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Lucanis hated jobs like this.
He had no issue with jobs that drew him towards artifice of such a manner in general. He was never opposed to posing as the occasional guard or distant uncle or nobility of some far-off city well beyond the grasp of his contracted target. On one occasion, he was even able to showcase his cooking ability as a contracted chef for the evening (a surprisingly difficult contract when it came to ensuring no innocent bystander or at the very least person-he-was-not-paid-to-kill suffered the price).
But jobs like this?
Lucanis hated these.
He tugged his tie loose the moment he crossed the threshold into the beautiful, expensive, secure hotel room they had booked for the weekend.
Jobs like this required more than Lucanis preferred them to. More covert terminology than a normal job. More communication with civilians than a normal job. More time. More eyes on him. More space outside of the shadows. More thought into who was watching from where. More thought into how he slept, into where he slept, into what he slept in.
Jobs like this—overnight, weekend-long—were hardly worth the money he made.
Especially when it was split.
“Underbaked,” Lucanis said, deft fingers already starting on the top button of the soft, dawn-break purple button-down. “And somehow overdone as well. Almost impressive, were it not nearly inedible.”
A touch—soft in weight but calloused in the fingers—laid over the rise of his bicep, stilling the hand on his own collar. “Dear,” came the low, warm croon beside him.
Lucanis did not hear her enter. He knew she was behind him, an ever-present silent step beside him the entire walk from the stairwell to the front door.
“I don’t think dessert was that terrible.” Teia’s smile was bright, a curve at the corner of warm lips. She swept in front of him, a dance of feline grace stopping silently before him to swat his hands from his own shirt.
Her fingers were just as deft as his - just as quick as she unbuttoned the second and then third button of his button-down.
“Hm. If you cannot have acceptable catering at your over-decorated pre-wedding dinner, you simply should not have one,” Lucanis noted.
The code, at least, was not difficult.
“Maybe they are saving their money for the wedding,” Teia suggested.
(Translation: We would have another shot at the wedding.)
Lucanis pressed his lips together in a thin, tight line. “If the wedding cake is of similar quality, I have no hopes for their union.”
(Translation: The target wasn’t even there. If he makes no effort to show up to his own brother's pre-wedding drinks—I have little hope he would show up to the wedding itself.)
Teia’s hand slid down from where she had been working his buttons open down the full length of his shirt. It hung open, split over his undershirt and his scars. Her hand dragged down to rest on the buckle of his belt.
(Lucanis hated jobs like this)
He let his eyes drop to half-lowered as he makes a concerted effort to take in what Teia was wearing from the angle at which he was given.
Lucanis had opted for the dusty, pale lavender to match the dark, coming-dusk tone of Teia’s dress. It was a slinky thing, even with his jacket draped over her shoulders, with thin straps crossing over her chest to hold the light, delicate fabric up over her chest. It was obvious, Lucanis would presume to everyone with eyes let alone everyone with the sharpened, trained senses of an assassin, that she had forgone a brassier in it. From this angle, if Lucanis was so inclined, he could look down the front of it.
Propriety demanded he did not.
Propriety demanded he look anywhere but the freckled expanse of Teia Cantori’s chest.
Propriety demanded he did not follow the line of Antivan-sun-wrought marks down to the rise of her breast, to the spot where the narrow, pale flash of a scar cuts through.
Propriety demanded he did not oogle his fellow Crow, his fellow Talon.
But the job—
The job demanded he did.
Lucanis could appreciate a fine form. He could appreciate the evident curve of her musculature beneath the cling of her satin dress.
“I know you hate weddings, Lucanis, but could you at least try to enjoy yourself?”
(Translation: We’ll get him. Crows do not leave contracts unfulfilled.)
He let his hands rest in the cut of her neat, sharp waist. He knew the way that Teia felt under his touch—in perfectly professional ways, of course. He knew the way she felt every time he hauled her off the ground when they were younger, every time he dropped a hand to her shoulder as he passed her at the Diamond. He knew the way she felt the same way he knew how many of the Crows of his generation felt beneath a casual touch.
Teia was muscle, through and through. She was lean-packed strength wrapped in satin and soft, warm skin.
Viago is a lucky man, came the nagging little voice that crawled its way into his mind. He dropped his hands from her like she was the wrong end of a dagger.
“I am enjoying myself,” Lucanis argued. “Even if the coffee was burnt.”
(Translation: I know. The coffee here is terrible, though.)
Teia clicked her tongue, stepping back and sweeping to the suitcase she had left tucked beside the hotel dresser. Lucanis watched her crouch and casually check the safeguards she had left under the guise of looking for the zipper.
