MONTHLY MINISERIES - UNDEAD!KNIGHT X QUEEN!READER
✦ WARNINGS: 18+・smut・blood and violence・body horror・murder・bloodplay・(technically) necrophilia・jealousy・cunnilingus・breeding kink・ritual sex & sacrifice・infertility ✦ TAGS: fluff and angst・royalty!au・monster romance・ ✦ WORD COUNT: 6.1k ✦ AUTHOR'S NOTE: links to the masterlist and other chapters will be added as the story updates every saturday 🩶
・✦・masterlist || i.・ii.・iii.・iv.・✦・
The ballroom reeks of desperation masked in perfume.
You can taste it beneath the rosewater, beneath the wine too sweet on noble tongues. Rot disguised as ambition. They circle you, these carrion birds with painted smiles, waiting for you to prove what they already believe: that you're the unnatural thing that tore itself from your mother's womb, the abomination who watched her parents bleed on the polished floors of this very hall.
(twelve years old, marble tiles, so much blood—)
The blood pooled thick between the cracks. Seeped into the limestone and mortar. Your nursemaid knelt beside you, that sweet woman with her rough hands gentle on your shoulders, whispering it would be alright even as your parents' blood soaked through her skirts.
(—how would the servants ever get it clean?)
They managed, of course; all evidence scrubbed away by morning.
They'd been rewarded greatly for their efforts and their silence.
(You made sure of it. First lesson in queenship: someone else scrubs away your sins.)
Fifteen years later, your nursemaid still serves you. Gray-haired now, arthritic fingers that shake when she pours your tea, but her eyes never hold fear. None of them do—the servants, the commonfolk who crowd the streets, the orphans who you allow to braid your hair with their sticky fingers and press dandelions into your palms.
It's only the nobles who look at you wrong. Who act as though your very breath is an insult to the natural order.
Lord Fen bows before you now, his hand extended. Liver-spotted. Soft. You take it because you must. Because a queen dances, a queen smiles, a queen plays the game until the board is cleared and only she remains standing.
"Your Majesty." His breath smells of brandy and tooth decay. Of things rotting from the inside out. "You are radiant this evening."
"You flatter me, Lord Fen."
The words taste of ash. Like the burnt offerings you leave in the chamber tucked away behind your bookshelf.
He's handsome enough, you suppose. Was handsome once. Strong jaw going soft now, eyes the color of summer grass that's started to brown at the edges. Dark hair swept back from a face that might have launched a dozen love affairs in his youth. There's a thickness to him now. A cushiness around his middle that speaks of too much comfort, too many years of taking what he wants without consequence. Fingers too calloused. Smile too easy.
Forty-three and unwed, the halls whisper. Heir to considerable lands in the south. Vineyards and wheat fields that survived the scourge when so many others turned to dust. He's been angling for an audience for months.
Tonight, you've decided to grant it.
(tonight, you've decided to end it.)
"I speak only truth, Your Majesty." He pulls you closer as the orchestra swells—violins keening like wounded animals, like the sound your mother made when she bore you. "The kingdom has been without a proper heir for too long. The people grow…concerned."
Proper heir.
As if any child of yours could ever be considered proper by their standards. As if anything that came from your body could be anything but an abomination.
"The people," you echo. Lips curved just so, lashes lowered. Let him think he's getting somewhere. "Tell me, Lord Fen, what do the people say?"
He has the grace to look uncomfortable, but the wine quickly drowns his caution. A half-hiccupped breath; it bubbles up through his throat.
"They...the commonfolk adore you, Your Majesty. They speak of you like a saint." His voice drops lower, intimate, as though sharing a secret meant only for your ears. As if the entire ballroom isn't listening, waiting, watching. "But those of us with…perspective...we worry. So many years for a throne to remain unsecured. A young queen, unmarried, without prospects…"
He leaves the noose of implication hanging between you.
"I see." You keep your voice neutral; you've perfected neutrality over the years, learned to conceal everything behind a mask of polite interest. "And I suppose those of you who carry such a “worried perspective” have suggestions?"
"Only that perhaps Your Majesty might consider…companionship." His hand slides imperceptibly lower on your waist. Testing. Seeing how far to push before you break, before you reveal what you really are beneath the crown. "There are many suitable matches among the noble houses. Men of good breeding who would be honored to provide the kingdom with stability."
