrum of your breaths and the wild, feral stammer of his heart as it tries to slow. Your legs are boneless, splayed wide, and he keeps you pressed to the table, still impaled, as if even a breath’s space could risk losing what he’s just staked his soul on.

Finally, Steven eases back, hands gentle as he scoops you from the table—your limbs limp, trembling, useless in the aftermath—and cradles your whole body against his chest. He gathers your legs up as he moves back and reclaims his earlier seat, settling you in his lap, bundled and shattered against the heat of his skin. He strokes your hair, your back, mauling you close as if afraid you might dissolve into the air if not caged to him. His cock softens inside you, but he cannot let you go, not yet; he just clutches you tighter, your spent body rocked gently soothed, a motion at odds with the violence of minutes before.

When you can finally catch your breath, you turn slightly more into him and you press your cheek to the hollow of his throat. You listen to the tide of his pulse, the desperate hunt of his lungs for air. Somewhere outside, the world carries on—voices, firewood splitting, kids shrieking down the corridor—but here, in this carved-out moment, you are the only two who exist.

Steven is the one to speak first, rough and low in your ear. “I want—” He breaks off, his voice rough and strangely weak, so unlike the man who just ruined you over a council table you hardly know how to answer it. The man who has ruined you so many times. You lift your head to meet his gaze. The fires in his eyes are guttering now, but not cold—they burn with a different fuel, something almost like desperation.

“I want you to want it,” he says, the words torn from some engine deeper than pride, deeper than need. “Not just because I am your king. Not because it is owed. I want it because you choose it.”

The statement lands in the hollow between your ribs like a fist. You don’t know how to answer except to touch your lips to his, gentle, a whisper of a kiss where violent need reigned just minutes before. You press your mouth to the corner of his, then to the sharp line of his jaw, then the hollow beneath. “I do,” you say, and it’s a word so small it could barely crack a window in the cold stone of the Kongsgård, but you see the effect it has. His grip on you shifts, softer now, and he lets his forehead fall to yours, breaking into a long, shaky exhale. In this way you know that you have power, too—a different kind than you ever imagined, but no less absolute.

You stay like this, bodies twined, until the fire in the hearth burns low and the sweat on your skin cools to a chill. Every inch of you aches in the most delicious, dangerous ways. Your cunt is tender, the ring of your ass still pulsing with the memory of how he split you open and left you gaping. You ought to feel shame, but all you feel is a molten pride that you can take everything Steven gives and still want more.

You let him hold you until your breathing matches his, until your own hands find the strength to fist in the linen at his collar. His sweat cools in the hollow between your bodies, and you let your head rest heavy against his chest, the salt of his skin mixing with your own. Neither of you moves for a long while. When you finally slide off his lap, legs watery as river clay, Steven follows you, only a half-step behind, as if the gravity between your bodies is too constant to fully break.

You should return to your duties. Somewhere you are most certainly needed. But when Steven cups your chin and tilts your face up, his thumb grazing the corner of your mouth, every reason to leave the room vanishes. His lips devour you, slow and thorough, as if he wants to memorize this, encode it in every cell, until no part of you is untouched by the taste of this moment.

You break apart only when the need for air forces you to, but the hunger in it lingers. His hand cups the nape of your neck, thumb stroking slow over the vein that jumps there, and he rests his forehead to yours like a man newly landed from a voyage half the world wide. “You have unmade me,” he says, and it is a confession, not a complaint.

You laugh, shaky and soft, pressing your nose to his. “You did all the unmaking yourself.” The words are true, and you let them settle between you. He grins, the wolfish flash of his teeth just visible, and with it the tension diffuses, neither of you quite knowing what to do with so much tenderness made raw.

You gather yourself, smoothing your wrinkled skirt down over sticky thighs, but Steven is not finished. He crosses to the door, and opens it to speak with the attendant there. He instructs that a meal to be sent up to the royal chamber, and for a bath to be drawn, hot as the hearth can offer. The servant, catching the devastation in your overall appearance and the almost drunken glaze to Steven’s eyes, bows with a speed rarely seen and disappears before the king can clarify any further.

Steven’s attention returns to you. “I do not believe we are fit for anything but to retire for the rest of the day.”

For a moment, you feel like a maiden caught in mischief, but then Steven’s eyes drop to your mouth and you remember you are not a maiden, you are a queen, his queen, and whatever want burns in your blood is not merely allowed, but expected, demanded, starved for. His. Deeply his. And you feel anchored in that surety now.

Are we in a happily ever after yet? No. But things are certainly changing.

Please reblog if you enjoyed this/enjoy this series. My blog got marked as explicit permanently by dumblr, which means that my posts no longer show up in the public tags, so people honestly won't find it unless it's gets passed along by your reblogs now. 🥺 I'm wavering on how much longer it may or may not be worth it to post here if the point is being able to share it with others.

Main Masterlist | Aspen's Ask Box | Field Guide to the Forest

Things are different in the weeks that follow the visit from your guests from the south. You sense it in the way Steven moves through the halls—with more watchfulness than before, less the heedless animal force that once hurled him at everything in reach and more the measured, circumspect tread of a man who has recognized, possibly for the first time, the possibility of losing some part of his world.

He wakes you each morning with the same relentless heat, the same demanding hands and cock, but sometimes in the small moments after—when his breath has slowed and your bodies are still tied together by what he’s poured into you—he watches you as though trying to decipher a language only you two share, and that he’s afraid to find his own words missing.

He fills his days with a new kind of purpose, stalking the battlements at dusk, making careful inventory of the armory, drilling the younger men himself, relentless and all-consuming. He is building something, you think; you are watching him fortify what he loves, even if he cannot say so aloud.

It changes things between the two of you, this awareness—a tension not of violence or even sex, but of something almost—fragile. It surfaces in the way he sometimes laces his fingers with yours, as if idly, but never breaks the hold first. Or in the way his hand will pause at your back, hovering as though it wants to support you, but cannot quite allow itself the indulgence of tenderness outright. You feel it when he watches you from across the hall during mealtimes, and in how he discusses matters of the court with you, less dismissive, more—what is it, respect?—than before.

