Moon

Yet tears were for holy men... and, folly though it sounded, Ormund Hightower was a husband before he was ever a penitent.

True or not, he still knelt at the altars of the Starry Sept whenever duty and time allowed. His prayers were measured and humble, his hands clasped just so, his voice carrying the proper weight of contrition. He lit candles to the Mother, the Maiden, and the Crone alike, made his offerings on holy days, and listened patiently whilst septons spoke of virtue, duty, and the burdens the gods laid upon noble men.

Yet for all his devotion, Ormund possessed another passion besides prayer : he had a nose for perfumes.

Not merely an appreciation, but a keen, almost indecent sense for them, the way a hound might scent blood in the dark.

He could name the oils in any lady's hair from three paces, pick apart the florals and the musks and the rare eastern extracts : the smokebark from Qohor, the jasmine of Myr, the crushed petals of the winter rose. And yours, he'd told you once on your wedding night, after he'd spent two hours just pressing his face to the hollow of your throat, breathing you in — yours was the only scent that ever made his cock ache.

In company, when you teased him for it — which part, my lord? which part of me smells sweetest? — he'd play the gallant. Your hair, he'd say, lifting a strand between his fingers, letting the candlelight catch it. Or your wrist. The ladies would coo, your sisters would blush, the old men would nod and call him a devoted husband and you a beloved wife.

But when the door closed.

When the servants had taken the wine cups and the rushes had been swept and the candles burned low in their holders, and you stood before the basin in nothing but your thin linen shift, washing the powder and the perfume of the Great Hall from your skin — then he would tell you the truth.

You asked again, and you always asked, in the intimate dark of your bedchamber when the fire had dwindled to embers and you could feel the weight of his gaze on your back like a hand. Which part, husband?

His mouth would find your neck, wet and hot, his tongue dragging salt and skin and the faint trace of rosewater you'd dabbed there.

Your cunt, he'd murmur against your pulse, teeth scraping. When I'm hungry. He'd pause, breathing you in. Your neck, when I want to leave a mark. Your tongue, when I want to taste how sinful you can be when the gods aren't watching.

He was a man obsessed with perfumes, your husband. But his favorite had always been yours, yes, that particular musk of you, the scent that lingered in the sheets when you'd risen, that clung to the pillows he'd press his face into while you were away at the sept or at market.

That night, he stood at the basin longer than usual.

He watched you through the rippled reflection in the water before he plunged his face in, scrubbing the day's dust and the Great Hall's smoke from his skin. The candlelight caught the water trickling down his bare chest, the dark hair that matted his sternum, the hard muscle of his shoulders. Your husband slept bare every night, had done since your wedding, claiming your linens were too soft for wool and that anyway, he liked the feel of your thighs against his skin.

But tonight he wasn't watching you wash. He was watching you pray.

You were on your knees at the foot of the bed, hands clasped before you, head bowed. The shift you wore was good linen, near translucent in the firelight, falling to your calves and hiding nothing. The outline of your body — the dip of your waist, the curve of your hips, the shape of your cunt pressed against your thighs — all of it visible, all of it offered.

Your lips moved in silent devotion. Seven blessings. Seven thanks. The prayer for a husband's safe return, the one for a fruitful womb, the one your mother had taught you for forgiving a man his sins.

He didn't deserve forgiveness tonight.

When you finished, you made the sign of the seven-pointed star and slipped beneath the furs, settling onto your side, back to him. You hummed — that soft, contented sound you made when the sheets were clean and the bed was warm and you could feel him climbing in behind you.

Goodnight, my lord, you murmured.

He pressed his chest to your back. Skin to linen. The heat of him, still damp from the basin, seeping through the thin fabric. His cock was already half-hard against the curve of your ass, and you didn't flinch.

Goodnight, my love.

His mouth found your neck. A kiss, soft at first, then wetter, slower, his teeth grazing the tendon that ran from your ear to your shoulder. His palm spread flat on your belly, fingers splayed, just resting.

You didn't move.

Instead you pushed back into him. A slow, deliberate arch of your spine, pushing your ass against his cock, your back bowing until your shoulders pressed his chest and your hips cradled him. Your eyes were still closed. A faint smirk touched your lips.

