hold me [like a knife].
explicit. 18+ only. - 7,545 words - Enver Gortash x f!Dark Urge
content: power dynamics, memory loss, possessive behavior, expressions of ownership, tension, obsession, smut with plot
you may not be able to recall the past — but he's intent to give you a new one under his hands.
The headaches had only grown worse since the night Ketheric Thorm met his end at the hand that twitched at your side with growing persistence by the day. They had been a background throb before, the sort of ache you could swallow down with grit and distraction, but now they came sharper, meaner – jagged pulses that seemed to anticipate your steps before you even took them. Tonight, the pain marched in lockstep with your boots.
Every step toward Baldur’s Gate landed like a drumbeat inside your skull, pounding so hard it felt as though your head was too small to contain your thoughts. The pressure swelled behind your eyes until even blinking felt like pressing against bruised fruit. The ache rode each breath, low and insistent, a second heartbeat that didn’t belong to you but had rooted itself there all the same.
Home, you told yourself, though the word sat strangely in your mouth, as though you were tasting a language you’d once been fluent in but could no longer remember the grammar of. It had been home once – you knew that with the same quiet certainty you knew your own name – but the recognition was brittle, hollow, like a lock clicking without a key. Even the circus, the raucous heart of the place, where faces turned toward you with practiced smiles and voices called your name as if it had weight, offered no comfort.
Those greetings slid off you like water from waxed cloth, the warmth in them failing to find a purchase in your bones. They were distractions in bright colors, applause and laughter wrapped in familiarity that no longer fit. Another detour. Another smudge of faces you couldn’t hold onto between you and the thing tugging sharp and constant beneath your ribs.
The nostalgia that softened your companions’ eyes and straightened their shoulders didn’t touch you at the gate. It didn’t stir when you passed the first market, the scent of warm bread mixing with the tang of brine from stalls near the river, nor when the hush of evening bells rolled like a wave over the rooftops. It caught you only when the stones of Wyrm Rock took your weight, the hollow, ceremonial echo of your boots ringing up through your bones. The bridge’s span funneled the city’s sound upward in fragments: the muffled roll of war-drums, a chorus swelling toward celebration, the bright brassy flash of trumpets cut short by the wind. A coronation.
You already knew it was a lie. You’d known before you crossed the first shadow of the bridge. The ruler-to-be-crowned wore a mask you’d seen from too close – not the gilded one the crowd believed in, but the living one beneath, made of something harder than skin.
He had invited you. Your name in his mouth had sounded less like recognition and more like a vow renewed – the kind of vow sworn in blood and kept with fire. And with it came the first pull you had felt since the Nautiloid that wasn’t born of pure bloodlust. A pull toward. Toward the heat of him that you couldn’t explain, the slow crest of a campaign moving beneath the skin of the city, the unspoken expectation that you would be at his side when the next move was made.
You said yes.
The corridor to his private chambers was less a hallway and more a vein cut through the belly of well-fed stone, pulsing faintly with the warmth trapped within. The air was close and heavy with the scent of leather cured to a deep, animal musk, the sharper tang of oil rubbed into buckles and straps, and an older sweetness – woodsmoke that had long since left its fire but still clung to the seams of the walls. Somewhere ahead, a narrow window you couldn’t see admitted the rise and fall of the city’s voice in scattered fragments: the drawn-out tail of a trumpet, the smear of drunken laughter, the far-off roar that could have been a cheer or a warning.
“You can’t possibly understand what seeing you again in the Illithid Colony ignited in me.”
His voice came before his shape did – slipping free of the dark with the unhurried certainty of steel leaving a sheath. The tone was measured, precise, each word allowed its full weight before the next fell, so close to your ear that the fine hairs along your scalp prickled and stood at attention.
The scrape of flint, the cough of a struck torch – and then fire. The sudden bloom of light licked up the walls, throwing long, hungry fingers into every corner. The room emerged in stages: the severe, polished corners of a desk, the deep shine of a table set with a decanter and cups, the gleam of weapons hanging in ordered ranks like an attentive audience. The flame steadied, and he was there – not made by it, but gilded in it, a figure of shadow and gold.
A face you knew without knowing why. Lines cut in a way your memory insisted on filling in, even if your mind refused to give them context. The shadows carved his mouth into something both cruel and breathtaking, each shift in the firelight sharpening one edge and softening another.