How careful he is. How diplomatic.
They've learned not to be too direct with you, these nobles. They remember the one who pushed too hard, demanded too much, who thought a young queen would be easy to control. The ones who disappeared.
(—the ones who rot in that hidden chamber —the ones whose screams you still hear when the wind blows wrong.)
"How thoughtful," you murmur. "That the nobility concerns itself so deeply with my personal affairs."
"We concern ourselves with the kingdom's future, Your Majesty." His hand slides lower. Possessive, as if he has any right to touch you at all. "A future requires…continuation."
His eyes dart to the far corner of the ballroom where your Knight stands in the shadows, where the torchlight doesn't quite reach.
A figure of stillness among the whirling dancers. The others give him a wide berth, their discomfort palpable through the music and wine and gaiety. They don’t like to look at him too long. Don’t like the way he stands so still, or the chill that seems to emanate from him, or the faint smell of earth and decay that sticks to his armor no matter how many times he cleans it.
They think him strange. Unsettling. Wrong, just like the queen he protects.
They don't know.
(three years ago, assassins in the night, his last words breathed against your neck while his blood soaked through your nightgown: I love you—)
The ritual took everything you had and things you didn't know you could give. Your blood painted in circles around his corpse. Your hair, cut and burned. Your tears mixed with oils from things long forgotten. You carved sigils into his flesh that haven't faded, will never fade. Permanent marks of what you did, what he became, what you were willing to sacrifice. You screamed the words until your throat bled, poured magic into his body until you thought you'd die too.
And then his eyes opened.
Frost-rimmed. Milky. Fixed on you with a devotion that went beyond death, exists only in the space between breathing and not.
He was lovely once. Handsome in the way that made noble daughters blush and stammer and giggle behind fans and gossip over tea.
You grew up together; he was the son of your father's master-at-arms, raised in the castle alongside you. A friend, a protector, and something much, much more. Your childhood companion who taught you to climb trees and hide frogs in your tutor's desk. Your guardian when you grew older. Your lover, in the stolen moments when duty allowed, when no one was watching, when you could pretend to be just a girl and a boy instead of a queen and her servant.
He's something else, now.
A grotesque thing wearing the shape of the man you loved, the man you couldn't let go. His skin has gone gray, waxy. His movements are too smooth, too controlled, lacking the imperfections of life—the unconscious gestures, the fidgeting, the breathing. And the smell. Gods, the smell. It clings to him, drifting over your tongue when he stands too close: rot and decay, ancient and wrong and yours.
His armor conceals most of it. The full plate helm hides his face and the gauntlets, his hands. He never removes it in public, not where anyone might see what you’ve made him.
Only you know. Only you can see him without the armor, in the privacy of your chambers, where he's still yours.
"My Knight is loyal," you speak softly, barely heard over the music. Lord Fen shivers. "Can you say the same, my lord?"
You don't call him by name, another thing taken in that unholy ritual.
He used to be someone, but that person died three years ago. What came back is other. Changed. Transformed. Existing only in relation to you, defined only by his purpose.
Your Knight.
Your creature.
Your love.
Yours.
"I would be honored to prove my loyalty, Your Majesty." Lord Fen's voice takes a new, hungry tone now. Pretense stripped away by the wine. "In whatever capacity you might require."
The music swells around you. Violins and cellos, a waltz in minor key. You let the moment stretch, let him wonder, let him hope.
"Would you?" You meet his eyes, holding his gaze. Your fingers linger in invitation; the first step into a trap. "That's very generous, Lord Fen."
His breath is hot against your ear, wine-sour and desperate. "I would give you anything. Everything."
You pull back slightly, just enough to look at him. You let him see the consideration in your eyes, the possibility flickering there. The moment before the flame catches and everything burns.
"Come to my chambers when the ball ends," you say quietly. Soft enough that only he can hear. Loud enough that he knows you mean it. "We'll discuss the kingdom's…future."
You feel it the moment the words leave your lips.
A pull in your chest. A tightening of invisible threads that bind you to the figure in the shadows. Across the ballroom, through the dancers, through the space between beginning and end, your Knight's head turns. His eyes finds yours, see into you and through you and know you better than you know yourself.
The ball drags on and on and on.