He groaned. The sound was rough, dragged from somewhere deep, and he bit your earlobe for it.

Minx.

His hand slipped, down from your belly, across the linen, gathering the hem of your shift and pulling it up your thighs. Slow. Deliberate. The fabric whispered against your skin, bunching around your hips, leaving you bare from the waist down.

His fingers found the thatch of dark hair between your legs. He touched it first — just touched, just felt the coarse curls against his calloused fingertips. Then he tugged. Gentle pulls, wrapping strands around his fingers, tugging just enough to make your hips shift, to make you press back against him harder.

Nothing, he breathed into your ear. No smallclothes. No shift beneath the shift. You came to bed bare for me.

You said nothing. Your hand reached back, found the nape of his neck, fingers tangling in the damp hair at his skull.

His fingers slid lower.

Through the hair, through the wet heat of you, parting the lips of your cunt with a slowness that bordered on cruel. He found your pearl — that tight, swollen nub hidden in its hood of flesh — and pinched it between his thumb and forefinger.

You gasped. A real sound, torn from you, your hips bucking into his hand.

He pressed his mouth to your ear, and he laughed — a low, dark sound that vibrated through his chest into your back.

Oh, the gods would weep to see you now, wife. So pious at the sept. So proper at the feast. And here, in the dark, you spread your legs for a finger and a whisper.

His thumb worked your pearl in slow circles, wet with your slick, while his middle finger traced the length of your slit. Up and down. Teasing the entrance, pressing just barely at the rim of you, then dragging back up to circle your pearl again.

You were soaked. Puffy and swollen and dripping for him, your slick coating his fingers, your thighs trembling where they pressed together around his hand.

He kept whispering.

You think the septon knows? When he gives you the seven blessings and you lower your eyes so demurely — you think he knows your cunt is this wet? That you knelt at the altar this morning with your thighs pressed tight to keep my seed from running down your leg?

Two fingers. He pushed them into you without warning, without prelude, just the sudden, slick slide of them burying to the knuckle in your heat.

You cried out. Not loud — bitten off, swallowed, your hand clapping over your own mouth as his fingers curled inside you.

His other hand clamped over yours, pulling it away, lacing his fingers through yours and pressing your palm flat to the mattress.

No, he said. I want to hear you.

He fucked you with his fingers. There was no other word for it — the wet, obscene squash of his hand moving between your thighs, the rhythm of it, the way he curled his fingers to find that spot inside you that made your vision white at the edges. Your hips moved with him, pushing back to meet every thrust, your mouth open against the pillow, your moans muffled into the feathers.

That's it. That's my wife. His voice was wrecked, ragged. You take my fingers so well, love. What will you take next?

The sound of it filled the quiet room. The wet slap of his hand, the rhythm of his breathing, the broken sounds you made beneath him. He fucked you with three fingers now, stretching you open, his thumb pressing hard on your pearl while his teeth found your shoulder and bit down — just enough to mark, just enough to make you gasp.

You taste like honey and sin, he murmured against the bite mark. And I am the hungriest man in the Reach.

The squash of his wet hand. The stutter of your breath. The way you whispered his name, broken and desperate, as he pushed you closer and closer to that edge.

Come for me, he said. Let the whole of the Hightower know what a sinful little wife I have.

And in the dark of your bedchamber, with the prayers still warm on your lips and his fingers buried deep inside you, you did.

He was not finished.

The thought came to you through the haze, through the aftershocks still pulsing through your thighs, through the wet sound of your own breathing as you lay there, limp and shattered, your cunt still clenching around nothing. You thought perhaps he would roll off, would press a kiss to your shoulder and settle against your back, would whisper some sweet nothing and fall asleep with his nose pressed to your hair.

But Ormund Hightower was not a man who took one meal and called himself fed.

He pulled his fingers from you slow — dragging along your inner walls, making you shudder at the loss. You heard him bring them to his mouth. Heard the wet and sinful sound of him sucking them clean, the low groan he made tasting you on his own skin.

Then he grabbed your hip and turned you.