The headaches pulled meanly at your eyes. The darkest place in you – the part that still knew the taste of battle and the logic of ending a threat – wanted to let the fire consume him. But your ribs, traitorous in their ache, wanted the heat to spare his throat.
He didn’t hurry. He never hurried at first. He let silence stretch until it had weight, until it pressed down on your shoulders. You could feel his gaze like a physical thing, tracking the measured lift and fall of your breath, the minute quiver of your fingers near your blade. The twitch was so small you thought you might have hidden it. You hadn’t. He loved that you hadn’t.
“It pained me not to go to you then,” he said, stepping through the slow sweep of torchlight so that the sharp line of his jaw lit for a moment before it slid back into darkness. “But there are greater plans at work. And you…”
He inhaled deeply, as though drawing in your scent was a private act of devotion. “…were worth waiting for.”
Your hand flexed on the hilt and didn’t draw. A courtesy. One almost no one survived long enough to value.
“I could say I was patient,” he went on, circling now, his boots whispering over the floor in a way that made the walls feel closer. “But that would be a lie. I made myself patient. For this.”
Nostalgia didn’t creep in – it struck, hot and fast, sliding under your skin. Not for the city, not for any street you could name, but for something more intimate: the feel of a mouth against the back of your ear, the solid line of a wall at the wrong angle to the door, the press of a palm at your throat, and the way your own breath sounded when you were pinned open and told good. Your mind swore you didn’t remember. Your body, traitor that it was, remembered everything.
“You thought I was dead,” you said at last, and when he smiled, it was both the first cut and the balm applied to it in the same breath.
The firelight caught the curve of his mouth just enough to make it look dangerous. You didn’t want to remember that mouth, but a flash still tore through you – too fast to stop, too clear to dismiss. Your teeth in his lower lip. The precise give of the flesh beneath the pressure. The sharp, bright burst of copper flooding your tongue until you hummed against it without thinking.
The image came like an afterimage from staring into light too long – you could blink all you wanted, but it stayed, ghosting across your vision. Your jaw tightened against the echo. Your hand twitched again.
“As if something as trivial as death could keep us apart,” he murmured, his voice tilting down into a register that brushed over your skin like smoke. He didn’t bridge the last inches between you. He didn’t need to. Heat moved ahead of him, pushed forward by the torch’s breath and his own. It found your mouth before he did, the weight of it like a hand cupping your face without ever touching. “Pairs like us can scarcely be separated for long.”
“According to you.”
You hadn’t meant to let your voice drop like that, hadn’t meant for it to come out low and rough, but the sound of it made his lashes lower and his pupils flare wider, swallowing the gold around them.
“I don’t remember…‘us.’”
The words cut, and he wore the mark like a jewel pinned to his breast. You watched his mouth sharpen, the edges of it pulling taut, watched hunger spill into his gaze like night rushing to fill a window. Denial excited him. Resistance was oxygen to a man who had always liked to win.
“Oh, you do,” he said, the softness of it undercut by the iron certainty in his eyes. His hand lifted, not to touch but to hover – a single knuckle ghosting your temple, just shy of contact, the heat of his skin a hum under the torchlight. “Not here.”
The knuckle drifted down, unhurried, like a feather falling through still air. It stopped at the small of your back and pressed there, claiming without pressure, right where your spine wanted to arc into the touch.
“But here. In the way you’re standing still when you should be running. In the way your mouth parted when I spoke.”
He stepped in, just enough for the fabric of your clothes to whisper together. “Your body remembers me…and it’s dying to teach you.”
Outside, a cheer swelled – distant, muffled – and broke against the stone walls like surf. You didn’t step back. The room got smaller.
He moved behind you with the inevitability of a man stepping into a mark on the floor that had been waiting for him. It was choreographed, precise, and the air seemed to bend around him to make space. His fingers slid into your hair, slow, with a care that wasn’t tenderness so much as possession disguised as it. Each strand he gathered seemed to be claimed by some silent contract you hadn’t signed but could feel binding anyway.
He drew your hair aside, knuckles grazing the line of your nape in a slow, deliberate drag. The torch breathed. The heat kissed your skin a second before his mouth did – not a full kiss, not even a bite, just the warm threat of one, enough to make your pulse climb into your throat.
“Normally,” he said into the tender shell of your ear, teeth almost grazing the curve, “it would very much depend on the day.”
