The knock came like a hammer laid gently against velvet—three precise raps that still managed to vibrate my bones.

I didn’t move.

Cassie didn’t either. We were a tangle of limbs and heat and the slow, satisfied soreness that says yes, you did that, you did all of that. Her thigh was hooked over mine, her breath a soft, even ribbon against my throat. The room smelled like us—marshmallow-warmth gone to sugar at the edges, storm-kissed rain gone quiet, and the clean bite of citrus buried under vanilla that had no business being this tender. It was indecent and perfect. I wanted to live here forever.

“Majesty. Consort.” Roran’s voice through the door, iron wrapped in courtesy. “Urgent summons.”

My three-tap started up against Cassie’s hip bone before my brain caught up. She caught my pinky in her sleep and mumbled, “Breathe,” against my skin like a prayer she’d say even unconscious. I breathed. I did not think about how many times her mouth had been exactly there last night. I failed at not thinking about it almost immediately.

We did not answer.

The latch turned.

The door opened.

Roran crossed the threshold in a single, decisive stride and then failed to stride any farther, because the bed was right there and we were very, very naked.

He pivoted so fast to face the opposite wall you’d think it had threatened him. “My eyes,” he said, voice a little rougher than iron, “are elsewhere.”

Cassie jolted, the instinctive human part of her reaching for a sheet that wasn’t there. She froze halfway when her brain remembered the oath and the man and the new shape of the world. Her hand dropped back to my waist. Her breath tickled my collarbone. “Good morning to you too, Captain,” she said, dry as salt.

“Morning,” I echoed, because if I didn’t start smiling I was going to start laughing, and either would get me killed.

“Summons from the High Lady,” Roran said to the far wall. “Immediate audience.”

“Of course it is.” I stretched, lazy on purpose, just to be obnoxious. Every movement pulled at little new aches that made my cheeks heat in ways that had nothing to do with embarrassment. Cassie’s fingers tightened on my hip in a warning that sounded exactly like don’t you dare start something we can’t finish. She was right. Infuriating.

“We need five minutes,” Cassie said, captain’s steel of her own in the request.

“Three,” Roran said, which I’m pretty sure was his version of flirting.

I rolled onto my back, made no move to cover anything, and squinted at the hazy shape of him. “Since you’re already here, Captain, thoughts on yesterday’s… diplomatic outreach?”

“Mira,” Cassie hissed, scandalized and delighted.

Roran’s shoulders tightened. “I am not commenting.”

“On the outreach,” I said innocently, “or on the diplomacy?”

“Majesty.” He somehow put four entire lectures into the syllables.

Cassie pushed up to sit, hair wrecked and glorious, unbothered by the lack of fabric now that she’d decided to be. Her mouth curved. “He liked the diplomacy.”

He coughed, which for Roran is the same as fainting. “I am conveying an urgent summons,” he said, and if his ears had been any redder they’d have set off a fire alarm.

“Fine, fine.” I slid off the bed in one fluid, petty, queenly motion and padded across the rug. The chill of the floor made everything sharper. I felt Cassie’s gaze track the lines I knew last night had left on me and almost tripped over my own smugness. I threw open the wardrobe, grabbed charcoal trousers and a cream silk shell and a blazer that said I can navigate your traps with a smile. Behind me, fabric whispered as Cassie followed suit—black slacks, ice-blue shirt, blazer sharp enough to cut.

“Do we have to look like we slept?” Cassie asked, buttoning with clinical precision that did absolutely nothing to hide the rasp in her voice.

“We don’t,” I said, and crossed to her. “Mask on.”

She hooked our pinkies, a small, private catch in the middle of panic. “With you.”

I lifted my hands and let glamour slide over us both like warm water. It smoothed the pillow-crease from Cassie’s cheek, softened the flush along my throat, coaxed my hair out of the wreckage and into something that read deliberate rather than ruined. I left the crescent my fangs had sealed at her neck unglamoured—silver-faint and moon-cool just above her collar. Let them see. I didn’t bother hiding the matching constellation she’d put on my shoulder.

