Saruka's Seduction

Steam already clung to the bathing chamber when Saruka brought him there. Tektonia’s channels murmured beneath the stone, warm water closed around the ache, and within minutes the worst of the day had begun surrendering beneath hands that had spent a month learning exactly where Winston carried strain. The first touch was teasing, fingertips lingering over the firmer line of his shoulder before finding the stubborn muscle beneath it.

“I do like what the drills are doing to you, my king.” Saruka pressed slowly into the knot, satisfaction warming her voice as she felt it resist.

“The drills can claim some of it.” Winston let his head settle back against the stone while the pressure travelled deeper. “Living among Amazons appears to involve a great deal of exercise nobody includes in the official duties of kingship.”

A soft laugh reached him from behind. Saruka shifted as far around the bath as the stone allowed and set both thumbs beside his spine, working until the tension began releasing in increments. “You seem to have survived the burden.”

“Ask me again tomorrow.” The answer weakened when another knot gave beneath her hands, drawing an involuntary breath from him and ruining whatever dignity he had hoped to preserve.

For several minutes she let the water and her hands do most of the talking. Winston had almost forgotten that Saruka rarely fussed over him without simultaneously deciding something on his behalf when her thumb settled beneath his shoulder blade and stayed there.

“I have more than eleven names for the household.” She began worrying gently at the muscle beneath her hand. “Far more, actually.”

Winston opened one eye. “I thought we had already established eleven.”

“We established positions. I still have to decide which women deserve them.” Another careful push found the centre of the ache. “And there is something you should settle before any of them begin serving here.”

The change in Saruka’s voice was slight, but Winston knew it now. She had finished discussing servants somewhere beneath his shoulder blades and moved on to something she had plainly considered before bringing him into the bath. “That sounds ominous.”

“It is practical.” Her palms worked slowly upward again. The women she chose would be sleeping beneath his roof, preparing his food, carrying linen into his chamber and moving through the western rooms at hours when there would be very little distance between household service and his private life. Saruka had already accounted for competence and trust. What concerned her now was the possibility of bringing women into that intimacy who could acknowledge his crown and still regard serving the man beneath it as a degradation. “I do not want that festering here.”

The direction of the argument became clear before she took it any farther. Winston stared into the steam while her hands continued over his back. “You want me to change them.”

For a moment she concentrated on the muscle beneath one shoulder, following it until some of the stiffness finally eased. “I want you to decide whether you are willing to live with that division in them.” She did not pretend the distinction answered him. It merely placed the choice back where she believed it belonged.

He knew which word she was leaving for him. “Command them. Alter them. Make them feel something they did not feel before.” Saying it that plainly made the warmth of the bath suddenly seem beside the point.

“Yes.” Saruka did not withdraw her hands or hurry to justify herself. She simply accepted the language he had chosen and continued working, which left Winston with nothing to attack except the proposal itself.

Another tight place beneath his shoulder gradually loosened. He felt it happen despite himself, the ache receding while the thought she had put in his head became harder to dismiss. “You chose a remarkably convenient setting for this conversation.”

That brought a small smile. “You could barely stand when I found you.” Her hands paused against his shoulders rather than using the relief to press her advantage. “If you want me to stop, tell me.”

Winston considered saying it. His back still hurt, and Saruka knew perfectly well that it did. After a moment he settled against the stone again instead. “You know that is not what I want.”

“I know.” Only then did her hands begin moving again, slower than before. Whatever satisfaction she took from his answer stayed mostly at the corner of her mouth.

He let her work for another few moments before looking back at her. “That does not make this less manipulative.”

“No.” Saruka accepted that almost as readily as she had accepted *alter*. “But I am not asking you to mistake feeling better for agreeing with me.”

That left Winston with his accusation acknowledged and nowhere useful to take it. Saruka had not denied manipulating the setting, had not pretended the massage was irrelevant, and had not stopped either. The soreness continued receding beneath her hands while the suggestion she had planted remained exactly where she wanted it.

“The women I choose will not be the ones most hostile toward Man’s World.” Saruka worked gradually lower along his back as she spoke, more concerned now with the household than with defending herself. She knew the former palace staff too well to mistake open obedience for trust. Some would accept Winston’s crown readily enough and still carry the old contempt for men into every private service they performed for him. Saruka could screen out the worst of that, but not everything Themyscira had put into them since childhood. “I can choose women willing to serve you. I cannot choose what they will make that service mean.”