The bite that followed wasn’t true pressure – just the graze of enamel, the suggestion of what it could become later if you needed him to make good on it. His hand on your hip tightened, squeezing until your breath hitched. Then he hauled you back, aligning your body with his like a chess piece being placed in its only correct square, the press of him against you as blunt and inescapable as the wall you’d been standing against moments before.
“Sometimes you’d find your way in by yourself and we’d play a little game,” he went on, his voice shifting from your ear to somewhere nearer your jaw. He sounded like he was talking about weather or wine, not about the way his fingers were threading down your ribs toward the curve of your breast. “Sometimes we’d mark a victory. Sometimes we’d mourn a loss until mourning turned to something more useful.”
His palm cupped you lightly through your clothing, thumb tracing a lazy arc that made your nipple tighten under the barrier. “Sometimes I chained you because it was the only way to make you still for me.”
The word chain hit you like the clang of cold iron against hot skin. Your mind flinched, retreating from it. Your body warmed, answering without your permission. You hated the reaction. You wanted more of it. You wanted to know – in a way you shouldn’t – what would cross his face if you asked.
“And sometimes,” he said, his mouth now open against your pulse, his tongue tasting you there, “we didn’t need a reason.”
The ache gathering low in you tightened its band around your thighs until they pressed together on reflex. The torch popped sharply, throwing sparks into the air; one landed just shy of your boot and died in a blink, a tiny star collapsing between you.
“Right now,” he added, his voice curling into smoke, “we’re not taking a vote.”
He turned you – not with a push, but with a pivot that made it feel like the floor had shifted under your boots. You found yourself facing him, his hand still firm at your hip, the torque of his control leaving an almost physical bruise under your skin. His eyes were darker now, the edges of gold drowned in heat and certainty.
“You want me,” he said. Not a question.
The air between you was thick enough to feel, and it answered for you long before you could move your lips.
“I think I need you.”
The words dragged themselves through your throat like something pulled from a wound you shouldn’t be touching. The first time speaking them hurt. You knew it would feel like an absolution later.
He looked like a man hearing the words to a prayer he’d been reciting in silence for years. And then he took your mouth.
Not cautiously. Not in barter. He entered – his tongue sliding past your lips without hesitation, the taste of him a mix of smoke, salt, and the faintest shadow of something sweet. Control radiated from every movement of his mouth, from the way he angled your head to the slow, insistent pressure that made you open further for him. You trembled before you even realized it, and he caught the shiver with his body, drawing you closer so there was no space for it to go but into him.
The leather at his chest brushed your bare arms, the fine-stitched edges snagging faintly at your skin. His hands moved with a ritual he remembered and you didn’t: following hems, finding seams, loosing fastenings. Your top was gone in a single, practiced motion, the air against your bare breasts cool enough to make your nipples tighten almost painfully. His breath stuttered, quiet but telling, as though he’d uncovered a relic meant only for him.
His mouth left yours only to claim new territory – a slow descent down the line of your throat. He didn’t rush, didn’t bite immediately. Instead, his lips moved with a deliberate drag, heat sinking into your skin as though branding you one degree at a time. The faint scrape of stubble followed, sending static down your spine.
He pressed a kiss just above the pulse in your neck, open-mouthed enough for his tongue to taste the shallow throb there, and you swore you felt him smile faintly against you – not joy, but satisfaction, the kind a man gets from confirming something he already knew.
The heat of him bled through the thin space between each contact, and every time he pulled his mouth away to speak or breathe, the cool air rushed in to replace it, sharpening the sensation when he returned.
Over your collarbone, he moved slower still, his hand at your side keeping you steady. He let his mouth map the shape of the bone, kissed along it like following a border, then dropped lower. The torchlight caught in his hair, gleaming in the darker strands as he tilted his head to take in the sight of your bare chest.
He didn’t touch your breasts right away. He looked first. The weight of that look was physical – you felt it on your skin. His gaze lingered on the rise and fall of your breathing, on the way your nipples had tightened from the chill, on the faint, uneven rhythm of your chest where your heartbeat pressed faster under the surface.
When he finally brought his mouth to you, it was with the same deliberation as everything else – his lips brushing the outer curve of one breast before closing around the nipple. His tongue circled slowly, heat and wet combining to make your back arch into him without conscious thought.