“I can make you coffee in the morning,” Teia offered. It took everything in Lucanis’ power, everything in his years of training, to not make a face.
He thought it succeeded.
Maybe.
(Translation: It could be worse.)
“...maybe in the morning we get breakfast by ourselves, hm?”
(Translation: Teia, of all the skills you have, of all the things you do that make me proud to be a Crow beside you, for the love of the Maker making coffee is not one of them. And we should debrief somewhere safe.)
Teia rose, her sleep-wear draped over one arm. “I am going to change and take a shower,” she said, her eyes flicking towards the bed and then the windows. “Make sure the curtains are cracked? It was so dark in here in the morning.”
(Translation: Our cover couldn’t see us, and I was the one who got an earful during our check-in. Next time, I am leaving you to suffer it.)
“Showering alone?” Lucanis asked, already taking a step towards the wall adjacent to the window.
Teia’s laugh came like bells, chiming along the summer evening in Treviso. “I need you energized tomorrow, Lucanis.” Her voice drifted through the small room, bouncing off the walls of the adjoined bathroom. “If you can still move your legs once I’ve had you on the dance floor all night tomorrow.”
Lucanis did not need to translate that one, as the door clicked shut and the shower turned on.
He moved towards the window with a sharp, pointed efficiency—instinct carrying him out of the line of sight of anyone who might be peering in through the fourth-floor window. The side of the hotel they had been put on faced a block of commercial office buildings, the sort with more empty suites than occupied ones. It was a risky move, facing their rooms towards a building that was little more than a pile of dark corners and shadowed windows—but their cover needed a perch to watch the entrances and exits and, well, two Crows in a room were always going to spot an unwelcome intruder faster than an unwelcome intruder was going to spot them.
The hotel room was set up in a familiar, pristine way. A single king-sized bed sat a few feet from the window, with the head pressed against a wall that held two bed-side tables. The tops were glass, and the lamps that adorned them had a shined, chrome-plated finish that Lucanis made sure was tilted to see just right outside the window. The wall beside the bed held a framed piece of art—some Orlesian vista that Teia had crooned at when she first entered—but it held enough of a reflection that Lucanis could see the sliver of the office building outside the window as well.
It made for a decent enough vantage point as he quietly stripped from his own semi-formal wear and changed into the matching set of dark sleep-clothes he had packed himself. They were loose enough that he could move but not too loose that he worried about tripping should someone come upon them in the night.
The bed, wide and plush, was not quite as luxurious as his own bed in Antiva, but it would do for a weekend. (Just another reason to hate jobs like this, that he can’t go home afterwards. Confined to a stranger's bed instead of the comfortable routine of his own evenings.)
He laid across it, on the side closest to the door—his position, his job. It painted him as the gentleman on Teia’s arm, a physical barrier between her and danger. But they both knew how dangerous the window on the other side was. Moreso, in reality. He could cover one entrance, she could cover the other.
They had decided it when the contract came down.
On paper, before any physical trace of it was burned in the fireplace of the Diamond, the contract seemed as simple as it was proving itself to not be.
A young second-son wanted control of the corporation his father left in the hands of his brother. It was difficult enough to find his paranoid, guard-flanked brother alone, so the second-son offered his own wedding as the venue for a bloody succession.
Provided, of course, the following conditions were met:
It was quiet.
It was neat.
His new wife-to-be was none the wiser.
Those conditions were not the difficult part. The difficult part was being invisible at a wedding. It was hard enough to maintain the illusion of anonymity in a place designed to inspire the question: how do you know him? It was harder to do it in a place where being alone was more attention-drawing than not.
It was not Lucanis that was given the invite.
It was Teia.
Teia’s job, Teia’s contract.
Teia’s plus-one.
Lucanis let his eyes sweep the room again as he peeled back the bedsheets in time to hear the shower cut in the other room. He could already feel the seeping humidity whispering from beneath the shut bathroom door. He knew when she opened it, it would bleed into the room in a rush of soft, gentle spice mixed with warm citrus.
It felt like practice—like the sort of training his grandmother would do—to close his eyes and follow her with nothing but sound and smell and touch alone.
The heat of the trapped steam leeching into the room, the creak of the bathroom door. The shift of a towel following her around the corner where her feet moved from tile to carpeting. He heard the soft puff of a breath he knew was loud enough that he could hear intentionally—a cognizant noise to draw his attention, to alert him to her presence. Like two predators sharing a respectful howl in the night.
I am here. Do not be afraid.
It’s only me. (This is not a reason to not be afraid.)
When he was younger, his grandmother made him draw the path she cut through the rooms.
When he was younger, when he made mistakes, she did not offer grace.
