Hippolyta is not the only one

The white bed did not remain Hippolyta’s private claim for long.

By the time she finally rose from it, the sheets had already lost their untouched brightness and Winston was still lying back, considering whether remaining horizontal could reasonably qualify as recovery. Hippolyta kissed his temple before gathering the loose cloth around herself and heading toward the gallery, apparently unconcerned by the women who had spent the last several minutes making increasingly poor attempts to pretend they were not listening.

Helisparga had abandoned most of the pretence by then. Colour sat high beneath the gold wings at her temples, and whatever Hippolyta murmured while passing her left a brief flicker of surprise before her attention settled fully on Winston. Enough of the councilwoman remained for her to hesitate at the edge of the bed, though the effort was becoming increasingly transparent.

“You have been very patient,” Winston noted.

“My king, I have been standing ten paces away.” The laugh that escaped with the answer betrayed how little patience had actually been involved, and when Winston smiled at her, whatever dignity she had still been trying to preserve became considerably less important.

By the time she crossed the remaining distance, restraint was already giving way inside the movement. She climbed over him with some of the measured care he knew from council still in her hands, as if habit expected deliberation even here. Those hands found him, still slick from Hippolyta, and fitted him against her. For a moment she only breathed, the head of him caught at her entrance, and then she let herself down.

The slide was slow enough to feel in stages. Heat first, then the wet clutch of her, then the long give of her cunt taking him until her hips met his and he was buried to the root. A sound left her that did not belong in council. She stayed full of him for a heartbeat, forehead tipped toward his, and when she lifted it was only far enough for the drag of her along his cock to show on her face. She sank again. The mattress answered. So did he.

The next strokes came faster. Not careless yet. Still that councilwoman trying to keep a rhythm, still her palms braced on his chest as if posture might save her, but each drop of her weight seated him deeper and stole a little more of the pretence. Her breasts moved with it, brushing his chest on the way down, pulling away on the way up. The wet of her followed every motion, too loud for the new room. Winston, still recovering from Hippolyta, found himself developing an unfortunate sympathy for the mattress.

Aurascyra’s laugh reached them from somewhere beyond Helisparga’s shoulder. Colour flooded Helisparga’s face. She did not stop. She looked back over her shoulder with him still inside her, still rising and falling, breathless enough that the reprimand lacked most of its intended severity.

“You can wait.”

Across the room, Aurascyra had made herself comfortable with the delay and looked entirely too pleased about it.

“I am waiting.” The cheerfulness in her voice made clear how much entertainment she was getting from the process.

“You are laughing at me.” Helisparga tried to sound offended. The accusation broke around the beginning of her own smile, and then around a sharper cry as her hips lost the argument and she took him to the hilt, harder than she had meant to, the slap of skin on skin no longer something she could keep between the two of them.

“I can do both.” Aurascyra’s grin widened as though this were an accomplishment worth defending.

That finished whatever embarrassment Helisparga had managed to preserve. Her laughter disappeared against Winston’s shoulder. What followed was not careful at all. She rode him in full view of the room, thighs flexing, cunt dragging wet up his cock and slamming back down, her breath breaking against his neck on every stroke. One of his hands found her hip and stayed there, not guiding so much as holding on. She took that as permission. Faster. Deeper. The gold at her temples caught the light each time she came down, breasts heavy and moving, the sound of her fucking him filling the chamber until there was no version of dignity left to recover.

It ran out of her all at once. Her rhythm staggered, caught, then drove down and stayed, grinding him as far into her as he would go while her cunt seized around him in hot, pulling waves. A raw sound tore out of her mouth into his skin. She shook through it and kept him there, still moving in small helpless shudders, still clutching, as if her body had not finished arguing for more.

By the time she eventually settled against him, breathless and shining, she seemed far more pleased with herself than mortified by what they had witnessed. Only then did she look back toward Aurascyra.

“You are intolerable.”

The exchange pulled a laugh out of Winston, though even that small effort exposed how little energy Helisparga had left him. Her amusement softened when she felt it, and the hand resting near his shoulder moved once across him with quieter affection, almost an apology without quite becoming one. Aurascyra noticed the change before either of them could pretend it had passed unseen.

The scrape of her spear being settled against the wall followed before he had much time to contemplate what that meant. When Winston looked again, Aurascyra was already crossing toward the bed, amusement still intact in her eyes and sharpened considerably by the state Helisparga had left him in.

Unlike the woman now resting beside him, she had spent none of the morning wrestling with whether desire ought to look dignified. She stopped close enough to inspect him, taking her time over the obvious effort he was making not to appear completely exhausted, and when his attention wandered for a moment her fingers settled beneath his chin and turned him gently back toward her.

“Stay with me, my king.”

She kept him there. A shift of her weight brought her over his hips. One hand dropped between them, found him still wet from Helisparga, and fitted the head of him to her. She was already slick with waiting. The first inch opened her around him, slow enough that he felt the give of it, and she did not look away while she took the rest, sinking until he was seated in her to the root and her cunt had closed hot and tight down the whole of him. A small, pleased breath left her. She held his face through it, so he had nowhere to put the fact except into her eyes.

“I am making a heroic effort.” Winston tried to give the claim more dignity than his condition supported. Holding her gaze while she began to lift off him, then slide back down, probably weakened his case.

