now

It’s close to four in the morning when I get to the White House, and Greer is tucked into our bed, softly dreaming with her hair webbed gleaming and gold over the pillows. I sit on the edge of the mattress, and I watch her for a long time. The rise and fall of her chest, the little twitches behind her eyelids, the rosy part of her lips.

And then I’m crying.

I thought it would make it easier to say goodbye separately, I thought I could minimize the pain to myself, but I’d indulged in a lie, because this is no fucking easier. I’ve had so much practice saying goodbye to Embry, but to my Greer—

No, I’m as weak as a child right now, as lost as a lamb in the dark fields. How can I say goodbye to her? The keeper of my soul and my heart? The queen of broken glass?

My crying wakes her, and she stirs slowly, beautifully, a sleeping beauty straight out of a fairy tale. When her eyes flutter open and she sees me, she reaches for me, just like a kitten should reach for her Sir, and I let her, I pull her into my arms and hold her as tight as I can and as I let my tears fall into her hair.

“What is it?” she whispers against my throat. “Do you need me?”

“Yes. God. Please.”

“Then take me, Sir,” she says. Her words tickle the skin of my throat, and I tilt her head back, searching her eyes.

I wonder about telling her. Greer knows the myths and legends better than anyone, and unlike Embry, her self-worth and self-image aren’t wrapped up in resisting me. She of anyone might be the most likely to believe all of it, as staggeringly impossible as it is. But then what would it change? If she did believe me? There’s nothing I will do differently—I will still stand next to Embry tomorrow and I will still lay down my life if necessary. The only purpose it would serve would be to make her as miserable and as fearful as I am, and if I can spare her that at least, then I am delivering a mercy. Perhaps it’s better to be her Sir in this too, and protect her from as much as I can.

Her eyes are searching mine right back. “What is it?” she asks softly. “What is it?”

I think I’ve finally found my right sacrifice, I want to tell her. I think I’ve learned the day I’ll be asked to set down my sword and my crown.

It wasn’t enough for me to live, and now I have to die.

I don’t tell her that. Instead I kiss her lips, as gently as I’ve ever kissed her, just enjoying the silky brush of her mouth against my own, and I turn her over on my lap so that she’s draped across me and her ass is presented for my hand.

I spank her without warning, without warm-up. After each smack, I plump and soothe her stinging flesh, but I don’t take it easy on her, I don’t let up. I spank until I feel the sweat beading along my hairline, until she’s crying into the sheets, until her bottom is the color of cherries in the summer. And I play with her pussy in between the abuses, since it’s so available to me, swollen and wet and flushed and almost insolently peeking up through her ass cheeks. When I slide my fingers inside for the first time, I’m reminded that I am not the first man to use her body tonight, and oh, how that gets me hard. Especially as I feel the tender place in my own body where I was used by the same man.

I stroke her inner walls with demanding, cruel strokes. “It gets me off to feel you so slippery and messy from Embry.” I give her ass a hard slap. “Do you like that? Having your husband feel how wet you are from another man? To be your sloppy seconds?”

She moans against the sheets, wiggling her ass higher, and I give her cheek a final slap before I toss her roughly across the bed and crawl over her. I pin her hips in place with my thighs, rising up to yank off my shirt.

“All I’ve ever wanted,” I breathe, “from the first moment I saw you, was to cuff you to my bed and keep you forever. To trade my heart for yours, so that wherever we went, we were inside each other.”

She offers me her wrists, and she’s such a fucking picture right now with her nipples furled tight and her chest flushed and her delicious hair tangled everywhere. Offering herself. “Keep me forever, Mr. President,” she begs. “Please, please, please.”

God, how will I bear this? How will I disobey her tomorrow and let her go?

I unbuckle my belt and slide it free from its loops with a leathery hiss, cinching her wrists tight and threading the tail through the clasp. “Flex your fingers,” I tell her, and she does. I pinch one of her fingertips, then I put my palm against hers. “Squeeze my hand.” She does, her eyes glassy and her body trembling underneath me.

It was one of the sweetest discoveries of our relationship when it started—I’d already known she wanted the darkness—but her delight in the minutiae of kink gratified the careful Dom in me. More than gratified—it fed me, nourished me in ways I never even knew I needed. She thrived on the smallest of cares and attentions, and I delighted in giving them to her, watching my lonely little princess bloom into a formidable queen as I tended to her the way she needed. Every safety check, every negotiation, every pre-scene discussion was foreplay to her, and every shower and snuggle and morning when I chose what I wanted her to wear was the most tender aftercare. There are as many ways of being a submissive as there are of being a human, and while Embry’s brand of pugilistic submission was ambrosial in its own way, it was nothing compared to the intoxicatingly complete surrender of Greer’s.

