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Jessamine woke to the soft click of her door latch.
It was dark, her chambers a suggestion drawn in ghostly moonglow. The Tower exhaled and settled around her, old oak and masonry shifting as the brisk night breeze stole warmth away from the stones. She found the subtle creaking comforting. She’d grown accustomed to it over many years, just like she had the cadence of the muffled footsteps drawing near across the rug. A figure moved into a frame of illumination near the bed: tall, broad, and fluid like a cat.
Corvo.Jessamine smiled languidly, warm beneath her sheets and floating in the unhurried space between sleep and wakefulness. He swung his attention slowly about the room, hand on his sword hilt. Light caught briefly on the expression of faint concentration beneath his dark brows. One heartbeat of methodical surveying passed, then another, and at last Corvo relaxed.
He turned to her vanity and undid his belt, placing it gently atop the small table, then startled and shot a hand out to catch the buckle as it slipped free from where he’d wrapped it around his scabbard. A moment slower and it would’ve clattered against the wood, maybe even pulled the entire thing to the floor. Corvo cast a long breathless glance into the shadows where Jessamine’s bed stood before daring to move again.
He didn’t know he’d already woken her.
A glow suffused Jessamine at the realization. Roused but silent, she focused wholly on the man starting to undress mere feet from her bed. A man with deft hands, sharp eyes, and a secret smile that both she and Emily loved so much. Her Corvo, whose heart raced at the thought of disturbing her with even the slightest sound.
Buttons glimmered as he shucked off his clothes and folded each garment neatly on her chair. Jessamine could smell him now, a day’s worth of sweat and dust and a rich scent she could only describe as Corvo’s own. At last he tugged his hair free and tossed the tie carelessly onto the stack, stretching his arms up to the ceiling with a deep sigh. A joint popped somewhere. All that tension, all the sharp bearing and quiet threat that Corvo wore like intangible armor while he spent his days standing guard over her, drained away like water.
Moonlight skimmed across Corvo’s strong features as he absently pushed his tousled hair back from his face and Jessamine’s breath caught.
Jessamine wanted. Oh, how she wanted. She wanted to have a forever of dark, chilly nights, of the world reduced to this room and just the two of them in it, so that maybe her heart wouldn’t break at the thought of morning.
“Corvo,” Jessamine murmured at last. The wind shuddered outside. She shifted in the sheets, extending a lazy arm palm-up to brush her fingertips against his leg. He turned guiltily at the contact.
“Jess,” Corvo whispered. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“I don’t mind.”
She trailed her touch in idle circles and smiled up at him in the dark, drinking him in without shame. His body heat was magnetic through his linen breeches. The muscled curve of Corvo’s thigh matched the solid breadth of his shoulders, round with strength but sloping loosely in his now-evident weariness. Dark curling hair obscured his broad chest and its two glistening scars, thicker than the handful of other old cuts he bore, and trailed down across his belly. Jessamine loved to hold him, to run her fingers through it, to feel the planes of muscle there beneath the layers of skin and soft flesh.
He caught her wrist gently from below, briefly running a callused palm along the back of it before twining their hands together.
“Shh. Go back to sleep.”
“Mm,” she acknowledged, and ignored the suggestion. She drew her other arm from the covers to take his hand and pull. “Come here.”
Corvo followed without complaint. The mattress creaked as he settled onto the edge and folded an ankle beneath his opposite thigh. Jessamine curled into him, slipping her arms around his bare waist. It was inelegant and awkward but she didn’t care, especially not after Corvo laughed a single huff of amusement. He smoothed her sleep-tangled hair carefully back from her face in a lingering rhythm. Every touch from Corvo felt like it stood in for so many others, for the ones he couldn’t give her beyond this room and couldn’t possibly hope to make up while he was in it.
“Jessamine,” Corvo murmured after a while. She’d begun to drift again, she realized, and snuggled in closer. She didn’t want to fall asleep but it was just so easy to bask next to him, her heart a banked fire. Corvo shifted and she felt hot breath ghost along her cheek. “Jessamine, love.”
She looked up to find him bent over her, his thumb stilled along the curve of her jaw to cup it. His eyes were soft in the darkness.
“Hm?”
He placed a chaste kiss on her cheekbone that made her twist with contentment and then very sweetly said, “It’s damn cold out here and I’m shirtless.”
A sparkling laugh flew free from her. She took his face in her palms, smiling up at him from where her head rested on his thigh.
“Are you asking to get into into my bed?”
He grinned. “Please.”