Roran, hero that he is, kept his eyes glued to a very interesting patch of paneling. “If you’re finished attempting to murder me,” he said, “the High Lady waits.”

“Attempting?” Cassie murmured. “We’ll do better next time.”

I slipped into my heels and did a fast inventory—ring, earrings, nothing else to carry but nerve. “Captain,” I said sweetly, “would it help your recovery to know that your queen is in excellent health this morning?”

“It would help my recovery to know you will be on time,” he deadpanned. But when I slid past him to the door, his mouth betrayed him with the flicker of something that lived perilously close to a smile.

“We’ll be on time,” Cassie said, stepping to my right automatically, the tiniest half-step forward that told the world who she’d put between me and teeth. She glanced at Roran. “If you’re lucky, we’ll even behave.”

He didn’t blink. “No one here is lucky.”

I grinned at him over my shoulder. “You’re ours now, Captain. We’re going to civilize you.”

“I am already civilized.”

“Then we’ll make you fun.”

“Gods forbid,” he muttered.

We were almost out the door when Cassie leaned in, too close to be proper, just close enough to be cruel, her lips finding the shell of my ear with merciless precision. “If she keeps us longer than an hour,” she said, voice pitched so low only I could hear, “I am going to list to Roran every single thing I did to your mouth. In order. With annotations.”

My knees did something undignified. “That’s a war crime.”

“Then don’t make me deploy it.”

My scent hiccuped—the barest flare of sugar and rain that made Roran’s nostrils twitch despite himself. He pretended it didn’t happen. He is very good at pretending. He is less good at hiding the way he likes us.

“Move,” he said, and stepped out to clear the corridor, the line of his shoulders saying he would march the whole court into the sun if it bought us thirty more seconds. Loyal. Ours. A wall we could lean on.

I took Cassie’s hand as we followed, three taps under my skin leveling out to two, then one. “Ready?” I asked.

She squeezed once. “Always.”

The door swung wide. The smell of last night stayed behind. The day reached in with clean hands and grabbed us by the crowns.

Roran set a brutal pace. We matched it—mostly because Cassie’s hand at the small of my back made it feel less like marching and more like being piloted.

Servants tried not to stare; nobles failed better. The marble carried our footfalls like a drumline. My three-tap started up against my thigh; Cassie hooked a pinky and cut it to a single calm beat. Roran clocked the exchange without turning his head, adjusted half a step so he screened us from a knot of courtiers, and kept moving.

“Borrow my nose?” I murmured.

Cassie’s eyes flicked to mine. “With you.”

I opened the little tether between us. For a heartbeat she had my senses: the air still thick with the salt-slick tang of female sex and arousal mixed; our signatures—bright citrus, vanilla, marshmallow heat—braided and altered, like we’d been written into each other’s skin; and under it the cool, moon-metal trace of the crescent claim pulsing faint at her throat.

“Glamour doesn’t touch scent,” she breathed.

“I know,” I said. “I want them to know.”

Her mouth went feral at the corner. “Let them.”

A shadow peeled off a pillar ahead and fell into step behind Roran—Kael, lean and watchful, eyes flicking once to the crescent at Cassie’s neck, once to the way our hands brushed and didn’t quite link. “Majesty. Consort,” she said, voice soft as a knife being sheathed. The air around her tasted like cold iron and pine sap. Her nostrils flared, the tiniest smile tilting. “You smell… braided.”

“New perfume,” Cassie said blandly.

Kael’s eyebrow made a liar of her. “Mm.”

“Captain,” Cassie said, voice silk over steel, “you barged into our bedroom.”

“You did not answer,” Roran said, not missing a stride.

“We were busy,” I offered.

“You were asleep,” he corrected, deadpan.

“For a value of asleep,” Cassie murmured.

His ears went a dangerous shade—amusing, not medical. “We are on the clock.”

“We are the clock,” I said. “And we’re resetting you.”

“That is not how clocks work.”

“It is in our court.”

