Page 9

Eight

Tate

The rest of the night was a blur of skin and sighs in Adelais’s tent. And when Tate crept back to the abbey at dawn, sore between her legs and her heart feeling like it was too big to fit inside the mew of her ribs, Adelais went part of the way with her, walking Tate to the footpath she’d take up the hills and then around to the backside of the valley.

“Do you have to go?” Adelais asked. Her hair was all the way undone now, and she wore only a thin undershirt over her hose. In the gradually brightening gloom, Tate could see the lean shape of Adelais’s body through the fabric.

“I wish I could stay,” Tate said, meaning it. “With you.”

“Would that be strange for you?” Adelais asked. “Staying with me?”

“Because you’re not a man? Because I’m a nun?” She thought for a moment. “Or because you’re a Norman?”

Adelais let out a low laugh. “All three, I suppose.”

That was fair. This was hardly the usual way things happened, but then again, they were hardly the usual people. “Things are different where I grew up,” Tate explained. “At Thornchurch. There weren’t any limits as to who you shared a bed or a life with, at least not in the valley. And as for being a Norman, well. No one’s perfect.”

Adelais grinned. But the grin came with a pinning stare. “You didn’t address the part about being a nun.”

“And I won’t,” Tate replied. “Unless you do the impossible and win your bet.”

“My bet that I’ll learn the secrets of this place?” Adelais smiled, her hands tucked behind her back. “Hmmm.”

“Good night, Adelais. Or good morning, I suppose. I’ll see you tonight.”

And so Tate left the smiling soldier behind and trudged back to her abbey, her home, and her responsibility.

Her prison.

Leofgifu took one look at Tate and demanded she spend the day catching up on sleep, but Tate refused, joining her and Judith for lauds, and then helping care for the sick pilgrims. But as she prayed, carried water, and cleaned bed linens, her mind was still on the road with Adelais. Her body was still trembling with a release so powerful it unraveled everything she knew about herself, and her heart was still in her throat, remembering how Adelais’s voice sounded as she’d asked, Do you have to go?

But mostly, there was this thing that followed her, that was like a halo coming from inside her, but it came from her chest and her gut as well as her head, and it was this one simple revelation.

Absolution.

Tate didn’t know how Adelais had bequeathed it to her, how Adelais’s blunt non-judgment had done what Mother Ardith’s confidence and Edwin’s gentle reassurances hadn’t, but somehow, it had. Tate felt lighter, brighter, like maybe forgiveness could be hers. Like maybe it had been hers a long time ago, and God had to resort to sending a Norman invader to her door to tell her so.

A Norman invader who Tate couldn’t stop thinking about, couldn’t stop aching for.

Tonight , she told herself. Tonight. And maybe—well, the Normans were here to stay, weren’t they? Adelais had mentioned a son in Normandy, but perhaps it wasn’t so unreasonable that she would live in England, at least some of the time. William seemed to keep his favorite nobles close, rewarded them with stolen lands and titles. Tate had hated William for it before, but if it meant Adelais stayed in England, that she could see Adelais again after all this was over…

After their noontime prayers, Leofgifu ordered her to bed. Tate made sure the pilgrims were cared for, and then staggered to her cell, barely able to wash herself and change into a clean shift before she collapsed onto her bed and darkness took her.

Her dreams were all of Adelais.

They were very good ones.

But when she woke from her happy, wicked dreams, she woke not to late afternoon sunlight, but to complete darkness. Leofgifu must not have woken her up for their afternoon or evening prayers.

Tate had needed the sleep, but now she was going to be late to meet Adelais, and that had her tossing her blanket back to roll out of bed as quickly as she could.

Except her blanket didn’t flip over her legs. It barely fluttered at all. Tate blinked as the shadows at the edge of her bed began to move, resolve into a shape, tall and large, barely outlined by the faint moonlight coming in from a small, high window. A dagger hilt gleamed at the shadow’s waist.

Someone was in her cell.

Someone was in her cell watching her sleep .

Tate opened her mouth to scream, but a hand clapped over her mouth instead. “Shh,” said a musical voice in the dark. Tate smelled grass, metal, soap. “You don’t want to wake anyone up, do you?”

Tate tried to speak, but Adelais didn’t loosen her hand on Tate’s mouth.

“You know,” Adelais said conversationally, “when you didn’t show up tonight, I thought maybe you’d decided not to honor the arrangement after all. That a third Danegeld payment was one too many.”

Tate reached up to pull at Adelais’s wrist, but Adelais caught her hand with her free one, her eyes shining.