“Come on, then.” She scooted over beneath the covers to make room. Corvo clambered into the warm spot she’d left and immediately reached for her. Jessamine draped herself along his side, crabbed half over his body in just her nightgown with his arms holding her firmly to him. Corvo buried his face in the top of her hair and inhaled deeply.
He sighed, a great big thing that liberated more than air.
“I missed you,” she confessed. “We’ve been so busy for weeks.”
“I’ve missed you too.” The rumble of his voice vibrated right into her ear, a melody above the steady beating of his heart. “Time during the day doesn’t count.”
“No,” Jessamine agreed.
“With Burrows dropping the quarantine and deportation proposal, does this mean I can stop scowling so hard at him?” Corvo asked, mawkishly hopeful.
Jessamine chuckled ruefully. “Maybe a little. He hasn’t absolved himself entirely on that front, but it’s a start.”
“Oh, good. My eyebrows were tiring out.”
She snorted. Corvo squeezed her tighter in response as though he could meld them together if he tried fervently enough. She returned the pressure with just as much need, her arm thrown across his belly and hooked up his side along his ribs.
In public they adhered strictly to the professional expectations of their roles in Dunwall’s political machine. Their mutual understanding of social difference and the clinical focus with which Corvo carried out his security duties meant that either of them behaving otherwise was unthinkable, and that fact had kept them safe through many tumultuous years, including Jessamine’s daring pregnancy. But here?
Here, it was different.
Because when Corvo shed his armor and became someone else in this private darkness, so too did Jessamine. Off came the layers of starched wool and silk, the makeup, and the constant weight of knowing that nothing she did—a word, a smile, a single nod—could simply be, each gesture instead picked apart for signs of weakness or favor. Alone with Corvo she was just Jess, with old stretch marks on her belly and unruly hair and a laugh that she surprised herself with sometimes. In the space they made for one another they each untwisted and stretched until they felt nearly free.
Corvo traced an arc from the small of Jessamine’s back up along her ribs and shoulder and back again, rumpling her nightdress. He hummed and dipped his forehead even lower until it rested against hers. She tilted up into it as she always did, a head and then some shorter than him, filling her lungs with the warm air mingling between them like it was the first breath of the southern breeze after a hard winter. In the gray glow of the night she could just make out Corvo’s eyes, half-lidded under dark lashes and watching her with soft, hungry attention.
He was her rock, her sword, her dearest companion. And Void, he was beautiful.
The moment of desire caught in her chest and stayed there. Not the hot, quick fire of the early days of realizing she loved him, but a vibrant desire overwhelming in its clarity and tempered by time. It was surety and adoration and awe, a steady warmth that demanded release but that words alone could never free.
She reached up, buried her fingers in Corvo’s hair, and kissed him.
He rumbled a throaty little moan and pressed in hungrily. When she pulled away he chased, drawing her back with a nip and another soft noise that made her gut flutter. Her nightgown pulled and wrinkled where he clutched at her shoulder like a drowning man.
She finally forced the kiss to break, pushing herself up with her slender forearm across Corvo’s breadth and looking down at him, panting, her heart drumming a beat that it hadn’t in quite some time. Their legs tangled beneath the covers. The force of his focus on her was nearly physical in the darkness.
“It’s late,” Jessamine breathed. “I know today was long, especially for you. We can sleep instead if you’re tired.”
“Spirits, no,” Corvo said immediately. His voice was deep and thick with want.
Jessamine rose and swung a leg across his torso all at once, her nightdress rucking up around her knees and the sheets falling away. Corvo groaned when her hands met his chest to steady herself, pressing him down in the process. Her hair fell in a jet cascade over her shoulders. The expression cast in moonlight on Corvo’s face was better than any Academy master’s oil painting. He went rapt with longing, drinking her in with his lips parted halfway to a sound.
“Fuck. You’re gorgeous, Jess,” he whispered faintly. His hands skated up her thighs and hips until they came to rest gently on her waist, the firm pressure grounding her and making her fuzzy-headed at the same time.
Jessamine smiled and hummed a sigh—what could she possibly say to that with words? She ran a palm up along one of Corvo’s arms until she found his wrist and pressed his grip in place, both an invitation and a demand, then bent down to him.
Their lips met again for a brief, deep moment, then Jessamine broke to the side and nudged Covro’s jaw up with her cheek. He inhaled sharply and craned his neck obligingly away. She mouthed a slow, wet line from the rough hollow below his ear to the hot skin of his shoulder, delicate and teasing until she no longer needed to be for the sake of propriety and closed her teeth around the supple muscle there. Corvo gasped quietly. He twisted beneath her and pressed his thumbs hard into her hipbones in response. Jessamine relented, dragging her teeth across his skin and transforming the bite into a kiss.