The world spun, furs and linen and candlelight, and then you were on your back, your husband looming over you, his face dark with hunger. His dirty blonde hair hung damp across his brow, eyes black in the firelight, and mouth wet with you.

He kissed you. Oh, how he kissed you.

Not the chaste peck of a husband taking leave. Not the gentle press of a man being tender. This was a claiming — his tongue sliding into your mouth, thick and insistent, and you tasted yourself on him. Salty and musk and the copper of your own arousal. He kissed you until you couldn't breathe, until your chest heaved and your hands came up to push at his shoulders, and only then did he break it, mouths still close, breath mingling.

You taste even better on my tongue, he said. But I want your warmth.

He took off your shift, and then descended.

His mouth trailed down your chin, your throat, the hollow between your collarbones. He paused at your breasts — took a nipple between his teeth, bit just enough to make you arch, soothed it with his tongue while his hand found the other and pinched. Then lower. Over the soft swell of your belly, the jut of your hipbone, the place where your thighs began.

He settled between them.

Your hands found his hair before he'd even reached his destination — fingers tangling in the thick, dark curls, gripping hard. You bucked your hips toward his mouth, desperate, needy, the overstimulation from before still singing in your nerves.

He pinned you.

His hands clamped down on your hips, hard enough to bruise, pressing you flat into the mattress. You could not move, could not grind against his face, could not evenchase the friction you craved. You were held open, held still, held.

Patience, he murmured against your inner thigh. I'll have you when I'm ready.

His breath was hot on your cunt. You felt it — the warm exhalation against your soaked, swollen flesh — and your whole body trembled. You were raw from his fingers, sensitive to the point of pain, every nerve ending standing at attention and begging.

He licked you.

A single, long stroke, from the base of your slit to the tip of your pearl, his tongue flat and broad and wet. You cried out. Your hips strained against his grip, but he held you fast, and he did it again. And again. Each stroke slower than the last, savoring, tasting, groaning against your flesh until you felt the vibration through your whole body.

Gods, he breathed into you. I could die here. I would die happy, with your cunt on my tongue.

He ate you like a starving man.

His mouth devoured you — lips sucking your pearl, tongue fucking into your hole, his nose pressing against your clit with every movement. He groaned against you, the sound muffled by your flesh, and the vibration sent sparks up your spine. He pulled you impossibly closer, his hands gripping your hips and dragging you harder against his face, and you let him. You gave him everything. Your hands fisted in his hair, holding him there, and you rode his mouth with what little freedom he allowed you.

Ormund — His name came out broken, keening.

He answered by pressing his thumb to your pearl — hard, rubbing tight circles while his tongue speared into you, fucking you open, drinking everything you gave him.

You were close again too soon. Too fast. The pleasure was almost pain, the overstimulation building like a fever, and you tried to push his head away. You couldn't. Your hands pulled at his curls but he didn't stop, didn't slow, his thumb pressing harder, his tongue deeper.

Please — please, husband, I cannot —

He did not stop.

Your orgasm crashed over you like a wave, like a wall falling, like the whole of the Hightower crumbling to dust. You screamed. You saw white — a blinding, total whiteness that blotted out the room, the candles, the man between your thighs. Your cunt clenched and spasmed, flooding his mouth, and he groaned against you and kept licking, kept sucking, drawing it out until you were sobbing, until you were pushing at his shoulders with what little strength you had left.

Only then did he lift his head.

His face was slick with you. His chin gleamed in the candlelight, his lips wet, his eyes dark and satisfied. He did not wipe his mouth. He simply looked at you broken and panting beneath him, your thighs trembling, your cunt still fluttering) and he smiled.

But he was not finished.

Ormund reached to the bedside table. His hand moved with practiced ease, finding a small vial of cut crystal, the kind that usually held perfumes and rare oils. He uncorked it with his teeth.

And while your cunt still wept with your peak, he gathered it.

His fingers slid into you again — gentle this time, coaxing, milking your orgasm as it ebbed. You watched through half-lidded eyes as he held the vial beneath you, watched as your own wetness trickled down his fingers and into the crystal. Drop by drop. The vial filled with your slick, pale and thick in the candlelight, and he watched it with the same reverence he gave the seven-pointed star.

