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In the Daitian cosmogony, there was a demon of desire that seduced women with such sweet words, his love-talk lingered in their ears forever afterward, until they starved their hearts out with longing.

His Grace wasn’t much for talking, but he certainly looked like he could be a demon of desire.

Stretched out on the rug by the fire with his jerkin undone and his boots kicked partway under the bed, Ophele couldn’t understand what someone like him could possibly want with someone like her.

He was so big, so male, so serious and forbidding.

Husband.

In what mad world was Remin Grimjaw nibbling on her fingertips? And why did she like it?

“Come here,”

he said, pulling her to him to torment her some more.

She sprawled over his chest as he kissed her, his hand framing her face so the rough pads of his fingers brushed her cheek, curling back into her hair as if he were learning the shape of her bones.

Ophele still felt shy when he kissed her, uncertain what she should do, how she should respond.

It wasn’t at all what she had imagined it would be, neither the chaste kisses from the romances she read or the fearful and repellant act she had imagined in a loveless marriage.

He teased her with the slow motions of his mouth, drawing her in like a whirlpool, slow and dizzy and sucking her under before she knew where she was.

He bit her lips.

One hand moved stealthily over her body to cup her breast and when she gasped, he stroked his tongue into her mouth, a diversionary tactic to precipitate an invasion.

This was not chaste.

It didn’t feel loveless.

But he didn’t love her.

“I wonder if you’ll ever tell me what’s going on behind those eyes,”

he said against her lips, making her blink in incomprehension, and then he crushed her mouth under his own, his big hand gripping the back of her neck to eliminate all hope of escape.

He kissed her as if he were drinking her down, the muscles of his neck and jaw working as his tongue plundered her.

There were sounds to the kiss, liquid and hungry as the sea, the sound of his heavy breathing like the roaring of waves.

He sat up.

Somehow she was in his lap with her arms around his thick neck, feeling his hands sliding over her body from her shoulders to her thighs, eager caresses that made her feel as if she was melting.

When he lifted his head, he looked so handsome he almost didn’t seem real, and she thoughtlessly lifted a hand to touch his broad cheek, her thumb brushing the swooping scar over his cheekbone before she realized what she was doing.

She jerked her hand back.

“You can…you can touch me,”

he said, low. “Ophele…”

He closed his eyes at her tentative caress.

The corners of his eyes tilted upward; she hadn’t noticed that before, an almost exotic curve at their outer edge.

After everything they had been through over the past few days, it wasn’t quite so embarrassing to touch him, to feel the stubble on his jaw and the line of his straight nose, the bristle of his thick black brows.

Like a huge dog, he pushed his face into her palm and made her giggle.

“I won’t hurt you,”

he promised, stern-faced but with a twinkle in his eyes.

She touched him with her fingertips, brushed the grim line of his jaw with her thumb, and even wondered what it would feel like to stroke his rough cheek with her smooth one.

That was a little too bold.

Her face flushed.

“Do it,”

he whispered, angling his head to catch her thumb between his lips, his black eyes glinting like a proper demon of lust.

“Whatever you were thinking.”

She wasn’t thinking anything.

The feel of his teeth nipping her thumb had driven all capacity for thought from her head.

She stared at him with wide eyes, feeling as if her heart and breath had frozen together as his mouth moved down, biting her wrist, licking at her pulse point like a flame.

His breath burned the sensitive skin of her inner arm, scorched her shoulders, and her breath exploded out in a gasp as he tugged down the neck of her chemise and buried his face in her breasts.

“I have wanted to taste these for days,”

he said, muffled, as his hungry mouth found her nipple.

Why did it feel so good when he did that? Every tug of his lips seemed to lift her up all the way from her toes, short jerks that made her head fall back and something clench tight in her belly.

Her hands sank into his hair, thick and unruly, curling at the back of his neck.

“Your Grace…”

She moaned breathlessly as he sucked both breasts, one and then the other, ravenous.

His tongue circled each nipple, licking them into hardened peaks, and between her legs she felt his finger pierce her.

“You’re already wet,”

he murmured, lifting his head to look at her.

“You want me so much?”

“Well, it feels good,”

she admitted honestly, feeling her cheeks heat, and gasped as a second finger entered her, a taut stretch inside that made her voice quaver.

“Hoooow do you…haaa…know what…know what feels good?”

“I asked Miche,”

he answered, with a glint of humor.

“I didn’t know myself.

I never had a woman before you.”

“Never?”

That shocked her.

Especially since he said it while his long fingers were sliding in and out, circling inside, seeking out places that made her mind haze white.