She dragged her hands down along Corvo’s pectorals to his rib cage and followed them with more kisses and nibbles, the mat of his body hair soft against her cheeks. He smelled like comfort and heat. She knew Corvo savored the pressure of her touch on his chest, despite the deadened sensation across much of his skin there. His breath betrayed him when her ministrations struck a particular hitching chord. Wind rattled faintly at the window glass and wove the sounds into a dark susurrus.
One of Corvo’s grasping hands found the front of Jessamine’s nightdress and tugged her back up. She followed his lead playfully, mouthing a nibble along his neck before tossing her hair back over one shoulder and bracing herself fully above him. They met eyes.
Corvo looked ravenous, plainly eager to surge up to her if he could. His wavy hair splayed in tangles on the pillow and his pupils were blown so dark that Jessamine could see their depth even in the shadows of the night. And he couldn’t keep his hands quiet, one still tangling in her clothes and the other grasping the flesh of her thigh, skimming up her side, dragging fingernails along her back.
Jessamine bit her lip.
“Jess, let me—”
“Shh,” she whispered. “I’d like to just… look. For a moment.”
Deep conflict raced across Corvo’s expression until finally he acquiesced. He leaned back into the mattress, stretching his arms loosely above his head and fluttering his eyes closed. When he opened them again they were filled with the ricochet pleasure of watching her watch him. Jessamine bit her lip and steadied herself with a deep breath, suddenly feeling as though she’d been put on the back foot.
“Like what you see?” Corvo purred, a confident smile breaking on his face.
She flushed. “Always.”
“Jessamine,” Corvo rumbled. His touch rested meaningfully on her bare knee, just dipping beneath the lace trim of her slip. “Please. I’d like to see you too.”
His words zipped hot down her spine. She’d missed this heady, clutching foreplay. Jessamine shucked the garment off without hesitation, tossing it somewhere on the floor to be thoroughly forgotten. Scattered moonlight caught the edges of her bare skin as she rested her weight back on his thighs. It glinted along the faint fuzz on her forearms and down the stray strands of hair that slipped across her nipples, pebbled from both the chill air and Corvo’s intoxicating heat under her. Spirits, but she savored him beneath her like this.
“Look at you,” said Corvo, and Jessamine’s heart skipped a beat. His hands skimmed up from her knees to the crease of her hips and set goosebumps erupting in the wake of his hard-worn calluses. He reached even further around to her flanks and squeezed, kneading her skin and the muscle beneath. Jessamine dipped her head, eyes fluttering closed at the sensation.
“Oh, Corvo— ah!” She yelped, tumbling into surprise as the world lurched.
Corvo surged up from the bed with a burst of strength, jolting her back into his lap proper and catching her around the waist before she could fall anywhere unintended. He grinned, wide and smug, victorious in the change of position.
“Warn me, will you?” Jessamine laughed breathlessly.
Despite their difference in height Jessamine still sat taller than him like this. Corvo’s breath tickled hot against her breasts. Her belly pressed along his torso, wonderfully close. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders and buried her nose into his hair, then felt teeth and gasped.
He sucked bruises into the skin of her chest slowly and relentlessly, pressing a hand up beneath her breasts and kissing down her sternum. She arched back when he found a nipple and sucked, allowing him to free his other arm from supporting them to drag blunt fingernails down her back instead. Jessamine shivered. She was ravenous for him, inflamed by their back and forth.
“Fuck, Corvo,” Jessamine panted. She dropped her touch urgently down between them to his breeches, fiddling with the button fly only to find her wrist caught and gently tugged away.
“No?” she asked, puzzled. She looked down at where he had one breast in his mouth, his eyes reverent and upturned. Corvo dragged off and Jessamine groaned at the tug of teeth across her nipple.
It took him a moment to regain his words. He shook his head and breathed, “No, not—not now.”
Surprised, Jessamine plled herself back. “Alright.”
Jessamine sank the hand back into his hair and tugged instead, earning a moan but no quarter from his mouth. She angled her teeth for his neck again but the position just wasn’t right to get there. Frustrated, she growled and settled for dragging her nails down his chest instead.
Suddenly Corvo’s broad hands were on her buttocks and tugging her forward at the same time as he levered himself up on one knee, topping Jessamine backwards onto the rumpled sheets with a yelp and reversing them on the bed. She flailed out with an arm to catch herself, heart pounding, only to find Corvo grinning over her as he caged her in.
“Corvo!”