You’d imagined, once, that the longer you stayed here, the more invisible you might become. That a queen, even one captured and bartered for as you were, would eventually be more statue than person, a vessel for tradition and dynasty, not for selfhood. But the opposite has happened. Your days are full—helping Ursa plan the planting festivals, overseeing repairs to the winter-damaged barns, learning which of Helga’s cryptic warnings to heed and which to ignore. Even the village children know you now, trailing after your skirt-hems, bringing you bits of amber and sea glass as trophies.

You do not yet know all your position will be nor what your marriage is, but it has grown in ways you did not expect.

Today the itch comes before the noon hour but you try to ignore it—try to keep occupied, try to let your hands and mind be so full of tasks that they might crowd out the throb in your thighs, the heat curling low in your belly. You visit the kitchens, where the steam and spitting fat makes you lightheaded; you walk the length of the halls. Nothing works. The ache is stubborn, eager, and it turns every thought toward Steven and the way he sometimes bends you over the windowsill, or pins you against the wall, or drags you across the floor, or—most especially, most humiliatingly—the way he simply looks at you from across the room and makes you want to drop to your knees and beg for him.

It’s the wanting that undoes you.

So you go to him.

You find Steven in the council room, hunched over a parchment at the long pine table. Two of his advisors—Lorens with his pinched mouth and restless fingers, and Samuel with his strong jaw—lean in, voices serious as the men confer. The fire is banked low, providing warmth in the chill of late winter, some light still making itself available at the end of the afternoon.

Steven glances up before the others notice you, as if summoned by the heat of your gaze. His eyes meet yours and for a fraction of a second the animal in him flares out from behind his eyes—hungry, sharp, but now tempered by something that almost looks like pride. Then his face flickers back to impassiveness, the steel mask that serves him so well.

You linger at the edge of the room, weighing whether to approach, and Steven’s head tips a fraction—an order: come here.

You cross the stone flags, your steps soft in the hush, and though both advisors shoot glances your way, neither wavers in their discourse with their king. Steven’s attention swings fully your way. “What is your need?” he asks, tone flat, but his eyes flick down your body in a way that indicates he has a suspicion.

You feel the heat rise up your neck, but you meet his gaze with steadiness. “May I have a moment alone with my husband?” you ask, glancing at the two counselors, but then back to Steven, who holds the power to determine.

Steven doesn’t bother with the pretense of courtesy or debate. “You are both dismissed,” he says, without looking away from you.

Lorens rises first, shuffling his papers together, darting you a glance that slides away as soon as it lands. Samuel lingers a moment, still watching Steven, then bows and retreats. The door closes and the hush in the room is absolute.

He shifts his weight back, squares his shoulders and leans into the chair in a way that makes you aware, acutely, of the span of his thighs and the space he commands even at rest.

You cross the distance with measured dignity, careful not to let your pace betray the heat burning in the marrow of your bones, and stand just close enough that you can feel the warmth radiating from him, like a sun behind a cloud. He is silent, letting you name your need, or your shame, whichever will come first.

Steven watches you for a long moment, eyes keenly narrowed, the muscle in his jaw tight. He says nothing.

For a moment, you don’t know where to begin. Everything seems both urgent and trivial in the presence of his attention, so you choose the truth. “There are things I want,” you say, boldness tripping up over the lump in your throat.

He lets the silence hang there, sharp as a blade, before allowing himself the faintest lift of a brow. “Then take them.” He speaks with the same ruthless clarity he brings to every command, but there’s no mockery in it. He means it, means for you to have whatever you dare to name.

You do. The table is long, but you are bold; you slide one knee onto the bench beside Steven, the movement deliberate, and then sit on his lap, straddling him there in the firelit hush.

His hands go immediately to your hips, holding you hard but not to control—just to steady you. You feel the heat of him, not just between your thighs, but burning clean through the linen of his shirt, through the wool of your own bodice. He stares up at you, face hungry.

You stare at him, daring him to make the next move. He doesn’t. His hands rest at your hips, heavy and expectant. The fire at your back, the muscle and heat of him before you—everything about Steven in this instant screams that he is ready to be the instrument of whatever you wish, but will not move first. Not on this.

“Is that an order, my king?” you ask, your voice breathier than you wish it to be.

He tilts his head, considering you with that odd, deep tenderness that you’ve begun to learn is not softness, not in the way you once recognized, but a fiercer kind of loyalty. “If you want it to be,” he says. “If you find that easier.”

You shake your head slowly, hands coming up to splay over the breadth of his chest, flattening your palms against him. Your center rocks forward, brushing over the bulge beneath his breeches, his cock hard and already straining, and your knees nearly give out at the contact.

You move your hips again, slow at first, feeling the thick heat of him grow even harder through the layers of cloth. His hands tighten at your waist, fingers digging in, but he still does not guide, does not take—just lets you rut against him, lets you chase the friction, lets you lose yourself in the animal want while the firelight flickers on his jaw and shadow.

You know what you want. You want to make him want, want to crack this composure, want to see him desperate and raw for you in the way that matches the heat that drove you here, the appetite he’s shown so consistently for you night and day. You grind down, seeking the angle that brings his cock flush against your throbbing center. Steven’s hands tighten with every pass, and his breathing grows shallow, the tips of his ears red with the effort it costs him to hold back.

You slide your hands to his face—beard rough against your palms—and force him to look at you, really look. “I want you to fuck me,” you say, and the baldness of the word makes you pulse with shame and thrill both. “Here. Now.” The echo of that word clings in the air, lurid, and the last filter between you and your want is gone.

Steven’s mouth doesn’t twitch with a smirk, but his eyes—blue, hungry and dark—crinkle at the corners in a way that says everything. His hand moves, slow as a glacier but infinitely more dangerous, sliding beneath the folds of your skirt, up the naked curve of your thigh. The callused pads of his fingers ignite a trail of prickling heat as he climbs, relentless. He finds you already slick, sodden with want, and his thumb strokes the seam of your cunt with a firm, approving press.

“Good,” he murmurs, voice soft but thick with command, “you’re already soaked for me.” There is no pretense, no veneer of gentleness—he takes pride in your need. He sinks the tip of his finger into you, just a knuckle, then deeper, testing your readiness, your greed.

