Ivan Press

Hilary

Everyone in the household is awake the next day before Hilary or Ivan so much as roll over in their sleep. Polina insists on waking first, just as she insists that Izolda return from her brief respite with her own family and children by six sharp. Miron awakes when Anton awakes, which is usually early, but they have -- remarkably -- trained at least a little laziness into the boy. He plays with his stuffed toy for awhile in bed, occasionally kicking his legs furiously and eagerly and simultaneously. He blows spit bubbles and talks to himself. It only lasts fifteen, twenty minutes before he is thoroughly bored and very hungry and pulls himself up to his feet with his crib-wall to yell at the top of his lungs.

Rarely does he get to the point of crying or wailing, though. He yells, and there's some whine and some worry in it because he is just so very hungry and he cannot comprehend a thing like 'waiting'. So Izolda, or Miron sometimes, comes to get him. He is changed from his wet diaper and put back in his pajamas and held in his rocking chair while his wetnurse feeds him. She strokes his head and talks to him a little, but usually it is a quiet time. He does not spit up so easily anymore but he's aware of his own burps and always a little startled and delighted by them, just as he likes the way Izolda strokes her palm in a gentle circle on his back.

Then it's time to wash up a bit and put on his clothes for the day, usually some form of shorts and short-sleeved top, nothing too loose and certainly not too tight. He moves freely and is ready to explore his room again, as though new toys may have appeared out of nowhere. He makes sure the ones he likes are still there, where they always are when he wakes up. He is fed enough to tide him over til a proper breakfast with the few solids that make up his diet, and gurgles in a pleased manner all by himself. Sometimes Izolda brings up a basket of laundry and folds it while he plays, sitting on the floor of his nursery with him. Sometimes they go outside in the morning before it's too hot. Today, he plays alone. Downstairs, Izolda is making breakfast and keeps having to expand the dishes as various servants arrive. Polina is twitching and directing. She keeps repeating herself that no, they haven't gotten up yet. Miron greets the American staff -- that would be Hilary's pair -- with as much cordiality as the Russians, and perhaps he notices through the morning that he keeps catching Darya's eye.

Upstairs, Hilary moves once, shifting in her sleep, for no reason. They can't hear the nursery from up here, can't hear when Anton starts yelling for his servant to come feed him, not really. It's well insulated. But she moves, turning her face against Ivan, breathing in deeply before sleeping again.

It's quite late in the day by the time the two decadent Silver Fangs above bother to wake. Hilary -- and this is a bit rare -- wakes before Ivan. She is in a strange place that feels familiar and right on a primitive level, all gut and instinct. She doesn't realize that her nostrils flare, scenting the air. Smells like sex, like mate. They're naked, tangled in rich sheets of Egyptian cotton. Her eyes are drowsy and predatory. She's hungry and she is looking for her cub.

Maybe Ivan wakes a moment after she breathes differently, or maybe when she sits up, turning to drink the water that's there with a few thirsty gulps. Maybe he opens his eyes when she leaves the bed, the sheets dragging off of his body as she wraps them around herself, yanking them off of him. Such a selfish thing she is. She goes to the window and looks out. She stalks the room, kicking aside one of Ivan's shoes, going to the door and opening it, listening down. There is a maid sitting dutifully in the hallway, one of Ivan's, her hands folded on her lap and her chair a discreet distance away from their little attic apartment door -- not eavesdropping, of course. She'll hear if she's called and be there in less than thirty seconds. That's the least that Ivan expects, after all.

Hilary stares at her, not aware that she's scowling, her head tipped in a confused, lazily threatening way.

In the rest of the house, the servants are being obediently quiet but there are introductions of course. Darya is translating for Carlisle, who really would rather she not because it'd be so much easier to just sit out in the car with the windows down and wait to be useful. No one talks secrets. No one trusts each other.

Of course, for Anton, there are twice -- no, more like three times -- the people around than he's used to. And he's a bit excited but also wary and uncertain. Over and over he asks to be picked up only to struggle against whoever does so, not quite comfortable in his own home at the moment. There are some who want to play with him, and others who want to just watch him. Darya is fascinated by his dark, dark eyes and his fair, fair hair, the elegance of his features that favor his father but hint at his mother.

Izolda gives him a break by feeding him in the kitchen by himself while everyone else eats their servants' breakfast. Food is prepared and plated for Ivan and Hilary -- Ivan's maids and Darya do some correction of the presentation, which irritates Polina and hurts Izolda's feelings -- but then it has to be turned to the fridge because they're still asleep. There is industry, of course, they are none of them lazy, but there is awkwardness and distraction. Anton sucks his fingers while Miron reads him books, some in Russian and some in English.

Awhile later, the maid from upstairs trots downward and explains, to the necessary parties but really to everyone who is tilting their ears in her direction, that 'they' are going to take Anton on an outing to Novgorod to buy him toys. Instantly, the servants know just how much arrangement actually has to happen for this outing to occur. Who goes in what car? Who pretends to not be there? They ask the maid for details, who says only what she knows, which is --

"We're taking Anton on an outing," Hilary tells the maid upstairs, some time before. A pause, a flicker of a frown: "To buy him toys." A little wave of her hand there, aimless, as though the maid should fill in the blanks for whatever else will occur on this outing. "Miron should come." The door shuts on the maid, who blinks and heads downstairs. Hilary didn't even ask for food.

Hilary drops the sheet when she returns to the bed, crawling onto and over to Ivan, wherever he lies now. She bites him when she kisses him, and it wouldn't be out of place if she were to growl but she doesn't. It isn't dominance. It isn't even lust. It's just thoughtless, savage, hungry. She licks his lower lip after, but not to soothe him. More to taste him, seal that kiss, feel him on her tongue. When it parts, she's staring into his eyes, her dark hair hanging down to his chest.

"I'm going to clean you in the shower," she says, brooking no argument, but

what she means is that, when the hot water is flowing down their bodies, she's going to get on her knees. She's going to suck his cock while his fist wraps around her hair, while his hips flex again and again to fuck her mouth, watch her gag a little on deeper strokes.

This is a home Ivan has never even seen in person before yesterday. It is nevertheless a home that is more thoroughly his than any other he's ever owned. Here, in his den, with his cub near and his female closer yet -- here, in the very heart of the land that spawned him and his fathers before him -- Ivan feels ... different. In the dead of night he woke without reason. He looked out over his land. Later his mate woke and they went to their small one together. They watched over him, that tiny breathing thing that they somehow created together. Later still, they loved each other.

He did these things and he felt right. He felt a little less twisted. He felt a little more savage. He felt at once more settled in his soul and more restless in his body. He felt closer to his wolf; farther from his madness.

He could not explain why if his life depended on it.

Now it is day, and day ever was a safer time than night. Here in the day, Ivan sleeps a sleep as deep as an ocean. Utterly and instinctively certain of his place, he is slower to stir to consciousness than ever before. It takes a long time, and the process begins with that first altered breath his Hilary takes. That rocks him from the ocean-bottom of his sleep; sends him drifting upward through all those layers of slumber and dream.

By the time she sits up he is aware enough to turn his face toward her. Aware enough to open his eyes a narrow glimmering slit. He watches her drink, and somehow that satisfies him. He watches her get up; he thinks her back is lovely as a poem. It is a romantic thought. He keeps it to himself. She pulls the blankets from the bed, leaving him bare. Selfish thing, he thinks of her, fondly. It is a little cooler now. He stretches, his body taut and his skin golden. He knows he is lovely, too, lovely and strong and born to rule. On this recognition he sprawls lazy again in the bed, replete, waiting.

His lover goes to the door. She gives orders. A maid goes scrambling to obey; somewhere downstairs their mystified servants do their best to carry out this morning's ridiculosity. Morning; midday. Ivan is not sure. He stops thinking about the servants, bored with the subject. He watches Hilary come back to bed, and he thinks to himself

that she is lovely as a poem. She is lovely as a blade, and when she leans over him she scythes him open. He bleeds lust. He blinks lazily; he doesn't even bother to raise a hand to touch her. She kisses him and there is hunger in that kiss. He lifts his head to meet her halfway. She bites him and he snarls, a low rumbling in his throat, utterly inhuman. After, she tastes him, and he lets her, and when she pulls back to look at him he takes her hand and pulls it down his chest, down his stomach, all the way down to wrap around his rather recent erection.

"See what you do to me," he says to her, only he doesn't say it in English. So: "Smotrite, chto vy delaete dlya menya," instead, and maybe she catches a few words and maybe she doesn't, but either way Hilary's lover is sitting up in bed. He is twisting his fingers into her sheet and pulling it away from her, stripping her quite bare while she informs him

that she is going to clean him.

He laughs a little. His hand pulls at her hair a little when he kisses her again. Later, in the shower, neither of them reach for soaps, creams, puffs, towels. She goes to her knees as water streams down his back and over his shoulders. He has a hand in her hair, gripping tight at the roots. She sucks him and he fucks her, using her mouth, that lovely lovely mouth, and the truth is he goes deeper than she can handle on purpose. He likes it when she chokes a little; when he has to hold her right where she is and make her take it, take it like a whore,

this woman that he loves. The mother of his child.

He holds her on him, too, when he comes. He mutters at her, gasping, fucking her mouth mercilessly, coming in her mouth like it's her cunt, and she doesn't understand because he's speaking Russian again, but she knows it must be filthy, what he's saying, he must be calling her terrible hair-raising things, he must be so very pleased with her, he must adore her. Because afterward, when he finally lets her draw away, he pulls her to her feet. He is so gentle with her then. He kisses her so gently. He helps her rinse her mouth. He washes her, and even though he didn't break her so utterly that she needs this, he is careful and thorough.

When they go down to breakfast the servants have already figured everything out. The decadent Fangs are taking their boy out to buy toys. And a bed. Miron will accompany them, which really means Miron will be taking care of the boy. Dmitri and Polina will follow at a discreet distance, stepping in as necessary to handle the details of payment, delivery, all that.

They'll need two cars; Ivan will drive himself and Hilary, of course, in that flashy rental. Dmitri will follow in the car that Anton's household uses. Miron is trying to ask Ivan if he wants Anton (and by extension, Miron) to ride with him or Dmitri, but Ivan is sitting down at the kitchen table where that long ago-cooked breakfast has finally been laid out. Anton is there, too, sitting on Izolda's lap as Izolda waits to see if she will be drafted into the day's exertions as well. And Ivan, riding high on that burst of paternal feeling that will likely wane by early afternoon, is ignoring Miron and reaching out to play with Anton. Or try to.

If she did not hate his crib before -- and she did, as soon as she saw it, as soon as she though of Anton being put down in it like a cage -- getting up in the middle of the night and being unable to lie down next to him has made Hilary utterly loathe it. But she doesn't tell the maid they're going to buy a bed. Something furtive and defensive in her has risen up, as though everyone around her but Ivan will conspire to keep her away from Anton.

The truth is that it isn't the servants who would do such a thing. It's just... life. It's mistakes and choices she and Ivan have made themselves, resulting in this tiny warmblooded thing who may never, ever forgive them. She can't face that. So: the servants don't want her to be close to her child. Especially Izolda, who is not allowed to come on the outing. Izolda, who Hilary despises and yet insists on keeping, because

Anton may need her.

They fuck, in a manner of speaking, in the shower. She just wants to. She touches herself while he fucks her mouth. She doesn't come, and frankly, she doesn't need to. She feels satiated at the end, lazy, comforted. He gives her water afterward, soothing her throat, stroking her hair as she leans against him and washing her breasts, her arms, her belly and thighs. She knows what it sounds like when he calls her good girl, beautiful girl, in Russian. It's some of the only words she can pick out when he's spilling that language into midair in the midst of his pleasure, in the midst of this primal rightness they both feel.

Darya is called up later. She does Hilary's hair, as silent and unobtrusive as she can make herself. She helps Hilary do her makeup, and she dresses the woman as well. It is like Hilary is a child, though she is taller and far older than the maid: lifting her arms to have the dress slipped over her head, tipping her head forward while Darya zips her up. Holding ever so still, obediently, while Darya gives her a quick manicure.

By the time they get downstairs, it is lunchtime. The servants have made arrangements and Polina has gotten directions to the various shops available. Hilary and Ivan sit, and Anton -- having already been fed his pureed vegetables and his easy solids -- is sucking on a half-bottle of warm milk (not Izolda's) while sitting on his nurse's lap. Across the table, his mother watches, ignoring whoever it is that sets her lunch -- well, sort of brunch -- plate down as she lifts her fork.

And then Ivan reaches out to Anton. Those dark eyes the boy has track Ivan's fingers sharply, but he doesn't interrupt his sucking at his bottle. He's just very attentive, on the verge of wariness, but soothed by Izolda's arms around him and the fullness of his belly and the warmth of the milk in his pre-nap bottle. He's only been up for four or five hours but he's already exhausted from activity, from people, from all the adjustments to his routine.

Ivan has no idea how to play with a baby, or a near-toddler, or... a child. What exactly is his hand supposed to do? Tickle? Beep the boy's nose? Those long fingers that wrap so easily, so elegantly around a knife,

or tangle themselves in his bitch's hair,

are quite retarded when it comes to this. They are aimless at first, unsure, but nonthreatening. Anton's sucking slows, and he reaches out one arm and waves it, but he's not six months old anymore. He's very close to his first birthday and he is a bright, feral thing already. He grabs Ivan's index finger with very little flailing or batting, and then the games present themselves like nature is teaching them silently to Ivan.

He is to tug his finger away and see how long Anton can hold on, then bring it back so Anton can grab it again.

He is to wiggle his finger in Anton's grasp to see if Anton can maintain his grip.

He is to move Anton's arm up and down, all but shaking it, with Anton's arm limp, and this game in particular makes Anton laugh, a few flecks of milk shedding onto his lips because he didn't swallow completely before popping the bottle out of his mouth. He burps. Izolda wipes his mouth with a very soft cloth, rubbing his back, and Anton laughs again. He twists and looks up at her, as though to check and see if she's noticed Ivan, too, because clearly he is the first to have encountered this new creature and he must tell his pack about it.

Across the table still, eating quietly and slow, Hilary is also watching. She can see the ferocity of the play, the force Anton exerts, the struggle it is for him, the strength he's testing and learning. She can see the paternal glow about Ivan, which she would normally deride with some cutting remark, some cruel joke at all their expenses. She does not speak, though. She watches, and occasionally -- when Anton laughs -- there is a small, aching smile on her face that Ivan's never seen before. It's tender, and she is never tender. Even her submission to him, however loving and sweet, is not the same thing. It isn't as... protective.

The games get boring quickly though, mostly for Ivan and also for the sleepy Anton. Izolda says he should finish his bottle and then take his nap, which Hilary doesn't like one bit. They're going on an outing, she insists, and Anton looks at her when that tremor hits her voice. She almost sounds like a child, biting back fury at being denied what she wants, what they promised.

Izolda freezes like a deer in headlights. It's really Miron who helps here. Of course they're going. His afteroon nap is a short one, just a couple of hours. He only naps once a day now, he's already such a big boy.

(Unsaid, and suspected but unknown: he is too energetic, he is too wild, he is made for activity and bursting with it, and one day it will be too much for him and his body literally will not contain it anymore, it won't be able to, and he will have to

Change.)

Hilary aches but she calms. She watches Izolda, staring at Anton, and calms herself. "May I finish feeding him?" She isn't asking the nurse. She may be asking Miron, or Ivan, but she sure as hell is not asking permission from the wetnurse. She isn't even asking permission, per say. She's asking for instruction.

They bring Anton over to her. It's quiet, though Izolda is talking to Anton in Russian. They hear the word matushka, and Izolda murmuring mama, as though to seal it in Anton's mind. This is his mother. Mama. Mama. He doesn't repeat it -- of course he doesn't. But he presses his lips together with a forceful mmm! sound and bounces his bottom in a forward rolling motion a few times where he's held.

It would be romantic to say he's recognizing her as his mother. It would be a lie. He's practicing a noise that is easy to make and that he likes, because it vibrates at the front of his mouth and fills his entire face. Mmm. Mmmmmm!

He doesn't lie down easily in Hilary's arms, and she is cool and unsure, but when the put the bottle in her hand, he teaches her. This is how he lies down. This is how he opens his mouth and that is where she is supposed to put the food. One thing Anton does not struggle with is eating well. He rejects food when he is full. He demands it when he wants it. His weight is surprising. He sucks so strongly, so eagerly, curled up in a ball on Hilary's lap.

It is not the first time she's held him. It feels like it, though.

Hilary stares at him. She doesn't so much as blink. Anton stares at her, growing more sedate by the moment, sucking slower. Everyone is quiet, but Anton and Hilary are removed for now. He is sleepy and being fed. She is holding him against her body for the first time since she brought him to her bed, the bed he was taken from when he was brought here. One would think she might weep, but Hilary doesn't. When Anton, lazily, reaches up and starts sifting his fingers through the ends of her long, dark hair -- the way he sometimes does when he is being nursed, because this long dark hair is familiar, because his nurse has long dark hair and yet it is not so fine, so silken as Hilary's -- one would think Hilary might smile. She doesn't smile, either. She doesn't think to rock him.

She just watches him. Watches until he sucks the last drops of milk from his bottle and his eyelids are heavy, struggling to lift up. Watches him as she eases the nipple from his mouth and sets the bottle on the table without looking. His hand is still in her hair but it's still now, arm held up by her breast and body and cocked a bit above his head.

Izolda begins to offer to take him to bed.

"No," Hilary says softly, whispering by instinct, slowly lifting herself from the chair she's been in with the cobralike grace she has never lost. Anton is not quite asleep but he is finding it difficult to hold his eyes open, and he is held and fed and warm and this is good so he does not worry overmuch. He can smell her. Something about that is familiar.

Hilary does not say anything else. She just walks away from the table, wearing a pair of summery flats and an equally summery dress -- though the sort of summery you'll see at a New England country club function and not a city's riverwalk -- and heading for the stairs. And then heading up, up to the attic, to the bed she shared with Ivan, which

has already had its sheets changed to fresh ones, the bedding smoothed over by a maid. The window is slightly open and soft air filters through. Hilary does not care if anyone has come with her. She lays Anton in the center of that big soft bed and he struggles then, fights to stay awake, whines a bit. Her hand moves to the middle of his back as he rolls to his side.

"Non, Anton. Soyez toujours. Il est temps de dormir." Soft. Firm. He doesn't understand a word of it but his name, and the rest is so smooth and full-mouthed and rolling that it soothes him. It's unusual, when Hilary slips out of her shoes and lays down on the bed with him, facing him, her head on a pillow and his head on the bedspread. She rests her hand on his back still, motionless.

He sucks on his thumb, fingers splayed, the way he always does.

This time, sleeping in her bed with him, Hilary does not dare go to sleep.

Barely anyone speaks. From the time Hilary asks to feed her son to the time she disappears upstairs, barely anyone says a word. No one seems to know what to say. That first question -- not intended for Izolda -- is answered first by silence. It is a nervous silence. Anton's people don't know Hilary at all. Until yesterday, she was a ghost to them, lovely, young, deceased. Even so, not a one of them feels wholly comfortable handing her own child to her. She's so ... off. She's so removed, so alien, so cold in her perfection; not at all the doting, tragic mother of Ivan's lies. But then, Ivan lied to them about so many things.

In the end Ivan answers. He does it without words. He stands up, and he walks over to Izolda, and Izolda gives up the child to him without question. He knows how to hold Anton. Dmitri taught him. He carries the boy over to Hilary, and during that short trip Anton is curious, a little wary, batting his chubby little hands against his father's collar. His father lays him in

his mother's

arms, and there he stays, growing full, growing sleepy. Miron hesitantly draws a breath to talk to Ivan again, but then he sees Ivan is watching Hilary, staring at her, the look in his eyes strange. Miron lets that breath out, and he looks at Izolda, and they've lived together nearly a year now so there's some measure of communication without words there; he leaves the table silently and she remains.

Ivan stays. Ivan watches. Ivan aches, though he doesn't understand this any more than he understood the way he felt last night. This is not the first time Hilary has held her child, though it may as well be. This is not the first time Hilary has fed her child, but she's never, not once, fed him from her breast. Even that most basic act of nurturing, of caring, she has failed at. There is nothing in her that is capable of the sort of whole, giving love other women -- other people -- understand by nature. She is not right, and love, empathy, human connection, is precisely where she went wrong.

And yet still she goes to her cub. Still she tries to protect him, feed him, care for him. Still, in her own strange and broken way, she loves him. And it hurts Ivan to see it.

A little later Hilary takes Anton upstairs. Izolda excuses herself with a murmur soon after. Ivan stays where he is, his eyes downcast, lashes golden, fingers toying with some scrap or spoon. Time goes by. His thoughts turn lazy circles, and gradually wounds heal and rifts close. Some time later he stands smoothly. His feet make no sound on the steps; not even on the ones that creak when anyone else pass. He goes up to the converted attic, where Anton is sleeping, where Hilary is afraid to sleep. He looks at them a moment.