“Sorry,” he apologized, sly but with a hint of genuine temperance that always put her at ease. “Are you alright?”
Jessamine laughed but it quickly tailed off when she bit her lip. “I’m fine.”
Fine, yes, but startled twice over. The strength of Corvo’s appetite for initiative tonight and the deferral of his own pleasure was unusual. She typically found him beneath her with relative speed when they made love, sculpting him under her fingers and watching him come apart as she worked. Right now he just wouldn’t stay put where she wanted him.
Still… on occasions like this when Corvo brought his raw strength to bear it made Jessamine’s stomach drop and he knew it. He tumbled her around so easily.
She flushed deeper, worried at her lip, and flicked her eyes up to meet his.
The little smile grew on Corvo’s face above her. He shifted and Jessamine felt his knee press slowly up into her crotch, his other swinging to the mattress outside her hip for balance. Her eyes slipped closed under furrowed brows, her lips parting into a soft moan, and she closed her legs as far as she could. She savored the pressure and the soft friction from his breeches, flexing up against him.
“What can I do for you?” Corvo breathed with startling seriousness against her ear.
Jessamine flushed, hot desire throbbing between her legs and tingling across her skin. She’d become so pent up after weeks of contentious parliament sessions about the flooding and the plague that dragged into the early hours of the morning, leaving her falling asleep on her feet and Corvo strung out with vigilant anxiety. Stars, she’d barely even had time for Emily let alone intimacy, her girl growing up so fast into the complicated world beyond childhood.
Untouched beneath Corvo except for the one single glorious point of contact, she felt a pang of bereavement. She wanted connection, to exist without her worries, to have the world folded up into a neat little space in the dark for a while.
Corvo’s question still hung in the air. When they shared a bed she knew her baser desires could be plain and unfiltered—a rarity.
“I want you to fuck me,” she told him.
“Gladly.”
Sheets rustled. Something rote and intangible clicked into a well-worn groove between them. Jessamine would have needed a much clearer head to realize what it was, to name it and pause, but in the moment it was subsumed by touch and heat and forgotten.
Corvo leaned close and found Jessamine’s lips. The kiss was slow and warm, intentionally unhurried, and she melted into it, tugging him in with one hand around his back and the other at the nape of his neck. When he drew back she let him go easily, eyes locked.
A warm hand slid down her belly, palm against her skin, slipping easily through the hair of her crotch until it found its goal. Two of Corvo’s fingers rested firmly along her clit, taking a moment to find the angle he knew she liked. He folded over her, his head in the crook of her shoulder and his weight along one side of her body in the dark, and moved.
“Oh,” Jessamine breathed. She canted her hips against his leg, matching the roll of his touch and hanging onto the back of his shoulder and arm, the rounded muscles there tensing and releasing as he stroked her. Soon she was sweating, clutching at him, and she knew she’d leave scratch marks but she didn’t care. She craned her face to Corvo where his forehead pressed against the sheets at her shoulder, moaning nothings and inhaling their shared breath. She felt him turn to look at her, watching, but she couldn’t see him in the dark.
“Corvo, I want—” she gasped.
He immediately pushed up, breathing hard, light catching in his hair for a moment where it curtained loose around his face. He sat back and moved urgently between her legs, dragging kisses down her breast and torso, then slid his fingers lower. She knew Corvo could interpret her desires just by the way she squirmed, after so many years of stolen moments spent learning and ministering to each other’s bodies—and yet still he slowed, waiting, just to be certain.
The unwavering service of that small pause hit her low in her belly, turning her unfettered desire into something liable to burn itself up if left unsated.
“Yes, Corvo,” Jessamine shuddered out.
The pressure as he slid his fingers into her was bliss. She moaned, finding a new rhythm with him as he crooked them and rocked against her. Jessamine dipped her own hand down to where Corvo had left off on her clit, craving sensation, and demanded, “More.”
He pressed deeper and Jessamine arched back, a half cry, half sob breaking from her.
“Shh, Jess,” Corvo murmured, his voice rapturous with devotion in the enveloping dark. He gently hooked his free hand beneath one knee and pressed her leg up, kissing her thigh. His pace was steady and firm, driving her higher and higher until she felt like she was about to spin apart, chasing the tipping point of fullness and friction and heat.
Jessamine keened, stroking herself into climax as she clenched around Corvo’s fingers. She shuddered with it, panting, twisting and gasping as he kept his rhythm steady against the place inside her that nearly felt like too much, and yet drove her to chase for more. He was murmuring to her still, praises and reassurances that she couldn’t quite yet process. He slowed as she finally stilled, about to pull out, but she caught him with her free hand and kept him there, riding the aftershocks with the occasional slow rub of her clit. Her fingers buzzed.