You dance with others. Lord Kyran with his snow-pale eyes that never blink. Lady Ilse who touches your arms with clammy fingers, who smells of lilacs and something sour underneath. The Duke of something-or-other whose name slides out of your mind the moment he speaks it, whose face you won't remember tomorrow, who will die eventually and you won't even notice. They blur together, these nobles. Interchangeable in their greed and certainty that they deserve more than they have.
Lord Fen watches you from across the room.
Wine glass after wine glass disappearing down his throat. His gaze grows heavier, more obvious, tracking you. When you catch his eye, you don't look away. You hold it, letting your smile tilt up ever-so-slightly.
(he thinks he's won—)
He thinks he'll bed a queen tonight. Put a child in her belly and secure his legacy. He thinks his name will be written in the histories as the man who “saved” a kingdom by giving the cursed queen what she needed most: legitimacy, continuation, an heir.
Funny, how everyone assumes they know what you need.
The clock strikes midnight, chime echoing through the ballroom. A warning no one heeds, the sound of inevitability. You catch Lord Fen's eye one last time, then turn, and make your way toward the doors.
The corridors of the castle are darker than the ballroom, lit by torches spaced too far apart. Your shadow stretches long and thin against the stone walls, elongating, distorting. Behind you, Lord Fen's footsteps echo too loud, too clumsy.
Behind him, another set of footsteps. Silent as the grave.
Your chambers are in the eastern tower, up three flights of winding stairs. By the time you reach the door, Lord Fen is breathing hard, panting with exertion and want and the belief that he's about to be handed everything he's ever dreamed of. You push open the heavy, wooden door and step inside, leaving it open behind you.
An invitation.
He follows like a dog after meat.
Your chambers are exactly as you left them this morning. The four-poster bed with its curtains of dark velvet—
(you've bled on those sheets, screamed into those pillows, worked magic that would damn you while in that bed)
—sits near the fireplace that crackles with low flames. Bookshelves crammed with a collection of texts, some common, some that would condemn you if they were ever found. The air smells of myrrh and incense, of smoke and the dried herbs that hang in bundles tied with red thread: yarrow, wormwood, belladonna, nightshade. Candles cluster on every surface, their flames casting dancing shadows that move like living things, like spirits, like the ghosts that linger behind your bookshelf.
Press the spine of a leather-bound tome on poisons and it swings open, revealing the small chamber beyond. That's where the worst of it happens: the rituals that require circles and blood and screaming; the magic that costs pieces of your soul; the sacrifices that keep your kingdom fed, your harvest plentiful, your people healthy while your nobles corrode from the inside out.
(—the bodies feed the land and the land feeds the people and the people love their queen who keeps them safe)
No one knows. Not your nursemaid, not your advisors, not the servants who adore you. Only your Knight knows what you are, what you've done, what you'll do. Only he knows the truth of your parents’ assassination; that you were twelve years old, steeped in dark magics, and willing to do whatever it took to rule.
He loves you anyway.
(loved—loves—what's the difference when death is just another battle he's returned to you from?)
"Your Majesty," Lord Fen begins, but you silence him with a raised hand.
"Lock the door."
He obeys, fumbling with the bolt, fingers clumsy with wine and anticipation. When he turns back, his eyes are glazed with want. Pupils blown wide, breathing ragged, hands already reaching for you.
You slink toward him, fingers trailing along the back of a chair, the edge of your desk, touching familiar things, grounding yourself in what you're about to do.
"You said you would give me anything," you murmur as you close in on him. His beard tickles your lips when you lean close. "Everything."
"Yes. Yes, anything you desire."
He reaches for you with the confidence of a man who's never been denied, but you step back to keep yourself just out of reach.
"Tell me, Lord Fen—" you circle him slowly, predator assessing prey, queen measuring subject. "—what do you imagine happens next?"
"I..." He swallows hard. "I had hoped that Your Majesty might...that we might..."
"Might what?" You stop in front of him. "Speak plainly."
"That you would allow me to..." The words tumble out in a rush, tripping over themselves in their eagerness to be said. "To serve you. Give you what the kingdom needs: an heir. I would be honored. Grateful. I would ask for nothing in return, no recognition, no—"
"Liar."
You smile when you say it. Sweet and understanding.
"You'd want everything. The power, the recognition. The knowledge that a child of yours might sit on my throne one day." You move closer, closer, closer, until you can smell the wine on his breath and see the sweat beginning to bead on his forehead. "But that's what makes this so perfect. Your ambition. Your appetite."