Leaving them untouched still seemed the obvious answer to Winston, yet the longer he considered the household she was describing, the less abstract the problem became. These women would not be distant subjects encountered at audiences. They would handle his clothes and meals, enter his chamber, see him asleep or ill, and move around him when there was no guard of ceremony between king and servant. “And you think changing them solves that.”

“I think it removes one danger and creates another.” Saruka shifted behind him to reach the opposite shoulder, her closeness making the admission feel more intimate than reassuring. She did not try to pretend otherwise. “If you leave them as they are, perhaps they grow comfortable with you. Perhaps some never do. Perhaps one decides that serving a man is a humiliation she can endure only by despising him for requiring it. I would rather know what is living under this roof.”

That was closer to the real seduction than any promise of affection. She was taking something Winston already feared, distrust inside his own household, and putting beside it an answer he possessed whether he liked possessing it or not. The ease with which her hands kept finding and removing the pain made the answer still harder to contemplate cleanly.

“That still does not give me the right to manufacture affection.” He turned enough to look at her, unwilling to let the matter remain a problem of household discipline.

“No.” Saruka held his gaze while her fingers continued their slow work. The concession came without reluctance. What she wanted was obvious anyway. Loyalty would satisfy the practical problem; affection would satisfy Saruka. She had spent a month discovering how pleasant devotion to Winston could feel from the inside, and some part of her plainly wanted to see other women arrive at the same place.

Winston saw that satisfaction gathering in her face before she said anything more. “You do not merely want them loyal. You want them to adore me.”

“I would prefer it.” There was no embarrassment in the admission. Her palms settled over his shoulders again, familiar now with every place the afternoon had left sore. “I enjoy it. I think they might as well.”

He almost laughed, but the thought would not stay light. Saruka could speak about adoration as though it were a comfort she wanted to share because, for her, it genuinely was. That was precisely what made her impossible to trust on the question.

“I made you love me.” Winston let the words sit there before adding the rest. “I did not persuade you. I did not earn it. I changed something in you until the answer I wanted became the answer you wanted too.”

Saruka’s hands slowed and then became still against him. The easy warmth in her expression faded, leaving something more difficult behind. “I know.” She did not withdraw from him, but neither did she try to turn the admission into another argument.

That quiet acceptance gave Winston less relief than denial would have. He turned farther toward her, forcing both of them to look directly at the contradiction they had been circling. “So why are you the woman telling me I should do it again?”

For once, Saruka did not have an answer waiting. Water slipped from her fingers back into the bath while her attention dropped to her hands, and Winston remembered the woman who had first attended him there a month earlier. She had loved Hippolyta without reservation and regarded Winston as little more than an obligation placed upon that devotion. She had known exactly where loyalty belonged.

Now she was choosing which women could safely enter his chamber and trying to persuade him that they might be happier if he changed where theirs belonged too.

“I cannot tell you that what you did to me was right.” The certainty Saruka had brought to the question of servants was gone now, though none of the affection had gone with it. Her hand remained against his shoulder, warm and familiar. “You changed the part of me that would have judged you for it.”

For once, Winston had no defense waiting to meet hers. He had expected her happiness to become evidence, perhaps even an excuse. Instead she had placed the flaw in her own testimony directly between them.

The cloth slipped through the water once before she continued. “I remember resenting you. I remember thinking Hippolyta had given me to a man I could never value as I valued her. I remember how certain I was.” The memories came easily enough; what they had once felt like plainly did not. “They are still mine. I just cannot reach them from where I am now.”

“That is exactly the problem.” He turned toward her, relief nowhere in the words despite having finally heard her admit it.

“I know.” Nothing more followed. Her fingers returned to the place beneath his shoulder where the soreness still lingered, and the quiet acceptance left him with less to fight than denial would have.

The old Saruka had not been created by his command either. Her contempt for men, her pride in Hippolyta’s household, the certainty that service to him could only diminish what service to Hippolyta had meant, all of that had already existed when Winston arrived. Across Themyscira, other women still carried versions of the same beliefs. Changing Saruka had removed the resistance. It had not invented it.

“And I used that.” The admission felt uglier once it no longer had to compete with an argument.

“Yes.” Her attention stayed on him rather than retreating into the work of her hands. There was no attempt to replace the word with something kinder. He had wanted Hippolyta. He had wanted affection where there had been suspicion and hostility. Once he discovered that his authority could give him those things, virtue had not been the first reason he reached for it. Saruka knew that as well as he did. “I am not going to pretend otherwise because I happen to love you now.”

The answer should have made condemnation easier. Instead it stripped away another place to hide. Winston let the back of his head rest against the stone while the remaining ache gradually loosened beneath her hands.