Then he comes to the bed. Very carefully, very softly, he lowers himself to the mattress; eases himself closer and closer until his body forms half of a protective ring. There is his mate. There is his cub. Here is his pack; he who cannot summon up the faithfulness and devotion to run together under a totem spirit. He watches his small one sleep for a little while. Then he reaches out to his female, putting his hand on her cheek, touching her.

"I don't think you could bear to lose him again," he whispers.

No one follows them up to the attic apartment when Hilary takes Anton. Something lurches in some of the servants, particularly Izolda, and it is a raw uneasiness with letting that woman take that child out of their sight. Something isn't right about her. She's a ghost risen from the dead. She's bewitching the child already, just as she seems to have bewitched Ivan. This woman, more than any of the kin who make up the lower class, is so pure of blood that she almost reeks of madness. No one follows her, but some of them want to, feeling wary.

It's clean up here, and possibly too bright for Anton to sleep, but he doesn't really stir. Hilary doesn't bother closing the windowshades; she doesn't realize this might affect his nap, but the headboard blocks much of the light directly from the baby. And he is still a baby, still small, young enough that his belly pooches out from under his shirt now that it's full of lunch and milk, young enough that he sucks his thumb. He sleeps on his belly now, head turned to the side. Hilary can see his face.

Her head comes up, sharp and sudden and eyes glittering with malice, when the not-quite-shut door swings silently open. The first thing Ivan sees of her is her body half-raised at the top, those eyes bitingly savage, her nostrils slightly flaring. Her hand on Anton's back is very still, though. It does not clench.

But it's Ivan. And lazily, almost, sleepily, Hilary relaxes in a wave from her crown to her toes. She eases back down. She lays her head on her arm and keeps watching the cub. It's only the male. Just her mate. He is allowed to be here. It is his den, after all. Some primitive, far-back part of her mind sees and smells and feels a slaughter outside. He must have hunted, and killed, and protected. That is what wolves do. And Ivan is a wolf.

She is his mate.

This is their cub.

So: the one figure that could have walked into that room without being torn to pieces comes inside, and he has wrestled with his own angels and returned. He comes to the bed and lays down across from Hilary, Anton between them. Just like they did, once... and only once. Their knees almost touch, far below Anton's bare feet and curled toes. Their arms above their heads almost touch, feather-light. He extends his arm, a shadow falling across the boy, to touch her. She closes her eyes, but only for a moment.

Ivan touches her. She touches Anton.
Ivan watches her. She watches Anton.

She breathes in as quietly as she can after his words, and then she nods a little, her hair rustling on the pillowcase. He's right. But Hilary is silent for awhile. They can hear the baby breathing. They can hear his occasional, half-instinctive suck on his thumb before his mouth relaxes again.

"I think he's my soul," she whispers, because of course,

she has none.

Her eyes move to Ivan's face, seeing him like a stranger for a moment, as though she is waking from a coma and not sure what she remembers, who she remembers. Only: he matters. It takes her a moment to remember why, though.

"And you gave him to me," because of course,

that is what he did.

As though tired, Hilary's eyes move back to Anton's fair face. She is still quiet for awhile, long pauses of nothing, and she talks so carefully when she does, afraid to wake him. "I think... I'll tell Grey," she whispers, "that if I marry him, I'm going to kill myself."

So calm. So soft.

This is what he should say:

that she is mad to speak that way. That she is mad to so easily give up what may be her best chance at security, at safety, perhaps even at some sense of independence like this. That she is mad to give up what may well be her last honorable arrangement of this sort, and for what?

A bastard child that she doesn't know how to care for. A bastard child that she'll tire of and hate if she had to take care of it for more than a week. More than a day. More than an hour. A bastard child, and a nameless Cliath whose style doesn't match hers; who is young and crass by her standards, who does not have Grey's pedigree or his quietly impeccable dignity, and never will. An honorless Cliath who can't even protect her. Not the way Grey and all his wealth, all his power, all the might of his bloodline and progeny can.

She would be mad to give all that up. She must be mad.

Ivan doesn't say these things. He draws a quiet sip of breath. His eyes cloud; his brow furrows. He is dressed now, but no less beautiful for it. Still a son of the morning. Still golden, still sleek, still a young wolf, wild beneath his smooth skin.

"What will you do instead," he whispers, "if you won't marry Edmund Grey?"

Some part of her expects him to talk sense into her. He is her vladelets, isn't he? He pushed off suitors that weren't good for her, and not just because he didn't want to lose her. He introduced her to the one, the first one, that might be worthy, that might save her. Ivan always protects her. And like a child, she trusts implicitly.

Yet: she's not surprised when he doesn't argue. She doesn't look hurt that he doesn't fly into a panic at the thought of her killing herself. He's calm, and this is good because Anton can only sleep so deeply with a werewolf at his side, even if that werewolf is his father and even if that father is not a full moon, bursting with rage.

Idly, instinctively, Hilary strokes Anton's back. Maybe she won't tire of him. Maybe she won't hate him. Maybe. It could be. She can think this to herself, and she doesn't voice it because she doesn't want Ivan to argue sense into her. Not on that.

"I'll be with you," she says, easily as if she's been thinking about this for some time. Not that long; only since last night, when she was finally calm enough to leave Anton's nursery and return to this bed. It was the thought that got her to sleep. She doesn't fear death. Doesn't fear scandal or shame or her name being dragged through mud and the word WHORE being plastered over it in every book of Fang genealogy.

"And we'll be with Anton," Hilary goes on, her voice still a sussuration. Her palm moves in a circle over the miniature lungs, the miniscule ribs, the soft flesh, the thin t-shirt. "And he will grow up and just smirk at any Garou who think his parentage makes him low."

She looks at him, resting her head on the pillow. "Because he's perfect."

They go to bed, Hilary and her cub, Ivan and his lady. They go to bed and she tells them a fairytale to soothe them all to peace.

Anton sleeps. He is calmed by his belly full of milk and food. He is not yet craving meat the way he will as he grows older and his true nature grows harder and harder to mask. He still accepts the pureed fruits and vegetables and grains they feed him, alongside the tiniest bit of shredded soft meat. He is calmed, too, by the hand on his back; the soft voice and the smells that somewhere, somehow, his most primitive mind recalls.

Anton sleeps. Ivan does not. He is too old to believe in fairy tales. He is old enough to know better, as they say; though clearly not old enough to do better. He watches Hilary soothe Anton. He wonders how much of the story she believes. How much he should split asunder for her. Where the line between protection and deception lies. How much responsibility, really, he had toward her,

could bear toward her.

"If you cast Grey off," Ivan says - softly, testing the words and the thoughts as he speaks them, "and if he lets you go ... then I could claim you for myself. You have no family, no Garou blood-kin. I am your only guardian.

"I would be taking unfair advantage of the situation, of course, to allow myself a claim I would deny anyone else in my shoes. But that claim could stand. If anyone contests it, they would have to face me on equal footing. And you are," a certain wryness here, "no longer quite the prize you were, in the eyes of the Tribe. Perhaps fewer Garou would want to contest me. You're accruing a reputation: a dead mate, a dead child, a romance nipped cruelly in the bud for a rather mad reason. Fruit of a withered tree, as Espiridion so kindly put it. Not for consumption. Best left to sprout or rot as she pleases.

"I could keep you. At least for a while. A few months. Maybe even a few years." A pause. "Another child, a legitimate child born of our union, might solidify my claim. But make no mistake: all those reasons you are unfit will only dissuade the proud. My claim, legitimate or not, will only dissuade the honorable. And in the end, we are beasts."

His eyes touch her mouth. Her body. Return: meet hers.

"We see beauty, we smell blood, and we want. There is no pride and no honor that can trump raw desire." Ivan laughs and it is humorless: "Anton is proof enough of that."

Fairy tales. She does look like a princess from one, in a way. When she smiles, especially, she looks younger and fairer, light as air. It isn't hard to imagine her smiling like that, twirling in some gown just to show off, just to feel it fluttering. A princess grown into a queen. And if they'd kept up the lie, maybe she would have been Anton's fairy godmother, distant and beautiful and unknowable, but magical, making his life a confusing glow every time she touched it.

But:

Ivan speaks of beasts. Blood. Want. All after he speaks in careful weighing of pros and cons, possibilities, her reputation, what Dion said, potential hope, but in the end it comes down to blood. It comes down to what is raw. What they can see and smell and feel dripping down their chins as they sink their teeth in.

And:

Hilary's true nature moves in her eyes, buried in the deep, as heavy and ancient and violent as Leviathan. Old myths, older than the religions of a father-god, are of mother dragons with their bellies ripped open, the halves becoming sea and sky. Enormous, bloody goddesses, fat with pregnancy and heavy with milk, demanding the sacrifice of god knows how many hunters to bring her and the offspring meat, bring them fur, bring them food and warmth or else they all die, and the future of the world with them. Goddesses who create life, and measure it, and then cut it off with a yank and the slice of a knife, forcing mouthfuls of forgetting water down the throats of the dead.

One of the most frightening things to see in the wild is a cub without its mother. The species hardly matters: bear, lion, wolf. Because no matter where you are, you can't know where its dam is. You can't know if you are in the worst, most dangerous place on earth to be:

between her and that child.

Ivan talks about blood. He says they're beasts and it seems he's talking about the Garou. The true wolves. The frightening ones. And yet looking into Hilary's eyes, as she says I will kill myself, as she keeps that baby she barely knows how to love soothed by her hand, there is a moment when the rage in the room that is more terrifying is not emanating from Ivan.

"What do you think I will do," she whispers, though it isn't really a question.

"What do you think I am capable of?"

Hilary looks from Ivan to Anton for a moment. Her hand on his back smooths away from his shirt, but he barely stirs. She sits up with the grace of a cobra, looking at Ivan past her shoulder. "I have decided," she says, brutal and regal in those words. "The night I lay back for that man's cock is the night I bind him with silver in his sleep and cut it off of him. The same for his sons. The same for any. I will no longer be a whore for this tribe."

Ivan is still for a while, even after Hilary has coiled away from him and their son. He has never seen her like this, not even when she was screaming at him because he lashed her with the memory of her son; not even when she was flickering toward true sadism that one and only brief time he allowed her to take control of him. He's never heard her speak like this. Never seen that black wrath in her so gathered, so close to the surface, so sharply directed.

There is her soul, Ivan thinks. Closer to her than ever before. A few moments go by; then, quietly:

"All right, Hilary."

Here is the truth: he is her vladelets, and she gives her will over to him. But that has never meant her will bends to his, her wants to his. It has always meant this, and this alone:

he protects her. He cares for her. He executes the deepest, darkest secrets of her will; those things she wants so very much she doesn't even want to -- can't -- vocalize them.

Of course he would never force her to marry a man she doesn't want. Of course he would never force her to do anything she doesn't want. He is her vladelets, and

what she wants, he makes real. Like a magic mirror, reflecting desire to truth. Like her own personal god.

Ivan sits up too after a time. He rises slower, a little more languid. He doesn't stretch this time, but he swings his feet silently to the floor and rises. He leaves his tiny son where he lays, sleeping in the middle of a bed far too large for him. And Ivan goes to the window, glances out, turns, puts his back to the wall. Leans a little. Crosses his feet at the ankles, elegant and casual. He is facing her now, and

he is smiling.

"Though," he says, light now, "I hope you aren't intending to break your engagement to Edmund Grey in quite those terms. A little more tact, perhaps. Leave him no room for wrath ... or hope."

There is so much hatred and violence in her. It seems to be all there is most of the time. Anything else just exhausts her, bores her, annoys her. Occasionally, Ivan gives her something to hang onto for a little while, something brighter and if not good, then at least a little better than what else is in her. That there should be any niche carved out in her to hold love or care for another creature is a hard-won, miraculous thing. It took a year of self-starvation before coming here solidified it into something she couldn't deny anymore.

This is her son, Anton, and she loves him, and she always loves him. She doesn't hate him, like she thought she would. She has loved him every single day since he was born.

And this is Ivan, her mate, and she loves him, and he loves her even when she can't love him back. She hasn't grown bored of him, like she thought she would. She needs him. She can trust him.

Hilary stays on the bed, near the child but no longer laying with him. Ivan gets up, though. Anton moves, rubbing his face on the covers, making noises, then settles again, too tired to climb his way to wakefulness. Hilary watches him, curious more than endeared, then looks over at Ivan.

Ivan, leaning beautifully against the wall, standing the way she has often seen him stand. Lovely. Her head tips as she regards him, like he's a sculpture in a gallery.

He's smiling. He suggests she use some tact.

Hilary just watches him. "There is always room for wrath. He's Garou." She looks at Anton, but speaks to Ivan. "I'll tell him the truth. I don't want to be mated again, whored about by the tribe. I am content with you as my guardian. I do not and will never love him, or even be fond of him, and in fact I despise him for coming after me at all. I will tell him I lied to him because I knew it was best, and because I knew you wanted the best for me.

"I'll tell him I have a bastard son whose stillbirth I faked to avoid being killed by my husband for adultery. I'll tell him that with Espiridion divorcing me, I have a chance to be with that son, and if he takes that chance away from me, I will lose my mind and kill myself. I will make sure that all the tribe knows he drove me to it. He wouldn't bear a shame like that. No, he wouldn't," she whispers, and she's stroking Anton's fair, wispy hairs tenderly on his crown as she says this. Sing-song. Lullabye.

There's a bit of distance between them. More than they usually keep, if we're honest. Normally, if they're together -- provided they aren't fighting -- they're close enough to touch. Close enough to kiss. Close enough to fuck.

The distance doesn't feel awkward, though. That's a strange thing. Perhaps it's because they're in their den, Ivan thinks. He wonders if that's a romantic thought. He wonders if it's slightly insane.

"That's quite a burden of truth you're entrusting to a man you've decided to jilt," Ivan remarks. "Are you sure you want to mention Anton? It'd be disastrous if he let it slip to Espiridion."

Hilary smiles faintly, flickeringly, at the word 'jilt'; she must like the sound of that. Her hand reluctantly withdraws from Anton's cheek as her gaze swivels to meet Ivan's.

She aches a little. "I don't want them to hurt him. I just want them to stop wanting me."

This time when Ivan smiles it's humorless, a little pained. "They'll never stop wanting you," he says, just as quiet. "Not until you're old and grey, and maybe not even then. They'll just offer you less and less in return for the privilege of fucking you if they think you're mad, if they think you're an adulteress, if they think you're the mother of bastards."

A considering pause.

"Or maybe they'll want you more for that last one. Proof of your fertility, after all, if not your fidelity."

He comes back to the bed, then. Not to his side but to hers, sinking down beside her. Anton hardly moves. The bed doesn't make a sound. Ivan reaches for Hilary, curving his hand over her wrist, then down to wrap his fingers through hers.

"How did your parents die?" he asks. "And the rest of your house; what became of them? I don't think I've ever asked."

[dl2p]

Hilary smiles faintly, flickeringly, at the word 'jilt'; she must like the sound of that. Her hand reluctantly withdraws from Anton's cheek as her gaze swivels to Ivans. There's an ache in her. Everything they're talking about is slightly insane. It's so serious, so important, and neither of them were built to withstand things like that.

"I don't want them to hurt him," she says softly. "I just want them to stop wanting me."

This time when Ivan smiles it's humorless, a little pained. "They'll never stop wanting you," he says, just as quiet. "Not until you're old and grey, and maybe not even then. They'll just offer you less and less in return for the privilege of fucking you if they think you're mad, if they think you're an adulteress, if they think you're the mother of bastards."

A considering pause.

"Or maybe they'll want you more for that last one. Proof of your fertility, after all, if not your fidelity."

He comes back to the bed, then. Not to his side but to hers, sinking down beside her. Anton hardly moves. The bed doesn't make a sound. Ivan reaches for Hilary, curving his hand over her wrist, then down to wrap his fingers through hers.

"How did your parents die?" he asks. "And the rest of your house; what became of them? I don't think I've ever asked."

She looks away again. It isn't because she loves Anton more than Ivan, though in a brutal and unavoidable way that's true. Ivan does not have all of her heart, but he never did. He has her will and her truth. She cannot hide from him all the cracks running through her. She never lies to him. It's a form of surrender, and a form of trust, and certainly a form of love. What she lays on the altar for him is all sincere, all true, all genuine. It just isn't always a fragrant, beautiful sacrifice.

But it is his. And it is worship.

They could probably jump on either side of this bed and not wake Anton, the mattress is so finely made. So when Ivan tells her that no, they won't ever stop wanting her, they won't ever stop chasing her, they'll just consider her cunt less and less worthy of them. It makes her sick. So she looks at Anton, away from Ivan and those words, because... Anton is her soul. Right now, at least, he's proof that there was something good in her. She didn't give birth to a monster, scaly and tailed and misshapen. Something about her must be normal. Something must be soft.

Something in her had to have been a little bit innocent, for innocence to survive being held inside of her. But now it's outside. Now he's over there, and if she's parted too far from him, she's not sure she'll survive it. What she'll become.

She's never cared about that before.

Ivan's hand on her wrist is soothing. It always soothes her, a little, to feel those gentle reminders of dominance. She moves a bit, leaning her back against Ivan's chest. He asks about her parents. She gives a soft sigh.

"I was too young," she whispers. She doesn't remember them. "There were different stories for a long time." Hilary slips her fingers in between Ivan's. She looks at her knuckles, bare for now, and thinks about the ring he gave her, the offer of marriage that they rather jointly dismissed as insane and ridiculous. She wishes a little now that she'd said yes, whatever difference that would make.

"My caretakers told me when I was older, though, long after my brother died. They didn't care anymore." There's a pause. Just a pause. Her voice never breaks or cracks; there's something melodic about it. "When I was born, he thought she loved me more than him." A beat; realizing Ivan might think she means her brother: "My father, I mean. He was Garou, I think. Very pure. Very regal. And they told me that he took to pacing up and down the halls in the big wolf form, howling for my mother, wailing. He'd bite and claw himself and sometimes change enough to yell her name. She wouldn't let him touch her, they said, after my birth. For months and months. But he'd pace and howl and slice himself up and then she'd come out and take care of him and he'd be calm again, but then I'd cry and she'd go to me, or feed me, and he'd take it up again like it was a betrayal."

Hilary turns her head, nuzzling under Ivan's jawline. "So he kept going on and on until he asked her to promise him that she'd do whatever he said to prove that she loved him. And she promised, and he killed her, and then he killed himself."

This pause is longer. "I think the reason his name isn't anywhere is that they think it was murder, but... my nurse told me it was a pact. My mother agreed to let him do it." A soft sigh, more resigned than anything else. "So they were both quite mad, you see. Everyone writes and talks like such things are so romantic, but it's just very silly and stupid, isn't it?"

Hilary shrugs. "As for the rest of the staff, time and a dwindling inheritance picked everyone off one by one. By the time the manor was sold there were just a few servants with me. By the time I was dancing and being introduced to Garou, there was just my butler and my nurse, going quickly senile, shitting themselves or eating soap flakes, hearing voices. The butler died first.

"Then Dominique married me, and put my nurse in a quiet place to be cared for til she died, and he took me to a castle and got so busy fucking my brains out he forgot to provide for me at all in his will. His family only gave me anything to preserve his honor and reputation when he went out and got himself killed." She shrugs. "I suppose if I'd had even a kin baby, they would have kept me."

It's a harrowing story she tells him. But then, she's had a harrowing life. She's a harrowing woman sometimes. Sometimes there's no light in her eyes.

He listens, though. Because he asked. And because he knows the story must be awful, because all the House of Austerity ended awfully. And because he knows an awful story can be used, and the more awful the story, the more likely it is that this Gleaming Eye, this honorable aging Theurge in search of his last wife, will want to look elsewhere.

A few times, Ivan's hairs stand on end. Once, an inappropriate bubble of amusement rises in him; then it's crushed by the black pressure of those casual words:

And she promised, and he killed her, and then he killed himself.

He knows the rest of the story, really. He's asked before, though she gave him little more detail then than she does now. There was a brother, who was her whole world, everything good that she had left. He was devoured before her eyes when she was four. There were servants who grew old, who grew mad, who died of age or madness both. There was dancing. There was cooking. There was a coldness to her, but for a while she was happy with her first husband, or as close to happy as Hilary ever gets. He was a bit of a monster too. He took her out on a lake and stranded her there, a predator's game. She felt so loved.

She is leaning against him now: her third mate, in a sense. Her only true mate, in quite another sense. She seems to fit his body as though they were shaped for each other. They may as well have been. They are both such long, lean, lovely people, and their son will be long, lean, lovely himself. There he lies: her soul. His proof that

once, there was this.