Your hand comes up to rest on his chest. His heart pounds beneath your palm, terror and arousal in equal measure.
"You're very handsome, Lord Fen. I can feel how badly you want this." You trace the line of his jaw with your fingertip, feeling the scratch of stubble, the pulse jumping beneath his skin.
"Your Majes—"
"Shhh." You press a finger to his lips. They part at your touch, his breath hot and damp.
You kiss him then. Press your lips to his so he may taste the wine on your tongue. He groans, trembling hands coming up to your waist, still uncertain if he's allowed to touch. You take them, place them where you want them. Guide him. Control him. Show him exactly what you want him to think you want.
He kisses your neck, and you reward his clumsy trail down to your shoulder with a pitchy moan. Lord Fen's hands fumble with the laces of your gown. You help him; loosen the ties yourself to make it easy.
(You've perfected this performance: yield just enough; sigh breathy and gasping, press your body as if you can’t help yourself.)
The bodice loosens. The fabric begins to slip, revealing your shift, thin white silk that shows the shape of you. You press closer to him to let him feel your heat through the fabric. His hands slide down your waist, your hips, growing bolder now. Greedy in that way he only knows how to be.
You cup Lord Fen's face, pulling him in for another kiss. Deeper this time. More convincing. His hands tighten on you, possessive.
The gown slips further, falling to your waist.
You stand before him in just your shift, translucent in the candlelight. Pupils blown so wide they swallow the green, he breathes ragged when he reaches for you again, grasping, taking, claiming.
Your hand slides down to the back of your thigh where the small knife is strapped.
(A gift from your Knight, years ago when you were both still alive, when words came without struggle. Keep it close, he'd said, pressing it into your palm, closing your fingers around the hilt. Always be ready.)
You feel its weight, steel warmed by your body heat and the magic that courses through your veins.
In one swift motion, you drive it up into Lord Fen's throat.
The blade punches through flesh, severs something vital. An artery, maybe? His windpipe? Both? Blood floods hot over your hand, your wrist, splattering across your shift in waves of crimson dye. His eyes go wide with shock, with betrayal and a tiny spark of vindication that you are the monster he knew you were.
His mouth opens, a pathetic gurgle of a scream leaking through the blood and spit foaming on his lips.
You pull the knife free and stab again. —again. —again. Blood sprays across your face, your chest, your arms. It soaks the silk of your shift, painting you in violence and the price of ambition. Lord Fen gurgles more incomprehensible words, hands coming up weakly to claw at the air. You stab him once more, driving the blade deep between his ribs. You feel it sink into him, revel in the scrape of his bones.
Lord Fen collapses against you.
He's lighter than you expected. Still alive—barely, but alive. His blood pours scalding and slick between your bodies, pooling in the space where he thought he'd plant his seed and secure his future. You feel his heart stuttering against your chest, irregular beats growing weaker with every thump.
From the darkness, your Knight steps forward.
Helm set aside, his clouded eyes fixate on where Lord Fen slumps against you. His stare follows the flow of blood down to where the lord's hand still weakly clutches at your waist. Fingers curling into fists, his jealousy thrums in your bones.
When Lord Fen's legs give out, you let him slide down your body, leaving streaks of red. He crumples to the floor with a gooey, choking sound. Still breathing. Still bleeding. Watching as your Knight crosses the room in three strong strides.
His hands replace where Lord Fen's were moments ago, wiping away the touch with his own frigid grip. He pulls you close, buries his face to your neck, and breathes deep of the scent of you. The aroma of dried herbs and magic now mixed with the copper tang of blood; something so uniquely you, something that's always been his, that could never belong to anyone else.
Mine, the gesture says. Not his. Never his. Mine.
You feel Lord Fen's gaze on you both. Fading, but still aware. Realizing, in these final moments, what he was never going to have. Dying on your floor, he watches your monster cling to you with an embrace that speaks of obsession, of a devotion that goes beyond anything a living man could offer.
Your Knight pulls back just enough to look at you. His wrongness is dimmed in the candlelight—skin stretched too tight over bones that jut at angles not quite right, frost melting and reforming in the whites of his eyes with each blink.
You reach up, cup his monstrous face in your bloodied hands. You trace the sharp line of his jaw where the skin has discolored, the hollow of his sunken cheek, the far-bent curve of his brow. He leans into your touch, starving for it, as though it's the only thing keeping him tethered to this world.