She wanted to think about it, what it meant, whether it made her happy, but then his fingertips bore down on that tickling, troublesome spot inside her and a wail burst from her lips.

“Never,”

he said hoarsely, and bit her neck, licking up her throat with his tongue.

“So you have to be careful, you can’t claim a man’s body and not be responsible for it.”

The thought tickled her.

“Are you saying I should…o-ohhh…I should be gentle, Your Grace?”

she asked breathlessly, daring a small joke, and then clutched his shoulder as his fingers slid deep.

What was he doing that felt so good? His fingers stroked, circled, rubbed again at that place inside her and it was making her dissolve as if he were rubbing away at the edge of her sanity.

“Remin,”

he panted, low and excited.

“Call my name.”

She could feel that hardened part of him straining underneath her, pushing hot and urgent at her backside.

And though she vividly remembered the pain, she was crimson with the thought that that felt even better than his fingers, she wanted him to do it to her again.

Did that make her a lewd woman? Shouldn’t she pretend like she didn’t like it so much?

She bit her lips, her body straining toward release, fighting back her cries so hard that tears streaked from the corners of her eyes.

Her breath came in gasps and she couldn’t even hear what he was saying, she knew nothing but feeling, his fingers inside her and his hard arms around her, as if he were the only thing keeping her tethered to the world.

“Remin,”

she managed, trembling as if she were going to shake herself apart.

“Hnnnnn, ahhhhnn, ah, Remin!”

She didn’t even know the word for what was happening to her, vulgar or technical.

It just happened, her breath seizing in her lungs and then exploding outward, and she felt his hot lips on her belly, his hand on her breast, his fingers stroking, stroking, heating her to boiling.

She felt like she was bubbling, she was water, so wet she was dissolving as she climaxed in high, gasping cries.

“Wife, wife, Ophele…”

Remin was rapidly disrobing, yanking at his jerkin and dragging his shirt over his head.

She had the impression of his naked body, a glimpse of a hard and reddened member, but everything was hazy as a dream until he plunged it inside her.

* * *

Both of them cried out together.

Remin was shaking with the effort of restraining himself.

He didn’t want to hurt her again.

He didn’t know how hard it was safe to go, though he knew how hard he wanted to go, it felt so good inside her that all he wanted to do was grab her and pound himself blind, to etch his body into hers like a hammer and chisel.

“Tell me if it hurts,”

he rasped as he began to move.

He had always enjoyed the feeling of his own body working, the coiling flex of muscle and sinew, but he had never been so intensely aware of it as when he was with her.

The twin cords of heavy muscle in his lower back, the long muscles of his thighs, even the negligible burden of her body on the muscles of his arms, so much strength leashed and quivering as he pressed into her with torturous care.

Her body stretched around him, inner walls pulsating.

Ophele clutched his wrists, gasping.

Was it good that he had made her climax first before he put it in her? Maybe it was too much.

He could see tears trembling on her eyelashes, but her thighs were squeezing his waist, lifting her hips to meet him as if she wanted it.

“Do you like it?”

he panted, dragging himself back out of her and feeling her body cling to him, a heated wet grip that made him feel hard as iron.

It must feel good, it couldn’t possibly feel this good only to him.

“Y-yes…”

she breathed, her eyes screwed tight shut as he stroked back into her, a reedy whisper.

“Yes…yes, ohhhhh, feels good…”

He wasn’t going to last long if she was going to make noises like that.

Not with her devouring and massaging him until he could feel the heat flood all the way up to his face.

A vast buzzing filled his ears and the pulse of the blood in his veins was so hard and deep he could feel it to the root of his manhood.

Her breasts heaved.

Her lips parted as she gasped, and he gasped with her.

Again, a deep thrust that she met with intoxicating eagerness, her silky insides sucking him in.

Again, their bodies meeting with such perfection that it felt as if they were breathing together, moaning together, their hearts racing together, throbbing and pulsing and beating together in flawless rhythm.

His hips withdrew and plunged forward and she was there to meet him, straining her small, lovely body to take all of him in.

“Ophele,”

he groaned.

He was so close he was seeing stars in his peripheral vision, golden sparks like he was on fire, or maybe both of them were, blazing.

“Ophele, wife—”

“Yes, I am too, yes, yes,”

she breathed, her back arching in a sudden spasm of pleasure, understanding him in a way that went beyond words because she was with him and the time was now.

Gripping her hips in his hands, his lips peeled back from his teeth as he pounded, a rumbling grunt huffing from his chest.

More.

More.

More, more, more, she was gripping him so hard he didn’t know how he was going to pull himself out of her, balanced right on the flash point of their conflagration.

He was going to have to pull out of her soon.