Ivan's arms are laced loosely around his lover. He could feel her voice emanating through her body. She feels quite slender. When she falls silent, his hand moves: smooths up the center of her torso. His thumb brushes the indent at the base of her throat. Then upward: his hand cupping her jaw sightlessly, turning her face so he can press a kiss to her temple.

"I love you." Of all the things he could say, that's what comes to mind. That's the truth he comes up with. And it is the truth. He loves her: madly, without rhyme or reason, every part of her. Even the madness. Even the darkness.

"You should tell your parents' story to Grey," he adds, a little later. "And then when you tell him you'll kill yourself if he married you, he'll believe you. And you needn't mention Anton at all unless he presses for a reason. Let him believe a fairytale if he likes: you'll kill yourself out of love for him."

Any other woman might cringe as Ivan's hand passes up her like that. It's a grazing touch of utter ownership. Entitlement to her. When he touches her throat at one of its most vulnerable spots, when he holds her jaw and turns her to face him, most women would feel their skin crawling with revulsion, with fear. Hilary...

feels safe. She feels comforted. It isn't that she is incapable of grief, or unaware of how horrible her life story is. She doesn't talk about it precisely because no one ever knows what to do with it; they recoil from her. When she is honest with Ivan, though, she can say what she really thinks of all of it: silly. Stupid. They were so mad. The emotions of grief or loss or fear are very, very far away from her, as distant and confusing as shooting stars.

Ivan is here. Anton is here. And with them right here, in front of her, touching her, she can feel the things she knows they create.

Hilary sighs, closing her eyes as he kisses her temple. As he loves her. As he brutalizes her in this gentle, tender way to show her how much he owns her. She feels adored, just as she felt loved and terrified when Dominique left her on the lake. There is intimacy in being someone's particular, sole prey.

At first, she doesn't understand, and she frowns a little when he tells her that she should tell Grey about her parents. Even when Ivan goes on, she doesn't understand. They are still whispering. Their son is still sleeping. She's never been with him this long in his life.

"I don't understand," she tells him, though he can see it. "I don't know what you mean."

There is a stillness to Ivan. A wariness, as though suddenly he finds himself standing over ice of unknown thickness. She doesn't understand. He can't see how she could possibly fail to understand; so perhaps she is simply denying. Perhaps if he presses, she'll

split open. Pour blackness out. Scream like that again.

Ivan takes a breath. He lets it out slowly. He has not drawn away from Hilary. His hands are still on her, though no longer at her throat. He has her wrapped in his arms now, simply and securely, holding her as he explains it again:

"If you tell Edmund Grey that your parents made that pact to kill and die together, he'll believe you when you tell him you'll kill yourself should he marry you. There would be precedent of that sort of ... that sort of extremity in your bloodline."

No screaming comes from her. That would wake the baby. Hilary still looks confused, but she isn't angry. She can feel him tense but at the moment she reads it as frustration with her thickness, and it makes her more vulnerable, not more violent. Then again, with her, the line between the two is thin enough as to be nonexistent sometimes.

"I was just going to tell him I don't love him and if he makes me marry him I'll kill myself," she says quietly. "He's the type that would ask you -- or his sons -- if you think I'm serious. If I tell him about my parents to make him believe me, it will just sound like a child stamping her foot."

Her eyes move to Anton. She sighs softly. "And if he asks you, or if his sons ask me, I'll tell them that I thought of killing myself when I was pregnant. That I hated him." A pause. "That I believe I willed him dead with so much hate that that was why I lost him."

All this time Ivan hasn't moved away from Hilary. He keeps touching her, even as she speaks and he attends: sometimes running his fingers over her wrist and forearm, sometimes wrapping her in his arms, sometime rubbing the heel of his hand over her thigh. He barely seems to think about these casual, grazing caresses. It's as though fascinated by her, and the feel of her skin.

"Yes," he says quietly, thoughtful, "that could work. Do you want me to accompany you when you speak to him?"

The way his hand moves on her thigh hitches her dress up. She doesn't move to adjust it. Anton sleeps so deeply he seems to weigh down the entire room with it. Hilary shakes her head. "No," she murmurs. "I think it will make it seem false. Hiding behind you. Or like we're in cahoots. It needs to seem... on the verge of hysterical."

So calculating. And he's seen her hysterical. It's entirely possible that breakdown in her hallway after Anton was born was the first time in her life she's felt that extreme, felt anything that strong, and so much of it that it nearly destroyed her... and him.

Hilary exhales. "Lie down with us," she whispers to him. "I don't want to leave while he's sleeping."

Something about that amuses Ivan a little. "We are in cahoots," he points out, laughing softly. "We are, I would say, very much in cahoots."

Then he moves, shifting his lover with him. Earlier, when he came up, he and Hilary bracketed Anton with their own bodies. This time -- just like the day Anton was born -- it's Hilary that is kept in the middle. Ivan simply pivots as he lies down, keeping himself nearer the edge of the bed; Hilary between himself and their small, sleeping cub.

His hand smooths over her hip. There's a moment where it seems he might draw her dress up inch by inch, his fingers pulling at the fabric. Then he changes his mind. Smooths the skirt down flat, all the way down to her thigh. His arm wraps around her waist, then. He is lean, but not entirely strengthless. There's a certain ungiving hardness about his bones, his muscles. The band of his arm. The length of his body.

"And," he goes on, whispering, "we aren't leaving without Anton. We're taking him to buy toys, and a bed. A little outing, so he has presents on his birthday."

Cahoots. It's an archaic one -- of course it's the one Hilary would choose and Ivan would find funny. She has only a tired, wry-looking side smile to give him for that one, as she lays down again with her back to him. He comes easily, naturally to encircle her. A small part of her wishes he were on the other side, keeping Anton in the middle. More of her is simply comforted to feel him behind her.

There's a flicker, just that, where he wants to play with her. Pull her skirt up, touch her, or at least run his hand along her thigh to feel its smoothness. Ivan controls himself, straightening it instead, and Hilary just teases him, softly chiding: "Stop that." It may be the first time, however, that she's realized how heady his desire for her is in this place. How horny he is. Up until now she's been so distracted by her own pain she's barely even noticed the effect being here has had on Ivan. She doesn't read very deeply into it. He's a selfish young thing, wants to fuck, and that's no surprise, is it?

Hilary curls into his chest and around her child, moving her hand toward the center of the bed until her pinky crosses Anton's where it splays open. She looks at him awhile, and Ivan tells her a fairytale of what they're going to do when the boy awakes, and her eyes slowly close. They are a family.

It's a couple of hours later when Anton begins to stretch and wiggle. He kicks a few times, scooting his belly on the bedspread, then settles. He turns his head, drool leaving his mouth around his thumb and spreading on his cheek. He rubs his face back and forth on the blanket. He sighs, heavy and deep. He screws up his face and brings his hands it and itches at his nose with his fists, and by now Hilary -- only dozing -- is awake again, watching him.

"Anton," she murmurs, and he looks at her like whiplash, his mouth open, his eyes sleepy and stunned. And then upset. And very, very quickly, he goes from worried-looking to fussing to outright crying, because this is not only a strange place but these are strange people and he doesn't know them.

Downstairs, they don't hear him til he really gets going, and no one knows what to do. Go to him? He's up there. With them.

Hilary is horribly awkward at this. She pats him, her own face tortured, her hands almost shaking, trying to make him stop, be quiet, no. It doesn't occur to her to tell him it's okay, it's okay. She doesn't think to scoop him up instantly and hold him and kiss him and shush him, promising that he's safe. She just worriedly scoots herself into a seated position on her side, unable to find the rhythm to pat his back, telling him in an aching little voice: don't, don't. stop. stop crying.

But she tries. Of course she does.

It's absurd, really, how much Ivan wants Hilary here. How much he loves her here. Or, well - everywhere, really. But he feels it more here. Feels it every second, with every beat of his heart. There's nothing else to distract him from it. No gleaming white yachts, no shimmering blue water, no shimmering cocktail dresses at one of those hedonistic parties of his, no flash of shoulders and glint of eyes, no flirtatious smiles and legs crossed just so to remind him of what's between them, and what could be his

if he just held out his hand for it.

Not that he's indulged, lately. Ivan is a wolf after all, and he feels it more lately. He has a female. He has a cub. He is true to them. They are a unit, the three of them, a tiny pack, even if he cannot always bring himself to hold that thought in his mind very long.

They are a unit. And here, in his den, he is reminded of their unity. He is suffused in it. He is driven to add to it; to mount his female, this lovely, queenly, shattered creature who seems to be made a little more whole by the way they couple. To fuck her, to come in her, to lie back, replete, and wait for cubs by early spring.

These are the vague, murky thoughts in his mind as he drifts to sleep. Stop that, she said, chidingly, and so he stopped. But he can still think, can't he? He can still dream.

In his dreams he is eons old. He soars above the world and his eye can see all. The brightest and fairest and strongest of those belong he chooses as his own, and the first of them were just and fair, stern and kind. Then came their children, and their children's children, and as their beauty multiplied their strength waned. Their vanity grew. They began to mate one to another, these lovely children of his, and though their sins scorched his heart he could not help himself; he adored their beauty, he could not bear ugliness. And they were beautiful, these children of his, all through the eons. Beautiful, rarefied, honing their family trees into spears, into blades, into needles, brittle, fragile,

mad,

slicing down through the years until the earth below began to shriek and tremble with their madness. In his dream he is eons older now, and he is growing weak. His eye cannot see so far anymore. Entire swaths of his children fall into darkness. He can still hear them, screaming, always screaming, screaming into the silence where their souls ought to be,

screaming like twisting metal, screaming like raptors, screaming like infants.

Ivan comes awake with a hard start. He sits up, heart hammering, a single hard pulse of rage flaring a ripple of change through him; gone before it takes root. Something is screaming. It's his son. The noise is terrible; he remembers the last time he heard Anton screaming. It was on the plane. Dmitri and the maid dealt with it; he didn't want to. Couldn't bear it. Put earplugs in instead.

He has no earplugs this time. And besides, his mate is sitting up, and she is trying. She is failing miserably. Her misery is in every line of her back; even that is lovely, lovely as a poem. Ivan grimaces. He scrubs his face once with his longfingered hands. They are neither of them experienced parents -- far from it -- but he knows this much at least: when Anton cries, his caretakers pick him up. And Ivan knows how to pick him up.

He almost does just that. Yet some instinct stops him. Perhaps it's the way Hilary is trying so hard to comfort her tiny one. He understands: she has to try. He understands: if he succeeds where she fails, or worse, if the servants do, it would enrage her. It would devastate her.

So he shifts on the bed behind her. He moves closer, surrounding her, bracketing her between his knees and his arms. He lets her feel him behind her, his chest to her back, a warmth. A comfort, he hopes. "Here," he murmurs, close to her ear. He takes her wrists in his and he guides her hands. "Dmitri taught me."

And he teaches her. Tries, at least: pick him up. Support the head. Rock him; no, slower. Don't be afraid. He'll sense your fear. Be calm. Be calm, Hilary. Shh. Hold him. It's all right. We'll be all right.

Dmitri never taught him any of this. This is instinct, now.

Ivan dreams the dreams of every drop of blood in his veins, each cell a life history, every iota of his being connected somehow to that soaring, weakening bird of prey, crippled by its own adoration of beauty,

which of course Ivan would know something about.

Hilary doesn't dream. If she does, she forgets. Her mind is as bleak and black as the gaps between emotions in her heart. She floats in between asteroids. She dies and dwells there, comfortable and unafraid. Then her child cries, and those pieces of her that are half-formed blast apart all over again, shattering into pieces. It terrifies her.

She can't fix it. She pats aimlessly at Anton and at the air, shaking, begging him to please stop as though, like Ivan, he will see that he's hurting her feelings and stop being upset for her sake. She feels herself on the verge of panic, and then Ivan is wrapping around her, moving her arms, taking her wrists, containing her. A few morsels of existence cleave together once again and she breathes.

The rage that flickered through Ivan only amplified Anton's cries into wailing, into actual hiccuping sobs. Hilary didn't even seem to notice it, but Anton can't help it. He has no guards. There's just Hilary between him and that thing, and she isn't the most comforting.

He keeps trying to press his lips together to say mmm something. Probably Miron. He can't calm down enough to form a familiar sound, though. He keeps his eyes open, tears brimming and overflowing in them, and he's pushed himself to sitting now and seems to be begging Hilary and Ivan to fix it, even though they're part of the problem.

Like this, Ivan shows her. His serving man taught him, because Ivan could never figure this out on his own. Hilary is trembling as he helps her figure out to wrap Anton in her arms, lift him up onto her lap, wrap him up, cradle his head against her bicep though truth be told, he's so big and strong now that he isn't as fragile as he was when Ivan was taught to do this. Hilary covers the other side of Anton's head with her free hand, and she's kneeling between Ivan's legs, drawing Anton closer and closer until Ivan stops her hands, she's about to squeeze him too tightly.

Slower. Don't be afraid. Be calm.

She is almost crying now, too. "He doesn't like me," she whimpers, and turns her head for a moment to look at Ivan. "He doesn't like me, Ivan." But she is rocking him, right in that rhythm Ivan helped her find, and Anton is curved to her slender torso, and she is not sure what to do, and for perhaps the first time, she doesn't seem to trust that Ivan will be able to fix the fact that her son, her soul, does not love her back.

So Hilary, operating on instinct so far removed from reality and from modern culture that it is one more sign of her madness, pulls the strap of her sundress down, moves the cup of her bra, and draws Anton to her breast. The breast that hasn't produced a drop of milk in almost a year, the breast that she never offered him.

And he takes it. After a moment, after hiccuping and crying and trembling a little, he takes it and starts to suck. Hilary jerks in shock, and also in pain. She balls her hand into a fist and hits Ivan on the top of his leg with it, which is ineffectual and weak but redirects some of the adrenaline of that first sharp pain. She is looking at Anton in shock, because he's not crying anymore, just sniffling a little. He doesn't even seem upset that he's not getting any food. He just settles into what is a familiar, comforting routine that's been a daily part of his life since they brought Izolda to him, and he doesn't close his eyes but he begins to calm his breathing. He quiets. He suckles. And Hilary starts to calm, too, because he isn't rejecting her.

"I'm sorry," she says softly. To Ivan. For hitting him? No; for doing this. For letting Anton have what is, usually, Ivan's. "I just wanted him to be okay."

"He doesn't know you."

That's what Ivan says, softly but firmly, when Hilary twists about. She's almost in tears. He doesn't think he can bear it, if she cried too. He tries to remember the times he's seen her cry, not out of some mad ecstasy but out of hurt. He realizes he can't think of any at all; not in all those horrible, nasty fights.

"You just have to let him remember you."

And he stays where he is, supporting her as she supports the baby. And when she does what she does - that feral, maternal, slightly mad thing - he is still for a second. Then he helps her: shifting the strap of her sundress down, holding it for her as she slips her arm out of it. Those breasts of hers never held anything but new milk, and that only for a few days before her body realized the baby that was cut out rather than born would not be feeding after all. She has never nursed her child.

She pantomimes it now, though. And at this and this alone she is thoughtlessly adept. She doesn't need to be taught. Neither does Anton. He latches on: they do not reject each other, not the way they did when he was pulled out of her. Ivan watches, his smooth brow knit, a look of something like puzzlement on his face.

He touches her after a while. His fingertips are quite gentle on her skin. There are faint callouses on his palms: at the balls of the fingers and the undersides of the knuckles, where a knife would rest. But his touch is so light that she can barely feel them. He touches her, running those fingertips from her sternum to her breast, from her breast to where Anton's tiny mouth engulfs her nipple. And from there to Anton, his cheek impossibly soft, his hair downy. Ivan cups his son's head, holding him to his mother's breast. It is a strange, aching caress, given like a blessing: unerotic, adoring.

"Don't be," he whispers to Hilary. He kisses her then: a turn of the head, a gentle touch of his mouth to hers. Unerotic. Adoring. "You shouldn't be."

Anton cannot quite walk perfectly yet, but every day he's gotten more mobile. He cruises along walls and furniture when he wants to go fast, which is always, and he crawls when he gets to stairs, but he likes to be carried much of the time and his caretakers indulge him -- perhaps even a bit too much -- in this. Within a matter of months he will be running. He will be able to even go up and down stairs on his feet with some help. He will climb. Everything.

He doesn't talk very much yet. Movement is more important to him right now. His servants are of a class trained and bred to anticipate his needs, servants who have been ordered to attend to him at every cry so he never, ever has to feel want or fear or loneliness without someone answering. He knows his name, though, and he understands a great deal. He knows the names of his caregivers but they are reduced to sounds: mm and zo and puh. He says ba ba ba ba ba a lot, because it is easy and good for practicing with, and he can make it very loud and he knows it often means a ball or a bottle are handed to him. Language is becoming more important.

And to realize this -- to realize how long he's been away from them and how much he has changed -- is also to realize how small he still is. He still fits easily in Hilary's arms. He still looks like a baby. Especially now, calming, his eyes open and his breath still occasionally shuddering as he relaxes. Especially now, when he reaches for her, laying his hand on her upper chest, or touching her hair like he did downstairs as she fed him -- really fed him.

Hilary all but hunches over him, protective but also terribly weak, needing to be protected. She is soothed, too. Ivan touches them both, more tender than anything he's ever shown -- no. He is often tender with Hilary. More gentle, though. The gentlest those hands have ever been. Anton's lips are even softer than Hilary's breast, which hardly seems posible, but it's true. Then his cheek, just as shockingly smooth. He is closing his eyes, realizing that there's no milk but this still makes him feel better, returning to a hazy post-sleep calm that is now lined with alertness and curiosity.

She is kissed. Hilary sighs. "It hurts," she tells Ivan, like it's a bit of a wonder. She didn't ever know it could hurt. It doesn't seem to bother her that it does, but then, pain is something Hilary accepts and feels a fondness for in a way few people do. Of course closeness and pain go hand in hand. Of course love and pain and intertwined inextricably. Of course that is how it is. It only makes her feel more comforted. She wouldn't trust it, if it didn't hurt.

Ivan's arm is making Anton very curious indeed. His eyes keep opening, his eyes swiveling as he tries to get a better look at it. Eventually he just pulls off of Hilary, twisting around to Ivan's arm and hand, pushing on it, grabbing at his watch. Hilary's nipple is reddened and wet, but she doesn't put it away, just in case. She doesn't seem upset that he pulls away, either; it isn't a rejection this time. He isn't crying anymore. He just looks interested. Puts the sole of his foot along Ivan's elbow and pushes, pushes, not to push Ivan away but to arch his back, to use it as leverage, to test his strength against his father the way he was downstairs, over and over.

"We're going on an outing," Hilary tells him, and he turns toward her voice. "And we are going to get you a servant to teach you French as well. Maybe a decent cook."

Anton has no idea what she's talking about, but she goes on: "And also a bed, so you won't be in a cage anymore. And lots of toys and puzzles and books. And we're going to have a party on your birthday. With cake."

Anton is staring at her, open-mouthed, and he starts talking back to her, babbling meaninglessly. Hilary tips her head, quizzical, but she smiles. "You have to learn to talk," she informs him, quite seriously. Without taking her eyes off of him, she tells Ivan: "Tell them to get him ready to go out now that he's awake. I want him to eat with us in town and everyone see that he's ours."

She eases him back to the covers and, on his own, he rolls onto his belly, pushing up on his hands and knees. Instantly he starts crawling around, looking at the edges of the bed, flopping on the pillows, exploring. Hilary sits there, one breast exposed, hands in her lap, and watches him. She tenses when he gets near the edge, but when she sees that he understands that there is distance and a fall there, she relaxes a bit but doesn't stop watching him.

She does look at Ivan, though, and there's still apology but also gratitude in her eyes. "I know this can't last," she whispers, and perhaps she means the way she feels, the closeness with Anton, the perfection right now. "But thank you for it."

Ivan's eyes sharpen when Hilary tells him it hurts. Hilary cannot separate love from pain, but Ivan can, and so often does. For the first time that flash that Hilary feared - of resentment, of outrage - rises in Ivan. He almost pushes his child from his lover's breast.

But he doesn't. Because the child is his too. And because his lover seems ... calmed, now. Peaceful. Almost the way she is when he's done with her, those times when he's taken her very far indeed. And his heart twists, and he doesn't want her to hurt, but

he allows it, for her.

The boy suckles, calming himself by instinct and rote. The woman speaks.

There are moments where Hilary seems so far removed from what's real and normal that even Ivan doesn't know how to reach her, or deal with her. She tells the baby to learn to speak. She commands Ivan -- because obviously Ivan in her mind can communicate miraculously with the baby -- to inform Anton of their afternoon plans. Ivan's huff of a laugh is a touch disbelieving; he has no idea how to accomplish Hilary's will.