Lucanis tracked Teia’s movement from the bathroom to the suitcases to the side of the bed. The faint dip of the mattress, the movement beside him, the waiting, the waiting, the waiting before she buried herself into the sheets beside him.
It struck Lucanis, in the sensitive, soft places where a dagger could slip between his rib cages, that he did not recall the last time he slept beside a woman. Or a man. Or anyone.
(That was a lie. Of course Lucanis remembered the last time he slept beside another living person. The last time he dared let himself fall into the wash of sleep while another breathed slowly and steadily beside him. They had been hardly on the other side of twenty-five, pressed together for warmth on a pitiful, terrible job that neither of them really wanted to be on but he had insisted. Lucanis had laid his hand on his cousins sleeping back, feeling the steady rise-fall beat of his lungs and the tattoo of his heart. He had listened to the lullaby the proof of Illario’s life sang out until he fell asleep, his cheek pressed to his shoulder.)
He did not recall the last time he slept beside a person like this.
Teia settled, the shower-warm line of her back pressed against his arm as a soft puff of laughter caught in her throat. “Lucanis,” she sighed. “Do not lie there like a corpse.”
He cracked an eye open at her. She had turned the lights out, leaving them washed in a low, comfortable darkness. He could still see her. He could see the twisted braid she wrapped into a bun atop her head, he could see the curve of her cheek, he could see the gleam of her eye and the high, loose shorts that barely covered her legs and the Eastern Treviso Annual 5k For The Arts t-shirt he knew she did not buy for herself but pilfered from another long ago.
“I was wondering how long you would take,” he said, turning onto his side.
Lucanis could play her husband. He could play her loving, devoted thing.
(He could lay with his hand on her back, listening to the sound of her. He could hold her. He could pretend he was something that could have something made of steel and cinnamon.)
He drew the duvet up over them both, steeling himself to lay an arm over the neat cut of her waist.
Teia was small in stature, fitting against his chest as he curved his body around her. Lucanis knew he was not a large man. It was fitting, on occasion, the way he could use his size to slip through the bars of expectation. She nestled into his chest, her hand falling down where his came to rest as respectfully as it could on her midriff.
“I did not know you did annual charity runs,” Lucanis said, his voice pitched low and warm as he searched for the most comfortable place on her neck to tuck his nose.
He found it as she answered. “Mmm. Why else would I be wearing this?”
In a dagger-sharp flash, Lucanis could imagine Viago in his place instead. He could imagine the strong length of his narrow body flush to hers. He could imagine the way his eyes would look—half-lidded and overflowing with a distant amusement—as he looked down under his thick, dark lashes at her.
He could imagine the way his lips would twitch, the most subtle line of approval mixed with affectionate irritation. His mouth dried at the prospect.
“I did not imagine you for a thief, Teia, but I suppose there are always things I can learn about you,” he said into the slow, easy pulse he found to nose against.
Narrow, calloused fingers slide between his, holding his hand flush against her stomach. “I only steal from people I love. No one else has anything worth keeping.”
Lucanis could not formulate the appropriate reply, his mind flipping through the list of things he could and should say until he felt the line of Teia’s body slowly begin to relax against him.
Slowly.
Slowly.
And then all at once.
He waited until he could feel the expand-collapse of her lungs in perfect time with his own before he let himself slip into the cold, quiet oblivion beside her.
###
It was hardly the edge of dawn when Lucanis woke with a muted start.
It was Teia that tugged him from the recesses of a shallow, restless sleep, a soft sigh caught in her chest that dripped down into the sheets. Her hand pulled, drawing Lucanis’ suddenly-alert fingers up through the warm, worn fabric of her t-shirt.
For a moment, he thought she was still asleep—caught in the memories of other bodies in her bed—but the twist of her spine to draw herself closer to him could not be anything but intentional.
“Lucanis,” she sighed, guiding his hand up to the warm space just beneath her breasts. “It’s so early.”
Her head tipped back, rolling to flash him bright, brilliant eyes as her lips parted in a warm sigh.
His brows knit as Teia’s liquid spine rolled against him, the brush of her heel against his calf, the nudge of her—of her against his hips.
Something was wrong. His fingers tightened against her for a moment. Where her hand gripped his, she pressed the nails of her index, middle, and ring fingers into the palm of his hand.
Three.
His eyes flickered to the sliver of the cold, steely dawn chasing away the still midnight—then to the carefully primed reflection of the chrome-plated lamp.
Light bounced, reflecting off the faintest touch of movement across the courtyard.
Anyone else would presume it was nothing more than a trick of the light.
Anyone else would presume it was nothing more than the wind.
Crows know better.