When the vial was full, he corked it. Set it back on the bedside table. Returned his gaze to you.

You opened your mouth — to tease him, perhaps. To ask if he meant to wear your scent to court tomorrow, or if he planned to anoint himself before the septon. You were used to his strange ways with perfume, his collections of oils and essences, his obsession with the way things smelled.

But before the words could form, he took you.

His breeches disappeared, and with a single, swift motion — his hand on your hip, the blunt head of his cock pressing at your entrance, and then he was inside you. All of him. In one stroke, burying to the hilt, filling you completely.

Your breath left you in a rush. Your back arched off the bed. His name was a prayer, a curse, a sob.

He began to move.

No more talking, he growled, his forehead pressed to yours, his hips driving into you with desperate, hungry strokes. No more games. I want to feel you come on my cock. I want to feel you milk me dry.

So he fucked you.

Crude as it sound, there was no other word. He fucked you with the same hunger he'd eaten you with, with the same devotion he prayed with, with the same obsession he collected his perfumes. His hips slammed into yours, the wet sound of your bodies meeting filled the room, and you wrapped your legs around his waist and held on.

Come for me, he demanded. Again. Now.

And you did. Because you could not help it. Because he owned every part of you, because your body answered his before your mind could catch up, because the sight of him above you (sweating, desperate, beautiful) undid something deep in your chest.

You shattered around him.

He followed a heartbeat later, his groan low and guttural, his hips stuttering as he emptied himself into you. Hot and thick, filling you, marking you from the inside.

He collapsed on top of you, his full weight pressing you into the mattress, his face buried in your neck. He breathed you in, a long, shuddering inhale, and you felt his lips press a kiss to your pulse.

You smell like sin, he murmured against your skin. Like heaven and sin and everything I should not want.

His hand found the vial on the bedside table. He held it up to the candlelight, watching your slick catch the glow.

And I want to keep every drop.

He settled behind you like a man coming home.

The shift of the furs, the creak of the bedframe, the warmth of his chest pressing against your back. His arm slid beneath your head, making a pillow of his bicep, and he pulled the covers up over both of you — silk and the heavy quilt your mother had stitched for your wedding. He tucked it beneath your chin with a tenderness that seemed impossible from the man who'd just fucked you into the mattress.

His mouth found your neck. Small kisses, pecks really, soft as moth wings, trailing from your ear down to your shoulder. You felt him smile against your skin.

You were still catching your breath. Still floating in that warm, liquid haze that followed his claiming, your limbs heavy, your cunt sore and satisfied, the ghost of his cock and fingers still stretching you. You felt his softening length pressed against the curve of your ass, wet and spent, and you pushed back into him instinctively.

His hand found your breast. It always did. Every night, without fail, whether he'd taken you or not, his palm would cup your flesh, his thumb would find your nipple, and he would hold you like that until sleep took him. You'd come to expect it, to need it, the weight of his hand a comfort you couldn't name.

But his other hand did not go to your waist.

It slipped lower. Over the curve of your hip, across the soft skin of your belly, down through the coarse hair between your thighs. You were too tired to open your eyes, too spent to question, but you felt his fingers find your entrance — slick and swollen and still leaking his seed.

He pushed inside you.

Two fingers. Slow and gentle, a soft intrusion that made you sigh rather than gasp. He buried them to the knuckle, and then he stilled.

To keep your scent on me by morning, he murmured against your hair. So I can take you with me when I rise.

You hummed. A sound of agreement, or surrender, or simple exhaustion. Your hand found his where it cupped your breast, and you held him there, your fingers intertwined with his.

You were already gone. Already drifting into that deep, dreamless sleep that only a well-fucked wife could find. Your breathing evened, your body relaxed fully against his, your cunt clenching occasionally around his fingers in reflexive, dreaming pulses.

The Maiden herself might blush to hear such thoughts, and even the Stranger would raise an eyebrow, if the tales were true. Yet what were gods and their judgments beside the comfort and joy your husband brought you? Let the septons mutter of sin. Let them wag their fingers and speak of virtue. The Seven might forgive you...