Once the eleven women were living here, they would know far more about Winston than most people who approached him as king ever could. They would learn when he rose, what he neglected to eat, which clothes he reached for without thinking and how long he could disappear into a book before someone had to remind him that the rest of the world still existed. They would pass through his chamber while he slept, bring things into the bath, hear conversations through doors that had been left open because nobody remembered to close them. None of that made a servant dangerous. It simply meant that distrust inside a household had very little distance in which to remain harmless.

The thought stayed with him while Saruka worked at the last of the soreness along his back. By now the pressure of her hands had become familiar enough that he noticed mostly when she found somewhere that still hurt. “Suppose I leave them alone. No command, no alteration. They come here exactly as they are.”

“Then that is how they come.” There was no disappointment in her voice, and no attempt to hurry him toward the answer she preferred. She knew most of the women she was considering well enough to avoid anyone openly hostile to him, but that did not mean affection would arrive with them. One might settle into the household within a week. Another might need months before taking an instruction from him stopped feeling like a concession to Man’s World. Someone else might perform every duty perfectly and never quite lose the belief that serving a man placed her below the woman she had been before. “I can choose women I trust. I cannot know beforehand which of them will make peace with being here.”

Winston let himself picture it instead of answering at once. At breakfast he would wonder whether a silence meant resentment or simply a woman who disliked mornings. A chamber attendant might flinch once when he touched her arm and then spend the next month convincing everyone, perhaps even herself, that she had not. Saruka would notice. Penthascara would notice that Saruka had noticed. Before long a household meant to be private would have half a dozen people quietly measuring whether one servant’s discomfort mattered.

“You are making this sound exhausting.” The complaint came with less accusation than he intended. He could already imagine himself pretending not to watch for exactly the things she had described.

A small trace of satisfaction appeared at the corner of Saruka’s mouth, though her hands never changed their pace. “It might not be. They may all surprise us.” She shifted enough to reach the stiffness nearer his other shoulder and found it almost immediately. “But until I know them here, in this house, I will watch. Penthascara will watch because they can reach you. You will watch because you will notice us watching and decide you ought to know why.”

That last part was irritatingly plausible. He could see the whole thing becoming routine without anyone ever deciding that it should. A servant entered with linen, someone’s attention followed her for half a second too long, and afterward Winston spent an hour wondering whether the attention had meant anything.

There was another way to prevent all of it.

The thought came so readily that he disliked it before he had even finished thinking it. He possessed an authority that could remove the uncertainty at its source. Eleven women could cross the threshold already certain that serving him did not diminish them, with no months of careful observation and no old contempt waiting underneath ordinary duties to see whether it survived familiarity.

He turned his head enough to look at Saruka. “You knew I would get there.”

“I hoped you would.” She did not pretend innocence now that he had caught up with her. Her fingers stayed at the stubborn place in his shoulder, working it gradually rather than forcing it loose. “If I simply told you to command them, you would spend the next hour telling me why I should be ashamed of suggesting it.”

“I still might.”

“I know.” Amusement touched her voice, but she left the possibility open instead of challenging him to prove it.

That made resisting her more difficult than an argument would have. She had not told him the untouched household would fail. She had made him imagine how much effort it would take to discover whether it would fail, then allowed him to remember for himself that he could remove the uncertainty whenever he chose.

“And if they would have grown comfortable with me anyway?” Winston asked. He could not decide whether he was defending the women or trying to preserve a reason not to use the power.

“Then you would have changed something that time might have changed for you.” Saruka’s hands slowed slightly before continuing. She did not hide from that possibility. “You would never know which ones would have come to love you on their own.”

There was enough weight in the answer to make him look at her again. He had expected the seduction to depend on making the cost disappear. Instead she had left it sitting in front of him.

The warmth in her expression returned only after she was sure he understood. “But if you do it, I also know what walks into this house. No woman wondering whether caring for you makes her weak. No one forcing herself through every kindness because she thinks enjoying it would betray something. They could belong here without fighting themselves first.”

The picture changed as he sat with it. The women in Saruka’s imagined household were not simply obedient. They were comfortable. Their voices carried from the kitchen without dropping when he entered; they came into his rooms already accustomed to his presence, learned the habits that irritated them, noticed when he forgot to eat and developed opinions about where he left his clothes. Saruka could teach them the rhythms of the house without wondering whether every hesitation concealed resentment. It was easy to picture, and the longer Winston allowed himself to picture it, the harder it became to pretend that certainty was the only thing attracting him.

“You want more than loyalty.”