The sound he made in response was low and pleased, a vibration you could feel through your breastbone. He drew on you, not hard enough to hurt, but enough to make your legs tighten. His hand slid from your side to cup the other breast, thumb grazing over the nipple there until it matched the first in aching sensitivity.
The city murmured through the walls – distant enough to sound like another world. The voices rose and fell, faint, as though filtered through water. It only made the heat of the room and the press of him seem more absolute.
He didn’t rush the inventory. His mouth alternated between you, attention shifting like a worshiper offering equal devotion to each altar. Every flick of his tongue, every measured draw of his lips, was part of a litany he knew by heart. You could feel him reciting it – the order of touches, the rhythm of breaths – as if testing to see whether your body would respond exactly as it had before.
It did.
When your back arched harder under the pull of his mouth, he eased off, letting the cool air rush in over the wet he’d left. The sensitivity sharpened into a sweet ache that made you exhale unevenly.
“Still,” he murmured, though you hadn’t moved much – the command was instinctive for him, a way of keeping the scene in his tempo.
His hands slid lower, palms smoothing over the lines of your waist and hips. The pads of his fingers pressed into muscle with enough firmness to make you sway toward him without realizing you’d done it.
Your skirt began to give under his touch. He didn’t yank it. He let the fabric surrender in stages – the first slackening of the waistband, the soft brush down your thighs, the slow, whispering drop toward your boots. The sound it made against your skin was barely audible, but it seemed loud in the quiet of the room.
The torchlight caught the pooling fabric, shadowing the new expanse of bare skin it left behind. He stepped back just far enough to look at you fully.
His eyes swept over your belly, lingering on the faint shadows of old marks – bite-patterns he’d put there before, in another life, layered with fresh heat from his mouth tonight. The flush on your hips bloomed under the firelight like a living thing.
The room itself seemed to breathe with you now. The scent of heated leather had deepened with the nearness of your bodies, laced with the metallic hint of oiled buckles, the faint animal musk of wool worn close to skin, and under it all the salt-sweet tang of sweat beginning to dry.
The air slid over your bare skin like another set of hands, moving with the same unhurried, claiming precision as his real ones.
“Turn around,” he said, and though the words came velvet-smooth, there was iron under them – the kind that bent rather than broke but still held shape.
You went to the wall without being pushed, your palms finding the cool stone instinctively. The first touch was a shock, so clean and sharp it almost cleared the pressure in your skull. Almost. The relief was fleeting – it bled away the moment his heat pressed full-length against your back.
The contrast was dizzying: the unyielding chill of the stone under your hands, the warm, deliberate weight of him behind you. His chest aligned with your spine, his thighs bracketing yours, every point of contact reinforcing the fact that you were exactly where he wanted you.
His belt came loose with a metallic clink, the sound carrying a ritualistic gravity – the kind of noise your body recognized even if your mind wanted to pretend it was new. The slide of leather through metal was slow, deliberate, every inch drawn out until the final soft thud of it falling open.
He didn’t rush. He never did before he stopped holding back.
The blunt head of his cock found you with unerring ease, sliding through the slick heat of your folds in a lazy, unhurried stroke. He wasn’t trying to enter – not yet. He coated himself in you first, dragging from your clit to your entrance and back again, smearing the wet he’d already worked out of you until you were flushed and twitching under him.
When he lingered at your entrance, it wasn’t to test – it was to threaten. The weight of him there made your thighs tense. You felt your breath catch, felt the hollow ache of anticipation gnaw deeper the longer he stayed still.
His breath broke over your ear, warm and heavy. “You feel that?”
The growl in his voice wasn’t anger. It was pleasure wound so tight it couldn’t risk being louder.
“That’s what you keep walking toward,” he murmured, “even when you swear you aren’t.”
“Stop talking.” The p fractured in your mouth, your voice catching hard enough to make your own words sound like a stumble.
His smile pressed against your skin. “Say please.”
You hated that you said it so quickly. “Please.”
He pushed in.
Not in a single thrust – no, he took you slow, unrelenting, the thick stretch forcing you open inch by inch until your muscles trembled from the effort of taking him. Your cunt clenched reflexively around the intrusion, but still he pressed, steady, until your breath went thin and your forehead met the stone in front of you.
The stretch skirted the edge of pain before it broke open into something far worse – the raw, hot relief of being filled exactly to your limit.
His hand slid up to your throat, not to choke, but to hold you there – to anchor you in place with a pressure that made the blood in your ears roar louder. He tilted your head back, close enough that you could feel the ghost of his lips move against yours when he spoke.