All of the muttering on, the worrying and fussing over his opponent, that’s all he’s heard. All evening long.

He unhorsed him, that was all. A clean break in the leg and nothing more. And yet you were insistent.

“But what of him? They say he is to be permanently wounded Aerion that is not—“

“It’s the way of the sword. Nothing else to be done.” His fingers curl tight around the pommel as they drag the cloth over it, making short attempts to clean what little dirt littered the edges. While trying desperately to ignore the way you stand in front of him, frantic and far too observant.

“Yes but he—“

“Then he should not have challenged me.”

The air in the pavilion is thick. So thick it’s hard to breathe, but you don’t stop, you can’t. And not with him being so careless. The hearth crackles in the corner but the sound doesn’t break the tenseness between you, it only heightens it. Counting every second that passes as violet eyes cast over you, slowing the work on his dagger.

It’s dark and watchful, daring you to speak again, to challenge him, to tell him that he’s in the wrong. You know that he is, everyone who booed and jeered in the tourney grounds did.

You go to speak. Not so much to argue, but to reason. And he notices, the way Aerion does.

Snarling.

“Enough.” His voice comes fast, slamming the pommel to the table at his side, rising to his feet in less than a blink.

He has you then. Red faced and stuttering around the grip of his fingers he has piercing at your throat. His smirk grows dark, lips curving with a hitch from the back of his throat.

But that’s only the beginning. He hasn’t quite got you where he wants you yet, he hasn’t vanquished the argument, he hasn’t given his point, he hasn’t fucked all of those useless thoughts from you that leave only him.

But he vows it, in his gaze, in the way he backs you into the bed hand still closed around your throat, the other curling at your side to sink into your dresses.

“I believe you are contradicting your Prince on his own victory..”

The ‘your’ is punctuated with his thumb dragging over the hollow of your throat, eyes flickering to watch where it bobs and panics, and not on you. He’s transfixed. The way your body reacts, so beautiful like this. So, his..

“No Aerion I would not—“ You choke out from his grip, hands raising to grab at him, to pull him closer, to assure him. And by the Gods it’s the truth. And he knows it, he sees it, feels it. And that’s enough.

“Good.”

That’s all he gives, all he can bare to before he’s tearing the layers from you, teeth biting into your lips as he crowds you.

Your hands fist into the sheets, your mouth hung open with every thrust that sends you jolting up the bed and back into the cage of his arms. He keeps you grounded there, one hand grasped at your breast tightly, the other wrapped your leg at his hip

And he’s relentless.

“You just don’t know when to stop do you?” He calls out to you, and you barely make it out, eyes rolling into your head with the feel of him rutting deep into your tight cunt.

Pale planes of muscle glimmer and glint with the sweat that sheens him in the candlelight, the slap of skin lewdly filling your ears only adding to the pressure that coils in your belly. Your moans turn into babbles, your mind overwhelmed and turned to a muddle with the amount of times he’s made you come undone. His fingers, his mouth biting bruising marks into your skin, his cock..

His hand fists into your hair, gripping you tightly with both hands to spin you onto your front. Your mouth shoved the sheets, open and blissed.

“..So pretty dove.” The one hand moves, both settling to take fistfuls of the fat of your hips, dragging you back down onto his length as he bends you more into the mattress, his knees grinding into the backs of your thighs.. “So..” Thrust. “So..” Thrust.

“Pretty when you shut that mouth.”

He leans over you, coiling much like a snake, the hot air from his mouth blowing over the shell of your ear. And he stills, delicious and aching, settling right up where you squeeze him tight, cock shoved leaking and kissing at the plug of your cervix.

“Nothing more to say?” He tries not to stutter, grappling at your body to keep you anchored tight to him, tongue clicking against his lip.

His eyes flicker up, dragging over you with a darkness. An intensity that makes your skin burn and face heat up even where you can’t see him. All that leaves your lips is a moan, guttural and wanton. Because chest heaves at your back, sheen coating your bodies where your breaths tremble and bodies ache for more.