He pulls out, coats his thumb in your arousal, and draws lazy, humiliating circles over your clit. Every nerve is strung to that spot, never letting you retreat from the pleasure he wrings from you. You clutch at his shoulders as the world narrows to the relentless, masterful pressure of his hand, the delicious grind of your hips against his, and the raw, unslakable need that’s driven you across half the castle to tremble on his lap like a supplicant at an altar.

He toys with you like this until you’re panting, biting your own lip to keep from sobbing with how close you are, how much you need more—him, inside you, every inch. Steven keeps you there, strung out on the edge, until you think you’ll break apart from the wanting. He waits, and he watches, the blue eyes locked on yours as if daring you to beg.

You do, in the end. “Please,” you whisper, and the word is so thin and desperate it hardly sounds like your voice, but it gets the reaction you want. He withdraws his hand entirely, leaving you gasping and empty, eager.

His voice is a rough thread as he says, “Up. Bend.”

Your legs shake as you climb off him, but you obey instantly, turning to face the table and propping yourself on your elbows, the rough grain cool beneath your cheek. You hear him behind you, the scrape of his chair across the stone as he moves to stand. The weight of his hand at your back is both warning and anchor as he flips your skirts up and over your waist and exposing your bare flesh to the chill of the council room. The air is cold, but his hands are a brand, searing every inch they touch.

He grinds up behind you, the heavy, swollen head of his cock lining up with your slick, clenching entrance, and you are so hungry that you try to wriggle back to catch him, but his other hand clamps to your hip, holding you in place.

Steven bends low, beard scratch and all, and growls into your ear, “You want to be claimed, little queen? You want to prove who you belong to?” The timber of his voice, the brutal edge of the words, makes your knees go to water. The answer is obvious. The answer is him. Always, always, always him.

You nod, but it isn’t enough for Steven. He wants words, he wants confession, he wants you to submit to this truth with clarity. “Say it,” he snarls, and the hand at your hip shifts to wrap around your throat, not hard, but with promise of force.

“I belong to you,” you say, the words the admission to usher in the next movement. You feel the hot slide of the broad head of Steven’s cock dragging slow and deliberate through your folds—soaking it in the mess he’s just made of you, teasing as though there is any possibility you would not take him instantly and whole. He rubs the slick head up and down, slow, then lingers at your entrance, not yet breaching, just savoring the helpless flex and pulse of your body trying to draw him in, refusing you the fullness you crave.

“You’re so desperate, you will let me fuck you right here on the war table,” he mutters, voice raw. The hand at your throat tightens slightly, making you shiver. “Would you let the entire kingdom see their queen bred by her king?”

You whimper, the shameful thrill of his words tightening every muscle in your core. “Yes. I would.” The fibers in your throat burn with the confession, but Steven’s hand at your nape releases just enough to let you gasp in relief. He’s proud of you—can feel it in the pulse of his cock, straining now, that he has made you need him so absolutely in this place and in this way.

Then there’s the sharp, deliberate press of his body crowding your ass, the hard and heavy heat of his cock settling between your cheeks, threatening the softest, tightest part of you. He bends down, mouth at your ear, and you feel the scrape of his beard and the thrum of his voice as he says, “Hold still.”

You do.

You pulse with anticipation, with nerves, with a need that borders on terror. Steven spits into his hand—loud, crude, and the sound goes straight to your clit—and then he smears the spit over the head of his cock, and over you, and then the push comes, blunt and inexorable, at the forbidden ring of muscle. It is too much, always, but you want it, you want the proof of his hunger, the rawness of being taken where only he has ever claimed.

The stretch is a fire in your bones. You dig your fingers into the edge of the table, desperate to ground yourself as Steven pushes past every last shred of resistance. It is agony and rapture, the full width of him splitting you, and for a moment you go blind, dizzy from the stretch and the heat and the sheer, obscene fullness of him forcing its way inside you.

He doesn’t take you all at once. He works you open, withdrawing and then pressing back in, a little deeper with every rut until you shake beneath him, gasping for air, sobbing around the thickness of him. Sweat beads along your spine, and you are aware only of the way the rough grain of the table digs into your cheek and the way his voice is a rasp of praise washing over you as he speaks.

“You take it,” he says, a kind of awe in the echoing hollowness of the council chamber. “You take me so well, little wife.”

Once fully sheathed, he holds you there, impaled, the hand on your neck now a bracing anchor, his hips flush to your ass. His other hand splays over your lower back, holding you steady and open, thumbs digging in just above the curve of your hips. You feel the tremble in his thighs, the fight he wages to keep from just rutting you through the table; you feel, too, the seething pride in how willing—how eager—you are to take whatever he gives, no matter how intense.

Slowly, Steven withdraws, the drag of his cock raw against the tight, trembling ring. He spits another mouthful into his palm, adds more lube to your now-aching hole, and sets a rhythm that is measured, deliberate. The sound of it—his hips meeting your flesh, the wet suction, the low, rough praise in his voice—is a percussion that underlines every brutal stroke. You crave the violence of it, the way he fucks you open with single-minded focus, and still, still, you want more.

“Steven,” you gasp, not knowing what you’re begging for, only that you want every inch, every ounce of him, even in the places that ache and pulse and maybe cannot take more. He answers with a groan, a hand moving from your hip to your clit, grinding over the little bundle of nerves with all the wicked skill he’s refined over months of your fucking.

The overwhelming friction, the fullness, the throb—is unbearable, and you come, hard, so hard it borders on violence. Your body clamps around him, the spasm nearly paralyzing you as your limbs weaken, every muscle in your core pulsing and throbbing around the invasive, overwhelming width of your king. The edges of your vision blur and the sound you make is animal, wordless, but Steven answers, driving you through the crest of your climax, sinking into you with a force that obliterates all thought.

He fucks you through it, relentless and victorious, hands huge and hard at your hips, jerking you back to claim every last inch until you’re sobbing with how full, how impossibly stuffed you are. Each thrust pushes you flat to the table, and you are only vaguely aware of the smears of spit and slick and sweat pooling at the join of your bodies, the way it soaks through your thighs, leaving you wrecked and open for him.

He’s not finished with you, not by a long shot. Steven’s cock withdraws from your ass with a slow, wrenching drag, leaving you shuddering and empty, all your muscles fluttering and your face hot against the cold grain of the table. You sob, a little, at the loss, and you can feel the slick mess of your own juices and his spit running down your thighs, the burn at your rim pulsing in time with your heartbeat.