“Spirits, Jess,” she finally registered Corvo say. She inhaled deeply, shuddering, and released his wrist to allow him to withdraw. He returned her leg to the mattress and crawled up to kiss her, quite sweetly, pushing her damp hair from her face with a shaking hand. She clutched at him. He fell beside her and wrapped an arm around her waist in return.
“That was very good.” was all she could think to say, the words floating out dreamily. An understatement. The rest of it was spoken in touch and pressure.
Corvo laughed warmly.
Slowly her body came down and the tingling receded from her hands. She stroked Corvo’s chest with the back of her fingers from where she lay, her head turned lazily to him, slowly putting her thoughts in order. It was quiet again, save for the wind and timbers settling overhead. A clock ticked its even rhythm near her door. They watched one another, holding each other steady with the barest of contact, existing unfettered and alive and vibrant in the drifting calm.
But Jessamine’s heart had only been half satisfied.
“Come up here,” she invited gently, rousing herself and returning to the pillows where they lay unused at the elaborate headboard of her bed. Corvo obliged. The clouds had shifted and now moonlight fell into the room in bright silvery tones, Jessamine’s eyes adjusting to pick out faint details in greater clarity: the wallpaper, the wrinkling of fabric where Corvo’s weight dipped the bedding, the solid cut of his arms as he moved.
Corvo settled over her on one elbow, but Jessamine had other plans. She tipped him onto his back with a push to the shoulder. He hit the mattress with a soft oof, and Jessamine smiled with the satisfaction of having him on his back again at last.
“You’re very sweet, and very good with your hands. But you’re also a schemer, Corvo.” Jessamine’s husky tone dropped dangerously low. “You interrupted me.”
He hummed, a deep teasing rumble. “Interrupted you?”
“I’m the one who started this, dearest, I kissed you first.”
“I wouldn’t say it was only you who—oh,” Corvo gasped, voice hitching, shifting against the hand she’d cupped firmly along the crotch of his breeches. They were damp, and not just with sweat.
Again, with the same startling swiftness he’d used to topple her before, Corvo tried to rise. But this time Jessamine wasn’t having any of it. She wanted him to stay now.
She reacted fast, rolling to her knees and catching him, pushing him back with an unrelenting hand high on his chest. His eyes flicked intensely to hers. She slid up a scant inch further, her thumb and forefinger pressing near the hollows of his collarbones, the web of her hand resting just below his Adam’s apple. Corvo’s breath seized.
But it wasn’t anticipation—it was anxiety, uncertainty, the trepidation of suddenly veering off-script.
And in Jessamine’s post-orgasmic clarity, the pieces clicked together.
Desire, devotion, service and expectation: they had all sifted down through the messy weave of foreplay and found familiar patterns. Day in and day out, Corvo executed service on her behalf and she accepted it with a waiting silk-gloved hand. She’d practically ordered him to fuck her, she realized, his question striking her now as not a question at all, but an enthusiastic verbal standing at attention.
Damn it all, Jessamine didn’t just want his duty. She wanted all of him. From his laugh to his troubles to his quiet breath in restful sleep and his selfishness with the covers.
When was the last time she’d told him that? Really told him outright in the last several months while the shadow of impending crisis bore down on Dunwall? She couldn’t honestly remember. Had so much time truly passed in isolation from one another’s private selves that Corvo felt once more that his service to her was the most important thing he had to contribute, even here, on this precious windy night in one another’s arms?
Jessamine’s chest seized and it showed painfully clear on her face. She wanted her bed—their bed—to be a place where Corvo could rest and let go and forget about always prioritizing her. He didn’t need to earn his role at her side with an out-turned blade or gentle touches, not here.
“Corvo,” she said, low in her throat.
“...Jess?”
“Just… stop. Stay,” Jessamine whispered. Her voice carried the barest hint of steel. “I think see what you’re doing and you don’t have to. Let go and let me take care of you too. It’s okay.”
Corvo’s eyes fluttered shut. His throat bobbed against her hand and she flexed her fingers—no real pressure, just enough to feel his reaction and tell him she was there. He arched his neck into her and pressed back onto the pillows, taking shallow shuddering breaths, his pulse beating fast and steady like a sparrow’s wings. The conflict between reticent devotion and his desire to give in beneath her was plain in his face and the tautness of his body.
“Jessamine, I…” Raw-voiced, he swallowed.
Jessamine leaned closer.