“That’s it,” he murmured, voice low enough to scrape along your nerves. “Breathe me in.”
When he bottomed out, he stayed there, the heavy pulse of his cock settling deep inside you. You felt the twitch of it – needy, possessive – and your walls answered, fluttering without your permission. His other hand came down to your lower belly, his palm spreading wide as if to stake a claim on the place where you joined.
Outside, the city roared again. Inside, the smaller, wetter echo of your body around him answered.
When he drew back, the drag was its own language. The ridge of his crown caught on the tight ring of muscle at your entrance, scraped at every nerve on its way out, only to drive back in on a perfect, punishing line.
The sound that left you wasn’t a word.
“Say it,” he ordered, his rhythm slow and exact, each snap of his hips calculated to land you further into helplessness. “Whose are you?”
“Not –”
The lie caught in your throat, useless. He turned your face just enough that you could see the corner of his mouth, and you swallowed pride like a stone. “Yours.”
“Again.”
“Yours.”
It came out wrecked, high in your throat.
He rewarded you with a deep roll of his hips that punched the air from your lungs, finding that unbearable, perfect angle that made your knees loosen. His grip at your throat tightened just enough to keep you from falling forward. The hand at your belly tugged you back to meet the next thrust.
He didn’t speed up. Not yet. He refined the pace instead – the cadence tightening from simply controlled to something curated, each stroke designed to grind your clit subtly against the inside of your thigh, to drag your nipples against the rough chill of the wall when your chest tilted forward, to keep you hovering in the kiln without letting you out of it.
Your cunt made slick, hungry sounds every time he seated himself fully inside you. The wet, obscene music of it was caught and amplified in the air between you, and you felt his mouth shift nearer to your ear as if to hear it better.
“That,” he said, voice softened to something filthier, “is the sound you make when you remember me.”
The ache in your body braided with the pounding in your skull until you couldn’t tell which was making your eyes sting.
His hand left your throat to cup your jaw, turning you so he could kiss you without withdrawing an inch from inside you. The kiss was filthy – slow tongue, no space for air – and when he pulled back just enough to speak, you could taste your own breath caught between you.
“Good,” he said, his mouth brushing yours. “Open.”
His hand slid down between your thighs with a certainty that told you he already knew exactly where you were aching. The first direct stroke over your clit made your hips lurch away from the wall before you could stop them. The second had your voice catching mid-breath, the sound breaking on its way out.
He didn’t change his pace inside you. The slow, relentless thrusts stayed unbroken as his fingers began to circle, each motion precise – not teasing, but deliberate, pressing and stroking just hard enough to make your calves tremble.
The torch hissed as a draught found it, the shadows in the room shifting over your bare skin like another set of hands. The warmth from him wrapped around you even as the wall at your front kept you pinned to the cool stone.
“Don’t run from it,” he said, his tone intimate in a way that was filthier than anything else he’d done. “Take it. Give it to me.”
Your cunt clenched around him in a reflex you couldn’t stop, and the sound he made in your hair was pure satisfaction – low, rough, and dangerous.
His hand left your clit for a moment, sliding lower until his fingers pressed at your entrance beside his cock. The pads of two fingers pushed in alongside him, the stretch so intense your vision sparked white at the edges. It was too much, too full, but it was the kind of too much that felt designed for you, and your body betrayed you by opening to it almost immediately.
He fucked you around both – the thick, steady slide of his cock taking most of the space, the grind of his knuckles catching and rubbing at the lips of your sex with every stroke. Each push made your clit jolt against the base of his hand. The friction sent heat through you like a current, pooling so fast you were already panting.
“You think this is me sating myself?” he asked, his voice a low, measured purr that made your skin feel thinner. “No. This is me breaking the lock you put on us. I want your body to remember before your mind catches up.”
The hand on your hip tightened, holding you still so he could control the motion entirely – withdrawing both cock and fingers at the same slow, punishing pace, then pushing back in until you swore you could feel him deeper than your own heartbeat.
“Tell me,” he said, his breathing starting to roughen, the perfect edges of his control beginning to fray. “Tell me whose you are while I carve it back into you.”
“Yours,” you managed, though it was barely a word – more a sound made of heat and salt and surrender.
“Again.”
“Yours.”
The repetition came out wrecked, high and desperate, your throat raw from the strain of holding back everything else you wanted to say.