But then his hands are gentler—one at your hip, one braced at your shoulder as he lines himself up again, this time pressing the heavy, hot tip of his cock between your thighs, seeking the place you are already swollen and desperate for him. You whimper, still spent and oversensitive from your first climax, but even so, you arch your hips, eager for the fullness only he gives.

He slides in, not slow but not cruel, just driving every inch into your aching, greedy cunt. You keen, desperate, not even caring that your voice is a needy, broken thing in the echoing hush of the council chamber.

Steven’s mouth finds your ear, “Every man at court, every lord, every advisor—every last one knows you are mine, but I want it ringing in their ears forever as I breed you.”

With every stroke, Steven’s cock brushes the most sensitive part inside you, your battered and wet cunt spasming around him, milking him for all he can give. You feel every vein, every ridge, every pulse of his cock as it spears you open, and it’s so much, so good, you come again, harder this time, a rush that’s almost terror but made only of pleasure, pure and shattering.

Your cunt pulses around him, hungry and slick, wringing him, wringing you, until there is nothing left in your head but the need to come again—and the way Steven makes you do it, every time, with just a fuck and a promise and the weight of his whole body pressing you down. You arch your back, desperate to take him deeper, and the hand at your shoulder pins you flat to the table, holding you still as he braces and thrusts, making you quiver and moan, making you mindless for him.

The pace now is punishing, but you crave it. Each time your hips threaten to buck off the wood he keeps you pinned down, rutting into you as if you’re a thing made only for his taking. The itch in your belly blooms to wildfire, sharp and wild, and the overstimulation is edged with a pleasure so beautiful you could scream for it, could cry for the way it rips you open and fills in every last corner of your wanting, and so you do.

He fucks you through the aftershocks, fucking every last spasm of pleasure from your body, fucking you until you’re hoarse and sobbing and barely conscious with the white-hot pleasure and the raw bruise of being so completely, so thoroughly used. You know you will wear the marks of this for days—on your throat, on your hips, at the tight, spent holes still drooling spit and slick and sweat down your thighs.

Steven comes at last with a roar, hips slamming into you so hard the edge of the table cuts the breath from your lungs, and the twitch and pulse of his cock fills you, flooding you in one final, conquering pulse. The heat of him, the quantity of him, is unspeakable—you feel it sear a path to your womb, a brutal, claiming flood that fills you so full the excess is forced out around his cock, further slicking your thighs, sticking your skin to the wood.

The hand at your nape strokes the ridge of your spine, his breath crashing against your back, and you realize he is fighting himself, struggling to corral the violent tenderness now threatening to shatter him from the inside out.

For a long while, neither of you move. The only sound is the ragged thrum of your breaths and the wild, feral stammer of his heart as it tries to slow. Your legs are boneless, splayed wide, and he keeps you pressed to the table, still impaled, as if even a breath’s space could risk losing what he’s just staked his soul on.

Finally, Steven eases back, hands gentle as he scoops you from the table—your limbs limp, trembling, useless in the aftermath—and cradles your whole body against his chest. He gathers your legs up as he moves back and reclaims his earlier seat, settling you in his lap, bundled and shattered against the heat of his skin. He strokes your hair, your back, mauling you close as if afraid you might dissolve into the air if not caged to him. His cock softens inside you, but he cannot let you go, not yet; he just clutches you tighter, your spent body rocked gently soothed, a motion at odds with the violence of minutes before.

When you can finally catch your breath, you turn slightly more into him and you press your cheek to the hollow of his throat. You listen to the tide of his pulse, the desperate hunt of his lungs for air. Somewhere outside, the world carries on—voices, firewood splitting, kids shrieking down the corridor—but here, in this carved-out moment, you are the only two who exist.

Steven is the one to speak first, rough and low in your ear. “I want—” He breaks off, his voice rough and strangely weak, so unlike the man who just ruined you over a council table you hardly know how to answer it. The man who has ruined you so many times. You lift your head to meet his gaze. The fires in his eyes are guttering now, but not cold—they burn with a different fuel, something almost like desperation.

“I want you to want it,” he says, the words torn from some engine deeper than pride, deeper than need. “Not just because I am your king. Not because it is owed. I want it because you choose it.”

The statement lands in the hollow between your ribs like a fist. You don’t know how to answer except to touch your lips to his, gentle, a whisper of a kiss where violent need reigned just minutes before. You press your mouth to the corner of his, then to the sharp line of his jaw, then the hollow beneath. “I do,” you say, and it’s a word so small it could barely crack a window in the cold stone of the Kongsgård, but you see the effect it has. His grip on you shifts, softer now, and he lets his forehead fall to yours, breaking into a long, shaky exhale. In this way you know that you have power, too—a different kind than you ever imagined, but no less absolute.

You stay like this, bodies twined, until the fire in the hearth burns low and the sweat on your skin cools to a chill. Every inch of you aches in the most delicious, dangerous ways. Your cunt is tender, the ring of your ass still pulsing with the memory of how he split you open and left you gaping. You ought to feel shame, but all you feel is a molten pride that you can take everything Steven gives and still want more.

You let him hold you until your breathing matches his, until your own hands find the strength to fist in the linen at his collar. His sweat cools in the hollow between your bodies, and you let your head rest heavy against his chest, the salt of his skin mixing with your own. Neither of you moves for a long while. When you finally slide off his lap, legs watery as river clay, Steven follows you, only a half-step behind, as if the gravity between your bodies is too constant to fully break.

You should return to your duties. Somewhere you are most certainly needed. But when Steven cups your chin and tilts your face up, his thumb grazing the corner of your mouth, every reason to leave the room vanishes. His lips devour you, slow and thorough, as if he wants to memorize this, encode it in every cell, until no part of you is untouched by the taste of this moment.

You break apart only when the need for air forces you to, but the hunger in it lingers. His hand cups the nape of your neck, thumb stroking slow over the vein that jumps there, and he rests his forehead to yours like a man newly landed from a voyage half the world wide. “You have unmade me,” he says, and it is a confession, not a complaint.

You laugh, shaky and soft, pressing your nose to his. “You did all the unmaking yourself.” The words are true, and you let them settle between you. He grins, the wolfish flash of his teeth just visible, and with it the tension diffuses, neither of you quite knowing what to do with so much tenderness made raw.