“Teia,” he whispered, his voice scratching with sleep. He pressed his nose back into her skin as his eyes swept for each carefully-planned angle.
“I know,” she replied, stretching out like a stray cat comfortable on the sofas of her House’s rooms. She settled in against him again, guiding his hand in a sweeping motion down to—to the hem of her shirt. She moved as if she was following him, as if he was skating a touch along the length of her strong, solid abdomen.
The heat of her skin was enticing, a siren song in the same way a warm bed called to one after a long night’s work. He steeled himself against the urge to brush a feather-light touch against her, to press his fingertips to her skin until she could feel every whorl of his prints marked against her flesh.
She guided his hand, until his nails brushed the hem of the shorts she wore.
“Lucanis,” she crooned back, her hair falling loose from the protective style it was wrapped in. Strands brushed across the rise of a sleep-warm cheek. This time, four nails bit into his palm.
His gaze trailed off her face to the lamp. The blinds that had shuddered were on the fourth floor. He squeezed her hand in return. A question wrapped in the delicate guise of an affectionate gesture.
“Forgive me,” he said, his voice low with sleep. He searched for more words, for something that someone like this would say in a moment like this. How can I be expected to keep my hands off you? Terrible. You are simply too beautiful to be left alone? Ugh.
Lucanis had never been good at this. He had never been good at the oozing charm and the ichorous dripping that came with seduction as an art form. That was for people like—
For people like Teia and for people like people who Lucanis would prefer to not think of while Teia was artfully pushing his hand down the rise of one strong, powerful thigh. He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment before he recalled where he was, recalled that they were not alone.
(Translation: Three—three people. Four—fourth floor.)
“Hush,” Teia breathed, bringing Lucanis’ hand back to the rise of her hip instead. He gripped her there for dear life, as if letting her go would mean letting himself fall backwards into an uncertain oblivion. “Let me do the talking for us, hm? Oh, you would like that wouldn’t you?” It came bubbled with a sweet, coiling laugh as Teia arched back into him. “Mmm. You always act so shy and sweet, but this?” She repeated the gesture, her heel dragging up his calf as he pushed herself into the cage of his arms. “This does not lie, mi amor.”
It was teasing, sweet, and it struck Lucanis midway through his horrifying realization that she was going to make him hard, that she was pretending she already had.
Late to the comprehension, Lucanis slid his hand up the curve of her side—following the slope of her hip down into the neat cut of her waist. He shirt gathered with it as he let his thumb sweep down over the gently-scarred ridge of her side.
(A blade. Three years ago. She had been on a job. Viago was worried sick when she was late, the hours creeping past until he broke. The second he decided to go looking for her, the second he told Lucanis to come with him, Teia had shouldered the door of the safehouse in. She’d bled through the pretty dress that she had bought. She complained more about that than she did the knife wound.)
Next, his fingers danced down towards her navel, towards the soft hairs that darken ever-so-faintly in the space beneath it. He wouldn’t touch her there, even as he breath shivered and the goose-flesh along the length of her stomach prickled.
(Translation: Three people, fourth floor.)
Lucanis scratched one finger gently from the ridge of her hip down to the rise of her shorts before smoothing his touch in wide, welcoming circles.
(Translation: Room ten.)
“Eager,” Teia teased, twisting to face him instead. It was harder to face her than it was to be pressed to the line of her back. He could see the warmth in her eyes, the soft attentive glisten as her lips parted on a sweet, warm sigh. Teia was beautiful. Lucanis would have to be either blind or a fool to not recognize it, and even worse to speak such things into the world. Teia was not his to remark upon, her beauty was known enough that to speak it would only invite the softened blows of playful ridicule. “We have time, we can take it slow. We have what?” She made a show of turning her head to check the clock. “Four hours until breakfast is over? Ten hours until we need to start getting ready.”
Lucanis lifted his hand, sweeping around her back to delve up her shirt and trace the length of her spine instead. He could do that, he could touch her in the way a lover would—a map of muscle memory from lessons upon lessons upon lessons woven into the lines of his bones. (This was not his forte. This was not his specialty. Lucanis hated jobs like this, he hated jobs that required him to press into the skin of another and pretend he knew how to act when his heart threw itself against his bird-cage chest.)
“We could spare a few more hours, no?” He tried, burying his nose in her shoulder. He hoped their cover had microphones, as he kept his mouth buried in the shirt that unfortunately smelled of the intoxicating warmth of Teia’s body.
He bites his nails into the rise of her shoulder. Three pressing firm, curving then dragging to press her chest into him before he swept his touch down.
