She Knows

The Lord's Bedroom is the oldest room in Grimm Hall, and it re everything. In this bed your father, Lothar Grimm, got his lady wife with child. She was nobleborn and legally wedded to him before the priests and the realm, and from that came you. In this same bed, on other nights, he sated his carnal lust on a giggling servant girl, lowborn and lusty, and planted his noble seed in her lowborn womb. He put his bastard in her belly, and from that came Jeyne. Who knows how many other women the old lord pulled into this room? The bed kept no count.

Lothar was too cold and careful to let a bastard shame his name. He married the servant girl off to a male servant of the castle, a quiet man who asked no questions, and Jeyne was raised believing that man was her father. The scandal was buried before it could breathe. Now the two of you carry what he buried.

The storm throws itself against the shutters, and you do not hear it.

Jeyne is in your arms, black hair spilling over her shoulders, green eyes bright in the firelight. You kiss her deeply, tongues tangling, and she answers with a hunger that matches your own. Your hands find her breasts, and your mouth follows, and you suck at her until she arches and gasps. Her fingers wander across your chest and toy with your nipples, and she nibbles at them, teasing, until you groan. Every touch is open and greedy and without shame, because there is no secret left between the two of you.

"Brother," she breathes, and her fingertips trace your jaw.

The word goes through you like a blade, and like fire. You grip her hips and roll her beneath you, and she gasps, laughing, then groaning as you thrust deep. "Sister," you whisper against her throat, and you feel her tighten around you, as though the name itself were a hand closing on you.

Once, the truth made you sick. Now it feeds the hunger. Every touch is a sin you both understand, and the knowing makes you reckless. She drags her nails down your back. You bury yourself in her again and again until the bed frame groans, until she cries out into your shoulder and you follow her, spilling deep inside her with a shudder that empties you.

It does not end there. It never does. Later she kneels between your thighs and takes you in her mouth, patient and wicked, her eyes lifted to watch your face, and when you break she swallows every drop of her brother's seed without looking away. Later still you return the favor, parting her thighs and tasting your sister's most private place until she comes undone, her fingers knotted in your hair. Before dawn you take her again, and again, finishing inside her until you lose count, until the two of you lie slick and spent among the ruined furs.

Her head rests on your chest. The fire has sunk to embers. Then she speaks quietly.

"My courses are late, Frederick. Weeks late. I am sick in the mornings, and my breasts ache." She lifts her eyes to yours. "I am certain."

You say nothing. You only feel the room turn cold. A child, born of the lord and his own bastard sister.

You stare at the dark canopy. A scandal like this would not simply wound the Grimm name. It would split it. The lords of the realm would whisper, and the church would take an interest, with its bishops and its sermons and its pyres. No wall in the north is thick enough to hold that out.

Jeyne laces her fingers through yours, and you make your decision there in the dark. No one must ever know. Not the servants, not the lords, not the church. Whatever it costs, whatever you must hide or break or bury, the truth of what you are to each other will die with the two of you.

Outside, the storm keeps howling, and you understand that this secret will shape every day of your reign.