You gather yourself, smoothing your wrinkled skirt down over sticky thighs, but Steven is not finished. He crosses to the door, and opens it to speak with the attendant there. He instructs that a meal to be sent up to the royal chamber, and for a bath to be drawn, hot as the hearth can offer. The servant, catching the devastation in your overall appearance and the almost drunken glaze to Steven’s eyes, bows with a speed rarely seen and disappears before the king can clarify any further.

Steven’s attention returns to you. “I do not believe we are fit for anything but to retire for the rest of the day.”

For a moment, you feel like a maiden caught in mischief, but then Steven’s eyes drop to your mouth and you remember you are not a maiden, you are a queen, his queen, and whatever want burns in your blood is not merely allowed, but expected, demanded, starved for. His. Deeply his. And you feel anchored in that surety now.

Are we in a happily ever after yet? No. But things are certainly changing.

Please reblog if you enjoyed this/enjoy this series. My blog got marked as explicit permanently by dumblr, which means that my posts no longer show up in the public tags, so people honestly won't find it unless it's gets passed along by your reblogs now. 🥺 I'm wavering on how much longer it may or may not be worth it to post here if the point is being able to share it with others.

Main Masterlist | Aspen's Ask Box | Field Guide to the Forest

Of course, there are so many layers to it, beyond just physical craving. The way it develops between them, how it adds to that fire in Reader's heart (and between her thighs) - you capture it so perfectly!

It's the slowest of burns, that started from a dark place, but with each part of their story you show that no darkness is absolute. There are lights Reader never imagined existing. Perhaps not fairytale bright, or the sunny sky shining freedom, but a row of candles producing dimmed light that's surprisingly warming and steady.

I started marking passages I wanted to quote as my favourite, but it quickly became obvious I'd be copying half of the fic ❤️

So many beautiful lines, so many sentences built into masterpieces piercing right through the heart. I love and appreciate each for different value - composition, emotional vulnerability, punch of feels, absolute raw hotness 🔥

Ah, I can't help myself, I have to quote at least a few:

he watches you as though trying to decipher a language only you two share, and that he’s afraid to find his own words missing.

He is building something, you think; you are watching him fortify what he loves, even if he cannot say so aloud.

His hand moves, slow as a glacier but infinitely more dangerous

you gasp, not knowing what you’re begging for, only that you want every inch, every ounce of him, even in the places that ache and pulse and maybe cannot take more

In this way you know that you have power, too—a different kind than you ever imagined, but no less absolute.

And yes, the fucking part was raw and hot, leaving me a mess 🥵 I was 😳 at him taking her ass so crudely AND then switching back to breed her pussy 😳😳😳

Things are different in the weeks that follow the visit from your guests from the south. You sense it in the way Steven moves through the halls—with more watchfulness than before, less the heedless animal force that once hurled him at everything in reach and more the measured, circumspect tread of a man who has recognized, possibly for the first time, the possibility of losing some part of his world.

He wakes you each morning with the same relentless heat, the same demanding hands and cock, but sometimes in the small moments after—when his breath has slowed and your bodies are still tied together by what he’s poured into you—he watches you as though trying to decipher a language only you two share, and that he’s afraid to find his own words missing.

He fills his days with a new kind of purpose, stalking the battlements at dusk, making careful inventory of the armory, drilling the younger men himself, relentless and all-consuming. He is building something, you think; you are watching him fortify what he loves, even if he cannot say so aloud.

It changes things between the two of you, this awareness—a tension not of violence or even sex, but of something almost—fragile. It surfaces in the way he sometimes laces his fingers with yours, as if idly, but never breaks the hold first. Or in the way his hand will pause at your back, hovering as though it wants to support you, but cannot quite allow itself the indulgence of tenderness outright. You feel it when he watches you from across the hall during mealtimes, and in how he discusses matters of the court with you, less dismissive, more—what is it, respect?—than before.

You’d imagined, once, that the longer you stayed here, the more invisible you might become. That a queen, even one captured and bartered for as you were, would eventually be more statue than person, a vessel for tradition and dynasty, not for selfhood. But the opposite has happened. Your days are full—helping Ursa plan the planting festivals, overseeing repairs to the winter-damaged barns, learning which of Helga’s cryptic warnings to heed and which to ignore. Even the village children know you now, trailing after your skirt-hems, bringing you bits of amber and sea glass as trophies.

You do not yet know all your position will be nor what your marriage is, but it has grown in ways you did not expect.

Today the itch comes before the noon hour but you try to ignore it—try to keep occupied, try to let your hands and mind be so full of tasks that they might crowd out the throb in your thighs, the heat curling low in your belly. You visit the kitchens, where the steam and spitting fat makes you lightheaded; you walk the length of the halls. Nothing works. The ache is stubborn, eager, and it turns every thought toward Steven and the way he sometimes bends you over the windowsill, or pins you against the wall, or drags you across the floor, or—most especially, most humiliatingly—the way he simply looks at you from across the room and makes you want to drop to your knees and beg for him.

It’s the wanting that undoes you.

So you go to him.

You find Steven in the council room, hunched over a parchment at the long pine table. Two of his advisors—Lorens with his pinched mouth and restless fingers, and Samuel with his strong jaw—lean in, voices serious as the men confer. The fire is banked low, providing warmth in the chill of late winter, some light still making itself available at the end of the afternoon.

Steven glances up before the others notice you, as if summoned by the heat of your gaze. His eyes meet yours and for a fraction of a second the animal in him flares out from behind his eyes—hungry, sharp, but now tempered by something that almost looks like pride. Then his face flickers back to impassiveness, the steel mask that serves him so well.

You linger at the edge of the room, weighing whether to approach, and Steven’s head tips a fraction—an order: come here.

You cross the stone flags, your steps soft in the hush, and though both advisors shoot glances your way, neither wavers in their discourse with their king. Steven’s attention swings fully your way. “What is your need?” he asks, tone flat, but his eyes flick down your body in a way that indicates he has a suspicion.

You feel the heat rise up your neck, but you meet his gaze with steadiness. “May I have a moment alone with my husband?” you ask, glancing at the two counselors, but then back to Steven, who holds the power to determine.