Teia giggled, a sound half-foreign and familiar to him. “A few hours for what? For one of us to be a tease?” She unwound her hand from him, a calloused, affectionate palm curving over the line of his cheek. He wished, foolishly, that he had time to see to his beard. Surely the early morning would leave it coarse in her hand as he leaned into the touch. Logically, Lucanis knew it did not matter. This was not real.
This would never be real.
(Teia was not had, she was not someone’s but she was. Teia smelled of Viago’s cologne, she wore his shirts, she let him sleep in her bed. Teia did not belong to anyone but her own skin, but she had already welcomed in another. Lucanis tasted steel and something acrid and bitter and if it was envy he could not name to whom it belonged)
Her thumb swept under his lip. “Three years together, you think I have not learned a few tricks?”
(Four. One. Three.)
Lucanis let his eyes flicker to the bouncing reflections again. The blinds in room 413 shuddered before the faintest glimmer of light sparked and fizzled.
Good.
He had exactly enough time to think: thank the Maker our cover is paying close attention. And exactly enough time to think: Oh, Maker, our cover is playing close attention.
He could hide the burning of his face in the dip of Teia’s throat again, his lips skating the gentle thrum of her pulse, but he could not quiet the tattoo of his chest against her own. “Teia,” he warned, as she slid her knee up over his hip. It breached the confines of the sheets, dragging a leg over him as she seamed their bodies together.
She was warm. Warm and solid and soft against him, her breasts shoved against his chest and her heat seeping through the thin fabric that separated their skin. Warm and solid and there and sighing into his ear as she brushed her bottom lip against the burning shell of it. Lucanis was, above all else, a consummate professional.
He was, unfortunately, little more than a man.
“My Lucanis,” she said, the fingers of her other hand tangling into his hair. “Stop playing at being a shy little boy and kiss me.”
His mouth was dry when he pulled his face back, the hand on her back sliding to cup the soft, gentle curve of her cheek. Lucanis was not a large man, but Teia was not a large woman either. She was small, still, where he held her. Small where she pressed against his chest and anchored his hips to hers.
There was a glee in her eye, bright and dark and eager as Lucanis leaned into brush the dry rise of his lips against her own. It was not a kiss.
Her breath shuddered against his own.
“One kiss?” She asked, with the catch of his slightly-chapped lips dragging against her soft, smooth ones.
“Where?” He tried to make it sound coy. He tried to make it sound coy and suggestive and it came out pleading instead, like a wasteful thing begging for permission.
“Oh?” Teia purred back in response. “You don’t know where I want you to kiss me?”
“I could wager a guess,” he tried back.
“Mm.” The hand in his hair tightened, pulling him closer. Lucanis shuddered despite himself and quietly begged for forgiveness when other parts of him twitched in interest. Teia’s eyes flashed and Lucanis knew the joy he found there was little more than prayer. “Where do you want to kiss me?”
At once, his chest jerked and his traitorous mind tried to offer up a litany of options. He could not translate them into numbers he did not know. There was no way to pretend the space beneath your jawline was a room number for one of their current voyeurs. There was no way to define your collarbone, your shoulders, the scar on your chest, the space between your breasts, all down your stomach until you are writhing beneath me with want mixed with need, every inch up the inside of your legs and then down again, the places where you are most sensitive, buried up between your thighs and on your dripping heat as anything other than it was.
And worst of all—
—Worst of all—
Lucanis didn’t know.
The angle into the window could only get him as far as the fourteenth room and as far as Lucanis could tell, whatever third person Teia had spotted was beyond his vantage point.
“Everywhere,” he said, hoping she understood both points he longed to make.
Teia laughed, uncruel and generous. “We can arrange this, you know.”
Lucanis could not prevent his brows from jumping if he tried. If pressed, he would attribute it to the roles they are playing.
The strong leg draped over his hip held steady, flexing as Teia used it to roll Lucanis directly onto his back, leaving both their hips tangled in the sheets as she sat proudly astride his lap. In the bathing light of the early morning glow, Lucanis nearly forgot the contract. He nearly forgot the mission at its core and the roles upon which they were supposed to be playing. The light caught in the brown curls hanging loose from her head, bouncing affectionately down to her shoulders. It cast her in a golden hue, brilliant and blinding and beautiful where her pilfered shirt rode up on her stomach and her shorts had crawled up an almost obscene length of her thighs. Her lips parted as she looked down at him.
He could not keep himself from laying his hands on the tops of her bare legs.
One hand rose to urge her hair back, tossing the loosened curls over her shoulder and ah—
—ah.
It registered in a moment.
A better vantage point.
That was what she was doing.
The knowledge did not keep Lucanis’ mortification from growing as Teia’s hips slid down over his lap, the trapped line of his reaction to her pressed against the inside of her thigh.