Aurascyra let her attention travel over him before returning slowly to his face. “An effort, certainly.” The appraisal took long enough to make clear that she had enjoyed reaching the conclusion. She punctuated it by taking him deeper, a roll of her hips that dragged her along every overworked inch of him and left very little of the effort untested.

“Cruel.” He managed the accusation without much force, which only seemed to entertain her more.

“Observant.” Her smile deepened, and the fingers beneath his chin remained where they were as though the correction settled more than the choice of word.

Then she fucked him.

The room stayed in the act this time. Where Helisparga had forgotten it, Aurascyra rose until he almost slipped free, paused with the head of him caught at her entrance, and watched his face as she sank and took him to the root again. Wet sound filled the space between their mouths. On the downstroke her breasts brushed his chest and lifted away on the next, and the moment his eyes tried to close, the fingers at his jaw brought him back. An attempt to answer with his hips lost the rhythm at once, slowed until every inch of the slide registered, then filled again by that long drop that pulled a sound out of him he had not meant to give her.

There was enjoyment in keeping him conscious of all of it: the attention on his face, the heat of her cunt working up and down his cock, how little he had left, and the household hearing every wet joining of them. A stroke would draw out until his hands found her hips and he thought he had her pace, only for Aurascyra to drop and take him to the hilt hard enough that the mattress answered, slick and pulling on the rise, burying him again before he had recovered from the last. Looking became its own problem. The longer those eyes held him, the less he could pretend he was enduring her. Being used was the point, and she wanted him present for both the using and the pleasure she took in it.

Colour climbed her throat and her breath roughened against his mouth as the play went out of the next few strokes and left only hunger. Her thighs took over. She came down on him hard enough that the wet of it filled the space between them, again and again, until she broke with her eyes still open and her cunt seizing around his cock in hot, dragging pulls. She did not let him look away for any of it. She rode him through her own finish and then through his, through the thick helpless pulse of him emptying into her, her hand still at his jaw so he had to watch that too.

She came down against his chest flushed, satisfied, and still seated on him, as if the argument about effort had been settled in her favour. Sweat and the wreck of the sheets were still there, and so was the sound of someone by the wall trying to breathe evenly and failing.

Near the door Xanthibarqa’s axe had not moved, though she had. Her attention kept leaving the approach she was supposed to be holding and coming back to the bed, to Aurascyra still full of him, to the shine on Helisparga’s thigh, and each return seemed to cost her a little more of the stillness she was using as armour. Her stance had narrowed until her knees nearly touched. The muscle in her thigh jumped in a rhythm she was not choosing, and the breath she dragged in through her teeth did not come out clean.

Further in, Penthascara had managed the shape of a guard who was not watching: arms folded, jaw locked, eyes on a point that was not the mattress. The rest of her had not received the order. Heat stood in her face, her hips tucked in hard, thighs grinding together in a slow abortive motion she kept almost stilling and never quite did, as if stillness were a duty she could still perform if she only applied it in time.

The Circle had no such luck.

Whatever distance they had brought in with them had not survived Hippolyta, and it had not survived this. Colour ran high across mouths that had been trained to give nothing away. One of them, Myrto, had her shoulders so carefully placed that the effort was its own confession, while lower down her thighs rubbed in small helpless increments, wet enough now that the shift of her stance made a quieter sound than she would have wanted anyone to hear. Charis had left the far wall entirely. She was closer than she remembered moving, lips parted, watching Aurascyra’s hips with an openness that kept embarrassing her a heartbeat too late. Her legs pressed and eased and pressed again, chasing the wet rhythm coming off the bed as if her body had decided to finish what her pride would not.

Philomela could not even look away. The blindfold had stripped the act down to mattress, breath, the slap of skin, Helisparga’s broken laugh, the sound of Aurascyra taking him to the root. It arrived without a picture to put it in, which only seemed to make it worse. Her chest was going too fast. Her knees had fallen inward. Between them her thighs worked in slow, hungry strokes against each other, over and over, her head turned toward the bed as though proximity might spare her any of it.

Alkyone had stayed at Hippolyta’s side, which was not the mercy it appeared to be.

The former queen stood in the open doors as if the afternoon were an ordinary one, loose cloth at her shoulders, utterly at ease with the smell of the room and the women still on her husband. The woman beside her was not. Flush had climbed out of Alkyone’s armour into her throat and the high bones of her cheeks. Both feet remained exactly where she had planted them. That seemed to be all she trusted. Her breath snagged, was forced slower, snagged again. A tremor lived in her thighs, squeeze and release, squeeze and release, regular enough to count, and her eyes went to Hippolyta first, as they always had, before they dragged back to Winston and to the two who had taken him without asking the room’s permission.

Helisparga’s fingers were still on his shoulder. Aurascyra’s weight was still in his lap, slick and settled. The guards were still at their posts, after a fashion. Nobody in the household was treating the arrangement as a crisis except the four who had come in expecting a queen in amber and found a bed instead.

Winston felt Aurascyra shift on him and the pleasure in the room came into focus all at once. Duty had not left. Desire had simply sat down beside it, and the Circle’s bodies had sat down with it, whether they liked that or not.

Much of it felt wonderful.

The ease with which he enjoyed that fact was beginning to trouble him more than the fact itself.