“You’re so, so good to me,” she murmured. “You don’t have to prove it. Let go, Corvo. I’ve got you. It’s just us here, just this room.”
Her words pushed against something in him until it cracked. He exhaled sharply.
“Yes, fuck,” Corvo swallowed, hesitant. Then, stronger, “Okay.”
The air turned heavy and electric.
Jessamine flexed her hand again, sliding up to bracket the junction of Corvo’s throat and jaw with gentle pressure. His eyes met hers like she was anchor from which which the pendulum of the whole entire world swung. His hands relaxed to the sheets. They stayed there together like that for a long moment, and then Corvo remembered to breathe—great big breaths that began from his belly and left his heartbeat slow and steady and powerful.
“Do you want to keep going?” she questioned gently.
Corvo made a small noise in the darkness.
“Yes?”
“Yes.”
A hot shiver crawled down Jessamine’s spine. “Take your breeches off, darling.”
He did so without hesitation once she released him. Undressing in bed was never elegant, but most things that followed getting nude generally weren’t either, and Corvo was one supple line of power even when tasked with the awkward. More hair ran soft and smooth over his hips and thighs and thatched black between his legs.
Jessamine slipped off the bed, her eyes heavy on him as he sat up, and beckoned.
“Where are you going?” Corvo asked, sounding lost.
“Nowhere, shh. Come here.”
They slotted together at the edge. Jessamine stood with her elbows at his shoulders and drew him close to cup his scruffy jaw in her hands, smoothing her thumbs over his cheekbones and tracing her fingertips around his ears. Her nudity in the cool air threw their hot points of contact into stark relief: breasts, hips, the outside of her thighs at the inside of his. Corvo’s arms came up around her back, his calluses rough and warm below her shoulder blades.
“Tell me what you’d like me to do for you,” she asked in soft reciprocity, craning her neck down to meet his searching eyes. One caught the moonlight and the other lay in the shadow cast by the strong bridge of his nose. Both were dark and rapt beneath furrowed brows and mussed hair.
“Anything you’ll give,” he whispered.
“Is that what you want?” Jessamine questioned. “Or are you saying that because I’m being pushy right now?”
Corvo shook his head and met her gaze fiercely. “No. Take me apart, Jess. Make me feel good. I trust you.”
Jessamine hummed, trust going straight to the fire in her heart.
“Can I touch you?”
“Yes.”
Gently, so gently, she reached behind herself, found his wrists, and pushed him down. He melted with her. With a kiss to his sternum she drew downwards, running her fingertips from the base of his palms to his elbows and down his sides. A tremor went through Corvo, a shudder of breath, and she glanced up to see him watching her with an expression of fervid anticipation, his lips parted.
Jessamine smiled, sweet and unrelenting, and dragged a hand down through his slick folds. Corvo bucked gently and grabbed for her other hand. She twined her fingers with his on the mattress. She knelt down between where his legs hung off the edge, the rug plush and yielding below her knees, and spread him with her fingers.
Popular rumor held that Emily’s birth had been unplanned. That rumor was quite wrong, and in ways that the people who whispered it couldn’t even begin to guess.
“Oh. Jess.” A pang of anticipation in his voice.
“Mhm?” she responded, keeping eye contact.
“Please,” Corvo whispered, and Jessamine took him into her mouth all at once—hot and tangy, rich and alive and wet. His hard cock fit perfectly on her tongue, her nose buried in his hair, her chin immediately slick at his entrance.
“Spirits, fuck, oh—” Corvo choked.
He bucked in earnest and twisted, one leg kicking up to find purchase with a heel on the edge of the mattress. Corvo was always vocal in bed but she knew she truly had him when he began turning explosive like this beneath her. At his most intense she could barely even hold on to him. She hollowed her cheeks and drew in more of him, his labia smooth against her flattened tongue.
He whimpered, halfway crushing her fingers in his grip, and buried his free hand in her wild hair. Jessamine closed her eyes and savored the hold. She drowned in the heady scent of Corvo’s body and the way he flexed and bent against her, his choked curses and supplications all running together towards incoherence. At some point he released her hand from his and she took the chance to grab at him, gripping the juncture of Corvo’s hip and thigh to keep him close and pressing his pelvis down into the sheets. She couldn’t help herself and dragged marks through the hair of his hips and thighs with clawed fingers. His fervor was contagious.
“Close, Jess, close—”
Jessamine flicked her eyes up and pulled off to lean over him. She panted for breath, her tongue tangy and her knees raw.
“Jess!”