The issue at hand did not get better when her fingers dropped to the hem of her shirt and it did not get better when she lifted it over her head and dropped it down off the mattress and into a world that Lucanis certainly knew existed but didn’t exist anymore.
Teia’s torso was a storybook of scars and strength, the knife wound he recalled, a burn just under her left breast, a puckered wound that looked terribly like a bullet. There were other things there, too. Things that Lucanis had never been privy to. A dark little birthmark beside her right nipple, a patch of sun-spotted freckles down her chest that was difficult to discern in any light but the brilliance of the morning, the soft marks and scars of time changing her body from a youth to an adult.
“Come up here and I will show you where to kiss me.”
Moving was difficult, if only because it meant pieces of her vanished from his sight. The little mole beside her belly-button, the trail of dark hair where the elastic of her shorts met her skin, the lines where she slept on a slightly folded sheet.
He bent up to meet her, arms looping around her waist to feel her skin press to his shirt. A shirt he very, very wished was gone at the moment. A shirt that Lucanis, in a fit of madness, shed to let her skin push to his skin.
Teia groaned, a low and rumbling thing as she cupped his face in her hands and tilted her head back.
“Here,” she said, offering her jaw to him.
(It was so she could look to the windows without suspicion. That is what he told himself. It was for the contract. It was for the job.)
He touched his lips to her skin, a skating thing before he pressed to kiss her properly against her jaw.
Teia’s hands fell to the rise of his shoulders, her grip tightening as she gasped and tipped her head further. “Lower,” she said.
And he kissed her lower, the side of her throat where his nose could brush the throbbing line of her pulse.
“Keep going.”
Clearly she needed more time, no? Clearly Lucanis needed to buy her time by following her instructions and peppering her shoulders and collarbone with the shape of his lips again and again and again, kissing the sleep-sweep heat of her skin without pause as she bent herself backwards into his hands, letting him following the line of her chest and collar to her other shoulder and back up her throat.
Every inch of her.
She told him where to kiss, back on her throat again and again and again and again, then her shoulders, then her chest, and her jaw, and her ears.
He was lost in the intoxicating miasma of Teia Teia Teia, her skin and sweat and the soft sweet sound of her sighing, that it almost did not register when she let herself unwind his hands.
“That should be all of them,” she said, her eyes half-lidded as she looked down at Lucanis.
He opened his mouth to ask before it registered, a half-second too late. He winced as he shut it. “The last one?”
“Four to the neck, one to the ear, nine to the chest.”
“Lucky us they all decided to be on the fourth floor. Sloppy, but lucky.”
“They must have thought we would not notice all of them. I have no qualms using someone’s bad practices against themselves.”
Teia had not let go of him.
Neither had Lucanis let go of her.
“Teia—I—”
“Hush,” she said, as if predicting his next move. “If the next words from your mouth are an apology, I will be giving our cover this room number next.”
He winced, again. She shifted in his lap, the heat of her groin seeping down against him and—
—and—
“Teia.”
“We do have time,” she said, her fingers turning gentle in his hair. “I asked you to join me for a reason, Lucanis.”
“I presumed you were on the outs with Viago.”
She laughed, this time genuine. “Viago could not play nice with the sort here long enough to get the information that we needed. It is easy to play at being the partner of someone like you.”
His ears burned again. “Teia.”
“Viago, I’m certain, is only upset that he must watch instead of participate.”
The heat that had slowly burned within him douses at once. “What?”
“Do you think I would trust just anyone to cover us while we slept? Or to listen to our instructions? Besides, Viago would not stop complaining that he could not be here when it was you and I. I said he could watch.”
“Our cover—” No. Lucanis was a dead man. His hands were still on Teia’s back, his mouth still tasted like her skin.
He was still hard.
There was no saving him. House de Riva would have his skin mounted on their wall and his bones fed to Viago’s snake.
Teia did not seem concerned above him, her hips still idly rocking.
“He—” I said he could watch. “What?”
Teia laid her arms over Lucanis’ shoulders, her fingers toying with the ends of his hair. “Do you think neither Viago nor I have noticed the way you look at us?” She breathed, sinking closer to Lucanis as his heart only rattled harder in his chest. “Lucanis. You are a perfect assassin but your poker face? When Viago slides up behind me and puts his hand on my waist? When I touch his arms? I can see it when you look away.” A fingertip trails over the rise of an ear. “You get darker, you cannot look at us. A dagger in a bedroom with a note, no?”
Lucanis swallowed, the thick, heavy weight bobbing in his throat. “He ignored it. It—we were young, Teia.”