“No, no, abbess, I’m not angry. I came here to demand my payment, thinking I’d find you defiant, hiding yourself away from me, and instead I found my little mouse curled up asleep in her nest. I must have worn you out last night.”

It wasn’t that the fear was leaking out of Tate so much that it was joined by something just as hot, just as torturous, a brew of the same wicked, sizzling lust she felt last night. She should be wondering how Adelais made it inside the abbey, if any other Normans were inside the walls.

Adelais seemed to sense her questions, because she leaned close to Tate and murmured, “It’s only me, abbess. Now, about that payment…”

Tate squirmed as Adelais considered her.

“Whatever shall I do with this little nun I’ve caught unawares?” the Wolf mused. “Hmm.”

Tate moaned against her hand.

“Perhaps,” Adelais said slowly, “I will do whatever I want.”

She lifted her hand from Tate’s mouth, but only long enough to shove the blankets off and find the edge of Tate’s shift. It was a threadbare thing, since it would be a sin to waste Far Hope’s wealth on something as frivolous as luxurious clothes for the sisters. Adelais seemed almost offended by it as she looked at it in the moonlight; with a displeased noise, she easily ripped a long piece from the hem, leaning down and using her teeth to tear the whole strip free.

Tate was about to protest—this was one of only two shifts she owned, and she’d planned on wearing it until it literally fell apart—but then Adelais was wrapping the linen around Tate’s wrists and cinching them together. Tate was bound fast, like a captive for real, although strangely the insides of her felt unbound now, like the knots around her wrists had unraveled something that had been choking and pinching the insides of her without her knowing it until this very moment.

Adelais sat up to admire her handiwork. “If you need to stop, say the word,” she said bluntly, warmly. Arestes . It sounded like a secret, sacred word when she uttered it in the dark. Tate nodded to show she understood Adelais’s instructions.

“Now,” Adelais went on, her voice tilting darker and colder, becoming the voice of an Adelais who crept into abbeys at night and sated her lusts on the innocent nuns she found there. “What will I do with you…”

Adelais moved so that her entire body was on the cot and then crawled down Tate’s body until she knelt between Tate’s legs. She pushed the now-tattered hem of Tate’s shift up to her hips.

“What a pretty pussy,” said the Wolf. “A shame it’s locked away in a convent for no one else to enjoy, hmm?”

She ran idle fingers over the topography of Tate’s cunt, toying with the wet rim of Tate’s opening, with the sensitive berry of her clit.

“Please,” gasped Tate. “I’ll give you anything.”

Firm fingers pushed into Tate, and Tate’s back arched clean off the bed. “You’re right about that,” Adelais said, a toothy smile coming with her words. “You will give me anything.”

It felt good to resist, to say no. To be forced to take what Adelais was giving her, because that way she didn’t have to ask for it, she didn’t have to weigh if she’d atoned enough to deserve it. She didn’t have to wonder if it was selfish to take just one thing, one moment, for herself when the abbey needed her so desperately and always would.

Adelais slid her fingers free and then braced both hands on Tate’s naked thighs. She could feel her own wetness against her skin from Adelais’s touch, and it abruptly felt so raw, so carnal, that she could hardly stand it. Then came the Wolf’s mouth, a hot slick of tongue, and Tate uttered a broken groan. She hadn’t felt someone’s mouth on her in so long, hadn’t felt that symphony of soft lips, slippery tongue, blunt teeth in what felt like forever. Since before Edwin had died.

Adelais ate Tate’s cunt with a sort of greed that made the dynamic perfectly clear: this was not for Tate. Tate was bound and helpless for Adelais’s pleasure, not her own, and that alone ratcheted up Tate’s pleasure even higher.

Heat, tickling and seeking, twined through Tate’s core, twisting up into her chest and throat. Adelais licked and swirled like Tate was the only food she’d had in years, and then she pulled Tate’s clit into her mouth and sucked.

Tate cried out, squirming, reaching down to thread fingers through Adelais’s hair, and then remembered all over again that her hands were tied and she could do no such thing.

Adelais lifted her head from between Tate’s legs and looked up at her with shining eyes and a shining, wet mouth. “It won’t do to be so noisy, sister,” the Wolf said. “I’d hate to have to flip you over and make you bite the blanket as I feel this lovely cunt for myself. Are you going to be quiet for me?”

Tate nodded quickly, sealing her lips together, although she couldn’t deny that the threat wound her up too.

“I think I know the problem,” Adelais said, a thread of malice weaving through her words. It made Tate shiver to hear. “You’ve been hiding this sweet thing away from everyone for so long, and it needs to come before you can behave. Don’t worry. I can help with that.”

