My Fated Mate Was a Lie, Now the Alpha King Wants the Truth novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Midnight in the Vault

In the archive vault at midnight the mark burns and her hands quiet it; the queen file's seal carries the same notch.

The archive vaults run under the Registry.

I had worked in them for seven years and never once been in them at midnight.

Two guards walked us down the last stair and went back up without being told.

Cassian carried the lamp.

I carried the keys he had put in my hand an hour earlier, all fourteen of them, on a ring heavier than my head.

"Where do we start?" he said.

"With the queen," I said. "If she's in the Registry, she's in the Crown Ledgers."

The Crown Ledgers live in a cage at the back, behind a grille only the High Registrar opens.

The third key fit.

I stared at it.

"Tull gave you every key he thought was safe," Cassian said. "He didn't count on a woman who could read his shelf marks."

"He's not stupid."

"No." His voice was flat. "That's what worries me."

He stopped halfway down the aisle and put a hand on a shelf.

The lamp shook.

"It's midnight," he said through his teeth.

I put the keys down on the reading table.

His shirt was already open when I reached him.

I hadn't noticed him do it.

The black lines had crept further since the afternoon.

They ran under his ribs now, thin as spider silk, and when I laid my palm over the crescent they stopped moving.

His whole body eased.

"Better," he said. "Gods. Better."

Under my hand the rope-hum went quiet and the young voice said, again, "I will keep them safe."

"You said that to the whole kingdom," I said.

"I said it to my father's body."

I looked up.

He was watching me, and there was nothing dry in his face at all.

"I was twenty-eight," he said. "I meant it."

"I believe you."

"You shouldn't. Not yet."

"I'm a clerk," I said. "I believe nothing until I've seen the paperwork. Hold still."

I kept one hand on him and opened the Crown Ledger with the other.

The page for the queen-designate was in the third volume.

It was a single sheet with a clean entry in a registrar's hand, and a witness seal in the corner.

I tilted it to the lamp.

The seal was the dead woman's, and there at the lower rim was my nick.

"Same die," I said. "It was used on this and on Verity's. Somebody has the die out of my drawer."

"Or somebody copied it," Cassian said, "and copied the flaw too."

"You can't copy a flaw you didn't see. They had the die in their hands."

"So it's inside the Registry."

"It's inside the vault," I said.

We stood there.

His heartbeat was steady under my palm now, slower than it had been, and the lamp threw our shadows long up the shelves.

I was suddenly aware of how little I had on under the borrowed dressing gown a maid had put me in.

I was suddenly aware of how big he was.

"You're staring," he said.

"I'm not."

"At my mouth."

"You're very tall," I said.

"Is that a complaint?"

"It's an observation."

He laughed under his breath, then stopped, because my hand had moved.

It slid down over the tight muscle of his stomach to the waist of his trousers.

"Idony."

"You said you'd like my hands in the vault with you," I said. "I've got a lot of ideas about my hands."

His breath caught.

"The guards," he said.

"Are up the stair and not paid to hear."

"The ledger."

"Will wait."

I sat on the edge of the reading table and pulled him between my knees by his open shirt.

His open shirt was in my fists.

I pulled him closer by it.

His thighs hit the table's edge and my knees parted wider to take him in.

The dressing gown had fallen open over my thighs.

The lamp light made the skin there look gold.

"Idony."

"Shut up," I said. "I'm busy."

I let go of his shirt and found the laces of his trousers.

They came loose under my fingers and I pushed the fabric down over his hips.

His cock sprang free, heavy and thick and already hard enough to curve toward his stomach.

I wrapped my hand around it.

He hissed through his teeth.

"You are," I said. "Aren't you."

"I am what?"

"Big."

I looked up at him and squeezed slowly, from root to tip, and watched his jaw go tight as a bowstring.

"Say it," I said.

"Say what?"

"That nobody's touched you here in three years."

His eyes went black, and I saw the pulse jump in his throat.

"Nobody," he said. "Not since the mark."

"Then I'll do it properly."

I slid my other palm flat over the crescent on his chest.

The hum rose, then quieted.

The black lines stopped their crawl under my touch.

He breathed out, long and unsteady, and I started to stroke him with a rhythm I had been thinking about since the sofa.

"Slower," I told him, though he wasn't the one moving.

I slowed my own hand, dragging the pad of my thumb over the slick head.

"Gods, Idony."

"Good," I said. "Say my name again."

"Idony."

"Slower."

I pulled my hand almost all the way off him, then took him again, and again, and he was shaking like the floor of the vault had gone out from under him.

"Your fingers," I said. "I want them inside me."

His hand went under the dressing gown and found me bare beneath it.

I had put nothing on under it.

I had planned exactly this, and I did not try to hide it.

"Fuck," he said.

"That's the idea."

He pushed my thighs wider with his free hand and slid two fingers into me in one slow thrust.

I bit down on my lip hard enough to taste salt.

"You're so wet," he said, rough and low.

"Say what you're going to do with them."

"I'm going to make you come on my hand."

"Then do it."

He curled his fingers inside me and found the place that made my hips jerk forward.

His thumb settled over my clit.

I kept my hand moving on his cock, but I couldn't keep the rhythm.

I was rocking into his hand, small desperate rolls of my hips, and he watched me with his mouth open.

"That's it," he said. "Good. Look at you."

"Don't stop."

"I won't."

"Don't stop."

He added a third finger and I made a noise I only held in because I turned my head and bit his shoulder through the open shirt.

The muscle bunched under my teeth.

His fingers worked me deep and slow, and his thumb circled my clit in a tight, merciless loop.

I was going to come.

I was going to come in the vault with the Crown Ledger open behind me and the guards asleep on the stair.

"Cassian," I said, into the meat of his shoulder. "Now. Don't stop."

"I won't."

He said my name against my hair, and I came on his hand so hard my thighs locked around his hips and my hand clenched on his cock.

He grunted.

I kept stroking him through it, even when my body shook, even when I couldn't see straight.

"Look at you," he said. "You take them so well."

"Come for me now," I said.

"Idony."

"I want to watch."

I leaned back a little, on one hand, and worked him fast and slick with my own wetness still on my fingers.

His hips snapped forward into my grip.

His hands braced on the table on either side of my legs.

He fucked into my fist, and his head went back, and the lamp threw the black lines of his mark across the shelves like veins.

"Gods," he said. "Gods, Idony."

"Come in my hand."

He did.

His whole body went rigid, and the noise he made was torn out of him like a confession.

I watched him come, and I did not close my eyes.

After a long moment he sagged forward, his forehead against my collarbone, and breathed against my skin.

"Three years," I said.

"I haven't slept a full night in three years."

"Stay on the table with me."

His laugh was short and wrecked.

"There are ledgers."

"You and me and the ledgers," I said. "I want all of you, Cassian. The bed. The weight of you."

"Not tonight."

"Not tonight."

He lifted his head and looked at me.

"Good," he said. "Because I'm going to take my time with you."

I pulled the dressing gown closed over my knees.

"Afterward," I said. "Sleep."

He laid his head back against the shelf behind us and closed his eyes.

He slept for ten minutes, sitting on the floor with his back against the shelf.

I watched his chest rise and fall.

Then I pulled the Crown Ledger onto my knees and, with a nail, scratched a tiny line of ink off the queen-designate's page.

It was brown, not black.

Iron-gall ink goes from brown to black as it ages, and the black takes years.

This entry hadn't had three years.

The woman the Registry swore was the King's destined queen had been written into the book last spring.

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