He is still cradling his son's head though. And his son is wriggling around in his mother's arms, testing his small but growing strength, and Ivan has the strange, slightly unnerving thought that one day Anton will be stronger than he is. That is the way of the world: time passes, people age, fathers ever give way to sons.

The boy is set down, and he explores. He has never been up here. The attic was empty when they moved in. Then it was full of the leftover boxes from their move-in, which Polina meticulously folded flat and stored away. Then when summer became winter the attic was stuffed full of summer things they would not need for Novgorod's long cold; and later, when winter became summer again the things multiplied again. Boxes upon boxes of winter things were stored away.

Then, a period of great upheaval. Things that were put in the attic were put in the basement instead. There was a lot of banging and whirring, the shriek of saws. The attic transformed into a sleekly modern suite. Not too long after, Ivan came -- and not alone.

Ivan doesn't quite know what Hilary means when she says it can't last. He doesn't know what 'it' is. Her mood? Her love for her child? Her time in Russia, perhaps. Her time with Anton.

Her time with Ivan.

He doesn't know. He doesn't really want to think about it. Anton is moving about the bed, and Hilary is still close to him. She thanks him. He covers her breast with his hand, warming it against his palm, as though to soothe the hurt his boy caused. Here is the terrible truth: Hilary loves Anton more than Ivan. And Ivan loves Hilary more than Anton. Here, precisely, are the poisonous angles that drove Hilary's mad parents to their end.

The thought disturbs Ivan. He cups Hilary's breast a little more deliberately. He kisses her again, and this time there's heat in it, shimmering beneath the surface.

"You needn't thank me," he says, after - and before he begins to get up. "I'll inform the servants we're ready to go."

That story she told earlier had to have held some glimpse of the future for Ivan. He sees Hilary with this baby, the one he feels a passing fondness and possession for but little else, and sees in her eyes the sort of adoration and unconditional love that she has never given him. He thought her incapable of it. She thought herself incapable of it. Turns out she has it in her... just not for him. Not like this. She'll never look at him the way she looks at Anton.

She'll never look at Anton in utter worship, though. Or gratitude. Certainly not the sort of need that comes over her when Ivan pins her down. Anton will never give her that kind of closeness to herself.

It isn't fair, though. It isn't fair to Anton that his father doesn't love him, not really, that he'd throw the child to the lions if it were a choice between Hilary and the boy. And it isn't fair to Ivan that Hilary would never forgive him, she'd claw his eyes out, she'd hate him if he sacrified that child. That child. His son. Her soul. It's not fair that she loves them both differently, she loves them both deeply, but really:

she loves Anton more. If she loves anything at all.

She doesn't understand that he'd be angry at Anton for hurting her. Sanely, he knows that it isn't the boy's fault. But there's her breast, reddened by the baby's mouth, and she told him flat-out that it hurt. She seemed grateful for the pain, at peace with it, but he hates it when she's hurt. He can't even stand to hurt her as much as she'd let him. As much as she'd like him to.

When he covers her breast with his hand like that, it's exactly what she wants, though. She was hoping for it. She leans over and nuzzles Ivan as he cups her breast, and she knows that he is going to want her now. Lick and bite her himself, hurt her a little to own her again, only now he thinks of her parents, her mad parents, and the fears and resentments that drove her father completely out of his mind. The twisted meeting points of differing lines of love that made her mother say yes, yes, he could kill her.

But there it is:

if she'd really loved Hilary more than Hilary's father, she never would have abandoned her like that.

Ivan kisses her and Hilary tilts her head back, accepting it, letting him bend her a bit. He starts to pull back, tells her he'll inform the servants, and she glances at Anton and then at Ivan, holding onto his sleeve. "We're not," she murmurs. "Tell them to come get him."

His sleeve caught, Ivan pauses. He turns back. There's complexity in his eyes; the green shadowed, the gold muted. He looks at her a moment. He cups her cheek, then. Bends. Lays his brow to hers.

He is quiet, then. Quiet and close and -- soothed, perhaps. Or soothing. He feels close to her. He loves her, very much.

"Okay, Hilary," he whispers. And then he is straightening, finding and lifting her hand. He kisses her knuckles, courtly, teasing. "Wait for me here," he says.

He is straight-backed and slim, going to the door. His bones are surprisingly heavy: deep-browed, wide at the shoulders, though thoroughly without that thick layer of muscle that some other wolves - both of Hilary's exes, for that matter - had. Ivan calls for his people, speaking Russian. Hilary can hear the distant answer. Then footsteps coming up the steps.

It's Miron who enters. There's a hint of wariness in the youth, because

what might he see.

Whatever he does or doesn't see, Miron efficiently gathers Anton up. The boy knows him; is happy to see him. Expresses it by grabbing at Miron, catching a lip or an ear. Poor, longsuffering Miron bows to Ivan whilst prying Anton off himself, informs Ivan -- in English, polite thing that he is -- that he'll get Anton dressed and ready in twenty minutes.

"Thirty," Ivan says. He is still at the door, waiting. After Miron passes him, Ivan closes that door. His back is to Hilary for another moment. His shoulders lift on an inhale; fall. Then he turns around,

and there's a new heat in his eyes, smouldering, dark. He wastes little time. They only have thirty minutes, after all. He tugs the buttons of his shirt open as he crosses the room. He is still working on the last few buttons when he climbs onto the bed, straddling her on his knees, finishing with his shirt. It's shortsleeved; no cuffs to worry about. He leaves it on the floor as he takes her by the shoulders and pushes her down on the bed; pulls the straps of her sundress down again; yanks the dress down to bare her breasts.

This much mercy, at least: he doesn't put his mouth on the reddened nipple. He puts his hand there instead, cupping her in his palm, exerting that sort of firm, deep pressure that keeps her right where she is as he

put plainly

goes at her other breast as though he were starved for the taste of her. For the sound of her moans shivering through the air.

"I've wanted to fuck you for so long," he mutters: by which he means, since the last time he fucked her. Two or three whole hours. The poor thing; however did he manage? His mouth barely leaves her though, and he sucks her nipple back in right after, and meanwhile he's wrestling with her dress, pushing it down, pushing it out of the way, kicking it past her knees, past her ankles, off. When he has her naked, or near enough, he grabs her by the waist and slides her up the bed. The sheets crumple with her. He pries her thighs open; his eyes flash up to hers, wild. He rarely does this, and the few times he thinks to do it, she seems almost put off her stride. So often when they fuck it's rough, it's brutal, and even when it's not there's an edge of dominance that would be in utter dissonance to this act. Still:

"Don't fucking stop me, okay?" -- and, holding her legs open, puts his mouth to her cunt: slow, savage, ravenous.

What Ivan gives her in answer to that is an order. He teases her hand, removing it from his sleeve to kiss it, and tells her to wait. She waits. She looks over at Anton, who is rocking on his hands and knees, vibrating a noise loudly between his lips, looking over the edge of the bed. Absently, she draws the cup of her bra over her breast again, lifts her strap of her dress. Moments, only moments later, Ivan enters her field of vision again to pick up the boy.

He looks around, his vantage point changed, and Hilary follows the two of them across the room to see Miron. Anton immediately starts reaching for him, babbling loudly, 'talking' to his favorite about everything, oh everything, telling him the whole story, bouncing himself where he's held, grabbing at his bestbestfriend's face.

Twenty minutes, Miron promises. Thirty, Ivan tells him. Hilary stares the whole while. Anton looks at her as Miron turns to carry him out, and the door closes, and her eyes snap to the wolf still in the room with her.

Who breathes.

And comes after her. She moves up the bed as though in retreat as he stalks like that across the room, pulling off his shirt. First he has to grab her, pull her down from the headboard, before he pushes her down, throws his shirt aside. Her hair is down, straightened, which is not the way he likes it best, and her dress is rucked up now around her thighs. She doesn't dare to touch him, but she barely has time to.

Her dress is yanked down, her bra with it, just enough so he can maul her with his mouth. She whimpers as his fingers touch the tender, raw nipple that she gave Anton, but it makes a shudder go through her. He's wanted to fuck her, and maybe he means fuck her, like last night, not her mouth with her hair in his hand and her choking on his cock but like this, under him, squirming.

Clothing comes off of her, scraping her skin where it's meant to fit, the zipper up the back spreading open and nearly breaking, the clasps of her bra nearly torn. Ivan just pulls clothes off of her senselessly, unsensually, almost brutally. Her underwear hangs off the edge of the bed where he tosses it. Naked, then, looking at him, panting silently but visibly. Ivan moves her where he wants her, opens her legs and she moans -- moans, aloud, for the first time.

He knows she doesn't like this best. Doesn't hate it, doesn't avoid it, certainly, but she never asks him for it. She never even seems particularly eager for it. Hilary squirms as though to get away, whimpering like he's about to attack her, but there's still that scent of arousal in the air, that look in her eyes that he knows is submission. To him. Sometimes it comes in a look of pain and even fear but he knows the difference now, he can see when she wants that pain, wants even a bit of fear, wants him more because he can give that to her

and won't take it too far.

Ivan gets her down again. Tells her not to stop him, and she moans in protest when he goes down on her. She clutches at the bedding, moving as though to get away, moving as though she wants to escape but knows she can't, she shouldn't, he told her no. She does try to be obedient.

Call it one more sign of his madness: he likes it when she resists. Even more damningly, he likes it when there's that touch of fear in her eyes. When her pleasure mixes with just a little bit of pain. He likes it when her hands can't quite seem to decide whether to draw him closer or push him away.

He likes it because it reminds him: she trusts him to walk that ever-so-fine line between not far enough and too, too far. And that reminder

arouses him.

He's so aroused when he comes over her like a wave. He drags her back. He pushes her down. He all but tears her clothes off, his heart a hammer in his chest, his breathing harsh and unsteady. The first time he makes her moan he answers it with a growl, his voice all but lost against her flesh. His mouth is against her stomach, low, inches below her navel. And later,

on her cunt, mauling, devouring her flesh where she's most tender. He feels like a beast. He feels starved; ferocious; out of his mind. Her hands twist the sheets; he feels the stress in the fabric beneath his bare skin. He loves that she spreads her legs because he tells her to. He loves that she lets him fuck her with his mouth because he tells her to. He loves the way she breathes. He loves the way she moves.

His mouth is wet when he lifts his head. His chin, too. He's panting, his teeth showing, his eyes wild. "I love the way you taste," he says. "So fucking sweet."

Then his mouth is on her again. He watches her this time. He eats at her, holding her legs open and holding her down, working her clit with his tongue, snarling at her. Words, maybe, inaudible. Or perhaps simply growls, sounds of pure and unfiltered lust.

To anyone else, their most intimate and caring acts of love would look like abuse. It isn't even the times they're just playing, when he locks her in cuffs and chains her to a hook on the ceiling or spanks her with his hand or the soft leather flogger she gave him. That's just play. That's just a little bit of kink. Even some rather conservative folk would at least understand that. It's just for fun.

It's when she looks like she's whimpering, squirming away from him, weeping, and he doesn't let up. It's when he opens her up and summons party guest after party guest to fuck her until she's sobbing and forgetting English. It's when she says no and he snarls, pinning her down anyway. It's the fact that even Ivan isn't always sure where the line is. It's the fact that even Ivan has to look, sometimes very deeply, to tell the difference between Hilary egging him on and Hilary pulling away. That's not play. It isn't fun.

Yet: it is when they're closest. When he loves her the most. When she trusts him implicitly. When he is so ravaged by the burden of protecting her and pleasuring her at once that he's shaken to the core. When she finds herself again, finds her soul, and it lives in her body and not in a child. That's their love. That's their truth. It's why they're still here.

So: he likes it when she resists, when she looks afraid or hurt or repulsed. And she likes it when he makes her do it anyway, taking what he wants from her like he needs it. It's sick. It's more than a little twisted.

It's transcendant.

"Stop it," she begs him, her spine curving, living her off the bed a little, her cunt pulsing against his mouth, her wetness tasting like lust, her legs spread wide past his shoulders. Hilary whines. "Ivan, please, don't..."

And she grinds against his face, rubs herself on his tongue, fucks his mouth as brutally and possessively as he fucked hers earlier in the shower. All the while she's whimpering, whining, squirming, pleading with him to stop.

And Ivan

just

laughs at her. There's a cruelty in that sound. He must be cruel, to do the things he does to her. He must be cruel, to be ruthless enough to give Hilary what she wants. Or needs.

So he laughs at her. Laughs right against her cunt. It's almost a scornful sound. She's so wet. He can taste her, smell her, he can feel her grinding on his face like she can't get enough even as she's asking him, she's begging him no, please, stop.

He doesn't stop. Obviously. He goes at her harder than before if anything, fucking her with his tongue, pressing back against her, biting at her with his lips, forcing her thighs farther apart every time they try to clench on him.

Then his fingers are in her. Then he's lifting his head, dripping and savage. "I told you not to tell me no," he says, and it's a velvet snarl. He pushes another finger into her. He puts his mouth on her clit, just for a single burning moment; he sucks far too hard; he gives her a little pain to spice the pleasure. "But you just wouldn't listen."

And his fingers moving again. Pulling out. He licks her taste off his middle finger. It's utterly obscene. Her turn then: he gives her the other two fingers, shoves them in her mouth when she opens for him, muffles whatever else she might say or plead. "Suck it," he says. "Taste what a horny little slut you are. Maybe that'll keep your mouth shut,"

and his mouth, that dirty filthy mouth of his, that talented agile mouth of his, is going right back to her cunt.

Of course he doesn't stop when she begs him to. He'd know if she really wanted him to stop. That's his duty -- not as her guardian, not even as her mate, but as her vladelets. It's this third title that makes him lord of her, and this third one that is most vital between the two of them. It's everything that 'mate' and 'beloved' and 'father of my child' can't possibly be or even come close to. It's everything that is private, secret, and something they could never really have with anyone else.

Of course he doesn't stop. Of course he laughs at her, mocks her, bites her. His mouth is agile and talented and filthy, yes, but it isn't his skill between her legs that is making Hilary's senses abandon her. Not just that, at least. It's the way he speaks to her. It is, in fact, that laughter and that brutality, that proof in his hands and tongue that he doesn't care if she enjoys this. This isn't for her.

But then, it's always for her in the end.

Ivan smears her wet across her face. She's pressing her lips together, moaning behind them, refusing to take his fingers when he first slides them out of her cunt and tells her to suck it. She whimpers; he forces. She opens her mouth then eagerly, licking between his fingers, sucking them deep into her mouth, sucking with such want that her head lifts from the pillow. Sucks his fingers the way she sucks his cock, greedy and selfish and terribly, innocently wanton. Her thighs almost close on his face.

It's the obedience that turns her on. It's the the velvet in his snarl. It's the way he mixes pain in with everything else he's giving her just to dominate her, just to punish her for pretending she doesn't want it. She's almost screaming around his fingers; she bites for a moment, bearing down, groaning headily as she starts flat-out riding his face, going back to suckling on the burning, stinging sensation through his fingers.

This is filthy. Her saliva and her wet mingle together on the corners of her mouth, her lips, and there's slick smeared over her cheeks and jawline. His face must be all but dripping by now. The bedding is thoroughly disrupted, and wrinkles more as she moves on top of it. Hilary's breathing changes; her sucking gets lazy, sloppy, loose. She's gasping now, grabbing his hair, finding a rhythm of her own and no longer protesting but riding it out, chasing her orgasm, panting for it like an animal.

They're both animals now, though for a while she pretended she wasn't. She pretended she was some sort of lady, some sort of fair and fainting creature who was shocked, shocked by this sort of hunger. She pretended. It turned him on. He tore it down. That turns her on.

And now she's riding his face. She bites his fingers. He growls against her cunt. He twists his face to the side and bites her thigh, hard enough to feel the slim muscle under the skin quiver. Then he shifts, rears over her without taking his mouth off her, presses her knees apart and down, holds her down,

keeps her down,

anchors her as her orgasm starts to break over her. Oh, she's crying out now. He pushes his fingers back in her mouth. She can't quite hear him, but he might be calling her terrible names again. He might be telling her to shut the fuck up, shut the fuck up and come like a good little whore like he knows she wants to. He might simply be growling at her, growling the way any carnivore would when eating

such a juicy little morsel as her.

He takes her through that orgasm. He doesn't stop. He makes her cry out, he makes her scream, he makes her start begging in earnest for him to stop, stop, before he finally shows a little mercy. Just a little, slowing. Slowing. Lapping at her now, lazy and satisfied, licking her clit delicately and luxuriously, rubbing his face all over her hot, pulsating little cunt.

When he's done with her - for the moment, anyway - he pushes himself up. He's like an animal, muscles moving beneath skin. He crawls over her and goes to kiss her and if she tries to turn away, if she so much as tries to pretend disgust, he grabs her wrists and pins her, he grabs her face and holds her still.

"Kiss me," he whispers. "Slow and sweet. Or I won't fuck that greedy little cunt of yours."

Hilary shrieks at the bite to her thigh, the skin there so sensitive, so soft, yielding to his teeth. It's possible that Ivan's staff, who have known these two together the longest, know exactly why they linger upstairs and do not want to think more about it. No one hears, or at least not very much. Hilary turns her head to the pillow and moans, wailingly, trailing off into a whimper. Helpless. Hopeless.

Her orgasm breaks like wave, crashes down atop her like a building in an earthquake, binds her to the earth and swallows her, makes her scream and claw her way towards air and light. She bends like a bow, and the sight of it is gorgeous, elegant, crystalline, but Ivan

can't see it. He's buried in her, drinking her, drowning in her, shutting her up with his hand on her mouth and then his fingers in it, but she can't suck, she gags and she rakes her teeth over his knuckles as she turns her face away, bites the pillow instead, comes wet and pulsing on his face, hot as a heartbeat.

She starts crying eventually. She's sobbing, weeping openly, as a smaller, softer, secondary orgasm quakes through her. Her thighs tremble. She barely has the strength left to squirm or move away. She can't close her thighs. She can't catch her breath because he keeps licking her, slow and lazy and selfish, flicking her click tenderly and it makes her want to die every. single. time.

Hilary is still crying when he pushes himself up over her. She won't even look at him, like she hates him, like she can't bear him or what he's done to her, so

he grabs her face and forces her. He holds her in place by the jaw and he holds her in place by the wrists and he tells her to kiss him, kiss him like this, or he won't fuck her, he won't give her sluttish pussy what it wants, he won't give his whore what she needs, which is, of course

to be fucked. To be abused. To be used til he comes.

Hilary tries to stop struggling but her cunt is still clenching, needful and horrible, on nothing but air, and she looks up at him, tears on her face and in her eyes, and

submits, when he kisses her again. Opens her mouth and softens it on his tongue, lets him guide that kiss as slow and deep and tender as he likes. She tastes her cum all over him, smells her sex, feels it translating from his chin to hers. She groans into his mouth, aroused again, squirming on the bed again,

greedy, selfish little whore.

After the cataclysm of her orgasm, and the aftershock of the one right after -- after the way he made her come, and kept right on enjoying her even though every touch of his tongue afterward made her want to die -- Ivan is shockingly gentle now. He kisses her so slowly, so lightly, his mouth grazing, nibbling, sucking with infinite care. He doesn't close his eyes. He watches her, watches the expressions that flit across her face, as though right now, and only now, Hilary is transformed, made clear as water. Sometimes he feels as though he can look into her and see right to the bottom, right to the benthic depths where what remains of her soul dwells.

When the kiss is over he kisses her again. Her mouth, her lips, her cheek, her chin. Every part of her he's made filthy, he makes clean again. When he's done the mattress shifts. He pushes himself up, and

just like that

the tenderness is gone. He lifts her ankles over his shoulder. He grabs her by the tops of her thighs and he hauls her to the edge of the bed, pulls her right to the edge where he can reach her.

"Open your eyes," he tells her. "Look at me."

And when she does -- he reaches with one hand to undo his pants. The belt buckle clinks. The zipper hisses. He drops his pants around his ankles; steps out of it. Then the snap of elastic, his boxerbriefs pushed down and out of the way. When he steps forward, his chest presses to the backs of her legs. He slaps his cock against her, the shaft of it, heavy and hot against her wetness. His eyes are on her. His eyes never leave her,

not even when he starts to slide into her, inch by inch. It's impossible to pretend he doesn't feel this. It's impossible to remain remote, unaffected, vicious and mocking and cool. What he feels flickers over his brow, burns in his eyes. The line of his jaw squares as he clenches his teeth. Breathes through his teeth, in and out, holding back a groan. After all the times he's plunged into her, all the times he's filled her full on the first brutal stroke, this is unbearably slow. This is an exercise in slow, patient torment.

