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Even now, sullied and wanton, his lady wife holds herself with dignity.
No inkling of shame dips her chin. No trace of regret slumps her spine. She sits with her shoulders back and her hands clasped atop her brocade lap, elegantly, as though in wait for her ladies to gather over tea. Propriety drapes her as would a shield.
Beron observes this from above the rim of his glass. Bourbon hits his tongue chilled and slides down his throat molten. His hopes were that the spirit would dull the whetted edges of his ire, but it settles in his belly like cordwood on embers.
Steps sharp on the still air, he makes his approach. The cast of his shadow looms dark over her body with the hearthfire raging at his back. It is itself bright as the sun and half as hot.
Lowly, "His name."
It is as each time he has demanded it of her before: a turn of her face away to gaze into the inglenook, expression placid, tongue held.
He is struck by the urge to rip it from her mouth, that tongue. Rob her of its utility—of the memories it stored, the arousal it tasted, the veins it traced. Tear a rend clean through the spite that keeps it still.
But if he leaves her with such a mark, it will be seen, it will be known, and that knowledge will spread as does brushfire in the dry season: the Lady of Autumn, punished; so callous, so cruel; for what, for what?
And, eventually, through all the misspeak and lies, someone will speak the truth: for making a cuckold of the High Lord; for straying from his bed like a common whore; for playing him for a fool and a half-wit—and surely he must be, for what sort of ruler cannot handle even his own female?
A sneer ripples his mouth. "I won't ask you again, Amalia."
She knows he speaks true. She has seen it before in his handling of their progeny. Just as often, she has looked away, but only because she knows what the consequences must be for disobedience.
Silence.
As though he—her husband, her lord, her numen—has not demanded anything of her at all.
Sweltering heat gives rise from his flesh form, such that it becomes a strain to keep it intact around his bones. Wavelets of distortion ripple through the air. They lap against the exposed skin of her clavicles and her slender neck, fury borne, stinging her red.
Still, she refuses him her acknowledgement.
Beron knows a blazing indignation as he has not been made to confront in so long. Longer than even memory can serve. It is a jarring, discomfiting reminder of his origins, shadowing only over the farthest edges of the mind and cast there in the spectral pallor of ephemerality.
Then, he had quenched his umbrage with blood of his blood—a lesson that never quite left him in the after, stained too darkly into his palms, carved too deeply into his forging: the power had come once enough blood had spilled, and it alone had been the thing to balm how hot he burned within.
He lowers to his haunches before his lady wife. A smooth descent, constrictive about his loins beneath the strain of his trousers. He regards her now from a vantage he has rarely suffered and never before relished in. It is a moment like a scald—not shared between or bestowed upon but left for him to endure alone.
Burning and burning and burning again.
Any bourbon left to his glass turns to mist, then into nothing at all. In his hold, the smooth surface molds against the exacting ridges demanded by his touch. With less than a thought, he could turn it weapon. Bend it to his will until it became as liquid lash, as blade unerring. Brandish its molten edge against the delicate give of her throat. Press until it met the resistance of bone and beyond.
His father would have done so in the very moment that her betrayal was made known, before the indignation had chance to rekindle in him, tucked away there where not even he was permitted to feel the wafting shame of it. That death would have been unkindlier than the one he bestowed would be, and it would not have preserved this dignity she clings to. His father would have borne his shame onto her sevenfold.
A thing Beron is yet unable to do.
If she knows he considers her death, she offers him no sign.
Only her far-gazing silence.
Something of it incenses him beyond the disrespect. After a time, he manages to wrangle the offense and wring its neck to stillness. In the charred corpse, he finds it: a pervasive disgust that the wife he chose to grace his dais, that the mother he chose bear his sons would sit now in mortal peril and use only impassivity as means of preservation. No word in her defense. No action.
He could kill her. He wants to kill her.
It would be only the birthright of his ascendance.
For this pathetic show of force alone, he should. None would whisper of his hand in her death, not with any merit. Punishment made tragedy, made gasping, heaving loss. Their folk would mourn, but as he would grieve alongside them, they would not suspect what he sought to conceal—nor would any dare be the first to cast aspersion, even if they did.
But there is not blood enough to undo what she has already done, nor to remake all that she has ruined.
Through the gaps between his fingers, the glass takes to flowing, a fire running like water in his periphery. Considerate and formless as he regards his wife's impudence. Itself, it remains in unhurried, serpentine wait to bear his impression and fulfill his intentions.
"Did such defiance please him?” Beron goads. “Did he enjoy you willful and contrary? Is that where you’ve come across such piss-poor manners?"
Light dances across her placid features. It flickers out as quickly.
In response, his ire surges. His vision sharpens, the narrow focus of slitted predation. The beneath of his skin shimmers, metallic and crimson, a hide like a beast of old. All sensation rises to the harkening of a simple, possessive fury.
"Surely," he croons, "I trained you better than to be broken by a cock."
Songless bird, sat snipped of wing. Scent unaffected and silence absolute. Her feathers do not ruffle before him, let alone preen, let alone burn alongside.
His match is unmet now that his female has been leched by another.