Saruka’s smile came easily now. She had already admitted enough that there was little point disguising the rest. “Of course I do. I want them to enjoy being here.” Her hands remained warm against him while she spoke, familiarity making the future she described feel less hypothetical. She wanted women who would care whether he had eaten, become annoyed by his habits, take pride when he noticed their work and eventually stop thinking of every small kindness as service offered to a man they had been taught to distrust. “I want this to become their home too.”

That brought Winston back to the part of the picture she kept making inviting. None of those ordinary affections could be separated from the means she was proposing to secure them. “And you want me to make sure they feel that before they ever have the chance to decide it for themselves.”

The smile faded slightly, though not because the desire behind it had changed. Saruka knew exactly what he was accusing her of. “Yes. I want you to.” She stayed close, unwilling to hide behind loyalty or security now that he had reached the real point of her argument. She remembered being the woman who would have hated such a choice, and she remembered enough of that woman to understand why Winston hesitated. It simply had not made the life she lived now feel any less worth wanting for someone else.

By then the last ache beneath her hands had nearly gone unnoticed. Warmth had settled through Winston’s back, and with it came the more dangerous comfort of the household Saruka had been describing. Eleven women who did not stiffen when he entered a room. No months spent wondering which kindness had been offered freely and which had been dragged through old resentment first. The image had begun as something he could condemn easily enough. It was becoming harder to dismiss now that he could see what daily life inside it might actually feel like.

The thought brought him back to the woman beside him. “Do you resent me for changing you?”

Something altered beneath her hands. Not enough for the touch to disappear, but enough that the easy certainty went out of it. For a while the cloth moved through the water without purpose while she considered him, and when the answer came it carried none of the teasing she had used to draw him this far. “I resent that I cannot tell where you end and what you did to me begins.”

Memory remained intact even where feeling no longer matched it. She could still recall the first bath, the resentment she had carried into it, the certainty that Hippolyta had placed her in service to someone she could never value in the same way. Those thoughts belonged to her past as clearly as anything else, yet speaking of them now had the strange distance of describing convictions once held by someone she knew intimately and could no longer become.

That distance was exactly what Winston had been afraid of hearing. “If I could undo it now, put you back where you were before that first bath, would you want me to?”

The question left them with nothing to hide behind. Water slipped quietly along the stone while her hands rested against him, and the pause lasted long enough for uncertainty to become part of the answer before she finally gave it.

“No.” The word came softly, but once spoken it did not waver. “I remember how I felt then. I do not want to feel that way about you again. I do not want to look at caring for you and believe it diminishes me.”

There was no comfort in hearing it. The woman who might once have demanded restoration was gone in precisely the way that made restoration impossible to judge from where Saruka stood now. She seemed to recognize the thought before Winston found language for it, because the hand at his shoulder began moving again without any attempt to soothe the implication away.

“I know what that means,” she said. “My wanting to remain this way does not prove you were right.”

For a moment that might have been enough to end the argument. Instead the warmth of her hand lingered at the back of his neck, familiar now in a way that would once have been unimaginable, and Winston found himself looking at the life she was defending rather than only at the means by which he had created it.

“And you still want me to do it to them.” By the time Winston asked, there was little uncertainty left in the question. He had heard every reason she distrusted her own judgment and still watched her come back to the same desire.

“Yes.” Saruka no longer needed to defend the answer as household necessity. She remembered what resistance had felt like from inside it, how much of her pride had once depended on believing that caring for him must diminish her somehow. Those memories remained clear enough to trouble her, yet from where she stood now the struggle itself seemed exhausting, months of suspicion and resentment spent protecting something she no longer believed had needed protecting.

The thought pulled an unwilling smile from Winston before he could stop it. He could see exactly why that version appealed to her, which did nothing to make it right. “You being happier now does not prove I should do the same thing again.”

“No.” The concession came easily because she had already accepted that much. Her fingers returned to the lingering stiffness beneath his shoulder, working it slowly while she considered what remained after the moral defense was stripped away. “But I know how much effort I spent resisting you because I thought I was supposed to. I know what it felt like when that stopped.”

That was harder to push away. She was no longer offering him obedient servants or even a safer household. What she kept putting before him was ease: women entering the residence without carrying an argument into every room, affection that did not have to force its way through suspicion first, ordinary familiarity arriving without months of guarded looks and measured kindness. Saruka could direct them without wondering whether every hesitation concealed resentment, and Winston would not have to keep asking himself whether a woman serving him did so while privately wishing he were gone.

By the time he looked back at her, the real preference beneath everything she had said had become difficult to miss. “You do not just want them loyal. You want them to enjoy loving me.”