Adelais reached down to her hip, and there was a flash of metal in the dark. Tate twisted instinctively—no matter how much she trusted Adelais, no matter how much she loved this depraved game of theirs, there was no escaping the urge to shy away from a knife.

With an annoyed sigh, Adelais splayed a hand on Tate’s belly to pin her to the cot. Adelais put the blade between her own teeth and held the knife in her mouth while she unpinned her cloak and wrapped part of it around her hand. “It’s for your own good, beautiful.” And then she did something that Tate, abbess of Far Hope, leader of secret prayers in the star-ceilinged chamber, couldn’t understand. Adelais took the knife out of her mouth and licked the smooth, unornamented hilt.

Tate blinked, wondering if the darkness was playing tricks on her, if she’d missed something in her twenty-five years of life that would have indicated that hilt-licking was a sexual act.

But then it became shockingly, exquisitely clear when Adelais took the knife and gently eased the hilt inside Tate.

Never—not even since she’d been initiated into Far Hope’s rites—had Tate done such a thing, had she even heard of such a thing, using an object this way. Not even at Thornchurch, where she’d admittedly been too young to stay at the Beltane fires past dark, had she heard rumors or whispers of anything like this—and what happened by the fires was the most popular topic of conversation among her friends before she’d left for the abbey.

And yet it was happening, the handle of the knife was moving inside her, slow and good and intoxicating. Tate had seen the wide knob at the top of the handle when Adelais had held the knife between her teeth, but now she felt the knob inside: cool and hard against her soft places, and every slide and press of it was like a bright light moving inside her.

It was different from clever fingers or a thick penis, and it felt even more depraved for that difference. It felt wonderful. She couldn’t get enough of it. She didn’t ever want to.

But she also couldn’t move, she didn’t dare, because even with Adelais’s cloak-wrapped hand over most of the blade, it felt like any movement could slice her right open. So she stayed as still as she possibly could, shivering in place as Adelais slowly worked the hilt in and out of her sex.

Adelais tilted the hilt in such a way that the knob pressed into the very front of Tate’s walls, and she cried out again, unable to help it. Adelais didn’t scold her this time, however, and there was a wide, wolfish smile in the dark as she did it again, fucking Tate better with the handle of a knife than anyone had ever fucked her with their body before.

Still unable to move for fear of the blade, Tate trembled in place, panting, her body not her own. Her body was Adelais’s now, the Wolf’s, and every rush and sear of sensation felt like it was coming from outside herself, coming from heaven above. A falling star, a burning bush, all kindling deep in her core.

“Oh, abbess, I wish you could see what I see right now,” Adelais said. “You getting fucked like this. It’s beautiful.”

Tate was past speech. Whatever the hilt was rubbing against now was so fundamental to her existence, so frantically necessary, that she couldn’t even think of the words she might speak. There was only surviving this onslaught of pleasure, there was only holding her body ready for this, and then Adelais finished her off.

Adelais leaned forward—hand still working the hilt inside Tate—and licked Tate’s clit, thoroughly polishing its little tip with her tongue and then pulling it into her mouth with a hot suck.

Tate broke apart, a quake followed by a shattering followed by another quake, and on and on, her body contracting around the thickness in her cunt like it was the only thing she could hold onto in this world, her thighs locked and her chest heaving with short, wild breaths as her body shuddered and clenched and sent shivering release to every single part of her body.

Her lips tingled, her toes and fingertips too, and over and over again she came on Adelais’s knife and against Adelais’s mouth; she came like no nun should at the touch of her abbey’s invader.

And yet she did.

Adelais pulled away to watch as Tate finally, finally subsided, going limp as if her spirit had left her body. Adelais slid the knife free, and even in her stupor, Tate felt how careful the movement was. She was making sure no part of the blade was at risk of cutting Tate’s thighs.

“A real Viking wouldn’t have been so considerate,” Tate murmured, barely able to move her head to get a better look at Adelais wiping the hilt of her knife on her cloak.

Adelais laughed as she sheathed it. “Hard to say. Maybe a Viking would have known good treasure when they saw it.” A peremptory hand played over Tate’s sex, which was slick and swollen now. “Even very greedy people can take very good care of their treasures. At any rate, I’m not finished with you yet.”

She stood and pulled off her boots and hose with rough, dangerous motions. The moonlight illuminated the high curves of her ass and firm lines of her thighs as she moved, and then she was pushing Tate’s bound hands over her head.

“Snap your fingers if you want to stop,” Adelais said, more cheerful than cruel now, and then she climbed onto the cot.