She clicked her tongue in return, giving lips pressing into the slope of his forehead. “He still has it, you know. And I know he is furious in the building across the courtyard, listening to me tell you about it. He kept it because he wanted to accept it but the thought scared him.”
Nothing scares Viago, Lucanis wanted to say—but they both knew it was a lie. All three of them knew it was a lie. “Why?”
Teia shrugged. “I could say it is because Viago is a complicated man. But the truth is he isn’t. And I know you are angry over there. Throw a tantrum all you like.” She turned her face back to Lucanis from where it had drifted towards the window. “He is not as complicated as he wants you to think. And neither am I, Lucanis. You are attractive. You are talented.”
“Teia—”
“I know, I know. So am I.” There was a wry smile attached to it. “Do you know what Viago is like in bed?”
(Translation: ???)
The question jolted him from his idle warmth, pulling him back to the moment with a twist low in his belly as Teia rolled her hips down against him.
“He is as demanding as you would think, of course, strong and tall and handsome. He throws his weight around like he knows what to do with it. It’s all orders with him. Roll over, spread your legs, come here, come for me, Teia.” Her hips did not stop, even as Lucanis tightened his grip around her, his own hips nudging faintly to meet her own at the thought of Viago’s hands around his wrists, holding him down and holding them together.
And together.
And together.
(Translation: And together.)
“I always make him take his time,” Teia breathed. “You have not seen him until you have seen his face slick with me, until you have seen his eyes, those eyes, looking up from between your legs. He always had a clever tongue, and trust me, we find good use for it. And he is always so eager for it too. Mm, to have him under you? To have him pull you down to meet his face? Ah—Lucanis, I want you to see. I want you to watch while he fucks me open on his tongue.”
He was aching now, the throbbing between them impossible to ignore as he pants into Teia’s throat. “I would,” he breathed, his voice since. “I would watch him and then do the same to you. I want to know what you look like when you tremble apart, I want to know what you—what you both look like.”
Lucanis could not pretend he had not imagined it. He could not pretend he did not consider what they had looked like.
“Do you want to taste me, Lucanis?” Teia asked, her lips sliding down over his temple. “Would you eat me after Viago has spent inside me? Eat the taste of your fellow Crow from inside my cunt?”
His arms tightened without his permission as a groan trembled free from the depths of his chest. “Gladly.”
Teia leaned backwards and, with a motion of finality and self-assuredness that Lucanis could never even pretend to contain, sealed her mouth to his.
The kiss was slow, not the fevered and desperate rut that Lucanis had once worried it would become. She kissed him like he was more than an idly fantasy, more than a daydream caught in the hushed talk of lovers on the brink. She kissed him like she wanted him, like she wanted to cradle part of him in the center of her palm and hold him and hold him and hold him. Like she wanted to take him in hand and split him to share like the first fresh bread of a winter feast.
She kissed him.
And she kissed him.
Teia bent to the press of Lucanis’ lips, to the sweep of his tongue to taste the line of her teeth. She folded backwards to let him at the rest of her chest, the parts of her that he refused to let himself have access to.
“He would take you apart,” Teia sighed, as Lucanis kissed the peak of one eager, taut nipple. “Slowly. He loves to pick things apart bit by bit, you know.”
“Does he take you apart like that?” Lucanis asked, his tongue dragging over her.
She shivered in his arms. “Mm. When I want him to. You would enjoy it when he melts wax to pour over you. When he touches you with his gloves still on. When he buries his fingers inside of you and makes you wait to come.”
Lucanis pretended like his cock did not jump at the prospect.
It was impossible to continue pretending when she added: “You would love when he splits you open on his cock, too, when he fucks you so full and so deep that you forget who you are. He is vigorous.”
He grazed his teeth over a nipple, his hand sliding around to take hold of her other breast as she smoothed a hand through his hair again.
“You should show him,” Teia said.
Lucanis blinked up at her. “Show him what?” He asked, his lips still against her skin.
Her hand dropped again, pressing between them to mold the curve of her palm against the line of his cock. “Show him how you fuck me.”
Whatever Lucanis had presumed she would say - this was not one of them.
But who was he to deny her, to deny the audience that he could feel watching with a prickle against his skin. Viago was watching them.
Viago was watching him lave his tongue over Teia’s breasts, Viago was watching him kiss her, Viago was watching him nip at her throat while she keened and sighed against him.
Viago was watching when Teia lifted to slide her shorts down and off, pouring herself down onto the edge of the bed. Viago was watching when Lucanis slid onto his knees in the space between the bed and the window, letting her drape her legs over his shoulder.