Then he's inside her. Then he's deep within her, grasping her hips in his hands, shifting his stance, shifting her position, sliding deeper with a gasp he can't quite hold back. "Krasivaya devushka," he whispers, kissing her calf where it cross his shoulder, stroking her leg,

and then her knee,

and then her thigh,

and then sliding in, seeking her out, teasing through the softness of her hair and the slipperiness of her labia to find, unerringly, her clitoris.

"Don't move." It's a command, low and steady. He starts to stroke her. It's so slow. It's so cruel, so patient. "You're not allowed to fuck me. You're not allowed to move. Keep my cock inside you. I want to feel you, feeling this."

Hilary sniffs, trying to stop crying, watching Ivan as he lays those soft kisses all over her. It's very gentle. She's shaking, quivering still, looking at him like he's going to wrap her in his arms and make everything better.

So it's all the more shocking, and she cries out with that much more pleading when he pulls back, grabbing her and yanking her to the edge of the bed. The covers she'd previously clutched at rumple downward with her, rolling off the pillowcases. She tips her head back, a shuddering sob leaving her, renewed by the sudden shift. She's saying something in French, and it sounds like begging, confessions, promises.

But she obeys. She looks at him because she hears the rustle of his hand on his slacks. She can't help it. She watches, though less distantly than she watched the very first time he undressed for her. This time she isn't wearing jewelry and bangles, stroking him into her mouth, telling him how he can fuck her full of his hot, sticky, dirty cum. This time she's already naked, sweating, smelling of sex, and her cunt is the hot red point at the center of skin that has gone pink and flushed from arousal.

Ivan has her legs up, and they are lazy and limp, exhausted. God knows how she's going to walk later. And he isn't done with her yet.

Her fingernails dig into the bedspread as Ivan starts to push into her. Her knuckles bend, curling. She moans, trying to slide herself faster down onto him, stopped by his hands firm on her, somewhere. That's when she starts crying again, almost petulant, furious, frustrated. Her fists ball up and hit the mattress, and she swears at him in French, gasping with every inch. It falls apart at that firm thrust near the end, as deep as he can go, and the sound she makes then is very close to pain, but then

it only really pleases her when it's that close, isn't that true?

No, not always true. But often enough. And right now, especially. He's bringing her back, reclaiming her from their child. No, he reminds her, she loves him. She loves this. She needs it. And nothing, no one on earth means to her what Ivan means. No one can make her feel this whole.

She cries out in pain and worship. She descends into shudders and whimpers as he kisses her leg, murmurs an endearment -- but it's the claim of ownership in those words that truly touches her. It's that claim that makes her start to move, and the claim that makes her stop when he grabs her, pushes against her, stops her somehow. She's stopped cursing him, at least. Her tongue slips out to lick her lips, her eyes closing as she tries to get used to him inside of her, but

his hand touches her again and she screams. It isn't a cry or a sob or a whimper, it isn't a yelp or shriek. The scream that leaves her throat is blood-curdling, and it resonates through the house despite the sound proofing. God knows how they handle hearing that, downstairs. The swearing then is savage, Hilary thrashing, reaching for him, clawing air where she misses him, flopping back on the bed and trying to get away from him. Some of it is in English:

"...you promised... you fucker, brûle en enfer!"

Her back arches, and though he told her no, she slides her cunt on him, fucks him, panting. "Fils de putain," she snarls, planting her feet on his shoulders and using him as leverage to ...well. Fuck him. Disobey him.

[French: burn in hell / son of a whore]

They always seems to be traumatizing their wait staff. God knows how much of Ivan's servants' admittedly generous salaries are spent on psychologists, psychiatrists, therapists. God knows how many of them - Silver Fangs, every last one of them - have found themselves sliding closer to their own personal abysses of madness and perversion.

Hilary screams. Everyone in the house hears. Everyone. And even if everything else were a non-issue, this, and this alone, would make them utterly unfit parents.

It doesn't matter now, though. Hilary screams, and god knows what the help thinks, but Ivan and Hilary don't care, and so perhaps they are greater than god. Ivan, bastard, son of a whore that he is, smirks to hear Hilary scream. To hear her curse him in that language that lies closest to her unformed mind. To see her go a little bit mad from frustration, from something perilously close to fury. He loves her like this. He loves her anyway, anyhow, but he especially loves her like this, undone, unhinged, on some transcendental edge between total wrath and total dissolution and total ecstasy.

He loves her like this because he makes her like this. He. Ivan. Only him. No other. And so she loves him. And so

she needs him.

Except then she disobeys him. She plants her feet on his shoulders. She starts fucking him. She starts riding him like he's made for her pleasure, and Ivan's smirk drops off his face like a mask. Instantly he moves; brutally. His hand is on her jaw. His hand is in her hair. He wrenches her upright, bending her like clay, pressing her breasts to her thighs. They should both be glad for her dancer's past or this little excursion in sexual acrobatics will end up in the emergency room. He grips her tight in his hands, trapped against his body, and as if to drive his point home

he fucks into her, hard, deep, giving her what he won't allow her to take from him.

"I never promised you a god damn thing," he whispers. His voice is like silk. His voice is like liquor: intoxicating, poisonous. "I told you what I wouldn't do if you didn't behave.

"And you. Just keep. Misbehaving."

Ivan drops her back on the bed. He shoves her down, pulls out of her, yanks her right off the edge of the bed, flips her like a fish. Before she can move he has a hand in the middle of her back, pinning her facedown to the mattress. He leaves her hands free. Maybe he likes to watch her struggle. Hilary can hear a rustle behind her, a hiss of leather on cloth, and then

the sharp crack, the hot sting, a leather belt folded double and lashed across her ass.

"I was going to be a gentleman, you know." Ivan sounds lazy. He sounds dispassionate. "I was going to selflessly get you off again before I used you like a whore, but you've been such a disobedient little slut. Now I don't feel like making the effort for a cock-hungry little cunt like yourself.

"So I'm going to put my cock inside you, and you're going to touch yourself. You're not going to fuck me. You're just going to come on this cock. And if you do it well, if you're a very good little slut for me ... well, I might just forgive your past transgressions. I might just pin you down and give you the good hard railing you've been spoiling for."

She can feel him prying her legs apart. She can feel him nudging his cock against her, moving into her, slow as before. One hand between her shoulderblades, palm down. The other at the small of her back - the knuckles, because that hand holds his belt, the leather cool against her skin.

"But if you disobey me again," it's easier for him to mask his own response when she can't see him, "then I'll know you obviously have no interest in getting fucked senseless today. So I'll just put my clothes back on and we can just go downstairs and embark on our pleasant little family outing a little earlier than planned. I wouldn't mind at all."

There's no warning: he lashes her again, harder than the first two times, her fair flesh flushing immediately. Then the palm of his hand, dissonantly gentle, rubbing her where he struck her.

"You might want to get started," he reminds her. "Miron's due in about fifteen minutes."

Ivan truly hates to hurt Hilary. Actually hurt her, cross that line between what is rough and what is injurious. Hates it enough that sometimes the knowledge of how he'll feel when he sees the bruises or friction burns on her skin is enough to stop him in the moment.

Even though, in the moment, hurting her has to be a little intoxicating.

It's surreal and attractive to see pleasure flush across her cheeks when he hits her, or hear the particular sound she makes when she's shoved face-down to the bed and her legs yanked apart. Nothing else in the world like it. This is the woman who acts so cool to everyone else, who is so high above everyone else that she scorns and threatens Garou with seeming impunity. This cold, porcelain woman... so easily turned into a whore.

That's the sound she makes -- that one, gasping and plaintive and shocked and grateful -- when he hauls her upward, shoving his cock harder and deeper into her, bending her in half, straining muscles in her back and her legs and making her whimper. His hand on her jaw, so very tight, makes her sore. The way he holds her is uncaring. Her cunt clenches involuntarily around him.

He never promised, he says. She keeps misbehaving, he says. Hilary lets out a moan, and it sounds like sorrow.

No matter. He withdraws and she starts to beg, she starts to promise, she starts to swear she'll be good, not sure if he's going to leave her there or spank her or what, but he's out of her now and she wants to die, she's crying, she's saying please, please.

And the sound she makes when he whips her is one of... relief. Gratitude. Mercy, mercy. The bedding dries her tears. He's talking to her like he doesn't care if he fucks her. She's just a slut. Insatiable, really. Good for just about one thing and not even that good for it. He was trying to be nice before he used her. Hilary arches her back, lifting her ass, yearning for another strike. She can barely even hear his instructions but she tries, she does, she tries to listen.

Hilary whimpers. Her hands clutch at the bedspread, the pillows, as he starts to sink into her again. She'd promise anything right now. She quivers as he pushes in harder, slower, his voice barely betraying how it feels to slide into that pussy, already slick from cum, slippery in its welcome of him. In moments she's panting, holding as still as she can, her hand starting to sneak towards her pussy.

He lashes her again and she buries a scream in the feather comforter. Only the best. Her hand starts to work at her clit, almost feverish in its intensity, and it makes her hips jump and her body jerk as though shocks are going through her. And she's squeezing him, trying so hard not to move, but after awhile -- a few minutes only, perhaps -- after those jerks and shocks turn into slower, deeper waves, Hilary gives a long, aching roll of her hips and it drags a moan out of her, feeling the movement of his cock out of her, back in. She stops, freezing in place. She is panting then, sniffing, turning her head to look up at him, longing and apologetic.

"I can't, I'm sorry, I can't," she whimpers. "Vladelets, pozhaluĭsta." Hilary is barely holding back sobs of what is very real despair. "Pozhaluĭsta. Don't leave me."

[Russian: please]

Ivan truly hates to hurt Hilary. He'd rather stop. He'd rather flee to the other side of the bed, the other side of the room. He'd rather whip himself raw, leave himself wanting and unsated. He'd rather -- he would, and readily, if he had to -- kill for her.

He'd rather break a promise, too. He'd rather lie.

Which is what he does, when she begs like that. When she begs him please, please, don't leave her, he proves himself a liar because no matter what he said earlier, whatever promises and threats he made,

he doesn't leave her.

A moment of painful clarity: everyone she's ever loved, cared for, or depended on in one way or another has left her. Her parents. Her brother. Her caretakers. That first, lovely Frenchman of hers. That second, obsessive, secretly savage Spaniard of hers. Her child, even.

Everyone but Ivan. Not that he hasn't tried -- but he didn't succeed. He didn't really want to. Or perhaps he did, but he couldn't. They are caught in one another's gravity, a pair of binary stars, one burning so hot and bright, the other just a pit of endless blackness where once, once, there was light. If he tore himself away, he would tear himself in half. Bleed out into the vacuum left behind.

He does not leave her.

He comes down over her when she begs like that. He covers her, matching his body to hers - his chest to her back, his arms to hers, his hands covering hers. He shushes her, shh, shh. He wraps his fingers through hers, and holds on to her, keeps her pressed between his body and the bed -- the sort of deep, warm pressure that triggers instincts, flicks reflex switches.

"Never," he whispers in her ear. Perhaps he won't break this promise, he thinks. He can do it. He can. "I would never leave you."

He kisses her, then. Softly. Then more insistently, finding her mouth, taking her breath. His hands shift on hers. Something in his gravity changes; weighs her more irrevocably to the bed. And there are no more commands. No more threats, no more promises, no more torment. He starts to move inside her, firm, heavy, slow. Fucking her now, his breath a wash across her upper back, laced with a moan.

Some distant flickering of his mind wonders if this makes him a bad vladelets. If he's not giving her what she really wants and needs. Ivan can't help it, though. He can't stand to hurt her.

If she were playing with him, he would be able to tell. He would at least wonder, at least try to look deeper, if he suspected she were only teasing him, egging him on to abuse her or mistreat her or withhold from her. He would at least try. That is what makes him such a good vladelets. That is why she loves him so. Even when Hilary barely knows what she wants or needs, he seeks it out for her. He takes her there.

What she says is not spoken in terror. She doesn't truly believe he'd abandon her forever. In some way she thinks of him as immortal, in fact. But she does believe him when he says he'd pull out of her, dress himself, leave her to clean herself up, and go out shopping all afternoon without fucking her. Nevermind that Ivan is the one who has been craving her like a drug, lost in her like a madness, ever since they got here. Nevermind that Ivan is the one who can barely look at her in this house, even holding their child, without growing hard for her. (They pretend that Hilary needs this more than he does. They pretend Ivan doesn't need it at all. And he pretends because that is how she likes it. He pretends because he needs to make her happy.)

The words, all the same, seem to strike a chord in Ivan that is deep and painful. He folds over her and around her instead of slapping the belt across her ass again and pulling out of her. He shushes her, presses her hard into the bed so she can feel him, and he can sense the way she calms. Like a beast, like a frightened animal, she settles a bit, trusting. It gentles her almost instantly. She shudders, and she closes her eyes, and she sniffs while he kisses her, kisses her all over, kisses her mouth, promises her he won't leave, would never leave. Never. Never.

And those words are still lingering on her lips along with the kiss when he starts to fuck her again. Hilary gasps, not in startlement or shock but an elongated sound that shivers in the air. Her legs open wider for him. He wonders if he's bad at this, bad for her, not a good master or lord or vladelets. Hilary just moans, and arching her back to take him harder and deeper, begs him softly:

"No... no, please, I can't... don't, please..."

[Ivan's Perc + Empathy: 7, 6, 4, 2]

[Her body language is more honest in this case; begging him to stop is false, egging him on. She's not afraid of being truly abandoned by him.]

Moments ago he would have lashed her for this sort of disobedience. He would have mocked her, brutalized her, struck her, laughed at her.

He is ... gentler now, in a way. He is careful. He senses she is close to an edge. He senses she is very close to utter and unspeakable fragility, and he wants to be careful. He doesn't want to hurt her.

So he pauses, when she begs him so softly. He pauses, and he nuzzles her, and he looks at her face. Closed eyes; tears on the lashes. He watches her, not with his eyes but with every sense he has, feeling the way she moves, feeling the invitation in her body, feeling the truth there while she lies to him with those soft lips, that lovely mouth.

"You can," he tells her. He's moving inside her again, gentle, then firmer. Bringing her back up slowly, relentlessly. "You can take it. And you will, because it's what you want. It's what you want, krasivaya devushka. I know."

His mouth on her back: kissing her over her spine, over her heart, like a blessing.

"Now open your legs a little more, baby. Let me touch you. Let me see you come for me again."

In one thing in his life -- one thing only, it seems -- Ivan errs on the side of caution. He reaches his limit so far before Hilary reaches hers, at least when it comes to true, physical pain. It's possible he hasn't even found her limit for the other kinds of abuse he can give to her. The closest Ivan has come to pushing Hilary over the edge is sheer exhaustion, which he saw on Halloween, or maybe

striking at her where she's weakest. Mentioning Anton. Making her grieve when she was doing so, so well at not caring at all.

He would rather flay himself alive than hurt her. Ivan knows that about himself. Hilary doesn't know that -- or else she doesn't care, or maybe she never really thinks of it. Maybe she thinks he's selfish, for not being willing to hurt her more.

Every dom, every sub, and every kink-oriented person says the same thing. Day one, lesson one: the sub is always the one who is in real control. The entire scene revolves around the sub. Even if they're being made to do something they hate, made to do something humiliating, made to endure pain or deprivation or a great number of things that they can't possibly find pleasurable, the core of it all is that releasing their own will is pleasurable. Submitting is where the enjoyment comes from. Sometimes it's also the pain, or the degradation.

Often, it's the knowledge that they're being used to get someone else off. The greatest gift a dom gives their sub is coming. It's when Ivan lets Hilary adore him with her mouth, feeding her his cock and fucking her throat like he can't help himself. It's when he finally half-collapses, groaning, swearing at her, forcing her to swallow it, take it. It's when he turns her over and fucks her then, telling her to shut up when she moans, because he's still hard. It's when he holds her by the hair so she can't turn around and look at him while he uses her pussy.

Sometimes they make love. Sometimes she needs him in a way that is more protective, though no less dominating. Sometimes she wants him to take care of his sweet, vulnerable little thing. The slightly dark, slightly mocking, slightly triumphant, entirely adoring look on his face then, laughing breathily while she comes on him for the third, fourth time, is joy. Her joy.

Ivan can feel how wanting her body is despite her words. The way she moves on him, sweet and pleading, even though her mouth is saying no, and don't, and stop. It is an invitation. She isn't truly afraid, isn't truly broken, but he still sees those tears and he still

fears for her. He wants to be careful. He wants to be gentle. He can't bear to hurt her. And though the truth is that Hilary is always, in some way, on the edge of shattering apart like a crystal chalice dropped to the floor, she isn't so fragile now. She isn't afraid of what he'll do to her. She isn't afraid that he'll leave her. She's never afraid that he'll hurt her.

But Ivan is.

The murmurs in her ear are gentle. Too soft, though he's so hard inside of her. She shudders openly when he pushes into her, steady and deep. But -- and there's a but, it's been building all this while, hasn't it -- he uses his pet name for her, not slut or whore but beautiful girl, the one for when she really is broken, breaking, and he is molding her back together. He kisses her and it's soft, there are no teeth in it. He calls her baby. He says let me, and again

he wants her to come for him.

"No," Hilary says, petulant, squirming away from him, bucking slightly to try and move him. She pants softly, pressing her hands into the bedspread, pulling, pushing away. "I don't want you."

Ivan does laugh now. He laughs because he understands. He gets it. They're still playing. It's part of the game,

and like every game, it's really dead serious.

He laughs: softly, but with an edge of hardness that surfaces like a knife through water. When he kisses her back again it's harder, sucking at her skin, biting at the delicate flesh over her shoulderblade. "Liar," he whispers, and the sound of it is vicious. "My lying, disobedient, hot little fuck. Stay where you are."

A second later he pushes himself up. He uses her body for this, even: puts his hands on her shoulders, those frail dancer's bones of hers, and leverages his weight against her. Standing, Ivan pauses a moment. Sweeps sweat off his brow; rakes his fingers back through his hair. He looks down, too. Looks at her back, the clean lines and curves. Looks at where they're joined; where he's penetrated her; where he's still so deep inside her that he can feel every move she makes echoed through her very flesh. Where he can feel the secret, unseen pulsations that echo through her, bearing witness to the lies she feeds him

just to urge him on.

"A little punishment is still in order, wouldn't you agree?" he says to her, and while he's saying this he's grabbing her arms and wrenching them behind her; he's wrapping that belt of his around her wrists, binding her arms behind her, wrapping the leather around and around until his grip on her is unshakable.

He snaps the belt taut. He watches her shoulders tauten with it; watches the strain in her back and arms. He's careful, careful -- brutal. The flat of his hand stings across her ass. He hits her right where he hit her before, where a red mark still slashes across her flesh. And in the same moment, before she can quite process one sensation from the other,

he starts fucking her again. He goes at her very hard, this time. His body slaps hers, batters hers. Aside from the inevitable contact of their lower halves and of his cock in her cunt, he barely touches her; controls her through the pressure of his hips against her ass, and the belt twisting tight around her wrists.

"Since you can't learn to stay still like a good girl," he's panting now, "let's see you do what you seem naturally adept at. Fuck me back, you little cockslut. Make a goddamn effort at pleasing your vladelets."

She has gasped, cried, fought, clawed at him, sobbed, tried to get away, and all of it has been to push him. All of it has been to egg him on, urge him to listen to the darker urges in his head. To fuck her. To stop caring if she comes or not, to punish her if she disobeys, to hit her if she makes too much noise, all in the name of

making her come. Rewarding her. Making her scream.

When Ivan kisses and bites at her back, Hilary is still trying to get away. She's squirming, grabbing at the sheets, pulling herself foward, even when he tells her she's a liar, even when he tells her to stay where she is. He ends up having to grab her, by the hips or the hair or what have you, and holding her in place or hitting her, pinching her, til she obeys and goes still. Hilary whimpers when she gives in. She presses to the bed as Ivan pushes himself up. She's quivering, whining.

He says he's going to punish her. Or at least: says that she deserves it. Hilary moans, but it's almost a wail. It's a sound of despair. And relief.

Her arms get wrenched behind her, and she presses to the bed on her chest, her ass still lifted, her body still taking his cock. Hilary turns her head, glancing back at him, panting for breath. He binds her, and she shudders. They didn't pack any toys, not really. It's not like he keeps them on his father's jet. Hilary didn't pack for herself, of course, and Darya isn't allowed to touch anything like that -- allowed, as though it would be a gift. If Ivan thought to bring at least a pair of manacles, he doesn't bother withdrawing from her to go get them from his suitcase. The belt will do. It always does.

A knot tied in the leather. He yanks on it to tighten it, wraps the end around his fist to hold her. Hilary moans at the pull on her wrists, her arms. She presses her hips back against Ivan, shuddering, her mouth opening in a gasp of pleasure. That's when he hits her. Slaps her across her ass so hard that a red mark blooms, unfurling just under her skin to bleed into the remainders of the last strike. She almost comes.