He pulled his fingers free, the sudden absence making your walls clutch hard around his cock. His hand returned to your clit, finding it slick and swollen, and began to work in tight, quick circles that made your thighs quake. This time his pace inside you shifted – no longer slow, no longer curated. His hips began to snap forward with a rhythm meant to break you open completely, every thrust meeting your body with wet, obscene precision.
“That’s it,” he hissed, his other hand coming back to your throat, thumb pressing just enough over your pulse to feel it gallop. “Now – come.”
It wasn’t an invitation. It was a name written in the imperative.
Your orgasm tore through you before you could even brace for it – a hard, sharp wave that had your cunt clamping down so tightly around him that he swore against your ear. He drove deeper, grinding against the high, swollen place inside you to feel every pulse of it.
The sound you made went raw against the wall, ugly and beautiful all at once. His mouth stayed at your ear to take it in, the tip of his tongue brushing the shell like he was tasting your reaction.
“Good,” he growled, holding you pinned against him with his arm across your chest as the aftershocks threatened to throw you forward. “Good girl. Again.”
You were still trembling when the second wave started to gather – faster this time, your nerves rubbed raw from the constant attention to your clit. His hips turned brutal, the sound of your bodies meeting ringing off the stone. The rack of weapons behind you rattled softly with the force of it.
He folded you more sharply over the wall, a hand flattened on your lower belly to push you back onto him with each thrust. The angle made him drive up into a spot that was all ache and pressure until your knees threatened to give out entirely.
“Breathe,” he rasped, his tone shredded with wanting now. “Let it happen. Let me have it.”
You came again – this one not an explosion but a long, wrenching dissolve, your thighs shaking and your sex fluttering in desperate little grabs that dragged a sound from his throat you were more than happy to hear again for the first time.
His control snapped. He shoved in deep, stayed buried, and ground himself against you, the root of him snug against your slick, swollen lips. You felt the first hot pulse of him spill inside you, then another, and another, each one pulling a whimper from your throat. His forearm stayed locked under your ribs, holding you in place until every drop was where he wanted it.
The room seemed to remember how to breathe only after he did. The torch hissed faintly as its flame steadied, shadows clinging stubbornly in the corners. Somewhere beyond the stone walls, the city’s chorus reached a crest – too far away now to touch you, thin and unreal compared to the heavy, wet reality holding you in place.
He didn’t pull out. Not yet. He never wasted this part – the moment when you were still around him, still fluttering faintly, your body not yet certain the act was over. His cock was thick and hot inside you, every twitch of him answered by an involuntary squeeze from you. The warmth of his release settled deep, heavy enough to make your body keenly aware of the fullness.
His palm stayed at your throat, not squeezing, just holding, as he bent to your ear. The words came out low, rough, iron-dirty: “You’ll remember me. If your mind won’t, your body will teach it. I’ll show you every time until there’s nothing left in you that doesn’t know whose you are.”
Only when your knees began to blur under you – legs starting to quiver with the effort of holding both of you upright – did he withdraw. Even then, it wasn’t quick. He dragged himself from you in one long, slow pull, the ridge of his crown catching on every swollen, tender place until you hissed at the sensation. The sound it made – slick, obscene – seemed to echo in the enclosed space, and the heat rushed to your face at the thought that he was listening for it.
His hand was between your thighs almost before you could close them. He pressed his fingers to your folds, gathering the hot mess he’d left, coating your clit in a lazy smear that made your hips twitch even through the exhaustion. He slid the mess back down, pushed two fingers shallowly into you – just far enough to keep his spend from running down your legs. The motion was casual, but the claim in it was absolute.
“Hold it,” he murmured, his tone lined with that amused affection he used when you obeyed without thinking. “That’s mine.”
He withdrew and brought his hand up, still wet with both of you. Without looking away from your face, he sucked his fingers clean. His lips closed slowly, the pull audible, and the sound at the back of his throat was deep, satisfied – like a man tasting a meal he’d been craving for too long.
You should have been embarrassed. You weren’t. The heat in your belly – small but stubborn – told you exactly why.
He wasn’t finished. You knew it from the look in his eyes – the narrow, assessing tilt, the smirk that curled like smoke. He caught your jaw in his palm and turned you toward him for another kiss, one made of heat and slick and ownership, the taste of yourself still faint on his tongue.
“Turn,” he said again, though the command had softened now.