"Help me with your armor," you command faintly.
His eyes flicker down to Lord Fen, still breathing, still watching. Good.
(let him see what real devotion looks like, what happens when you try to take what belongs to death itself)
Your Knight begins removing his armor piece by piece.
The gauntlets go first, revealing mottled hands, fingers stiff with rigor, skin that peels from the tips. Vambraces. Pauldrons. Each piece falls to the floor with the heavy clank of metal on stone. You help him with the breastplate, your fingers finding the straps by practice, by memory. The metal comes away to reveal his torso. There's no heartbeat beneath the stiff muscle, no rise and fall of his chest.
More armor. Tassets, cuisses, greaves. More and more until he stands before you in nothing but his undead body.
He's a horror. You know this objectively. Skin dotted with darker patches where blood pooled after death and never quite dispersed. His scars still ooze, bruises never fade, his temperature sits too corpse-cold. But his face...Even changed, you can still see the boy who held your hand when you skinned your knee, who showed you where the cooks hid the fresh treats. The young man who kissed you in the rose garden. The knight who swore he'd love you until death.
(and you think maybe that's what love is, in the end. needing someone so terribly, you'd drag them back from the beyond to keep them with you.)
You trace your bloodied finger down his chest, following the path of an old scar from a training accident when he was sixteen. His teacher had never been one to pull his punches, the sword the slipped past your Knight's guard a harsh reminder. He shivers under your touch.
"You're beautiful," you whisper.
His eyes close, and he makes a sound—half grief, half disbelief, lik he can't understand how you could say that. How could you look at what he's become and see anything but horror?
But you mean it. Even now, especially now. Because he came back for you; he stayed when he could have moved on, could have found peace, could have let go.
Behind you, Lord Fen gives one final, gasping breath. A frantic, heaving attempt to survive.
Then…silence.
Lord Fen's blood slicks your skin, cooling rapidly in the air. Your Knight pulls you flush against his rigid stillness, and lowers his head.
His mouth, where the skin of his lips has thinned and peeled, presses to the curve of your throat. He doesn't kiss you. Instead, he inhales the scent of your blood-sweat with furious greed. You tilt your head back, offering your neck. Surrender that is command. A sound, low in his chest, rattles through you. His teeth, sharper than they were in life—
(death changed them, changed everything)
—scrape over your sensitive skin. Not breaking. Not yet.
"Show me," you breathe. "Show me you're mine."
He needs no further direction. Never needs permission, always knows what you want before you want it because death made him yours in ways life never could.
His hands move from your waist, one tangling in the hair at your nape, the other gripping your hip with strength that would bruise living flesh.
(will bruise you, does bruise you, marks that will bloom purple-black and lasting)
He walks you backward with a purpose. Back, back, back, until your legs hit the plush edge of your bed. Velvet curtains dark as dried blood, as rust, as the stains that never quite come out no matter how the servants scrub.
He pushes. You fall.
The mattress sinks beneath you, welcoming you with its soft caress. He stands over you, eyes devouring the sight of you. He drinks you in inch by inch: the blood on your spreading thighs, the rise and fall of your breasts, the hunger in your eyes, the proof that you're alive, so alive, while he is—
(not)
His gaze is a physical touch. It lingers on all the places where Lord Fen had dared to touch. His jaw tightens, tendon standing out. The violent current of jealousy hums in the air, making the candles flicker and the tether of your soul respond. This possessiveness, fuel.
He follows you down, one knee pressing between your legs. He leans over you, caging you in with a hand on your hip, and his face is so close. The graverot smell of him fills your lungs, intoxicating as any incense. You breathe him in; you can't help it, you need him.
His hand leaves your hip, slides over to press on your belly, just below your navel. The touch is reverent, searching for something that isn't there yet, that might never be there, that you've killed for again and again trying to make real.
This body. This womb.
A sound escapes you. The desperate whimper of years spent poring over blasphemous texts and performing acts that would make lesser women scream. All for this one thing. To take a seed from a corpse and make it bloom inside you, create an heir that is truly, undeniably yours.
His.
Ours.
He understands—
(that's what makes this bearable, that he knows, he sees, and he loves you anyway)
—He always understands.