A smile answered before the words did. “I want them to enjoy being here. I want them to care whether you have eaten, complain when you leave your clothes where they should not be, learn what makes you impossible and become fond of you anyway.” Her hand moved once along his shoulder, affection making the argument more dangerous rather than less. “I want them to belong here without spending months fighting themselves first.”

There was enough honesty in that to make Winston uneasy. Security might have started the conversation, but Saruka had long since moved beyond wanting eleven trustworthy servants. She wanted a household that felt settled, affectionate, almost familial from the moment it formed. More troubling still, he could picture it with painful ease.

“You are using yourself as the example.”

“Of course.” Saruka did not try to disguise the weakness in that argument. She remembered the woman who had resented serving him and knew perfectly well that Winston had changed the part of her capable of returning to that judgment. None of it altered the fact that she liked the life on this side of the change. “I know I am compromised evidence. I also know I am happy.”

Winston had no way to separate those truths for her, and looking at her only made the problem worse. A month earlier the suggestion that she might one day fuss over his meals, learn the moods in which he needed quiet, or choose attendants according to how safely they could be brought into his private rooms would have offended something fundamental in her. Now those things had become ordinary parts of who she was. She could see the alteration clearly enough to name it and still regard losing what came afterward as a loss.

That should have made her cautious about wishing the same change on anyone else. Instead, as her hands remained warm against his shoulders, Winston could see that the knowledge had done almost nothing to diminish the desire behind her argument.

“You still want me to do it.”

The certainty returned to her expression before she answered. “Yes. I do.” She leaned a little closer, no longer trying to make the preference sound like a conclusion forced on her by security or household necessity. She wanted those women to arrive without the resistance she remembered carrying, wanted them to find pleasure in belonging here without first spending months fighting the idea of it. The more she spoke, the easier it became to picture what she meant.

Eleven women entering already at ease with him, learning the residence without carrying the old suspicion into every room, becoming part of his private life before resentment had time to settle into habit. Winston knew perfectly well how compromised the picture was. Saruka’s happiness could not prove that what had been done to her was right, and it certainly could not make the same choice harmless for anyone else. Even so, the image had begun to acquire a warmth of its own, and he could see why she wanted it badly enough to keep pressing him toward it.

“You have spent the last quarter hour making one option sound extremely attractive.” Winston turned far enough to look at her properly. By then accusation felt almost pointless. She had never been especially subtle about where she wanted him to end up.

The satisfaction that appeared in Saruka’s face confirmed it. “I was trying to make it attractive.” Her hands remained easy against his shoulders, no longer pretending the comfort she gave him had nothing to do with the argument. “You already knew what frightened you about using the power. I wanted you to see what you might gain from it.”

That was considerably more honest than the defense he had expected, and therefore harder to dismiss. Safety had begun the argument, but the thing drawing him now had very little to do with guards or poisoned meals. He was imagining a household where affection came easily, where nobody stiffened because the king happened to be a man, where Saruka could train new attendants without first teaching them that enjoying his company was not a surrender of themselves. “You really do want me to change them.”

“I want them to come here ready to belong.” There was no reluctance left in the admission. Saruka knew exactly how that sounded and seemed past caring. “I want them comfortable with you. I want them fond of you. I want eleven women who can discover your bad habits and complain about them because they already care enough to bother.” A smile touched her mouth. “And yes, I would enjoy watching that happen.”

Something about the last admission made the whole proposal more dangerous. Household security could still be argued over. This was desire, plain enough to recognize. Saruka wanted to share the contentment she now felt, and Winston wanted the ease she kept putting in front of him. The fact that neither of them could trust how that contentment had been created did very little to stop the imagined residence from feeling warmer every time he returned to it.

“You are seducing me into a moral catastrophe.” By the time Winston said it, the accusation had acquired enough weary amusement to betray how far the seduction had already worked.

Saruka leaned nearer, pleased rather than chastened. “Then resist me.” She left the challenge there while her fingers returned to the last stubborn place beneath his shoulder, working with the same patient confidence that had taken the rest of the pain out of him. She knew he could tell her to stop. She also knew he had not.

Winston tried to concentrate on the moral objection while the ache slowly disappeared beneath her hands. The difficulty was no longer finding reasons not to use the power. He had plenty. The difficulty was that Saruka had spent the entire bath making sure he understood exactly how pleasant ignoring those reasons could become.

“That is hardly fair.” He settled farther against the stone anyway, which weakened the complaint before it reached her.

“No.” Saruka felt the final tension begin to give and smiled close beside him. “I am trying to persuade you, my king.”