Greer wants to submit.

She needs to.

That young man dreaming of the Goblin King had never even come close to dreaming of this.

Satisfied that her circulation is good and we’re not risking nerve damage, I give her hand a squeeze back. “Hands above your head, sweetheart.”

She raises her bound wrists above her head, which serves the purpose of making her mouthwatering breasts jut closer to me with their tempting peaks. “What’s your safe word?”

“Maxen.”

I give one of her breasts a vicious slap, loving the arch of her underneath me as the pain sizzles through her body. Her eyes are still wet with tears from her spanking, and I know the blanket underneath her sensitive ass must feel sandpaper-rough. I lean down, one hand on her throat and the other running through her hair, and I have a moment when I’m frozen, hovering above her lips, the tips of our noses dancing together.

I’m frozen because it’s too much, she’s too much, she’s too interesting, too intelligent, too slyly funny, too honest, too brave, too fucking beautiful for me to say goodbye to her. My hand at her head could spend weeks stroking her hair, my other hand at her throat could feel the thread and thrum of her pulse for years. I was born to sit with her body between my thighs, and my lips could spend eternity slipping and breathing against hers.

How could I have thought I could say goodbye in one night? When I could spend years and years and never get enough of her?

I’m crying again.

I kiss her hard, kissing down all the questions and worries I know she must have, and then I clap a hand over her mouth as I move my lips to her jaw, to her throat, to her collarbone. And there I do my goddamned best to make a farewell of her body, my hand stifling her moans and my body keeping hers still as I nurse at her breasts and lick into the little well of her navel. I don’t pull my hand from her mouth until I’m moving down to her hips and her thighs, leaving no place unkissed, untasted, not even the backs of her knees or the rough pads of her toes.

I flip her over, making the same tour over her warm, spanked ass, over the dimples in her lower back, up to the angel wings of her shoulder blades. Kisses and bites and licks and sucks, anything a hungry mouth can do to a sweep of willing flesh, all the way up to her neck. I kiss her ears, the base of her skull, the winding loops of her cool, silky hair, remembering with pained fondness all the times I’ve rubbed that hair over the most private parts of me just to feel the cool silkiness on my most sensitive skin. Wrapped around my cock, sliding against my sac. Tickling my inner thighs. It would make her eyes glow with lust as she laid her head on my thigh and watched my face as I despoiled her hair. It would make her so wet that I could see the arousal shining on her thighs, so wet that I could smell the faint honey scent of it on the air.

Tonight, however, I move back down her body, kissing down the pearl necklace of her spine until I reach the spot I want to be. I grab her hips to hoist her up, and then I part her cheeks and give her a flat, long lick from clit to ass.

She cries out, rocking from side to side, and I give her a little swat. “Hold still, angel. This part’s for me, not you.”

“Mmph,” she says, pressing her face into the blanket as I return to her seam and begin fucking her with my tongue. “Mmph!”

I wasn’t lying though, because this part is for me. I can’t imagine dying without tasting her one last time; I can’t imagine leaving this life without the lingering memory of her on my tongue. She tastes so fucking sweet, with just that bit of salt and earth that makes her all woman, and I’m so hard as I eat her, as I wonder which parts of her taste are uniquely hers and which are uniquely Embry’s.

I must have tasted her at least once a day since we’ve been married, but it will never be enough. Fuck. Never ever.

I make her come like this…then a second time, rolling her to her back so that I can see her face as I peer up at her over the rise of her pussy. It’s not a position I’ve used often, which is partly because it’s a very passive, docile way to eat a woman, although I meant what I said to Embry about positions being irrelevant to the heart of kink. No, it’s more that the temptation of her is too great like this, when I can see her lips working silently and her gray eyes massive with lust and love—and the minute I make her come again, I’m unfastening my pants and sliding home.

Every part of it I savor. Every part I commit to memory. The gasping way she says my name. The frantic rock of her hips when I slow down. The tremors in her thighs after I pinch her ass for being an impertinent slut and moving when I didn’t tell her to.

The wet, sweet clench of her cunt as she comes a third time.

And finally, the look in her eyes as I surge over her and give her everything, everything of me.

Perhaps Embry’s always had the part of me that wielded the sword, but she…she’s always owned the part that wears the crown.

My little princess, my submissive, my professor and my angel.

My queen.

And maybe, if I’ve gotten to find her and Embry in a second life, I’ll get to find them in a third. Maybe tomorrow I’ll close my eyes and when I wake, we’ll all be together again, starting all over, heartbreaks and wars and all. Because one thing’s for fucking certain—while my heart beats, it will beat for them, no matter which life we’re in.

I will find them again and I will love them again.

And if I have to, I will die for them again.