He lowers and you think he'll kiss you, but he bypasses your lips. Instead, his mouth finds the blood splattered across your stomach. His tongue, cold and too rough, laps at it. It's not gentle, not a kiss. He's cleaning you. Trying to erase Lord Fen's presence and replace it with his own.
He traces patterns in the blood with his tongue, following lines of muscle and sinew to map you, know you, worship you. He reaches for the blood-soaked fabric of your shift still bunched around your hips. Without ceremony, he tears it. The echo of ripping silk louder than everything else.
He bares you completely to the firelight, to his starving gaze, to everything you are and everything you want to become.
He settles between your thighs, his scarred skin scraping yours (more marks, more evidence that this happened. you did this. you're doing it again). His hands grip your hips, pulling you forward, opening you to him. He looks up at you then—monster adoring his maker—and the raw devotion in his eyes is a physical blow.
You are everything to him.
His life. His death. His reason for being. His reason for not being.
His head dips.
His mouth is on you and you moan out a tickled gasp. The cold is a shock, exquisite agony against your heated flesh. His tongue works you with aching intensity. There is no practiced art here, no technique learned from courtesans or books, only his overwhelming need to indulge. To pleasure what is his and his alone, exploring every inch with lips and teeth and tongue.
The world dissolves.
Fire, candles, Lord Fen's corpse on the floor, it all fades into the background. There is only the feeling of him and the rough texture of his tongue on you—in you. He is relentless, driving you higher and higher, an eager climb toward a peak you both crave.
You fist your hands in the sheets, in your hair, searching for something—anything—to anchor you because you're floating, fracturing, coming apart. Body bowing off the bed, that string of sheer sensation pulling taut. His grip tightens, holding you in place for his onslaught. The pressure builds. The magic coils deep, air growing thick in response. The edges of your vision shimmer.
You want him inside you. Need it. Primal, animal urge that eclipses all thought and reason. You need to feel him, all of him, filling the emptiness inside you. You need him to banish that ache that has been your constant companion for the past three years.
"Please," you beg, the only word your mind can form.
He lifts his head, his face slick with you and with Lord Fen's blood—monstrously stunning, divine and damned. He understands. His body moves over yours, skin against naked skin.
You feel him everywhere: the stillness of his chest against your breast; the rigid, unwavering length of him on your thigh. He positions himself and you brace for that blessed, impossible cold.
But he hesitates.
His hazed eyes lock onto yours, searching for something. Permission maybe, or absolution, or confirmation that you still want this, still want him despite what he's become.
"Mine," he croaks. The words are gravelly, painful, torn from a throat that should never again speak. "My...Queen."
"Yours," you breathe. "Always yours."
(and you mean it—gods help you, you mean it)
He enters you in one smooth, agonizing thrust.
It steals your breath, that feeling of being filled with a deep, burning chill that seems to reach your very core. You cry out again; this is the void you've been craving, the missing piece, what makes you whole.
He begins to move—a slow, deep rhythm that teeters on over-possessive. Each thrust is a declaration, each withdrawal a reminder of the way he completes you. He is not gentle, not tender, but a force of nature; a tidal wave of death and devotion, and you are the shore he breaks upon.
He leans down, and you expect a kiss, but his teeth sink into the junction where your neck meets your shoulder. Not hard enough to break skin, but hard enough to leave a mark. The pain is sharp, sacred, a jolt that pushes you over the edge. Your climax crashes through you, wrings you out so thoroughly to leave you boneless and breathless. You clench around him, body yearning for him to draw deeper. To give you the one thing he shouldn't be able to.
Seed. Life. Future.
At the height of your peak, the change pulses in him. His movements falter, harder, faster, stuttering desperation. A growl builds in his chest, a purring strain of effort. Pushing. Forcing. The magic in the air surges, a tangible pressure at the back of your eyes.
You can feel it. The unholy power he draws from the void, focused on this singular goal.
You wrap your legs around him, urging him on. You claw at his back, nails scraping against dry, scarred flesh. You feel the strain in every muscle of his body, so intense it feels as though he might break apart. He pours everything he has, everything he is and isn’t, into this single, monumental act.
A violent, convulsive tremor runs through him from head to toe. He groans, a noise of agony, of something being ripped from him that defies all laws of nature. He buries his face in your neck and you feel it: not the warmth of living seed, but something else entirely.