He didn’t sigh, which I respected. He did angle his body to block a prying lord’s line of sight and slipped us down a side corridor. Professional to the bone. Ours. Kael mirrored the shift without needing a word, a second wall that smiled with her eyes and kept her hands near the knives she pretended not to carry.

“Roran,” I said, gentler. He didn’t glance back, but the tendons along his neck eased. “We’re your queens. We know you take our safety seriously; we wouldn’t have you if you didn’t. But you can also be a person with us. This is our court; we set the precedent. You don’t have to be a statue.”

“I prefer to be a wall,” he said.

“Fine,” I said. “A wall that smiles sometimes.”

“Walls do not—”

“Shh,” Cassie said, wickedly kind. “Let the wall learn.”

A pair of junior courtiers rounded a corner, saw us, and pinwheeled into a bow so abrupt one of them squeaked. Roran’s hand twitched toward his sword purely because their grace was a public hazard; Cassie hid a laugh in a cough; I kept my face neutral and glamorous. Kael’s gaze cut to the bowing pair, then back to the silver crescent on Cassie’s throat. Her approval was a knife’s nod: understood. Claimed.

“Also,” I went on, “since you’re ours now—captain of our guard, personal bodyguard—you’re going to be stationed in our spaces. Sometimes inside the suite. Sometimes… in the room. You will see us naked. You will hear when we’re—” I let the sentence open its own door and saunter out. “You don’t have to bolt your eyes to the ceiling like it might attack you. We accept that your job is to keep us safe and normal people do normal things. We trust you not to act inappropriately because you won’t. Your first instinct is always our safety.”

He took two measured breaths. “Correct.”

“Look at that,” Cassie said, pleased. “We got a whole sentence.”

“I will post outside,” he insisted.

“Sometimes,” I said. “Sometimes inside. Hinge wards fail at the worst times. If you happen upon… normal things, you don’t need to be ashamed. You can say ‘I’m here’ and then continue being a terrifying wall.”

A beat. Then: “I will announce myself,” he said. “Loudly.”

“You did knock,” Cassie allowed. “We ignored you.”

“My point.”

We passed under a run of sunlit windows; the light painted Cassie’s throat in pale fire. Her scent went bright-citrus pleased; mine answered with a soft sugar spark that Roran pretended not to notice and absolutely noticed. Kael’s nostrils flared once, a tiny satisfied inhale, then she drifted a step farther back to give us space and menace in equal measure.

“For training purposes,” Cassie said, all innocent malice, “if we’re in the middle of—diplomacy—and you must enter, you’ll say…?”

“‘Captain entering,’” he said, perfectly grave.

“Too clinical,” I said. “Try, ‘Do not stab me; I bring politics.’”

One corner of his mouth betrayed him. “I will consider it.”

“Progress,” Cassie murmured. She brushed my shoulder where a collar hid a mark and added, casually lethal, “And if anyone on this floor breathes wrong at her, you break their nose.”

“That was already the plan,” he said. Simple. True.

I exhaled. For all his iron, he made me feel less like a target and more like a person with a perimeter. Between Roran’s wall and Kael’s shadow, I could be a queen without teeth bared. Or with them, if I chose.

We turned the last corner. The air changed—cooler, heavier—the way it always did outside the Solar. Selene waited by the carved doors, spine perfect, calm like a balm. Her eyes took in everything: our business-casual armor, the faint glamour sheen, Roran’s squared shoulders, Kael’s quiet orbit, the way Cassie’s hand hovered a fraction in front of me without touching, the silver crescent at my consort’s throat.

She stepped in, brushing her fingers once across my elbow—just enough to ground, not enough to scold. “Stand straight,” she said quietly. “And say only what you choose to be bound to.”

“Not ominous at all,” I muttered.

Her mouth curved. “Survive the next ten minutes and you can be insufferable about it later.”

Cassie’s knuckles grazed mine—our smallest ritual. Roran nodded to the door guards; the bolts drew back like a held breath. Kael peeled to the flank, where she could watch faces first and knives second.

“Mask on,” Cassie whispered.

“With you,” I said.

Roran pushed the doors. The court weather rolled out to meet us. We went in.