Then he starts fucking her and she does. Oh, she does, biting at the comforter, groaning suddenly, her cunt clenching hard around him. It erupts in waves through her, over and over, and keeps going on even as he pounds himself into her, snarling at her, panting. He demands she fuck him back. She arches once, gives a roll of her hips; it isn't much, and it isn't enough, but then she's using his cock a little bit, bouncing on him, riding out her orgasm against him.

He hits her. She almost comes. He laughs, low and pleased. He fucks her. She does come. And he,

her lovely, golden, beautiful morning-star of a lover,

pulls his cock out of her the moment her orgasm crests. He's never been so cruel to her before. He holds her fast with his hand pressed to the small of her back, her hands twisted behind her. He watches her, his cock gleaming wet, twitching as he watches her cunt clench on nothing, pulse on nothing, quiver around nothing.

"Did you like that?" He's mocking her; he's slapping her ass, he's shoving himself back into her as she's coming off that shattered high. "Was that what you wanted? Hm?"

and he's ordering her to fuck him, fuck him back, make an effort, please him. She manages a single roll of her hips. A few tiny bounces. He

hits her, forehand and backhand, hard across the ass. Barks, "Harder! I said fuck me."

For the second time in this all too brief half-hour of play before they go on their Pleasant Family Outing, Ivan makes Hilary scream. It's not rage this time, and she doesn't try twisting around to claw his eyes out. He's holding that belt, that leash, so tight, even as he pulls out of her. And she screams. She screams and aches backward, then clenches her hips together, squirming, moaning, falling apart.

It's the cruelest thing he's done to her. It's shocking that he could even bear it himself. It makes her start to cry again, for the loss of him.

Maybe it's mercy that makes him wrench her legs apart and take her again, push into her again. Hilary whimpers, sobbing softly now into the comforters, and he doesn't even have to tell her this time. He does. He hits her, he slaps her across her ass repeatedly, he yells at her, but she fucks him, starts panting and working herself on him, faster now, moving that delicious body with all the grace and subtle strength she has,

which is quite potent, in fact.

Her skin is covered in bright pink, mascara streaked down her cheeks from tears.

She's never more beautiful to him than when she's like this: utterly undone, in tears, her makeup smeared and her will all but incinerated. Maybe that's proof of how twisted he really is. If it is, he doesn't really care. She's beautiful like this, beautiful, miraculous, and the dark truth that he never wants to admit outside of moments like this is:

he loves shattering beautiful things into a million incandescent fragments. He loves it.

And Hilary is finally obedient. She is finally doing exactly what he told her to. She is finally fucking him, moving that body of hers in ways that make him want to howl, make him lose his mind. And he, after that final, sadistic piece of punishment, is rewarding her: groaning aloud for her, grunting on every hit like an animal; yanking back on that makeshift leash, pulling her ever tauter, ever tighter, until he finally hauls her upper body up off the bed; and yes --

fucking her right back, finally, holding nothing back, hammering her, railing her, using her cunt for his own inevitable pleasure.

He doesn't fold over her when he comes. Not this time. He pulls her upright. He wraps his arms around her, so possessive: grasping roughly at her breasts, clamping his hand over her cunt even as he's pounding his cum into her. His teeth are in her shoulder. He doesn't sound like anything human. He sounds savage. Carnivorous.

When it's over, Ivan does fold forward. He makes some abortive attempt at crawling onto the bed with her, but it's too much to ask. He is utterly spent; he has gone farther than he thought he would, and perhaps farther than he thought he could. In terms of physical brutality, he's done worse. In terms of the raw control he exerted over himself, her, the situation, and in terms of the sheer cruel creativity that required -- well; this is a new frontier.

He has no strength left, right now. He bears his strange, lovely lover to the bed. It is a slow collapse. He can't bear to leave her now, and so he doesn't. His arms are tight around her. He stays inside her, as long as he can, and

he lied again, after all, because she's never more beautiful to him than she is now. In moments like this, when he can't even summon the strength to look at her. When she's in his arms, vulnerable, real, and so absolutely his. She is perfect to him. She is perfect. He cannot bear to give her up. Giving her up again, he understands, will kill him.

"I'm glad you aren't marrying Grey," he whispers. And he nuzzles her, slow, scattered. He can smell her on every breath. Taste her almost. His, his.

A little later: "Stay with me."

There is something terribly wrong with them. She shouldn't like this, and he should see it and ask her to please, please find some help. If he loves her, he shouldn't want her to be so broken. She should leave him. She shouldn't be pushing him. They should get therapy. They should take medication. They should do something. They shouldn't have had a child together, they shouldn't have ever come here, they shouldn't be taking the poor boy out to buy him toys. They should feel grief, every time they come to this point.

They don't. He breaks her, and he loves the sight, adores the thrill. She shatters, and feels only gratitude and peace.

It hurts, what he does. Yanking her up like that, holding her upright on her knees, back arched, fucking her as hard as he does. The leather burns on her wrists and her joints wrench against each other. Just because she doesn't mind -- and, in fact, craves it -- doesn't mean that the force he uses when he fucks her doesn't hurt. Doesn't leave her burning, sore, and tired. It's just that if it doesn't hurt, if it doesn't linger, then she's not sure she really feels anything at all. Whatever glow someone normal might feel after lovemaking leaves her so quickly that she can barely tell it was there at all. It seems like a false memory. Pain, though. Pain stays. Pain makes her remember.

It's only been thirty minutes since Miron left them, and the Dmitri has wisely cautioned the young man against going upstairs; they will come down when they will. Their duty, as the help, is merely to wait on them. Darya plays with Anton; Anton keeps trying to eat her fingers. She regrets, a bit, that they'll eventually return to Chicago and Hilary will get married off. She's also grateful; the poor kid shouldn't have a mother like that.

Ivan collapses after he comes. In terms of sheer physical exertion, it wasn't much. He's Garou, too; he has reserves most people can't dream of, and he's not even on the stronger side of the spectrum of a werewolf's power. This hasn't even taken that long. But it isn't that which is so exhausting, for either of them, when they fuck like this. He has to pay attention. He has to be careful. He has to decide whether to punish her or reward her, when and how much. He has to hold himself back when all he wants is to put his cock inside of her and make her come, feel her moan, before he follows her over the edge. There's an unfair, unbalanced drain on Ivan when they play; he never complains.

Hilary never really thanks him. She doesn't roll over and take care of him. She doesn't stroke his hair and show him all the love and affection that he might actually want from her. She does not nurture; she can't help replenish him.

But maybe it helps that she is so beautiful like this to him. Maybe the knowledge that he's helped her a little is something. She can't know. She doesn't ask. All she does is let him hold her, her hands still bound behind her back, her face a mess, her cunt still pulsing softly around his cock, unbearably. She's shaking, shaken, and her tears are slowing. He sees her as real, right now, perfect, his. Hilary, though... she barely even exists right now. And it's a gift.

Still: Ivan whispers to her, nuzzling her, murmuring to her in a haphazard, exhausted fashion. She shivers, unable to answer, for a long time. It's difficult to know if she's even heard him.

This seems to be okay, though. He doesn't seem bereft, that she doesn't answer. That she doesn't ask what he means, how he means for her to stay, how he could possibly prevent her from

drifting away the way she always does.

And the truth is: he can't. No matter what he does, no matter what she does, no matter who they don't or do marry, fuck, whatever -- their intrinsic natures are not silver at all, but adamantine. Immutable. He is fickle. She is barely human. They are both so very twisted.

His hand covers her back, though. He rubs his nose, his lips, over her skin. Her shoulder. Her cheek. They should get up. They need to go soon. But for a few moments longer, and only that, Ivan stays

right here.

Five, ten, fifteen minutes later, he stirs. His hand strokes down her back. She feels like luxury itself, exquisite, priceless, precious. He leans over her as he draws out of her, kisses a line up her spine. Then, sitting up, Ivan stretches his jaws in an enormous yawn; gives a shake of his head.

"Shower?" he murmurs.

Gradually, Hilary finds herself calming. She remembers that her wrists are tied and that the person holding her is Ivan, and he has a name and identity beyond master. She stares at the wall opposite, or a folded peak of the comforter in front of her, and thinks of this person. He's so young. Too young to be a father, for one thing, especially since he isn't an Ahroun. She thinks -- realizes, silently -- how much she's ruined him. It isn't a thought laden with shame or sorrow, but she knows it. She does not hide from it in this moment.

He also loves her. It isn't just worship or adoration -- though he does adore her and the pain he gives her is a sort of worship -- but something very true. Very real. It is tender and deep and it makes him sore inside. This thought does make her feel something. She knows how scary that can be, loving someone. She loved Emmerich. She loves Anton. It's so frightening. What if something in the dark swallows them up? What if they're gone? How do you even breathe, then?

A tremor goes through her body, one of many, but this one is because of this thought. Ivan loves her. He must be so frightened.

Right now Hilary does not have the self or the sense to know if she loves him back, or loves him the same. The knowledge that she loved her brother and loves her son... these are distant things, not so much felt as understood. Right now all she knows is that she wishes Ivan weren't scared. She wishes she could make him not be scared anymore. But that takes promises that she'll never leave. That takes nurturing, comfort, sweetness that she can't often find in herself. It's like it's lost somewhere in a great, vast house with no lights on. It's there somewhere, small and locked away and hidden someplace. It is hard to find. Usually she only stumbles upon it.

But she is no fool, and she knows this: it makes him feel better to nuzzle her. He is happier when she touches him, when she nuzzles him back. If she returns his affections it comforts him even as much as it makes him bitter, because he's not right in the head either. She knows that. She's seen it.

So she turns her head into the way he's caressing her, touching her, kissing her. They rub their faces on each other, her eyes closed. He holds her so tightly, softening inside of her, and she stays quiet, because she does not want to tell him lies just to make him feel better. He'd know. He's her vladelets. He would know that she was doing it for his sake, and he would be grieved by it. Angry, even.

The sun still pours through the attic windows. The servants still entertain themselves, and Anton, downstairs. He gnaws on a toy, slobbering his tongue all over it to really get a feel for it, then throws it across the room. It rolls; he crawls after it, smacking his hands after each other as he moves as quickly as he can to get it again. Dmitri plays chess with Miron.

Ivan asks her if she wants to shower. He's yawning as though waking and she's shivering as he withdraws from her, aching, rolling onto her side more comfortably. Hilary finds him with her eyes. She gives a small nod. "Okay." So quietly, so softly, a little hopeful: "Then we'll go out?"

Impulsively, compelled by the same unstable instinct that makes him love, that makes him adore, that makes him want to keep her - Ivan reaches down, strokes back her hair. It is so long now, pin-straight. He liked it better the way it was in Mexico, but he likes it like this too, sleek and cool between his fingers, like water. He lets the strands fall from his fingers.

"Of course, love," he murmurs. And he bends to her, kissing the top of her head like a blessing. "Come on."

For the second time in not so very many hours, they shower. For the second time, Ivan washes Hilary, then himself. When he is finished he draws her against him, her back to his chest. They stand under the water. He leans against the wall and she leans against him, and a little more time steals by.

When they finally make it downstairs, it's well into midafternoon and the servants have been waiting around for some time. Nonetheless, Ivan's the one that's brisk and impatient, getting everyone up, up, up, ready to go. He's changed again. His hair is still damp. He looks fresh and cool, his sunglasses ever so fashionable on his lean face. He scoops Anton up when Miron isn't quite fast enough -- he's juggling the stroller and the baby bag, after all -- but he's rather quick to hand the boy off to Dmitri.

They split into two cars. Ivan and Hilary in Ivan's temporary roadster; everyone else in the larger of the two cars Anton 'owns'. It's an SUV, large enough to move most furniture if need be; more than large enough to fit Dmitri, Miron, Polina, Anton, and various Anton-paraphernalia.

"Let's go see about his bed first," Ivan says, shutting his door and igniting the engine. "Then we'll take Anton to see toys."

Their playing, the roughness of it, has tousled her hair. It isn't naturally this straight. She never bothered with it in Mexico; if there was a time he knew he loved her it was there, and it was then. She was round and heavy and hateful, she tried to claw at him when he wanted to touch her, she had more venom in her than he'd ever heard, she behaved bizarrely and hated herself, loathed him, was wishing away the baby inside of her, and

god, he adored her then. Even she can sometimes think back on that winter and know it to be true; Ivan loved her fully, and deeply, and it very nearly destroyed him because it came at a time when he thought -- when they both thought -- he would barely be able to look at her, much less touch her.

She wore her hair down when she didn't tie it back in frustration. It was wavy and uncut. It frizzed slightly in the humidity. It smelled like her shampoo, her soap, whatever she'd been cooking. She ate peppers like apples, cut and skinned vanilla beans til her fingers were flecked with black. It was like she was almost a different woman.

A different woman now, too, than the one she was just the other day at lunch with Grey. So cool, so smooth, so luxurious. She's shattered now, filthy, a quite literally cum-soaked whore. He strokes her hair and she sniffs, her eyes a little wider, a little less certain, a great deal less guarded. He murmurs to her, calls her love, kisses her gentle.

Ivan unties the belt from her wrists. He helps her up to sitting, then to her feet, and walks with her to the bath they built into this attic. He tests the water before he lets her get in and takes off the rest of his clothes; he barely even bothered getting completely naked before he fucked her. There's still red, bright pink, all over her ass. Her wrists. He uses a soft washcloth, a gentle soap, and washes the makeup from her face, his hand cupped around the back of her head to hold it in place, just outside of the water. She keeps her eyes closed. He brushes the eyeshadow away, and the trust in this is terrifying, because she barely so much as flinches when he touches her eyelids, her eyelashes.

He washes the product and the straightness from her hair. The conditioner he strokes through the locks runs down her back when it rinses out and makes her shoulders slippery for his palms as he massages her, works out the stiffness and soreness he caused when he wrenched her arms back, held her like that, bent over and screaming. A little cold water, briefly, on a cloth to hold to her thighs and her ass, soothing the skin that he struck again and again with his hands.

Hilary whimpers softly with mingled tenderness and want as he washes her cunt, fingers spreading her lips ever so carefully. Like the one for her face, it's a gentle soap, rinsed quickly away. He would never touch her with anything harsh, not like this. Not when he's taking care of her afterward. Hilary leans on his chest while all the soap, all the conditioner, while everything rinses away. Her wrists are still a little red. Her rear has faded. She's flushed from the heat of the water.

And then he washes himself. More quickly, more brusquely. It's about getting clean, for him. Hilary tries to help, but mostly she just gets in the way with trying to hold him, trying to wrap her arms around him, nuzzling his back or his chest. Of course he lets her. Of course he's gentle if he has to move her. Of course he takes care of her. She's his, precious thing. And she's one of the only things he owns that comes back to him after he breaks it, one of the only things he can put back together whole after shattering it into tiny, shimmering pieces.

Besides: this is one of the only times when she shows him this sort of affection, this kind of closeness.

Afterward, after drying off, Hilary seems to have entered that quiet haze between full connection with herself and returning to a safer, more solid place. She's almost always silent like this, pliant, drifting in a fog without her own will. She seems content, though -- not confused or frightened or lost. It's a kind of peace, though it does mean she lingers for a long time over what clothing to put on til Ivan helps her. New undergarments. He has to remind her to towel her hair dry before she puts on her dress or else it will get soaked. He has to ask if she wants Darya to come up -- if he even thinks of it. Hilary herself doesn't seem to think about her makeup or her hair without help right now.

She has to be reminded to comb it, or have it combed for her. She seems happy, if Ivan does it. Smiles to herself. She's in a different dress than before, a soft one of three-quarter sleeves that bell very slightly at the ends, knee-length, dove gray. She chooses a few bracelets, white gold and silver -- yes, because why should she have ever cared -- and adorns her wrists to half-cover the faint friction burns. She wears cream-colored heels with soft leather worked into a lace-like edge around her feet.

By the time they leave the bedroom, his hair is damp and her hair is wet but shaken out, drying into the waves he liked so much, and her skin is fresh and their room smells like fucking -- the bedding will have to be changed. Again.

Ivan is eager and impatient, active, and Hilary is walking over to the middle of the room where the servants are all trying to hustle suddenly from an hour-long wait that was supposed to be twenty minutes to get ready to leave. Anton has a teething biscuit that he's gnawing into mush, and when Ivan scoops him up he wiggles, bouncing enough in Ivan's arms to nearly topple out of them, grabbing at his father's face with small fingers absolutely coated in saliva-biscuit-goo. He is 'talking' again, babbling, and Izolda is rushing to try and wipe his fingers and mouth off so he doesn't get thrown across the room by his Garou sire.

Hilary simply ignores everyone. Dmitri and Polina are going and Anton and she and Ivan are going and Miron is going and she was thinking earlier that perhaps Darya should go, but doesn't remember that thought now. She steps out into the sunlight, hair streaming behind her for a moment with a gust of wind, standing next to Ivan, tickling Anton in his arms, beaming at him. They are a portrait, for a moment.

And then they take him to one of the larger cars and Ivan starts to guide her to the roadster and she damn near throws a fit.

"Why can't he come with us?" she demands, instantly on the edge of her fury. They're putting Anton in his carseat, still rear-facing and in the back, and it doesn't seem to mean anything to her that the car secured for Ivan on this trip is a vintage convertible, it doesn't even have a back seat. She looks at Ivan through their two pairs of sunglasses; Anton is used to this car, this carseat, it's how he gets to town on all his outings and it already has a toy in it to keep him settled while they drive, but Hilary is not used to any of this and it bothers her.

She looks angry, but mostly, and somewhere under all that, is that terror of him being taken. That knowledge that she wished him away, she wished him dead or gone, and he keeps being taken. It's a wonder she got any sleep last night. It's no wonder at all that she didn't sleep until she'd gone back to be with him a little longer.

"I don't like it," she says, before Ivan can even answer her. She steels her shoulders and she gets into the roadster. She knows he can't come with them. She knows that she doesn't want to drive with the help, that Ivan wouldn't want to either. She knows all that. It still bothers her, right now, when she is still not quite herself yet. Her guard is down. She's still so... vulnerable.

But she gets into the car. She looks out the window, and if he wants to drive with the top down this time she doesn't argue about what it will do to her hair -- which isn't dried or done, any way. She does what needs to be done, but her heart is beating a little too fast and her gut is twisting in a knot.

"I don't like it," she says again, quieter, almost like a mantra. Or a sulk.

Ivan's first, instinctive reaction is to call Miron back, take Anton, put him in his mother's arms. It's mad. It's absurd. It's wholly illogical, and he knows it, and he hardly cares.

But Hilary doesn't fly into a panic or a rage. She doesn't like it, she doesn't, but she can, and does, cope. Sort of. She sits in Ivan's car, sulking or chanting or both. He looks at her a moment, and then he puts his hand over hers. Applies enough pressure to make her look at him.

"Anton won't be far," Ivan says quietly. "And we'll be with him soon enough. I won't let anyone take him away from you. All right?"

On the way here, sensing upset in her, or tension, even a hint of it, Ivan had almost pulled the car over. He reacts instantly, voraciously to her -- always. In everything. Whether he's protecting her or snapping at her or lusting for her, it is always intense, always deep. And sometimes Hilary can barely feel anything at all; it's like he feels enough for both of them, makes up for the lack in her.

Now, though, he does not shout for his son's manservant and call him back. He doesn't take the boy and put him against Hilary, cup the boy's head to her chest or the crook of her arm to force him to recognize and love her if he has to. He doesn't say that no, it will be fine, she can just hold the child while they drive to town.

Because Hilary is... okay. Or something like it, for her. She's sad and sulking instead of hysterical, and that's a definite difference. She's shaken, fighting to control herself, but the fact that she's even trying is worth notice. But Ivan notices.

She looks over at him after his hand has gotten so firm on her hand that it is almost painful. She breathes in deeply and exhales slowly, nodding, keeping her eyes on his. "All right," she echoes.

The SUV's engine turns on, signaling that they are ready when Ivan is. Of course he'll lead. What if at the last second he decides he wants to go somewhere else? It could happen. Anton has the misfortune of being born to parents even more mercurial than Ivan's and just as obsessed with one another as Hilary's; the madness grows with every generation, it seems. God knows what he'll turn out to be, when right now he is simply perfect.

As the convertible pulls outward, heading towards Novgorod itself, Hilary begins to calm a bit more. She holds Ivan's hand when he isn't shifting, or she rests her hand on his leg. No one they know is watching them here, no friends from any clubs or society gossips. Here they are just... themselves, whatever they are. Their servants, because they are paid well enough or trained well enough or because their own quiet madness inclines them to protect, follow, obey, and perhaps even love their insane masters, can be trusted. Even Darya, the weakest-willed of Hilary's recently acquired help, feels a strange pull towards Hilary, an odd protectiveness and faith that she doesn't understand.

