"Mmmmmm." He allowed her words to linger, and the silence after them, for a long moment. "And is this the use of the royal we," he questioned, his dark eyes sparkling with a glint of mischief, amusement, though beneath the lightness of his tone there rested something colder, harsher. "Or have there been alliances formed?" He closes the gap between them with a languid step, long legs and frame offering him the opportunity to do so with seeming casualness. Fingers drift upwards, catching a single strand of long blonde hair, wrapping it idly between second and middle finger, curling it around his touch. "And what would that look like, I wonder." Thoughtful, pondering, little more than idle curiosity. "Would you fuck me to exhaustion, wait until I had drifted off to a peaceful slumber, and slide the blade between my ribs?" Fingers shifted, index finger tucked beneath her chin, thumb pressed lightly against it. A feather's touch. Barely present. "Or perhaps you would slip cyanide into my whiskey. Watch, while I choked to death on my own vomit?" His hand shifted again, knuckles dancing, teasing against the line of her jaw. "Do you so very much wish to be rid of me, Nadezdha, that you would take my life?" A tilt of his own head, then. "That you would kill the one and only person in all the wide world that knows you, knows all that you are, and accepts you for it?" The one and only person in all the wide world that knows the answers to all those questions that she had never dared ask?