Deep, searing ice poured directly into your womb. Desecration and salvation. You wail as that wicked life-force fills you, claiming you from the inside out.
Yes. Finally. Please let it work. Please.
He collapses onto you, limp and spent. His breathing—more affectation since his return—slows to a halt. He is a corpse again, draped over you like a shroud.
But inside you, the bitter chill fades to warmth. An ember in the cold dead of night.
You lie there for a long time, tangled together on soaked silks. You stroke his back, fingertips tracing across the notches of his spine.
The life you have taken, the magic you wrought, settles into your bones.
Taking root.
Please.
It fades, a sudden, vicious snuffing out. Your womb glows with life for one heartbeat-stretched moment before it cools, becoming just another part of your own familiar warmth. The tide of sizzling magic recedes, leaving behind only the sticky reality of sex and the hollow ache of failure.
(not again—)
(again—)
(andagainandagainandagainandagain—)
The weight on you becomes heavier. No longer the satisfying weight of a lover spent, but the oppressive deadness of a corpse.
His head lifts from the crook of your neck. The movement is stiff, grating, wrong. He looks down at you, the devotion in those colorless eyes now tinged with a terrible emptiness. The hope that burned there moments ago is gone, extinguished as quickly as the life within you.
He knows. He feels it through the invisible threads that connect you. He feels the barrenness of your womb as if it were his own.
(—you're crying now, when did you start crying?)
He pushes himself up, careful so as not to hurt you. His hands, still streaked with blood and your fluids, brace on the mattress on either side of your head. He withdraws from your body and the loss of him echoes. The cooling wetness that spills from you the final, ignominious proof of the ritual's failure.
A useless sacrifice.
(Not guilt. You can't afford to feel guilty. Guilt is a luxury for people who have other options, for people who aren't trying to create the impossible, for people who aren't queens.)
He kneels beside you, a statue carved from regret. His gaze sweeps over you, taking in the marks he's left: the bruise already forming on your shoulder, the fainter prints of his fingers on your hips, the scrape from his skin on your inner thighs. His expression remains that same mask of inhuman stillness, but you feel the flicker of something through your bond.
Remorse.
Not for the act—never for the act—but for the pain. For the evidence of his violence on your skin.
He touches you, infinitely gentler now. One gnarled hand slides under your back while the other cradles your head. With tender care, he levers you into a sitting position. The movement is effortless, devoid of any strain a living man might feel. He arranges the pillows behind you, plumping them in quiet service. He tucks the ruined shift around your lap, a futile attempt at modesty, at pretending you're anything other than what you are.
He stands, crossing to the washstand in the corner, each footfall a whisper on stone.
You watch him, take note of the way the orange fireglow catches on his waxy skin. He pours water from the ceramic pitcher into a silver goblet, a delicate splash in the heavy silence.
He doesn't use a cloth to wipe the blood from himself first. Doesn't seem to notice it. His focus is singular.
You.
"I'm sorry," you whisper into the dark. "I'm so sorry."
(For what?
For killing him in the first place, for failing to protect him three years ago?
For dragging him back, for making him into this twisted thing?
For what you made him do tonight?
For what you'll make him do again?
For loving him so obsessively that you'd damn the world to have his child?)
He doesn't answer. The dead rarely do.
He returns to the bed, goblet and pitcher held carefully. Pitcher set on the nightstand, he kneels again, pressing the goblet delicately to your lips. You tilt your head back, mouth parted just enough to sip. The water is clean, tasteless, washing away the coppery tang of blood from your mouth.
When he's satisfied, he lets you take the goblet in favor of settling beside you. His frigid hands stroke your hair, sweeping down to soothe over your back to pull you into his chest. He rocks softly, a subtle back and forth as an uneven rasp rattles from his throat. A poor imitation of the orchestra’s song to gift you your own private dance. Soothing you in the only way he knows how.
You sway together for a long time, curled against his cold chest with his arms around you. The blood dries, the candles burn down to nothing, your eyelids droop.
"We'll try again," you say through a yawn as he takes the goblet from your hands. "Next time. Next time it will work."
He nods slowly. Then, with obvious effort, his jaw working, his throat convulsing with difficulty: "Next...time."
Two words. Forced from a dead tongue. For you.
(he knows what you are and he loves you anyway—
—loves—loved—loves again—what's the difference when you've rewritten the rules of death itself?)