He takes hold of her by the throat as he rises to full height, drawing her up with him until it is only her toes which brush the floor. Against her parted mouth, he makes to speak—
—and there, on his flicking tongue, he tastes the change in her scent that had been obscured by her quiescience: the warmth and light of another like honey oozing through a comb. Not just the fleeting pollen of arousal but a thicker lingering. Something hidden from him with intent.
A glamour.
His crystalline grip constricts until she at last makes a soft, choked sound.
As she might while another male pushed his cock past her lips. As she might with another male filling up her cunt and spilling himself deep. As she might as another male sampled her saccharine taste for himself.
Everything of her, he shares now with another. Nameless and shapeless, the male could be anyone. He is peasant lord slave merchant soldier. He is each shift of the shade, each gust of the wind. His presence looms high above them, ever between them, inextricable from the dominion he has over his own wife.
His wife.
She was once only his.
She will belong only to him again.
With the sudden alacrity of the primal, Beron thinks, I need neither blood nor death to reclaim what is mine; I am power unto myself.
Sibilant, "If you want to play act a whore, I shall treat you as one."
There is no fight to her as he reduces her raiment to ash and drags her lifeless to their marriage bed. Beneath his weight, her naked body is limber not with the yielding of a female cowed but the resignation of a fate sealed before he ever laid hand to her. It contorts his ire into something novel.
The molten glass slithers down his fingers, purposeful now, swift to heed him. It coils tight around her neck, wrapping like a covetous tail. Heat drawn back behind his breastbone, he leaves his claim affixed to her.
In the form of a collar.
Beron draws his thumb over its sleek surface as he withdraws his cock from his trousers. Amalia turns her face aside, pressing a high-boned cheek flush to the duvet, and pinches her eyes against the notch of his head at her entrance. It is clenched tight with appall.
A whore, he reminds himself. His lady wife has made herself into a whore, no matter her dignity, no matter her primness. She had more opportunity than she deserved to offer up a name in her stead, and she elected to keep her silence about her as armament. She is unworthy of his mercy.
With a single snap of his hips, he buries himself to the hilt. Her cry as he batters against her womb is muffled and forlorn, but no quarter is permitted her.
Not even when the first tear slips free and undams the rest.
Instead, his focus turns away, aside, honed on the familiar warmth of her fit around him, if not yet slick then becoming so as he demands it of her. The unsteadying of her breath as the sudden stretch is eased with the pleasure inherent to any coupling. The slow relenting of her pleading thighs around his hips and the hesitant rise of her own to meet them.
Surrender, comes the satisfied thought. Then, with a hitch to his thrusts: But to whom?
Behind her shuttered gaze, the intrusion of the other. Yet nameless for him. Shapeless.
But not for her.
She knows his sweat on her skin. She knows his satisfaction in her lungs. She knows his spend spilled within.
Even now, with a cock buried inside, with a claim marked, with a punishment bestowed such that none would think to whisper of it—her mind is her own to stray as it pleases. It feels as much betrayal as her body belonging to another.
Beron jerks his hand up the curve of her neck, takes hold of her jaw and wrenches her face to meet his. "Look at me," he demands.
A sniffle. A defiance.
Through his teeth, "You will look at me, Amalia."
Finally, she does.
Stillness seizes him.
In the depths of her eyes, he sees no impression left behind by the other male. Only a heart wounded, irrevocably. And on the glass of their surface: himself as his power, alone and struck dumb with the realization.
It had not been a matter of the body.
Her silence had not been spite, and it had not been a means of self-preservation.
His lady wife loved her swain, no matter that he had been a lesser male. She loves him even now. Enough to place herself bodily between him and his owed death.
It was her loyalty which strayed.
Beron, burningburningburning, feels the scrabble of panicked fingers around his wrist, then lines of fire striped down his forearms. Despite that his cock has fallen limp, he recognizes that the thrashing against his body, that the frantic whimpers against the heel of his palm speak of pain demanded by his touch.
His hand returns to her throat, leaving rawed flesh in its wake. The fleeting balm that meets the heel of his palm mocks him with its false simplicity. As if anything could belong to him without a bloodprice exacted from it.
With less than a thought, the collar shatters from around her red-ringed neck.
Amalia, naked at his behest, wounded by his hand, draws up to the edge of the bed as he finds his feet. She is careless now for how her body presents itself. Stripped, at last, of her shielding silence.
"Please," she rasps. "Please, my lord."
Stay, she might have said then. Forgive me. My heart has been fickle, but you must know it is you who I bleed for.
Yet she leaves the finishing words to dangle between, endless.
He prods at the cavity of his chest for the spark of his indignation, but he finds that it burns no longer. There is a petrified thing there now. Hard and vicious, knotted heavily against itself at the center.
A wave of his hand sees him resituated. He turns for the door as if he had only stepped inside their chambers to collect something forgotten.
"Beron."
Refusing her the satisfaction, he does not pause until his hand is on the latch. There, he exacts his price.
"It need not be his life, Amalia. Any blood that is not of mine will flow well enough."
Beron does not look back to see if his lady wife has the wherewithal to feign ignorance.