Steven doesn’t bother with the pretense of courtesy or debate. “You are both dismissed,” he says, without looking away from you.

Lorens rises first, shuffling his papers together, darting you a glance that slides away as soon as it lands. Samuel lingers a moment, still watching Steven, then bows and retreats. The door closes and the hush in the room is absolute.

He shifts his weight back, squares his shoulders and leans into the chair in a way that makes you aware, acutely, of the span of his thighs and the space he commands even at rest.

You cross the distance with measured dignity, careful not to let your pace betray the heat burning in the marrow of your bones, and stand just close enough that you can feel the warmth radiating from him, like a sun behind a cloud. He is silent, letting you name your need, or your shame, whichever will come first.

Steven watches you for a long moment, eyes keenly narrowed, the muscle in his jaw tight. He says nothing.

For a moment, you don’t know where to begin. Everything seems both urgent and trivial in the presence of his attention, so you choose the truth. “There are things I want,” you say, boldness tripping up over the lump in your throat.

He lets the silence hang there, sharp as a blade, before allowing himself the faintest lift of a brow. “Then take them.” He speaks with the same ruthless clarity he brings to every command, but there’s no mockery in it. He means it, means for you to have whatever you dare to name.

You do. The table is long, but you are bold; you slide one knee onto the bench beside Steven, the movement deliberate, and then sit on his lap, straddling him there in the firelit hush.

His hands go immediately to your hips, holding you hard but not to control—just to steady you. You feel the heat of him, not just between your thighs, but burning clean through the linen of his shirt, through the wool of your own bodice. He stares up at you, face hungry.

You stare at him, daring him to make the next move. He doesn’t. His hands rest at your hips, heavy and expectant. The fire at your back, the muscle and heat of him before you—everything about Steven in this instant screams that he is ready to be the instrument of whatever you wish, but will not move first. Not on this.

“Is that an order, my king?” you ask, your voice breathier than you wish it to be.

He tilts his head, considering you with that odd, deep tenderness that you’ve begun to learn is not softness, not in the way you once recognized, but a fiercer kind of loyalty. “If you want it to be,” he says. “If you find that easier.”

You shake your head slowly, hands coming up to splay over the breadth of his chest, flattening your palms against him. Your center rocks forward, brushing over the bulge beneath his breeches, his cock hard and already straining, and your knees nearly give out at the contact.

You move your hips again, slow at first, feeling the thick heat of him grow even harder through the layers of cloth. His hands tighten at your waist, fingers digging in, but he still does not guide, does not take—just lets you rut against him, lets you chase the friction, lets you lose yourself in the animal want while the firelight flickers on his jaw and shadow.

You know what you want. You want to make him want, want to crack this composure, want to see him desperate and raw for you in the way that matches the heat that drove you here, the appetite he’s shown so consistently for you night and day. You grind down, seeking the angle that brings his cock flush against your throbbing center. Steven’s hands tighten with every pass, and his breathing grows shallow, the tips of his ears red with the effort it costs him to hold back.

You slide your hands to his face—beard rough against your palms—and force him to look at you, really look. “I want you to fuck me,” you say, and the baldness of the word makes you pulse with shame and thrill both. “Here. Now.” The echo of that word clings in the air, lurid, and the last filter between you and your want is gone.

Steven’s mouth doesn’t twitch with a smirk, but his eyes—blue, hungry and dark—crinkle at the corners in a way that says everything. His hand moves, slow as a glacier but infinitely more dangerous, sliding beneath the folds of your skirt, up the naked curve of your thigh. The callused pads of his fingers ignite a trail of prickling heat as he climbs, relentless. He finds you already slick, sodden with want, and his thumb strokes the seam of your cunt with a firm, approving press.

“Good,” he murmurs, voice soft but thick with command, “you’re already soaked for me.” There is no pretense, no veneer of gentleness—he takes pride in your need. He sinks the tip of his finger into you, just a knuckle, then deeper, testing your readiness, your greed.

He pulls out, coats his thumb in your arousal, and draws lazy, humiliating circles over your clit. Every nerve is strung to that spot, never letting you retreat from the pleasure he wrings from you. You clutch at his shoulders as the world narrows to the relentless, masterful pressure of his hand, the delicious grind of your hips against his, and the raw, unslakable need that’s driven you across half the castle to tremble on his lap like a supplicant at an altar.

He toys with you like this until you’re panting, biting your own lip to keep from sobbing with how close you are, how much you need more—him, inside you, every inch. Steven keeps you there, strung out on the edge, until you think you’ll break apart from the wanting. He waits, and he watches, the blue eyes locked on yours as if daring you to beg.

You do, in the end. “Please,” you whisper, and the word is so thin and desperate it hardly sounds like your voice, but it gets the reaction you want. He withdraws his hand entirely, leaving you gasping and empty, eager.

His voice is a rough thread as he says, “Up. Bend.”

Your legs shake as you climb off him, but you obey instantly, turning to face the table and propping yourself on your elbows, the rough grain cool beneath your cheek. You hear him behind you, the scrape of his chair across the stone as he moves to stand. The weight of his hand at your back is both warning and anchor as he flips your skirts up and over your waist and exposing your bare flesh to the chill of the council room. The air is cold, but his hands are a brand, searing every inch they touch.

He grinds up behind you, the heavy, swollen head of his cock lining up with your slick, clenching entrance, and you are so hungry that you try to wriggle back to catch him, but his other hand clamps to your hip, holding you in place.

Steven bends low, beard scratch and all, and growls into your ear, “You want to be claimed, little queen? You want to prove who you belong to?” The timber of his voice, the brutal edge of the words, makes your knees go to water. The answer is obvious. The answer is him. Always, always, always him.

You nod, but it isn’t enough for Steven. He wants words, he wants confession, he wants you to submit to this truth with clarity. “Say it,” he snarls, and the hand at your hip shifts to wrap around your throat, not hard, but with promise of force.

“I belong to you,” you say, the words the admission to usher in the next movement. You feel the hot slide of the broad head of Steven’s cock dragging slow and deliberate through your folds—soaking it in the mess he’s just made of you, teasing as though there is any possibility you would not take him instantly and whole. He rubs the slick head up and down, slow, then lingers at your entrance, not yet breaching, just savoring the helpless flex and pulse of your body trying to draw him in, refusing you the fullness you crave.