Remnants. Scraps of a time when the Silver Fangs deserved to be kings. Their shared blood-memory, lingering down through the ages long after it has lost its usefulness.

So Hilary lets herself touch Ivan's leg, hold his hand. She lets the wind blow through her hair, drying it, tying it into knots, rippling it into waves. She looks back occasionally at the SUV following them. She thinks of calling Miron, telling him to place his phone's camera at the boy and leave it on, but she's not entirely sure it would work out here anyway and even to her that seems a bit obsessive. Her mind is coming back to her body. Her will is rebuilding itself, and sealing the cracks Ivan beat into her walls. Like every time. She is a human scar, a walking wound reopened over and over again, never quite healing, never quite able to.

They are still a long way from town when Hilary speaks again. It comes out of nowhere. She is watching the horizon.

"We made a good thing," she is saying, as though only now realizing it, and only now seeing that it is a wonder, a miracle, that it came from them. That something decent, even temporarily decent, could ever be born of the two of them together. She looks at Ivan as the words are taken by the wind. "Didn't we?"

There's a decent amount of distance between the house and the city. Not so much that Anton seems locked away in some unseen rural hole, but enough that they'll be driving a while. Twenty, thirty minutes.

They are quiet on that drive. The SUV hovers in their mirrors. Dmitri is driving, careful and precise as ever. Truth be told, Anton is likely far safer in that car than in this one. Ivan's driving this one, and Ivan sometimes throws his cars around lightposts just to see which way they bend. Besides, it's a vintage convertible, older than Ivan, older than Hilary, soft-topped, fragile. And if Ivan throws this one around a lightpost, or flips it into a ditch, it's Hilary he'd wrap himself around. Hilary he'd protect.

Neither of them are thinking about that, though. Hilary is staring out the window, quiet. Ivan isn't sure she's thinking anything at all. Ivan is driving, his eyes on the road behind his sunglasses, reading the signs, finding his unerring tracker's way to Novgorod. He doesn't really remember this city; didn't spend much time amongst the humans in his few years here. He knows where the historic quarter is. He knows where the Novgorod kremlin is. He knows where the shopping avenues are, where designers open their boutiques -- nothing compared to Paris or New York or London or Chicago, of course -- and where, on adjoining, slightly quieter streets, independent merchants and craftsmen sell their wares.

A thousand years ago, before the tribe was quite so deranged, they might have done this too. Ridden out from behind their thick walls and their high towers; passed amongst the populace like demigods, so brilliant and shining it almost hurt to look upon them. Nobility. Kings and princes and heirs. And something more than that: something eldritch and wild, dangerous in their beauty.

They get worse with every generation. More corrupt, more degenerate. Their son won't be perfect forever, but for now --

a good thing, she calls him. And Ivan turns to look at Hilary, the light of the day a gleam on his cheekbone. His eyes move behind his sunglasses. Then he pulls the shades off and meets her eyes.

"Absolutely," he says quietly. And that is all.

Not long after, their country highway becomes a suburban boulevard, and then the narrower, bumpier roads of the city. The traffic isn't too bad here, but it still takes a few stops-and-gos to make it to where they're going. Ivan pulls over. The SUV pulls in behind them. They are both parked illegally, right in front of the children's furniture store Miron found earlier on the internet. Ivan hands Hilary out of the convertible as Polina is unbuckling Anton from his carseat and Miron is unloading the stroller. Ivan ends up pushing the stroller, though Hilary might have scooped Anton out of it. The servants trail a discreet distance behind them.

The store isn't large -- no American big-box furniture bonanza, this. The building is old and the windows are on the small side, rather charmingly curtained. The scent of wood is in the air as they enter. There are cribs here, tiny tables and chairs, handcarved walkers, toy soldiers, toy animals, rocking horses, hanging mobiles of wooden patterns cut so thin they clink together musically. There is a small section for mattresses toward the back, which is where Ivan goes.

There should be a certain amount of distance between a royal son and the common village, even if he lives in a mansion and not a castle. It seems so natural as to not bear mentioning, to Hilary, to drive for some time between one place and another. If they were on horseback, if they were in a carriage, it would take much longer than a half hour. That's the way it should be. Her eyes close behind her sunglasses against the sunlight as Ivan acknowledges, agrees, that they made something good, and this

is a miracle.

People look at them when they drive further into the town. Outlying houses. They've stepped back in time a bit; this is not like living in Chicago or some other cosmopolitan, upscale, modern place. It feels right to see Hilary here. It seems normal. She seems to belong in another decade, another century. She doesn't belong in time at all.

But it is like Mexico, somehow. Cooler, less bright. Her hair is not as long; she's cut it since then. Her fingers comb tangles out of it as the car pulls to a stop, and her dress swirls around her knees when she exits the car -- only after Ivan has opened her door, of course, only after he has held out his hand to help her out, of course. The SUV is opening and Polina is unbuckling Anton, Miron is unfolding and locking the stroller, which is a rather lightweight one that pops open with a flip-down sun shade. Polina has already smeared a fresh coat of sunblock on the boy's fair skin, all the same, and he smells faintly of it when they pull him from the car. He is looking at everything. This is all very exciting.

Ivan pushes the stroller and Hilary just laughs at him -- twinkling, mocking, and not even a little contrite. She walks close by, but ahead, were Anton can see her. Where she can look down over her shoulder and see him, too. He has a toy, attached to his stroller by a series of brightly colored links that he hasn't learned how to connect or disconnect yet. The toy crinkles, and rattles, and beeps, depending on what part he squeezes, bashes, or stuffs in his mouth. It has a mirror on it; it catches the light. He likes that.

He also likes looking. He leans so far out of his stroller that if he weren't buckled in he'd fall. And Hilary is just... delighted with him. Like he's a pair of ballet shoes or a new set of knives, a pretty new present. Just looking at him seems to amuse her. She's infatuated. But she doesn't try to carry him, because some part of her

still thinks he will cry. Still thinks he will fight, push at her, try to get away. If she brings him too close, holds him too long, he will only reject her.

But right now, just looking at him, being near to him, seems to make her happy. She has been abused this morning, punished and then rewarded, and her wrists are still pink beneath their bangles. Her heels are almost silent on the worn wood floor of this place. She touches a chime -- no, it's a mobile, but it makes music. She glances over her shoulder at the servants, doesn't matter which one, and gives the faintest of nods to the mobile that her hand is grazing away from. They all know, regardless, what that glance and half-flick of a nod means:

Buy that.

And her attention moves on, interested in everything simply because it is novel and new and different. Anton sneezes two or three times and looks startled by it on each repetition; mucus comes out of his nose and Miron is there, a half-second later, wiping a tissue across the boy's face -- and of course the boy tries to fight it, twisting his head around. Hilary's eyes are dark on the young man who will grow old in his service to her son: "Use a handkerchief," she says, right on the verge of snapping, though this is less sanitary, obviously. But it's softer.

Her attention moves away again, almost instantly, as though Miron ceases to exist as soon as she's given an instruction. He gets no thanks for cleaning up her child's face. He likely does not expect to be thanked for everything he has done, all the promises he's made, the blood he is likely willing to shed for that goddamned prince.

Who has Hilary's blood. Who, like all children of Garou and Kin, get the strength of their purity from their kinfolk parent, their tribe from the wolf. Ivan has snagged himself quite the prize, though trying to keep her when he doesn't deserve her may get him killed. But there is that child, whose blood will always smell like Hilary's, who will always have her eyes, who will always remind his father of that woman,

no matter what becomes of her.

The sight of a rocking horse makes Hilary say something she was thinking on the ride: "Should he have stables?" she muses to Ivan. "He lives in the country; it seems right that he should learn to ride. Maybe a pony at first." Her fingers tangle in the cream-colored yarn that makes up the rocking-horse's mane. "I was never allowed animals," she adds, though she sounds more petulant or bitter than truly saddened by it.

Of course she fucking wasn't allowed pets. The girl hid dead birds in her toy chest as a child. Christ knows what she would have done, given a living creature at her mercy. But Ivan doesn't really know just how dark some of her interests were, how absolutely repulsive, how violent her mind was.

Are. Is.

Whatever Ivan says in return, they're almost at the back where the mattresses are. The largest are only twin sized, the small just big enough to fit into a handmade basinet that even Anton is too big for now. Hilary frowns at them; she doesn't quite know what to do from here.

Were he here without a baby in a stroller -- unthinkable, a year or two ago: Ivan Press, consummate bachelor, quietly pushing his boy around -- Ivan would be moving amongst the wares right now. Slipping lean and silent between artificial forests of small wardrobes, tiny bookcases, cribs, toys. He would not keep to the aisles. He might sniff the mobile that Hilary buys, that the servants gather up and pay for.

He is pushing a baby in a stroller, though. He looks so new here, so bright and so golden. Something about Hilary fits this world, which still seems half-caught in some imperial past. Almost nothing about Ivan fits this world, except perhaps some innate and inalienable nobility of his face; the way he moves.

He's playing the part of daddy right now, of course, and it's still amusing him, and Hilary is delighted with everything, and the truth is on some level this is a bit of a game to them. They are terrible parents. Hilary loves Anton; Ivan feels some vague paternal attachment or responsibility there. But neither of them really care about Anton. Neither of them care for him, nor want to, nor are able to. And thus: they are utterly terrible parents, and will always be.

Should Anton have animals? Hilary wonders aloud. Stables, a pony? It seems right. Ivan looks at her; he sees her from behind, following with their child. There is a beat of pause. A crack of reality in their little fairy tale of an afternoon:

"If they can stand him, we'll buy him a pony, and a gelding when he's older. But they might not be able to, if he's like me."

They are approaching the mattresses. Small and smaller and smaller still: the only sizes, here. This, too, is concrete, real, not a fairy tale. Not toys and pleasantries. Hilary looks like she has no idea what to do.

Ivan hands the stroller to Miron. Or rather: he leaves the stroller, and Miron automatically takes it in hand. Ivan, meanwhile, goes to Hilary. He wraps his arm around her waist, securing her to his side. He smells fresh, woodsy; he is quite warm under his cool summer's clothing.

"A little mattress, right?" he prompts her gently. "Something thin enough that he won't hurt himself if he falls off. We can put it on a rug and set it against the wall." Ivan nods at a candidate, "What about that one?"

The people in Novgorod find themselves gossiping about that boy, parentless, abandoned, living out on that estate beyond the borders. It isn't like he's a celebrity. They don't know his name, but they are interested. It's such a strange thing: those three young people, though one of them has children of her own, living all alone with a baby that belongs to none of them. Now this: a private jet flying in, these two people who don't match each other any more than Miron, Polina, or Izolda do disembarking, coming into town, shopping.

They are fascinating and unnerving. But they are also rich. The shopkeeper, who keeps this place brightly lit and cheerful, has already tried to approach them. Dmitri has silently intercepted long before the woman has gotten anywhere near Ivan, Hilary, or Anton. Polina has crisply but politely directed that the mobile be brought down from its hanging and packed carefully to take home. She has taken a few notes with a stylus and tablet about what they need from the hardware store to hang the mobile above Anton's bed, calculating how much cord vs. how high the ceiling is and how much the mobile weighs;

she is a bit obsessive about making things just so, making them exact, being right.

Ivan has abandoned his son, not for the first time, to go to Hilary. Miron, perhaps a bit relieved, rescues the child, the way he always will. When his fickle father and mother, who are mostly indifferent to him or adore him (respectively), forget that he has needs or that he exists when they aren't paying attention to him, Miron will always be there. Even if he is sick. Even if he is wounded. Even if everything else crumbles around them, Miron will give up his time, his energy, his health, and his will...

perhaps a bit too much. He always does that.

Anton keeps blowing spit bubbles, making loud raspberries, touching everything, leaving drooled-on fingerprints, and no one apologizes for him or chastises him, not in public. Any discipline he receives must be in his own domain and in private, and it won't be very many years before his caretakers won't even be able to do that much. He is happy, and reasonably content. He likes outings. He chews on his toy, shakes it, bashes on it to make it emit the sounds he knows it's capable of. If he is mad, there is no inkling of it beyond the simple madness of all children, Silver Fang or Garou or mere mortal. Right now he's perfect. Just perfect.

Hilary eases into Ivan's arm as it encircles her. She'd liked Anton to grow up with horses, but not if one day he has to leave them after he's learned to love them, not if one day he grows full of rage and his beloved animals cannot stand the scent of him. She doesn't say this aloud. There are beds in front of her, bewildering her.

Ivan helps. Ivan holds her and for some reason his arm around her waist, possessive as it is, arouses her slightly. She does nothing about it. She reaches out, poking one of the mattresses. "Not too little," she says. She touches the candidate Ivan points out, touches one meant more for a twin bed. It's too thick. She tips her head, touches a thinner one that is a bit smaller, perhaps seventy percent the size. It's a bit firmer, though still soft. Not pillowy, though. Not downy. She pokes it again through the plastic.

And then she gets terribly bored. "That one," she says, sighing it, and turns around, looking back at Anton and Miron and Anton gnawing at his toy like it's a meat-rich bone he's about to crack and suck the marrow out of.

Maybe he is Garou.

She looks at Polina then. "Get a rug," she says. "A very large one, and soft."

And turns back to Ivan, tipping her head toward him and nuzzling him once, kissing his cheek. She flicks her tongue over the soft spot beneath his jaw, right over the artery. "I'm bored with this," she says. "I want to buy presents now."

Ivan isn't even looking at the mattresses while Hilary pokes them, prods them, grows suddenly bored and decisive. He's looking across the room, his attention caught on some trinket, some bauble, some wood-carving of some beast-of-prey or other. Perhaps it's a wolf. He can't really tell at this range, and anyway --

Hilary is turning back to him, nuzzling him, bringing him back, darkening the alert glitter of his eyes. He bends to her. She kisses his cheek, and then she does something that seems shockingly carnal for such a cool, lovely couple. It's barely seen, but anyone can see the way Ivan's eyelashes sweep down for a moment. He turns back. He kisses her, quite firmly, an unmistakable stamp of ownership right there in the middle of the woodworker's shop. His arm never leaves her waist.

Not even when they come back out of the shop. That's something they never would have done in Chicago. It would have been so very improper, and Hilary is mindful of her reputation there even if Ivan appears to have entirely forsaken his. They have no real reputation here, though. They are mysterious; they have no pasts, it seems; they simply appeared, like angels fallen to the earth. Untouchably beautiful. Even in a dark room they seem to shine, and here in the brightness, they seem to pull every mote of sunlight out of the air. They seem unreal, or so hyperreal that everything else pales.

Their retinue follows: the servants, and their little princeling. Polina and Dmitri stay behind to oversee the loading of the merchandise. Ivan decides that they will walk to their next destination, so Miron puts the shade down on the stroller and follows. They leave the roads behind, wandering into the heart of the historic merchants' quarter - cobblestoned streets lined by neat, low buildings that echo the architecture of the 19th century, the 18th, earlier. Veliky Novgorod is ancient, a cradle of the Russian civilization, but these days it has faded into the shadow of larger, rougher cities not so far away: St. Petersburg, Moscow. There's a sense of a quiet cleanness here; little traffic, little pollution, a very blue sky, a land and a river lush with summer.

Leaves rustle overhead as they wind down pedestrian avenues. They're so far north that the summers are not particularly warm, the light always slanted. It is a weekday afternoon; they don't pass many other people. There is another young mother pushing a stroller who looks at them curiously. There are pairs of lovers meeting over artisan ice cream, or idling in the shade. Eyes follow them and then turn away, sensing the privacy of their odd little ensemble, and the rank and status implied by the servant trailing behind.

They visit a toyshop where Ivan buys his boy an exquisitely articulate little knight mounted on an armored destrier. Then another, where they buy staggering amounts of new blocks and the like, enough to build a castle, enough to build a palace; and a third where they buy Anton a little set of toy soldiers to follow his knight. They'll have to find some dragons for Anton's knight to slay, Ivan remarks as they move on. There are stores in town that sell Batmen and Transformers, of course, but not here -- or at least, not open and gaudy on the shelves. That would be so tasteless. They pass a jeweler's, which they browse together; then another, across the street from a tiny cafe where the only seating comes in the form of wrought-iron patio sets out in the open. Their servants are carrying quite a few packages by then, and Ivan decides that they should stop a while, have a cup of coffee, a snack. Their people take the opportunity to move the cars, load the presents.

There's a moment where it's just Ivan and Hilary and Anton -- asleep now in his stroller. And Ivan keeps looking at the jeweler's, and then he gets to his feet. He's rolled his sleeves up, but rolls them down now and fastens the cuffs as he bends to kiss Hilary's cheek.

"Wait for me here," he says. "I won't be a minute."

He walks off into the jeweler's. The door opens with a tinkle of a bell; shuts behind him. A few minutes go by; then a few more. And then still more. Their coffee comes, and their pastries. Their servants reappear and make themselves discreetly available. When Ivan finally returns, he's smiling. He doesn't have anything for Anton. He doesn't even have a box. "Open your hand," he says to Hilary, and when she does, he pours a glittering handful of diamonds into her palm. Too many for a mere bracelet; more like a necklace. Only -- at the ends, instead of a clasp, there are a pair of tiny, padded clamps, screw-tightened.

Ivan doesn't explain a damned thing. He hardly even looks at the priceless, shocking little gift he just gave Hilary. He sips his coffee, he lounges cool and aristocratic in his chair, and he looks

so very pleased with himself.

Hilary's back arches with the way Ivan's arm tightens around her, pulls her more firmly against his body when he kisses her. If the shopkeeper or other patrons did not notice the way she licked him, they notice this and look away. Anton, stuck in a stroller that is no longer moving, strains his arms and whines at Miron to be set free. Miron distracts him, and Anton laughs briefly. Hilary licks Ivan's tongue, her fingertips stroking his jaw for a moment.

They leave. Polina oversees the purchase, the shopboy who wheels a large cart out carrying the mattress, the rocking horse, the box with the mobile in it. She is polite to him but cool, crisp, when he loads the items in the back of the SUV. They have to live here, after all. On the rare occasions that she or Miron or Izolda are in town or get a night to themselves, this is where they come; they do not make enemies. Even in this, they are mindful of their master. No one fears him yet. No one has reason to fear him. They do not have the freedom yet to treat the people of Novgorod like cobblestones to be walked on.

Perhaps one day they will.

Hilary wants to carry Anton when they get to the next store, the first toy store. She figures out easily how to unbuckle the straps and scoops the boy unceremoniously into her arms, mimicking the way she's seen Izolda or Miron hold some of his wait on her side, leaving one arm free. For the first time it seems natural. Anton seems to remember her now, though he is still nowhere near bonded to her the way he would have been if she'd kept him this past year, fed him from her own breast, carried him close to her heartbeat. But he remembers her from before his nap. He does not burst into wails as soon as she touches him, and she scolds him when he wiggles too much, making it difficult to not drop him.

She scolds him in French. He doesn't know French, but he knows that tone.

They buy him toys. They buy him toys that are too young for him, many that are too old for him, few that he will actually have any interest in or ability to play with for a long time. They delight themselves, buying things they might have wished for themselves. They buy almost everything they touch, pick up, and hold for more than a few bored seconds. Anton drools on things, touches things, and for a few heartstopping minutes Hilary lets him down and he walks and crawls along the floor by shelves, knocking things over, trying to pull things to his mouth. Being a baby.

The servants take care of the details. That is what they're for. They smooth over the path ahead of and behind the Silver Fang royalty. Hilary, of course, disdains toys that most children would play with. They are as tacky as some of Ivan's ridiculous vehicles, and she won't have it. She seems like she'd rather Anton grow up as someone a hundred years ago might have,

like she did.

Ivan wants to visit the jewelry store. Hilary already knows where that is going, and rolls her eyes behind her shades. He is bored with toys, and truth be told she almost is, as well, but Ivan has so little interest in the child to begin with. He is not lost, as Hilary is, in some half-dream of of her own childhood, so warped and partly forgotten that it exists in a haze. He also is not hopelessly infatuated with the little sack of meat and drool that she keeps tickling or cooing at or -- this has started -- laying kisses on. He does not find his existence validated every time the thing laughs. Hilary seems to.

But.

But there is always this: Hilary cannot love anything for long. Hilary forgets to care. She nearly does drop Anton. She nearly turns around and hits his head on a shelf. She gives Miron a dozen near heart attacks with how little she seems to care that Anton is still fragile, vulnerable, and helpless. She wants to get him an ice cream. She gets frustrated, upset, when Anton starts getting fussy, whining when things are shaken in his face or handed to him, throwing things on the ground --

that gets her angry, snapping at the child like he's a grown one, asking him why he did that, like he can answer. She gets fed up when he begins to cry at the sharpness of her voice and the anger in her eyes, and she also gets frantic, frazzled, embarrassed and angry because he's embarrassing her, and

"Miron!" she demands. "Make him stop," as though it's that easy, as though Miron has a magical touch.