You let him ease you from the wall, his hands reading you like Braille – steadying you where he’d shaken you, guiding you forward without forcing you. Your legs wavered under you, and you felt his satisfaction in the way his grip lingered.
“Still unsteady,” he murmured, that ruined softness curling his words. “I’d have been offended if you weren’t.”
He positioned you in the torchlight like an artist moving his subject, turning your face and tilting your chin so the flame’s glow poured down your throat, mapping the bites, the bruises, the slick sheen of sweat beginning to cool on your skin. He brushed a damp strand of hair from your cheek with the backs of his fingers.
Then his thumb pressed to your lower lip until you opened for him, and he slid it into your mouth. You closed around him without thinking, tongue curling around the pad of it. His eyes dropped to watch your lips work, and the smile that followed was the kind a man wore when looking at a promise already kept.
“Do you feel it yet?” he asked, voice softened to something more dangerous than shouting could ever be. “That ache that isn’t your body?”
You nodded; your voice would have splintered like glass if you’d tried to speak.
“That’s memory straining at the bars,” he said, the pride in it as palpable as the heat still rolling off him. Good. Fight. I’ll make losing feel like the only sensible thing you’ve done in months.
He stooped to retrieve your discarded clothes in one hand but didn’t hand them back. The other hand came to the back of your neck, his thumb making slow, grounding circles into your nape.
“You don’t put these on until I’m finished looking at you.”
And he did look. Not idly. Not like a man admiring a painting. His gaze moved like touch – cataloguing, committing to memory, plotting where to leave the next mark. Your nipples tightened again under the weight of it, and the low, almost pleased hum in his throat told you he’d noticed and filed the information away where he kept all useful details: locked, ready.
Only then did he pass the garments to you, letting his fingers slide along yours like fastening a collar.
“Don’t think of this as the first time,” he said, his voice rich and low enough to settle under your skin. “Think of it as the first time again.”
Even clothed, you didn’t feel covered. His attention was its own heat, following you into every seam and fold.
When you took a step back, he caught your wrist – not tight, but with the exact pressure of a leash meant to instruct.
“You don’t leave without this.”
He turned your palm up and laid something small into it – a scrap of dark fabric, frayed and soft from handling. Its scent rose immediately, not of leather or smoke, but warmer: skin, salt, a spice you almost knew. The ache behind your eyes sharpened, threatening tears you refused to let fall.
“What is it?” Your thumb rasped along the edge, the sound almost indecent.
“A piece of you.”
The words were indulgence and truth in equal measure. “From a night you don’t remember yet. Keep it close.” His mouth curved. “When it’s time, you’ll know exactly what it means.”
He leaned in, lips brushing your temple in a touch that felt more like a brand than a kiss. “Don’t mistake this for a reunion,” he murmured into your hair. “It’s the beginning of the rest of your life. I’ll be in every moment of it.”
He could have let you go then. He didn’t.
Instead, his hand shifted from your nape to the small of your back, guiding you backward until the edge of the desk caught behind your thighs. The movement was unhurried but inevitable – the kind of control that didn’t need to push because you already knew where he wanted you.
The torchlight had burned lower, its glow licking along the walls in soft amber waves that bled into shadow. It no longer blazed; it breathed, and the room breathed with it. Outside, the voice of the city had dropped to a low hum, the coronation having slid from spectacle to speeches, the applause and cheers absorbed by the stone.
He reached for the decanter without looking, his off hand working the cork free with a slow, wet pop that sounded louder in the hush. The faint scent of cool water hit your senses just before he poured it into a cup. He held it out to you, and his voice left no space for refusal.
“Drink.”
Your throat was raw, and the command was as much necessity as it was ownership. You obeyed. The water touched your lips, cool and clean, and you swallowed greedily until a thin stream escaped the corner of your mouth. His thumb was there instantly, catching it, sweeping it back toward your lips with a motion so obscenely gentle it made your knees want to give again.
The cup clicked softly against the desk as he set it down. Without breaking eye contact, he reached into a drawer. You hadn’t even seen him open it. When his hand came back, it held a square of clean linen – plain, white, folded with care.
Then he was kneeling in front of you.
The sight was a gut punch – all the height, the heat, the command of him folded down on the floor between your boots. His knees braced apart, framing your stance, the lines of his body still radiating power even in the posture of service. The contrast made your breath stall.