“You’re so desperate, you will let me fuck you right here on the war table,” he mutters, voice raw. The hand at your throat tightens slightly, making you shiver. “Would you let the entire kingdom see their queen bred by her king?”

You whimper, the shameful thrill of his words tightening every muscle in your core. “Yes. I would.” The fibers in your throat burn with the confession, but Steven’s hand at your nape releases just enough to let you gasp in relief. He’s proud of you—can feel it in the pulse of his cock, straining now, that he has made you need him so absolutely in this place and in this way.

Then there’s the sharp, deliberate press of his body crowding your ass, the hard and heavy heat of his cock settling between your cheeks, threatening the softest, tightest part of you. He bends down, mouth at your ear, and you feel the scrape of his beard and the thrum of his voice as he says, “Hold still.”

You do.

You pulse with anticipation, with nerves, with a need that borders on terror. Steven spits into his hand—loud, crude, and the sound goes straight to your clit—and then he smears the spit over the head of his cock, and over you, and then the push comes, blunt and inexorable, at the forbidden ring of muscle. It is too much, always, but you want it, you want the proof of his hunger, the rawness of being taken where only he has ever claimed.

The stretch is a fire in your bones. You dig your fingers into the edge of the table, desperate to ground yourself as Steven pushes past every last shred of resistance. It is agony and rapture, the full width of him splitting you, and for a moment you go blind, dizzy from the stretch and the heat and the sheer, obscene fullness of him forcing its way inside you.

He doesn’t take you all at once. He works you open, withdrawing and then pressing back in, a little deeper with every rut until you shake beneath him, gasping for air, sobbing around the thickness of him. Sweat beads along your spine, and you are aware only of the way the rough grain of the table digs into your cheek and the way his voice is a rasp of praise washing over you as he speaks.

“You take it,” he says, a kind of awe in the echoing hollowness of the council chamber. “You take me so well, little wife.”

Once fully sheathed, he holds you there, impaled, the hand on your neck now a bracing anchor, his hips flush to your ass. His other hand splays over your lower back, holding you steady and open, thumbs digging in just above the curve of your hips. You feel the tremble in his thighs, the fight he wages to keep from just rutting you through the table; you feel, too, the seething pride in how willing—how eager—you are to take whatever he gives, no matter how intense.

Slowly, Steven withdraws, the drag of his cock raw against the tight, trembling ring. He spits another mouthful into his palm, adds more lube to your now-aching hole, and sets a rhythm that is measured, deliberate. The sound of it—his hips meeting your flesh, the wet suction, the low, rough praise in his voice—is a percussion that underlines every brutal stroke. You crave the violence of it, the way he fucks you open with single-minded focus, and still, still, you want more.

“Steven,” you gasp, not knowing what you’re begging for, only that you want every inch, every ounce of him, even in the places that ache and pulse and maybe cannot take more. He answers with a groan, a hand moving from your hip to your clit, grinding over the little bundle of nerves with all the wicked skill he’s refined over months of your fucking.

The overwhelming friction, the fullness, the throb—is unbearable, and you come, hard, so hard it borders on violence. Your body clamps around him, the spasm nearly paralyzing you as your limbs weaken, every muscle in your core pulsing and throbbing around the invasive, overwhelming width of your king. The edges of your vision blur and the sound you make is animal, wordless, but Steven answers, driving you through the crest of your climax, sinking into you with a force that obliterates all thought.

He fucks you through it, relentless and victorious, hands huge and hard at your hips, jerking you back to claim every last inch until you’re sobbing with how full, how impossibly stuffed you are. Each thrust pushes you flat to the table, and you are only vaguely aware of the smears of spit and slick and sweat pooling at the join of your bodies, the way it soaks through your thighs, leaving you wrecked and open for him.

He’s not finished with you, not by a long shot. Steven’s cock withdraws from your ass with a slow, wrenching drag, leaving you shuddering and empty, all your muscles fluttering and your face hot against the cold grain of the table. You sob, a little, at the loss, and you can feel the slick mess of your own juices and his spit running down your thighs, the burn at your rim pulsing in time with your heartbeat.

But then his hands are gentler—one at your hip, one braced at your shoulder as he lines himself up again, this time pressing the heavy, hot tip of his cock between your thighs, seeking the place you are already swollen and desperate for him. You whimper, still spent and oversensitive from your first climax, but even so, you arch your hips, eager for the fullness only he gives.

He slides in, not slow but not cruel, just driving every inch into your aching, greedy cunt. You keen, desperate, not even caring that your voice is a needy, broken thing in the echoing hush of the council chamber.

Steven’s mouth finds your ear, “Every man at court, every lord, every advisor—every last one knows you are mine, but I want it ringing in their ears forever as I breed you.”

With every stroke, Steven’s cock brushes the most sensitive part inside you, your battered and wet cunt spasming around him, milking him for all he can give. You feel every vein, every ridge, every pulse of his cock as it spears you open, and it’s so much, so good, you come again, harder this time, a rush that’s almost terror but made only of pleasure, pure and shattering.

Your cunt pulses around him, hungry and slick, wringing him, wringing you, until there is nothing left in your head but the need to come again—and the way Steven makes you do it, every time, with just a fuck and a promise and the weight of his whole body pressing you down. You arch your back, desperate to take him deeper, and the hand at your shoulder pins you flat to the table, holding you still as he braces and thrusts, making you quiver and moan, making you mindless for him.

The pace now is punishing, but you crave it. Each time your hips threaten to buck off the wood he keeps you pinned down, rutting into you as if you’re a thing made only for his taking. The itch in your belly blooms to wildfire, sharp and wild, and the overstimulation is edged with a pleasure so beautiful you could scream for it, could cry for the way it rips you open and fills in every last corner of your wanting, and so you do.

He fucks you through the aftershocks, fucking every last spasm of pleasure from your body, fucking you until you’re hoarse and sobbing and barely conscious with the white-hot pleasure and the raw bruise of being so completely, so thoroughly used. You know you will wear the marks of this for days—on your throat, on your hips, at the tight, spent holes still drooling spit and slick and sweat down your thighs.