His growl vibrated deep and ragged. In a flash her hand was on him again, pressing up firmly with a flat palm on his pubic bone and fingers on either side of his cock. Corvo writhed, chasing. Jessamine’s heart pounded at the sight of her lover so loudly undone, his hair sticking to his sweaty forehead and his lips bitten raw in the moonlight, the sheets twisted where he’d thrown a hand above his head to grasp for something, anything to hang on to.
He pressed his eyes shut and groaned.
“Good, baby. You’re so good,” Jessamine panted, awestruck. “I’m going to give you more, okay?”
Corvo nodded enthusiastically.
He gasped at the fullness when her fingers sank into him. She breached him slowly despite how wet he was—even in the heat of the moment she didn’t want it to hurt and she knew this could be delicate for him. Jessamine crooked her fingers, just letting them sit inside him, savoring the feeling of him working around her.
“Ngh, fuck you please Jess—” Corvo protested when his squirming didn’t draw her to move, then reached up and pushed her sweat-tangled hair back from her face as sweetly as he could. Jessamine laughed—his shaky hand rested there on her head with its natural weight pushing her down. She followed where the motion guided her.
It didn’t take long once she had her mouth on him again. Corvo’s hips stuttered and his gasps turned into keens, his thighs tensing as he bucked against her mouth as though torn between chasing the sensation and overstimulation. Jessamine felt the shudder build around her gently curling fingers first. It was a long, rolling orgasm that ended with Corvo nearly twisting away from her, the tension bowing his body like a jackknifing fish, her strength barely enough to keep from losing him entirely.
Jessamine stilled her tongue and drew off only once he finally went limp. Their duet of exhausted breaths filled the room over the faint ticking of the clocks. She closed her eyes and rested her brow against Corvo’s pelvis, grinning like an idiot where he couldn’t see.
A warm moment of calm passed between them and then she felt hot, broad hands drawing her upwards.
“C’mere,” Corvo slurred.
Jessamine clambered ungracefully back onto the bed. She ended up half-straddling his leg and had to hold his shoulder for support when he pressed his lips to hers. He kissed her like he wanted to drown himself in her. She bit back. And then he let go and flopped bonelessly onto the sheets, bouncing her off balance to tumble down next to him.
Jessamine wiped saliva and slick from her mouth and burst out laughing.
“Shh,” Corvo grumbled melodramatically. “I’m recovering.”
She propped her cheek up on the heel of her palm and fixed him with a look, mouth quirked. “What, did we fuck too well?”
“Outsider’s ass, no. I think I needed that.”
“You think? Hah!”
Corvo smiled thoughtfully, the mood slowly sobering. A loaded pause set in. Jessamine held her breath, waiting, but Corvo didn’t resume speaking and suddenly her sarcasm felt woefully inappropriate.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to imply anything rude—”
“No, it’s alright,” Corvo said to the ceiling. “I just… I forget sometimes, about myself. I want to make you feel good, Jess. I want to offer whatever I can when everything outside your door is so void-damned taxing on you.”
“But what about you?” Jessamine asked softly. “What about your pleasure?”
“I enjoy giving to you.”
Jessamine couldn’t deny the obvious truth of that, but the reductiveness of his statement sat wrong with her. She huffed. “Just because I exhaust myself making decisions all day doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy taking the lead. It’s different.”
“I just thought if I can take care of you, then you...”
“Corvo, look at me,” she whispered.
He did.
“You don’t need to earn anything from me. Especially not in bed.”
“That’s not what I—”
Corvo shut his mouth, then was silent for a long moment.
Over the years Jessamine had learned to read Corvo’s plethora of silences by the weight they placed in a room. They were all so distinct: concentrated watchfulness at her shoulder, the gentle stillness of a moment off his feet as she penned letters, the thunderous kind of dead-air hush that set teeth on edge and sent fingers twitching to pistols when it descended.
The measure of this particular quiet, here in bed sticky and sweaty and satisfied, was one of sudden re-evaluation.
“Corvo?” she asked eventually, as the clock ticked on.
He came back to himself and turned to her with a disarming smile. “Thank you, Jess.”
“Always, love,” she replied earnestly.
A little pang of disappointment, or perhaps sorrow, twitched its way into Jessamine’s glow. She did her best to put it out of mind. Corvo pondered at his own pace and matters of the heart always took longest. That he’d thought deeply was enough for now. They’d talk about this more eventually, she’d make sure—figure something out, make a plan so they’d know how to approach the giving and the taking and the fucking that wasn’t just about fucking before they rolled in bed again.
But now was not the right time. The moment had passed, and Jessamine was really, truly exhausted now.