He lifted your skirt without haste, letting the fabric slide over his knuckles, baring you to the cooler air. The hem caught briefly on your knee before he freed it and eased the folds higher.
The first touch of the linen was soft but certain. He wiped you with the same precision he’d used in every other act tonight – deliberate, slow, making sure no movement was wasted. The cloth caught on the oversensitized peak of your clit, and the jolt that went through you made him smirk against the inside of your knee. He didn’t look up; his mouth pressed a slow kiss there, heat searing through the thin skin.
“Hold still,” he said, indulgence dripping from every syllable, as though your twitching was for his amusement.
He worked downward, cleaning every trace of his release with unhurried strokes that somehow felt more possessive than the act of leaving it in you. When he was satisfied, he folded the linen neatly in half, concealing the mess as if it were evidence he meant to keep, and slipped it away into the drawer without a word.
Rising, he took up more space than the room seemed to have a moment before. You hated how small you felt with him standing again – hated it, and leaned into it all the same.
His hands came to your collar, adjusting it with an intimacy that felt more obscene than anything prior. He smoothed your hair next, his palm warm as it threaded back to your nape. He held you there, thumb tracing slow arcs into your skin, a gesture as much about reapplying a seal as it was about comfort.
Then he bent, his mouth finding the same place he’d bitten before. His teeth sank in again – gentler, but enough to raise heat, enough to promise the bruise you’d see in the mirror later. He sucked, the pull just this side of pain, and your breath caught. His tongue followed, soothing over the sting.
“There,” he said, a final press of his lips sealing the mark. “Something the mirror will understand.”
You swallowed, your voice unsteady. “This changes nothing,” you lied, because you needed to hear yourself say it.
The quiet laugh he gave rolled down your spine like a drop of hot wax. “It changes everything,” he said, certain in a way that left no air in the space between you. “And if you think you can walk back to whatever you were before tonight and not hear me every time you breathe, you haven’t been listening.”
His hand found yours – the one still curled around the scrap of fabric – and folded your fingers tighter around it. He lifted your knuckles to his mouth, kissed them once, then turned your palm up and dragged the flat of his tongue in a slow line over the center. His eyes stayed on yours the whole time.
The heat arrowed straight down your spine, pulling the low ache in your belly back into awareness.
“Tomorrow,” he said, his tone like a schedule already written. “You will stand where I want you. At my side. You’ll wear something that lets me see the mark I’ve put on your throat. And you’ll look at me when they say my name.”
“And if I don’t?”
His smile cut sharp as a blade. “You will.”
The torch guttered once and caught again. The air in the room still smelled of smoke, sex, and the faint ghost of spiced cologne clinging to his collar. Somewhere outside, another cheer rose – farther this time, blurred by distance, as though the city were applauding lines from a play you had already rewritten together.
His grip on your neck loosened at last, but stepping back wasn’t distance – it was just a different kind of hold. You adjusted without thinking, your shoulders shifting, your stance subtly preserving space for him inside you.
The look that passed over his face was pride, warm and sharp. He was a man with a city about to bend, and none of that pleased him as much as seeing you try – and fail – to stand completely steady.
He offered his arm. It wasn’t parody; it was an order dressed in manners.
“Come,” he said softly. “Let me walk you to the door.”
You hesitated, but only for a heartbeat. Then your hand found its place where he wanted it. The leather under your palm was warm from his body; the muscle beneath flexed as he drew you in close.
He turned you toward the corridor. The torch by the door sighed as it opened, letting cooler night air reach in, stroking the damp at your hairline and carrying a clearer current of the city’s hum.
At the threshold, he paused. His mouth grazed your ear one last time.
“Don’t get lost on your way back,” he said, amused, possessive, with just a touch of cruelty. “I’d only have to come find you.”
You looked down at the scrap of fabric in your hand. Harmless, in appearance. It felt like a key you hadn’t meant to take.
When he finally let you go, it didn’t feel like freedom. It felt like permission. The corridor ahead wasn’t an escape – it was a thread you’d been placed on. You walked it because he’d set you there, because the city outside called for you like a stage, because the ache he’d left inside you was an echo you could follow with your eyes closed.
Behind you, the torch breathed. The room rearranged its shadows to close around the space you’d left. His heat lingered in the air, as if the walls had learned his shape.
You didn’t look back.
You didn’t have to.
He would be in every moment that followed.
masterlist.
