The Dragon God's Bride Asked for a Divorce novel · Chapter 3 of 24
Chapter 3: The Empty Rooms
She asks where the other brides are and he says 'They are not here.' She sits on his throne and makes him kneel; he tells her he has counted the ceiling pearls nine thousand times. 'Ask me again after you've slept in my bed.'
"Whose rooms are these?" Shizuku asked Kohaku.
Kohaku looked at the empty comb cases and then at the ceiling.
"Ask his lordship," she said. "I've been told to be quiet about that, and I'm very bad at it, so please stop looking at me like that."
Shizuku did not sleep.
She lay on the edge of the huge bed and thought about two empty combs.
The village had always said the same thing about the brides of the lake.
They went down, and the lake kept them.
At dawn she wrote her third request, and it had only one ground.
She carried it up to the hall with her bare feet slapping on the stone.
Ryugen was sitting on the lowest step of the dais with his tail wrapped around his own knees.
He looked like a cat that had decided not to seem.
"Request three," Shizuku said, and held it out. "Where are the women who slept in the east wing?"
He took the paper and read the single line.
His face did not change at all.
"They are not here," he said.
"That's not an answer."
"It is the whole of the answer I can give you today. Denied, insofar as it is a request. Try again tomorrow."
"You killed them."
"No."
"Then where are they?"
"They are not here, Shizuku."
He said it so quietly and so steadily that all she could hear was a door closing.
She turned and walked away from him across the hall, because if she stayed another breath she was going to hit him.
She spent the day in the palace garden, where pale fish drifted through rows of black pines.
Kohaku brought her rice cakes and said nothing in a great many different ways.
By evening, Shizuku had decided what to do about the evening.
She went to the hall in the clothes Kohaku had given her, a loose dark robe with a sash.
She found him at the far end of the room, standing at the foot of his own throne.
"I'm here for my company hour," she said.
"I am glad."
"I'm not. Sit down."
He looked around for a chair.
"Not there," Shizuku said.
She walked up the steps and sat down on the throne herself, on the cold jade seat that was far too big for her, with her feet hanging above the floor.
"You, there. On your knees."
His eyes went very bright.
He had sat on that throne for eleven hundred years, and no one had ever once told him where to put his body.
"As my wife commands," he said, and went down on both knees on the step below her.
His tail lashed once against the stone.
"Take off my sash."
His long fingers found the knot and pulled, and the robe fell open.
She had nothing on under it, because Kohaku had been smug about the sleeping arrangements.
He drew a breath that shook a little at the end.
"Shizuku."
"You wanted my company. Here it is. Now put your mouth on me, and be quiet."
He dragged her forward by the hips until her thighs were over his shoulders.
His hair fell across her knees like cold silk.
Then his mouth was on her.
It was hot and open and unhurried.
He licked a long, slow line up the center of her, and her hands clamped on the carved arms of the throne.
"Oh, gods."
"One god," he murmured against her. "Only the one."
"Don't talk."
He made a low rough sound that she felt in her bones.
His tongue circled her clit, slow, then slower, until she was squirming on the jade.
He slid two fingers into her and crooked them, and his tail coiled around her thigh and held it open and pressed it high.
He had her totally exposed to him.
The most beautiful being in the world was kneeling at her feet, eating her with his eyes shut.
She grabbed his horns.
She had meant only to hold on.
But the horns were smooth and warm and he shuddered all over, and groaned into her flesh, and Shizuku understood that she had found something.
"They're sensitive," she said, breathless.
"They are," he gasped. "Please do not"
She tightened her grip and pulled his face harder against her.
"Don't what?"
His eyes opened.
They were gold and blown wide and lost, and he looked up at her over the swell of her belly with his lips shining.
"Don't stop," he said.
That was all it took.
The pleasure rose in her.
She rode his mouth and cried out, loud enough to bounce off the pearl lamps.
He held her hips down against the next wave and the next and kept going.
She came twice against his tongue before she pushed him away.
He sat back on his heels, hair a mess, mouth wet, breathing.
The front of his robe stood out hard and tight.
"You didn't," Shizuku said. "Do you want me to"
"No." His voice was ragged. "Not yet. Not until you ask for it."
She slid off the throne, since her legs wouldn't hold her.
She sat on the step with her back against his chest and his arm around her waist.
For a while they just breathed.
"I have counted the pearls in this ceiling," he said eventually.
"What?"
"Nine thousand and some, nine thousand times. It is the only thing I have to do between rites." His chin came to rest on the top of her head. "I do not tell you this to make you pity me."
"Good, because I don't."
"I tell you because you asked me a true question and I could not answer it, and I wanted you to have something true."
Shizuku sat very still.
The throne room hummed, and the pearl lamps swung in the current.
"Where did they go?" she said. "The women who slept in the east wing. Ryugen, please."
His arm tightened.
"Ask me again," he said, "after you have slept in my bed."
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