She stroked a hand affectionately along the stubble of Corvo’s jaw from where she lay. He caught her forearm and smiled softly over at her in the shadows. She felt so, so warm, a steady heartbeat of heat, entirely unaffected by the prickle of her cooling skin.
“Here,” Corvo murmured. She curled into him. He found a sheet and pulled it across them both in the velvet night. They floated there together, sated and buoyant and lashed to one another to keep from floating away. At last the world was simple, and they slept.
Jessamine woke to thin blue-gray twilight.
Movement rustled next to her. She made a soft questioning noise and rolled to face the source, reaching out blindly. Her hand found warm, solid flesh but it didn’t stay there long despite her grasping. Corvo drew free, then took her hand and squeezed.
“I need to go,” he whispered softly. “Reports to catch up on before I meet with the guard captains.”
Jessamine groaned and stretched as he slipped from the bed. When she sat up the sky beyond the windows was pale gray with clouds like soft brushstrokes, the layers shearing sideways and revealing the predawn glow beyond. It couldn’t have been much later than six in the morning. A glance at the clock surprised her when she saw it only read half past five.
“Now?” she asked, rubbing her eyes. “It’s so early.”
At the chair, Corvo shrugged his shirt on and gave Jessamine a regretful look. “I’m sorry,” he apologized. “It can’t be helped. Burrows rescheduled this week’s intelligence briefing so we had to bump earlier, and with the privy council meeting today—”
Jessamine groaned. “Corvo, darling, I haven’t even woken up yet.”
“Ah. Sorry.”
Cool sheets slipped from her still-naked chest as she slouched and yawned. Loose hair fell across her eyes. Pushing it away, she turned and watched as Corvo buttoned up both his coat and his soul in the watery morning light.
A sudden fury welled in Jessamine.
It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair that the moment the sun broke he had to flatten himself down into what the rest of Dunwall expected of him for Jessamine’s sake. Especially after last night. It was like watching a symphony get punched onto an audiograph card when she’d heard the real performance from the front row. She wanted to have Corvo at her side, not at her shoulder. She wanted her daughter to understand that she had more than just a trusted adult in Corvo. She wanted, she wanted, she wanted.
She choked it back.
Jessamine was Empress. Her desires weren’t just hers, they belonged to the nation. She’d known for a long time that no matter how many years of companionship or intimate nights she and Corvo shared, the bounds of their circumstances meant she could never, ever have something normal. Not in the way she truly yearned for. So why couldn’t she strangle the voice in her head that always shoutedbut why not?
With a click, Corvo secured his sword belt and the Royal Protector stood before her again, single-minded and reserved.
“Jess?” he asked.
Spirits. She hadn’t hidden her expression well enough and it had tipped his into concern. His well-worn bearing of dutiful neutrality wasn’t impenetrable yet like it would be later in court, the reality of the morning setting in in increments.
“I’m fine.” It came out sharper than she’d intended.
Corvo’s brows knit tighter and he drifted to the edge of the bed, hand hovering.
“I’m sorry,” she apologized, and forced a smile for him. It turned out rueful. “Really, it’s nothing. Go take care of what you need to this morning. The maids will come through to stoke the fires soon, in any case. Best that we’re both in our proper places.”
Corvo huffed in acknowledgment and glanced towards the door. He hesitated, then turned back to her. His rough, warm fingers grazed along her cheek.
“I love you, Jess,” he rumbled.
A knot tied itself in her throat, but the steady-beating warmth in her chest surged to overflow it. She laid her hand over Corvo’s and gripped a grip she never wanted to let go. Jessamine met his deep brown eyes and mustered all the vehemence of her angry, tangled, surging heart into her next words.
“I love you too, Corvo.”
They parted. Corvo slipped out the door with a final glance over his shoulder before years of training shuttered his softness away. Jessamine dragged herself from bed, reclaimed her nightdress, sat before her vanity, and stared intently at her pained expression in the twilight. She grabbed her brush and began yanking it through the tangled ends of her hair.
What could an empress earn? Respect? Fear? Certainly not privacy or solitude. Certainly not freedom. She’d told Corvo he didn’t have to earn anything from her, but there was no one left to tell Jessamine the same.
Maybe, when Emily came of age and was ready, when Jessamine was no longer the only Kaldwin entitled to rule and if the moment was right, maybe then, just maybe she could—
She caught hard on a knot, the burn of her scalp sobering her. No, no more of that. Just like Corvo, she would put her armor on piece by starched and glittering piece and step out into the Tower as not a woman, but as a force.
And she would do her duty.