He could feel the shuddering spasms wracking her body, like the tremors before an earthquake.

Harder, harder, hammering into her, and he felt her erupt in a blaze of heat and a flood of wetness, working him violently to completion.

Remin yanked himself out of her as he came, pinning her to the floor as he climaxed on top of her.

Stars.

It was so intense, so searing, so vast, it was like the immensity of the sky, dark and trembling with the blaze of distant stars behind his eyelids.

He held her to him as he finished, his sides heaving as he inhaled huge lungfuls of air.

His heart was beating like a Vallethi war drum.

“It’s cold on the floor,”

he said dazedly, turning his face to kiss her.

Honestly, he never wanted to move again, but he wanted her to get sick even less.

“Can you stand?”

In bed, he rested and then had her again, slower.

He had wanted her too badly to prolong the first time, and their wedding night had been such a revelation, all he could do was drown himself in her body.

Now he wanted to experiment.

He wanted to learn every inch of her.

Her body fascinated him, her long, narrow waist, her slender legs, her sleek curving thighs.

He wanted to taste every inch of her velvety skin, and lap at her round breasts.

And he was wild to feel her mouth on him, though her shy kisses and caresses roused him so unbearably, he couldn’t endure it long before he wanted back inside her, and streaked her thighs white with his seed.

It was dangerous, letting someone get close enough to touch him.

When she looked at him with those large, solemn eyes, suddenly his heart was beating so fast.

The merest brush of her hands made him shiver, as if he had been starving to be touched all these years and never known it.

But he made himself stop early, nevertheless.

He wouldn’t repeat the mistakes he had made on their wedding night, and it was strangely satisfying just to hold her, her head resting in the crook of his shoulder, her silky hair streaming off the side of the bed in the river.

Long after he should have sought his own bed, Remin lay looking at her sleeping face, soft and curving as a flower.

Inexperienced as he was with women, he’d never thought about why maidens were said to be blooming.

Nothing bloomed, in the places he had been.

But his wife did. She was so fresh and so lovely, he hardly knew what to do with her.

What if she wasn’t his enemy? It was far more likely that she was exactly what she seemed to be: a timid girl who had grown up a prisoner, too frightened to speak up for herself but brave enough to raise her voice for a friend.

He liked that about her, very much.

As a matter of fact, he had enjoyed almost every moment he had spent with her for days now.

She was so smart, and funny, when she forgot to be shy.

He wanted her to stop being shy with him.

Embracing the soft, warm bundle in his arms, Remin dozed, breathing her sweet scent.

Only a whisper of a sound alerted him.

A little past midnight, a shadow eeled its way through the window, cloth rasping against the windowsill, and Remin’s sharp eyes saw the darker shape in the shadows of the bedroom.

It was like a slap of icy air in his face.

His sword was by the fire, but he was instantly so angry, he didn’t need it.

Rising grimly from the bed, he stalked forward and smashed his arm into the tall wooden poster at the end, snapping it off.

Ophele woke with a cry.

“Stay under the covers, wife,”

he ordered without looking back.

“Close your eyes and don’t open them until I give you leave.”

Reversing the broken poster in his hand, he advanced, angling to put a small worktable between himself and the assassin.

There was the gleam of a blade in their hand, a shortsword, but there were many other, fouler means of murder.

He watched the blade, but he also watched the assassin’s other hand, and the hooded face.

There was one assassin in the Masaron Basin that had actually spat poison at him, like a frilled lizard, and only missed his eyes by chance.

“Miche! Tounot!”

he bellowed.

One of them should be at his door.

“Get someone outside!”

The assassin’s free hand shoved inside their robes and Remin exploded into motion, kicking the edge of the worktable up and twisting his body behind it.

Several sharp metal objects thudded into it as he bulled forward, intending to slam the bastard between the table and the wall, but even if the assassin hadn’t expected to find an awake and furious Remin Grimjaw, they were still quick to fling themselves right back out the window.

Swearing, Remin thrust the table aside and grabbed for their hood.

It tore away, revealing short blond hair, and he whipped the bedpost at it as a parting shot.

He couldn’t tell if it landed.

The assassin slid down the slate tiled roof and over the side like there weren’t two stories between them and the alley below.

Yanking the shutters closed and noting the broken lock on them, Remin went for his pants.

He hated having to face assassins when he was naked.

“Y-Your Grace?”

the princess asked from the bed, her voice quivering.

“You can look,”

he said shortly.

“He’s gone.”

“Who—what…”

She yanked the bedcovers up to her neck as Miche burst into the room, followed by Justenin.

“I guess someone decided to try their luck,”

Miche said, grim.