It is up to Miron to try and tell Hilary that Anton is just tired -- but he napped -- and that he is still a baby, he gets tired easily, and all this activity is more than he's used to. It's up to Miron to ease Anton out of his mother's arms and take him, try to soothe him, without making Hilary angrier. It's up to him to explain that Anton is probably a little hungry, too, because he still eats several times a day. And Hilary, who hates these details, who doesn't like hearing about people being 'tired' or 'hungry' or 'needing things', can barely even listen near the end. She goes, sulking a bit, back to Ivan's side, to receive her own comfort.

They've walked very far from the SUV. Dmitri and Polina are laden with bags; Miron has stashed some on the handles of the stroller. Dmitri has been carrying an enormous box of wooden blocks for roughly half a mile, and the day has only gotten hotter. But it isn't for this that they decide anything. It's because Hilary seems upset and Ivan is bored with toy-shopping.

Miron has Anton back in the stroller, and is hoping they stop soon so he can find a place to heat up the bottle that's in the mini-cooler so Anton will chill out and go to sleep. When Ivan decides to take them to a cafe, Miron all but collapses with relief. Hilary wonders aloud if there's even any place here that serves decent food.

She is not a fan of Russian cuisine.

So: they sit out on one of those patio tables. Miron gets a bottle heated for Anton and the boy holds it in his stroller, suckling firmly, interested in the milk and not in any offered solid food at the moment. His eyes are drooping long before he finishes. Hilary likes him again, looks at him fondly as she stirs a bit of cream into her coffee, her foot stroking idly against Ivan's calf. The servants depart to pack the SUV with the toys.

Hilary looks up, half-startled, when Ivan moves to leave, rolling his sleeves down. She tips her head to receive the kiss, like she's expecting it, watching him. "All right," she says, the words meaning nothing but obedience. And her eyes follow him to the jeweler's.

She wonders if he's going to buy her an engagement ring, something like that. It would be like him. She turns her eyes away, sipping her coffee, watching Anton fall asleep with a drop of milk on his lower lip, bottle hugged to his chest. There is a blanket tucked away in the stroller. She decides to cover him from the chest down, and sits again, pleased with herself for being so thoughtful. She's much better at this than anyone thinks, she decides.

The servants gather at another table, to drink their own coffee, eat their own small snacks. Hilary does not touch the food between her and Ivan's places; not til he comes back. He didn't tell her to eat. But he comes out, looking quite happy, a twinkle in his eye and a spring in his step. Hilary looks bemusedly at his approach, one eyebrow lifting as he comes up to her. He tells her to open her hand, and of course she does, unfolding her palms in front of him like she's about to receive a blessing.

Diamonds. Tiny ones, all strung together. They catch the sunlight and send it bouncing off in a thousand colors. People look. Of course people look. They don't see what the ends are; looks like a slender diamond necklace. God. The wealthy. And Americans, flashy and proud of it. Hilary, however, sees the clamps. She looks over at Ivan, who has seated himself, who looks like the cat that just ate the canary, pretending he doesn't care how she reacts.

Dryly, archly, she says: "Not their usual wares, I would assume. Or was there a back room?" She pools the diamonds from palm to palm, leaning back in her own chair. "Darling, you're so gauche."

How could Hilary possibly be a good mother? She's like a child herself. She mimics. She playacts. She plays the mother, she's so pleased with herself, she loves Anton in a way she doesn't understand so when she tries to express it, realize it, she ends up treating him like a new, favorite toy. She's upset when he won't play along. She talks to him like he might understand, as though he not only understood adult knowledge but a language he's never heard before she came here. She can't stand it when he cries.

Ivan doesn't care. He sees it. He doesn't resent her for it. He loves her; she's an awful, awful human being and he loves her.

So he gets her a gift. And it is a little scandalous, on a level that even the fur coat was not. She looks at it; she knows it for what it is. He lounges in his chair and smiles behind his cooling coffee. She makes an arch little comment. His smile turns into a smirk. He sets his coffee down with a tiny click.

"We've had this conversation before," he lazes. "It wasn't on the menu, so to speak. But anyone will serve anything given enough incentive. Anyway; you look good in diamonds."

And he glances over at her, turning that smirk on her, reaching out to stir the diamonds in her palm. His hand shifts down after a moment. Covers her thigh; then returns to lift a delicate little sweet cheese pastry.

"I had something sent to your Chicago apartment too," he adds. "I think you'll like it."

Her eyebrows flick -- this time with interest rather than cool mockery. He can see, in the shade under the umbrella where she's removed her sunglasses, the way her eyes sharpen a little. Greedy thing. He sees that, too. Seems to like it about her, that she's so goddamn demanding, so selfish, particularly

when he's fucking her.

If he'd given her something like this at Christmas, the shock would have been even greater. They would have thought it a diamond necklace and been appalled for him, giving that to a woman who was about to be divorced and had just lost a child, a woman something like ten years his senior. And if they'd seen the clamps, chances are no one would even know what to think. No one would be able to wrap their minds around it, make up a story to fit it. Women previously interested in Ivan might have recoiled or been that much more interested.

Hilary is rolling one of the clamps gently between her thumb and forefinger the way Ivan might tease the very nipple it's meant to torture. She is watching him, though.

His finger stirs the diamonds; she grabs it, crushes his finger in amidst the jewels. Playful, really. With a bit of pain. When she lets him go, he touches her thigh.

"Tell me what it is," she says. Demands.

Ivan's teeth part, his lips curl back - a soundless and slight wince. Not in earnest. Still enough to bare a glint of incisor, a flash of snarl. When she lets go, he doesn't touch her thigh. He grips it, the strength in his lean fingers imprinting his grip on her skin.

"No," he replies, mocking in the flatness of his refusal. He looks away from her, as though bored now, so very bored of the topic. "You'll see soon enough. Shall we continue?"

They keep coming back to this. Oh, they'll play the role of gently tolerant father, delighted mother, but they always come back to this. Ivan fascinated by a jewelry store, going in, demanding and having made -- rapidly -- a decadent and scandalous toy because he wants to see Hilary with that string of diamonds across her body, linking nipple to nipple, and the transcendent pain on her face.

She looks good in diamonds. She feels good under his hand when he grabs her thigh, digging his fingers into her, seeing the flash of submission in her eyes that comes when he hurts her, when he pushes back against her playful slaps of rebellion. There's no reason to use such force except that it pleases her so deeply, so quickly. It makes her want him -- that, too, flashes in her eyes.

"It won't be soon," she argues, petulant. "It will be more than a week." She ruffles, tosses her hair off her shoulder. "I'll call Miranda and tell her to open it and tell me what it is."

"Such greed," he chastises her. His hand hasn't left her. It belies the boredom in his tone; the way his eyes wander. He isn't gripping her anymore. He's rubbing the flat of his palm over her thigh, over and over, slow warm circles - playful. "And here I thought those diamonds would satisfy you, at least for a while."

Ivan reaches for his coffee again. He is the very picture of indolence: lounging in that wrought-iron chair, his balance low, one ankle over the other knee. No tie. His collar is open, the skin of his throat and his upper chest smooth and golden, unadorned except by that subtle sunlit sheen of health, of vitality. His throat moves as he swallows; his eyes are a shadow behind his sunglasses, following that delicate little cup back to its saucer.

"Don't have Miranda open it for you," he adds. "Open it yourself. While I watch. On second thought, maybe I should have it sent to the cabin."

If she were more self-aware, Hilary might tell him that she's never satisfied. That it isn't greed, it's entitlement. That she's going to run over the jewelry store and make them show her what he bought for her before they send it. But Hilary isn't self-aware. Hilary thinks that all it takes for her to be a good mother is to adore her child, at least most of the time. She thinks that all it will take for her to be free of Garou chasing her, sniffing her blood and her cunt and aching for her purity, beauty, and fertility is a little threat of suicide. She thinks sometimes that if she closes her eyes for long enough, she can disappear.

Hilary is quite mad. Clever, even brilliant, and yet most of the time she acts like a child -- and a rather disturbed one at that. She's graceful and yet has a nasty, vicious streak that makes her quite ugly sometimes. She smells like light and life and clean air and she's more than a little obsessed with death and decomposition -- what it looks like, what it smells like, what dead flesh feels like when you press your fingertip against it.

She keeps these things even from Ivan, because even he could not love her enough not to be sickened by that. Not to recoil from her. Maybe that's what she should do to turn Grey off -- bring a dead bird into their marriage bed and ask him if he ever wonders what's inside its now-cold, now-motionless breast.

Hilary has good reason to hate herself a little, and sometimes she does. But she's still entitled to diamonds, now and then and whenever she wants. She moves her leg into Ivan's hand, her skirt rucking up a bit, opening her thighs a little.

"I'm sure it hasn't gotten there yet," she muses aloud, half-mocking him. "You could always change the address. Or bring it here. Let me see it now."

"Actually," Ivan murmurs, "I do believe it's still in the process of being made."

He takes his sunglasses off, sets them on the little cafe table. There's a shuttered, sly, satisfied look about him. He takes his hand off her thigh, even though she's moving into him, opening, inviting him in a way that he can't possibly accept at the moment. Or, well. In a way that no sane, law-abiding man would accept. Not that Ivan is either of these things -- but we digress. The point is: he takes his hand off her thigh. He stretches, flexing his arms up and back, opening out those smooth joints, those lean limbs. And then, coiling back into himself, he brushes a hand absently over the front of his shirt; drops the other easily, naturally, back onto her leg.

"We really ought to wait until you're back in Chicago," he adds. "But I suppose if you simply haven't the patience..."

Ivan leaves off there; no promises made. This time his palm warms a stretch higher up on her leg; farther in. His fingers stroke her skin. She's so very soft; so very smooth. He loves how her legs feel when they fold around him. He wonders if she knows that; he decides that she must. She must know how very appealing he finds her.

"What are you going to give me," he asks suddenly, "if I were to give you your present early?"

Once upon a time, Ivan fucked Hilary in front of at least a hundred party guests, then opened her legs up to let several of those guests fuck her, too. That was private property, though. He can't exactly do the same here on the cafe table. He'll get arrested.

Chances are, though, Hilary wouldn't stop him. She might. She might scream and claw at his eyes; she might part those smooth thighs and lay back against wrought iron and take it, if he told her to be quiet. She might stand up, slap him across the face, and take Anton's stroller dramatically away, huffing off.

He never really knows with her.

Hilary hasn't thought to shift closer to him, and he hasn't told her to. She tips her head slowly to the side, hair swirling across her shoulder, and the bangles move across her wrist as she lifts a cup to her lips. Ivan stretches; Hilary watches. There's no appreciation in her eyes, obvious or not. She just stares at him, head tilted, like a cat watching a bird. His hand comes back down and slips slightly up her thigh, under her skirt. She lifts her eyebrows.

"It might depend on what the gift is."

Ivan laughs. Then a beat; then he grows serious. "You know, I don't think I've ever asked: what would you like?"

He never has asked. He's asked her about... ideas. She laid in bed beside him and words spilled out of her, helpless and eager. What he could do to her if he was afraid to her her too hard. Maybe he could hit her more times. Maybe he could hit her with something else. Maybe he could do this. Do that. Maybe she could wear nothing but long silken gloves and he could force her to her knees to suck his cock. She had ideas.

But as for gifts, Ivan's never asked Hilary what she might want. He's bought her jewelry, a mindbogglingly expensive fur coat, at least one economy-destroying diamond, cookware, ballet slippers. He's built her a cabin on the lake to give her serenity away from his cave of a mansion, to give her the peace that only seems to come when she is halfway between air and drowning. He's built her a ballet studio. He's given her technology, despite her apparent inability to make it function. He gave her a car. He took care of everything -- everything -- when Anton was born and turned out to be fair-skinned, pale-haired, light-eyed, undeniably a bastard. He took him away to keep him safe and bought everything they see here, including the lives of the servants who will likely stay with Anton most or all of his life. Ivan has possibly never had a thought of something to give to Hilary that he has not given her indeed.

But he's never asked her what she wants -- for her birthday, for Christmas.

Hilary looks at him, a bit of startle in her eyes. She seems slightly disarmed by the revelation. Then quiet, because the truth is that no one has asked her that in a very, very long time. Jewelry and furs and the accessories of grace and beauty, the part and parcel of what she represents to those who admire her.

It isn't that she can't think of things she wants. He's seen her, full of a childlike demand for whatever her whims or impulses lead to, but that isn't the same. Impulse and whim rule both of them in a way. They ignore thoughts of consequence. The greatest consequence sleeps a couple of feet away, breathing deeply and warmly, and they are ignoring him even now.

A few long moments go by, and Hilary just gives a slight shake of her head.

"I don't really want anything," she tells him quietly, in a tone of her own realization. "I want ...this. You and I. Anton." Her slender shoulders move up, then down. His hand is still beneath her hem. His fingertips still touch her thigh. "This is good."

It's almost strange to think it: of all the things he's asked her, given her, this most basic of questions has never crossed his lips. Maybe it's an expression of their relationship. He's the dom. She doesn't want to be asked. He should just know. Or maybe it's simply because he is, in the end, self-centered and selfish. Arrogant enough to assume he knows what she wants, and has always given it to her. Arrogant, like every one of her men, her wolves, who have showered her with gifts and luxuries that really, in a way, she has always accepted, and taken for granted, without ever really caring.

He asks now. She seems almost startled. For a moment he thinks she might not have anything to say in return; but then she does. And his head turns, and he watches her, and the light is gold and green in his eyes, and

when she's finished his eyes have softened; there's a hint of ache in his face. His hand is still on her thigh. He rubs his thumb over her skin, but there's something gentle about it now, not lascivious but ... loving. Perhaps that's the word. He loves her; that much, he doesn't have to wonder about anymore. You and I, he thinks. Anton. And the truth is, of all the things his money can buy, this is the one thing out of his grasp. He cannot promise her this. Not forever.

So he doesn't. And he doesn't say anything. He touches her, intimately and thoughtlessly. His eyes return to the little pedestrian lane after a while; he sees the street through her eyes. The little buildings, symmetrical, consummately European, built in an era when Russia tried so very hard to be civilized and unbarbaric, when the imperial court spoke French, when the tsars and tsarinas dripped with diamonds. The cobblestones beneath their feet, sunwarmed. The lettering on the signs hung over the doors, Cyrillic, perhaps completely illegible to her. She doesn't really speak Russian. She's trying, but she speaks English, and sometimes when she forgets that language she speaks French. He wants her to drip with diamonds. He pretends so very hard to be civilized and unbarbaric. He thinks of her as his; he would bare his teeth at anyone, anyone, who tries to take her from him.

The sun slides a little farther, the shadows grow a little longer. And eventually he takes a breath like a sigh, lets it out, and sits up.

"Let's go on, shall we?

In the end she demands so much, but wants so little. She finds herself content without understanding it, with the faith only that it can't last. It never lasts for anyone, though. And really, with so many other privileges, what has she to complain about? That this can't last, maybe. But she doesn't. She doesn't even ask Ivan to promise her that it can go on forever. She doesn't seem to be thinking about it.

And luckily, she's far too self-involved to see or understand the ache in his eyes. Hilary just muses, for a moment, on what it is she wants, and then she leans over to him and closes her eyes, nuzzling under his jaw like an animal. This. He and she. Cub. This is good. This is all she wants.

So they sit there, for a few moments. Anton moves around a little in his sleep, nearly smacks himself in the face, finds his thumb without meaning to and has his mouth around it unconsciously before he sighs, curls up again, goes still again. Hilary watches this from Ivan's shoulder and smiles lazily to herself. The servants have long ago finished their coffee and pastries; they carry on very light conversation, most of it in Russian, with an ear to their masters.

Which means they hear, and register, Ivan's words even before Hilary does. They are stirring, ready to go, as soon as Ivan finishes his shall we? and Hilary begins to extricate herself from where she leans against him. And within a few moments, as lazily as possible, the five adults leave the cafe. The tip is left. Miron takes up the job of strolling Anton, and Anton begins to wake, finding himself still on his outing, which he is both extremely bothered by and very curious about, and his diaper is wet and he definitely doesn't like that, and his bottle is cold so he tries to throw it on the ground and only succeeds in shoving it away from him. He sucks his thumb, sucks his blanket, tries to work up the energy to cry and finds it's too much to bother with.

Hilary walks with Ivan. She holds his hand because they can. In her other hand, a thin trail of diamonds escapes her curled palm, glinting in the light. She carries it as carelessly as she would a set of earbuds. Anywhere else, alone, she would be inviting a mugging, but not here. Not with her entourage, and not with this lover. They walk back to the cars, where Anton's bed and toys and gifts are filling all the space that isn't taken up by Anton himself or servants.

The sun is setting as they head back to the little estate. Hilary hangs her arm out the side, feeling the breeze through her fingertips.

The path back to the cars isn't long, but they take a long time getting there. His fingers threaded through hers, the slanting sun golden on their skin, they stroll. Sometimes he pauses in front of a window. Sometimes she nods at something she sees. Sometimes Dmitri or Polina are glad for their meandering path, because it affords them time to buy up those last few impulse purchases on the way back to the cars.

Sometimes Hilary rests her head on her lover's shoulder. Sometimes he slips his arm around her waist, anchoring her to his side. Mine, the hush of his blood whispers to him then. My mate, my female, mine.

At the cars, Ivan rouses himself to play daddy again: he holds Anton for a moment as Miron loads the stroller into the back. His longfingered hands grab the baby under the arms, rather like a man might a small puppy or a doll. He lifts the boy up and looks at him, face to face, eye to eye, curious. Anton grabs at his nose, so Ivan holds him a little farther away. His smile is indulgent. He tells the boy what a fine birthday he's going to have, and then

he hands him to Miron, his own hand reaching for Hilary's.

Once again he helps her into the car. Dancer that she was, graceful as she is, it's not as though she needs it. Then again, she doesn't need a great many of the things she expects. After she's situated, he pauses a moment, looking down at her in the passenger's seat of that tiny, vintage convertible. Something British. A Jaguar perhaps, or a '60s Aston Martin. Ivan doesn't particularly care; he usually likes his toys flashier than this. Not so very classy. Hilary is pure class, though, and

oh, how he does adore her.

On the way back, they leave the top down, but Ivan drives a little slower than usual so Hilary's hair doesn't fly into tangles. She hangs her hand out the side. He glances at the SUV shadowing them now and again, where his cub is being attended by his servants. After a while Ivan turns on the radio, and it's something local, something Russian, some bubbly europop with an undertone of melancholy. Everything in this country has an undertone of melancholy, Ivan thinks.

The sun is at the horizon when they pull up to the house. In the last light of day Anton's home looks neat and rather lovely. Ivan decides that he likes that big bay window in the front. The SUV stops behind them, and Izolda opens the front door, and there's the business of unloading all the things and bringing the baby inside and it's all so dreadfully boring that after Ivan hands Hilary out of the car he kisses her lightly on the lips and says,

"Izolda is going to feed Anton and put him to bed if you want to watch. But go and wait for me upstairs when you're done."

He stays below. If she looks out the window at any point, she'll see him down there, directing the servants to set that there, put that here, that should go in Anton's room in the corner, put the mattress on the rug. Even in this form he's likely stronger than a majority of the servants; in another it wouldn't even be a contest. He never lifts a finger to help, though.

He does, however, bring their dinner upstairs himself, the dishes clinking softly on their tray. Up and up he goes, past the softly lit room where Izolda's getting Anton ready for bed, past the little bedrooms where the servants live. Dmitri is getting ready to drive back out to the little inn where Carlisle and Darya have rooms. Ivan leaves them all to their own devices, trusting them all in so thoughtless and entitled a manner that it doesn't seem like trust at all.

The door to the attic suite opens. And even though earlier in the day he grabbed her hair and forced his cock into her mouth, even though earlier in the day he whipped her with his belt and tortured her with her own pleasure, even though just hours ago he bought nipple clamps for her, Ivan -- for the first time since he can easily remember -- looks at Hilary and doesn't instantly want to fuck her senseless.

He wants to feed her. He wants to keep her warm. In his own, incomplete way, he wants to protect her.

Ivan sets the tray down on the nightstand. He goes over to Hilary, wherever she is. He runs his hands through her hair, and a secret smile curls the corners of his mouth. He likes her hair like this. He bends to kiss her, and then he pulls her against him, their lithe bodies fitting silently and seamlessly together. His arms fold around her. He is reminded of Meillerie, and of their warm little suite in San Miguel. He thinks tomorrow they might take Anton down to the lake together. Or perhaps it'll just be him and Hilary. He thinks maybe he can give the servants a night off, convince her to cook for him.

He thinks he might be happy right now. He thinks maybe, just maybe, he can find a way to make this work.