Page 12 of Zenith Court

She opened my trousers and took my cock in her hand, one slow stroke and then another, until my breath broke. “Hips now.” She moved my hands down and set them. “Still just holding.” She rose over my lap and took me into her by her own measure, an inch at a time, pausing whenever she needed to. Her eyes stayed on my face through the whole slow descent. When her hips settled against mine, I felt her tighten around me.

Slow at first. Then harder. The boards creaked under the chest as she rode me, her thighs tightening against my hips. My arms wanted to lift her, and I kept them where she had placed them. She came again with my name low in her throat, her hands closing on my shoulders. I held her through it, hands steady at her hips.

“Now lift me.” Her legs came around my waist. “You’ve been afraid of it all day. Use it on me.”

I stood with her in my arms and did not reach for the post. She tightened her legs around my waist, taking me deeper. “Slow,” she said, and I gave her slow. “There. Hold.” I held while she moved against me. “Now.” I lifted her and brought her down harder. She came again without a sound, her mouth open against my jaw, the lines at her wrist bright in the darkening loft. I kept her steady until the last tremor passed.

“Now you,” she said against my ear. “Let go, Jonah. I want all of it.”

I came inside her with my arms steady beneath her, my face against her neck, and her voice at my ear telling me I was exactly where she wanted me.

“Blanket. Boards,” she said. I went to my knees with her still in my arms and laid her on the horse blanket. Damp hair clung to her temple. Her breath slowed in stages, and the three lines at her wrist dimmed to embers. I ran a light palm over her hip and waist, checking for tenderness. She watched me do it and nodded.

“You stayed where I put you,” she said.

“To the inch.” I smiled before I could stop myself.

For a while we listened to the swallows in the eaves and Kieran’s laugh rising faintly through the floor. Cold air came in off the fields. I drew the free edge of the blanket over her.

Earlier, I had told the woman at the table not to force her Mark quiet. Astra settled against me, warm and unafraid. I laid my hand over the burnt-copper lines at my wrist and left it there without pressing.

7

Astra

Delphine knocked an hour before first light. Two, a pause, then two more… the rider pattern. Jonah was already standing in the dark of the main room with his boots on, head tilted toward the valley.

“Horses,” he said. “On the road and off it.”

Off it. I came awake counting. Hooves crossed the frost-hard pasture, muffled, climbing where no track ran. Eight. Twelve. I lost them at sixteen. Two gray riders were a patrol. Sixteen were an attack.

Caspian killed the lamp before I found my coat. “Rev—cellar, the documents, then out the back. Don’t wait for us. Cosima, the ledger. Delphine’s at the fence corner. She’ll have seen them first.”

“She’ll bring herself in,” Aldric said, taking his stave from the porch pegs. Ten days under our roof, and he had already turned the farmyard into a drill ground. “Gate’s mine. Marsh, left post. Hale, orchard fence. Ashford—count for me. Verita, off the line, and stay off it.”

“I can hold a stave.”

“I know exactly what you can hold. That’s why you’re off the line.” He was through the door on the last word.

The yard was gray before dawn. Below us, the valley road lay empty. The hoofbeats came from the slope instead. The riders had left the road a quarter mile away and climbed through our pasture in formation, keeping their spacing even in the dark.

Then they hit the fence.

We had built the second fence along the orchard side in our first month—green lumber, my nails, low enough to look harmless and stout enough to stop a horse. Anyone coming that way would have to dismount and climb.

I counted the delay. Seven seconds to rein up, four more to dismount, six to get over the top rail with a blade in hand. Delphine was still in the open, halfway between the fence corner and the porch, skirts fisted in both hands.

The fence gave her enough time. She reached the porch as the first gray coat came over the rail. Rev hauled her through the door by the collar and kept hold of her on the way to the cellar.

Jonah met the fence.

He took the first man as his boots touched our ground: stave, elbow, down. The second fell before his blade cleared leather. The third saw both and tried to climb back over the rail. Jonah’s face showed nothing while he worked. Through the chord at my wrist—leather, warm skin, held low—I felt how much he hated his own strength.

At the gate, Aldric held.

The farm track entered the yard through a wagon-wide gap in the wall. Four men came at Aldric there, but the narrow gate kept them from surrounding him. His stave stayed below shoulder height. He struck the first man’s knee, caught the second across the wrist, and drove the others back into the track.

Kieran fought from the left porch post. When the second wave started over the rail, he called across the yard, “They got down off their horses for us—I’m touched⁠—”