Viago was watching when Lucanis drank in the sight of Teia’s cunt, slick and flushed with a want that had rapidly unbecome into a desperate need. She was drenched, dark curls plastered to her skin and her swollen, needy clit already pleading for attention. Lucanis had not been so close to so many people like this, so close that he could smell the heady scent of her arousal, so close that he could lean in and press his lips to the sweet, slick mess of hers.
He kissed her, once, before delving his tongue down between her folds. Teia laid herself down against the bed, a heel pressing against his back as Lucanis pulled back—a mixture of saliva and arousal stringing the point of his tongue to her for a moment before his breath dared snap the tenuous connection.
His breath ghosted over the shape of her as he savored the moment, savored the place he was permitted to be.
Crows were always two things: quick and thorough.
Lucanis had never been a very good Crow.
He took his time, framing either side of her with two fingers to open her to him, to split her like a fresh summer fruit that he could lay his tongue upon and feast and feast and feast. He drank from her like she was the fresh, clean summer water after an eternity spent under the beating Antivan sun. He devoured her, tongue and lips and lips and tongue and an unabashed dedication and determination that Lucanis only gave jobs. A single-minded and single-hearted drive and focus for completion and completion and completion. His tongue sank into her, tasting Teia from the inside before he wrapped his lips around her clit and rolled his tongue over the twitching, desperate head of it.
He worked her and he worked her and he worked her—like a blade to a whetstone.
Lucanis could feel her come to pieces.
Slowly, and then all at once.
He felt it first in her calves, then her thighs and her stomach before she made a proper mess of his beard and his throat and his jaw—come running mixed with spit down his face. (A Crow would never be so debauched. So ruined. It was only by the intoxication of Teia that Lucanis was able to keep himself from recalling the sting of his grandmother’s cane at the idea being being so unpresentable.)
He knew his hair was a mess when she came up for air, panting his name in quick succession as she pushed her sweat-slick hair off his face.
His cock ached, but for a flash-bang moment all he wanted was to crawl in bed and hold her. All he wanted was to kiss the side of her temple and hold her until the sun set and the dawn came.
Lucanis looked over his shoulder, to the flicker of space between the darkness. To the abandoned office building across the courtyard, to the flicker of blinds and the glimmer of glass on the other side.
He would pretend his heart skipped in instinctual fear as he climbed the bed, and draw Teia’s shivering form into his arms. He kept her in his lap again, letting her adjust and move and draw him from the confines of his pants.
Lucanis hissed at her touch, and gasped when she guided him against her fluttering, twitching slit.
To slide home within her was to unbecome and rebecome as something wholly different. To cling to her as she sunk down upon her, her cunt gripping at the length of him as they fell into rhythm.
For a breath, all Lucanis could consider was her—the feeling of her hair where it brushed over his shoulders, her nails biting into his shoulders, her breath, her voice, her bodyherbodyherbodyherbody—a thousand insistent points of contact flushed against him as she drove herself down onto him time and time again, meeting the movement of his hips to follow her, chasing the eager, desperate edge of pleasure and oblivion.
In the second breath, all Lucanis could consider was the window—was the shape of Viago he imagined against the glass. He could imagine his hands, his eyes—sharp and clear and unyielding—he could imagine her between them and the scrape of Viago’s facial hair against his shoulder and a thousand other things that Lucanis had not dared think since they were younger.
It is terrible, the speed with which he found himself chasing the ever-closening peak, but Teia did not seem to mind, her voice eagerly encouraging him to, “make a mess of me, Lucanis. Make me drip with you, make me messy with you. I want to feel your come running down my legs when I stand up, I want to feel how desperate I made you. Come for me, come for me and come for Vi. Show him what you sound like when you cannot stand it anymore. Show him what you sound like when you come.”
There was little he could do, between the clenching, liquid-fire heat of her and the voice and the fact that he could feel Viago’s eyes, hot and heavy and sharp, from the far, far distance.
His end came quick, a sharp and violent thing. He shoved himself deep into the welcoming grasp of her body, his arms pulling her closer as he buried her name between a series of swears and vows pressed to her chest.
Teia beathed, and then hummed.
Lucanis did not know how long he had sat there, clinging to her. It did not matter.
Eventually, they found their way back into the tangle of the sheets—the window open a fraction more and the sheets kicked fully around their feet.
Lucanis laid with his head on the steady rise-fall of Teia’s chest. She toyed with his fingers.
“He was never going to the wedding,” Lucanis said, after a long moment.
Teia hummed. “No.”
“We were a distraction for his guards.”
“Yes.” The fingers on her other hand carded through his hair. “We can wait here while Viago finishes. I’m certain it will not take much longer.”
Lucanis did not permit his heart to jump. “And he…”
“We have the room for the evening,” Teia hummed. “Besides. What good is an alibi if we do not use it?”