“Tounot and Ortaire went out the window as soon as you yelled, we’ll know in a minute.”

“I almost got a hand on him,”

Remin replied, tossing him the assassin’s hood.

Miche lit a lamp and they inspected Remin’s impromptu shield.

Three short throwing knives were sunk into the worktable, sharp silver steel with black edges on the blades.

All of them knew better than to touch it.

The black edge was likely poison.

He glanced at the terrified girl in the bed, pressed against the headboard with her knees drawn up to her chin and one hand covering her mouth.

Was she really frightened? Had she known? Could there have been some signal passed between her and one of the people she had spoken with that day, the glassblower, the lady at the pastry shop, the seamstress, the tinker? How had the assassin come unerringly to this room, when Remin ought to have been in another?

Had she pretended to enjoy his affections to keep him here, long enough for the assassin to attempt his task?

“I’m afraid you’ll have to get used to this, Princess,”

he said coldly.

The thought that he might have kissed her and let her touch him and moaned his pleasure in her arms after she had arranged for his murder made him burn with hurt and humiliation.

He knew better, but he couldn’t help dreaming that just once, it might be otherwise.

“Your father wants me dead quite badly.”

Her face went as pale as if he’d slapped her.

“Rem, maybe—”

Miche began, just as another voice shouted from outside in the alley.

“Rem!”

It was Tounot.

“You’ll want to see this!”

“Get up and get dressed, Princess,”

he ordered.

“Juste, guard her.

Miche, with me.”

“Oh, b-but, Your Grace—”

The princess was white with terror, but he was already shrugging into his shirt as he headed for the door.

“The window, w-what if—”

He didn’t hear her.

He didn’t have time for her mumbling right now.

Outside in the alley behind the inn, there was a very dead assassin.

The maddening thing about assassins was that they were like a bolt of lightning: impossible to anticipate, impossible to track back to their source.

The dead man was not going to be carrying anything that identified his client.

His knives were simple steel, without decoration or even a maker’s mark.

Remin had been set upon by everything from paid local thugs to—once—a painted journeyman of the Dream Flower Guild.

That was the one that tried to spit poison in his face.

The blond man in the alley had stabbed himself in the heart with a stiletto rather than be captured, which demonstrated considerable dedication to his client.

Bertin had already stripped him naked and was going over his clothing an inch at a time, searching for any concealed pockets.

“Here,”

said Tounot, kicking the dead man onto his belly.

The moon was as high and full as the tinker had promised, clearly illuminating a tattoo between his shoulder blades, a clock with many spokes and an eye in the center, slit-pupiled and lividly red.

“That one’s new to me.”

It was new to Remin, too.

It might not mean anything, or it might be another one like the Dream Flower guild, who rubbed dye into their eyelids and lacquered their fingernails.

“Drag him inside,”

he said.

“Make a copy of that tattoo.”

“Innkeeper won’t be happy.”

“We’ll pay him extra.”

Remin scowled.

“Though he’s the one with assassins creeping through the windows of his establishment trying to murder guests in their beds.

Get Bram to have a quiet word with him.

Maybe he knows something.”

“No one’s getting any sleep tonight,”

Tounot observed sourly, and gave the dead man a kick on the strength of that alone.

This was Granholme, in the duchy of Firkane, whose duke was fanatically devoted to the Emperor.

It would have been surprising if someone hadn’t taken a chance to curry favor by eliminating the perpetual thorn in the Imperial side.

And of course, no one knew anything.

The innkeeper threw a small fit about having a dead man sprawled on one of his dining tables, but after Bram explained things, he elected to retire back to his own room, with the courteous request that they knock if they needed anything else.

With no other evident threat, it didn’t seem dangerous enough to warrant leaving town immediately, so Remin sent everyone back to their beds to try and get a few more hours of sleep before sunrise.

He himself sat downstairs, watching as Tounot painstakingly reproduced the tattoo and contemplating the grisly possibility that it might be better just to slice it off and take it with them.

No.

It would just curl up and go black.

And stink.

It was a silent company that left Granholme later that day, after receiving a very large order of women’s clothing from a yawning Mistress Courcy.

The clothes were packed along with the princess’s books in the supply wagon, though the princess herself showed little interest in either.

She was silent, with red, swollen eyes, and she sat so stiffly in the saddle that Remin wondered if he’d hurt her after all.

The pleasures of the night before felt like a distant dream.

“Are you hurt?”

he asked wearily.

She shook her head.

“Do you want wine?”

He was going to make a drunkard of her at this rate, but he didn’t know what else to do.

She looked hurt.

When he gave her the wineskin, she gulped it down like water.