Steven comes at last with a roar, hips slamming into you so hard the edge of the table cuts the breath from your lungs, and the twitch and pulse of his cock fills you, flooding you in one final, conquering pulse. The heat of him, the quantity of him, is unspeakable—you feel it sear a path to your womb, a brutal, claiming flood that fills you so full the excess is forced out around his cock, further slicking your thighs, sticking your skin to the wood.

The hand at your nape strokes the ridge of your spine, his breath crashing against your back, and you realize he is fighting himself, struggling to corral the violent tenderness now threatening to shatter him from the inside out.

For a long while, neither of you move. The only sound is the ragged thrum of your breaths and the wild, feral stammer of his heart as it tries to slow. Your legs are boneless, splayed wide, and he keeps you pressed to the table, still impaled, as if even a breath’s space could risk losing what he’s just staked his soul on.

Finally, Steven eases back, hands gentle as he scoops you from the table—your limbs limp, trembling, useless in the aftermath—and cradles your whole body against his chest. He gathers your legs up as he moves back and reclaims his earlier seat, settling you in his lap, bundled and shattered against the heat of his skin. He strokes your hair, your back, mauling you close as if afraid you might dissolve into the air if not caged to him. His cock softens inside you, but he cannot let you go, not yet; he just clutches you tighter, your spent body rocked gently soothed, a motion at odds with the violence of minutes before.

When you can finally catch your breath, you turn slightly more into him and you press your cheek to the hollow of his throat. You listen to the tide of his pulse, the desperate hunt of his lungs for air. Somewhere outside, the world carries on—voices, firewood splitting, kids shrieking down the corridor—but here, in this carved-out moment, you are the only two who exist.

Steven is the one to speak first, rough and low in your ear. “I want—” He breaks off, his voice rough and strangely weak, so unlike the man who just ruined you over a council table you hardly know how to answer it. The man who has ruined you so many times. You lift your head to meet his gaze. The fires in his eyes are guttering now, but not cold—they burn with a different fuel, something almost like desperation.

“I want you to want it,” he says, the words torn from some engine deeper than pride, deeper than need. “Not just because I am your king. Not because it is owed. I want it because you choose it.”

The statement lands in the hollow between your ribs like a fist. You don’t know how to answer except to touch your lips to his, gentle, a whisper of a kiss where violent need reigned just minutes before. You press your mouth to the corner of his, then to the sharp line of his jaw, then the hollow beneath. “I do,” you say, and it’s a word so small it could barely crack a window in the cold stone of the Kongsgård, but you see the effect it has. His grip on you shifts, softer now, and he lets his forehead fall to yours, breaking into a long, shaky exhale. In this way you know that you have power, too—a different kind than you ever imagined, but no less absolute.

You stay like this, bodies twined, until the fire in the hearth burns low and the sweat on your skin cools to a chill. Every inch of you aches in the most delicious, dangerous ways. Your cunt is tender, the ring of your ass still pulsing with the memory of how he split you open and left you gaping. You ought to feel shame, but all you feel is a molten pride that you can take everything Steven gives and still want more.

You let him hold you until your breathing matches his, until your own hands find the strength to fist in the linen at his collar. His sweat cools in the hollow between your bodies, and you let your head rest heavy against his chest, the salt of his skin mixing with your own. Neither of you moves for a long while. When you finally slide off his lap, legs watery as river clay, Steven follows you, only a half-step behind, as if the gravity between your bodies is too constant to fully break.

You should return to your duties. Somewhere you are most certainly needed. But when Steven cups your chin and tilts your face up, his thumb grazing the corner of your mouth, every reason to leave the room vanishes. His lips devour you, slow and thorough, as if he wants to memorize this, encode it in every cell, until no part of you is untouched by the taste of this moment.

You break apart only when the need for air forces you to, but the hunger in it lingers. His hand cups the nape of your neck, thumb stroking slow over the vein that jumps there, and he rests his forehead to yours like a man newly landed from a voyage half the world wide. “You have unmade me,” he says, and it is a confession, not a complaint.

You laugh, shaky and soft, pressing your nose to his. “You did all the unmaking yourself.” The words are true, and you let them settle between you. He grins, the wolfish flash of his teeth just visible, and with it the tension diffuses, neither of you quite knowing what to do with so much tenderness made raw.

You gather yourself, smoothing your wrinkled skirt down over sticky thighs, but Steven is not finished. He crosses to the door, and opens it to speak with the attendant there. He instructs that a meal to be sent up to the royal chamber, and for a bath to be drawn, hot as the hearth can offer. The servant, catching the devastation in your overall appearance and the almost drunken glaze to Steven’s eyes, bows with a speed rarely seen and disappears before the king can clarify any further.

Steven’s attention returns to you. “I do not believe we are fit for anything but to retire for the rest of the day.”

For a moment, you feel like a maiden caught in mischief, but then Steven’s eyes drop to your mouth and you remember you are not a maiden, you are a queen, his queen, and whatever want burns in your blood is not merely allowed, but expected, demanded, starved for. His. Deeply his. And you feel anchored in that surety now.

Are we in a happily ever after yet? No. But things are certainly changing.

Please reblog if you enjoyed this/enjoy this series. My blog got marked as explicit permanently by dumblr, which means that my posts no longer show up in the public tags, so people honestly won't find it unless it's gets passed along by your reblogs now. 🥺 I'm wavering on how much longer it may or may not be worth it to post here if the point is being able to share it with others.

Main Masterlist | Aspen's Ask Box | Field Guide to the Forest

Thankfully, he doesn't sound too angry. Rather amused and fed up at the same time.

"I wasn't in trouble, I was just dancing." You counter.

"You snuck out of home, without a bodyguard or any family member to chaperone you." Andy mentions the rules that you know are there for a reason, but also annoy you too often.

Your brother, who became the head of your family after your dad's passing, is Andy's close friend and one of his most trusted men. Which is why in your brother's absence they dragged you straight to Andy.

Which was even worse, since he was the fucking head of the mob.

"You're a mafia princess. Not only you put yourself in potential danger, but also flaunt something that shouldn't be drooled over or touched by anyone beside your hudband."

Your fingers clench on the hem of your dress, pulling the fabric down your thighs. It's not that short and you know you're not that attractive, but Andy made it sound like you were attracting sexual attention of every man in that club.

You feel heat flooding your veins.

"Perhaps that's exactly what needs to be done." Andy tilts his head to the side.