The Governor’s House

Saeko. Two months of back alleys and locked doors, dodging her father's patrols, pulling her into dark rooms with my hand over her mouth so the guards wouldn't hear. Two months and I still can't look at her without my hands going stupid. She's standing in front of me with her robe half open and the lantern catching her collarbones and the slope of her shoulders and I want her so badly the corridor behind me stops existing. Her father's house. Her father's lanterns, her father's tatami under my boots, and his daughter's skin in front of me while my crew tears through his harbor. It hits my gut like liquor.

Itsumi reads the room and goes. Screen sliding shut. Footsteps receding down the stone corridor. Gone. I set my katana against the wall.

I should be watching the corridor. The garrison is still fighting. My crew is securing the outer compound and the gate squad is taking the yard. A raid to run. None of that is happening because Saeko's robe is open to her waist, red silk pooling off one shoulder, and I am not thinking about the raid. The gold hair ornament is still in. Her lips are dark from biting them. Her skin is pale against the red, and I stare at the line of her chest and the curve of her shoulder until I forget how my own body works.

"Your father's going to kill me," I say, because it's funny, and because the joke is also true in a direction she doesn't know, and because I am pulling her robe off her shoulders while I say it. I am going to hang her father before the smoke clears. I am pulling her robe off.

"My father's busy." Her fingers work my coat open. She's done this before, many times, in rented rooms that smelled like lamp oil and the alley outside. Her hands know the clasps. "He'll be busy for a while."

She has no idea how right she is. Her father is busy because I made him busy. Her father is going to be busy until he's dead.

The futon is against the wall and we don't bother unrolling it. The floor. Her back on the tatami, her robe spread under her, and I'm over her with my coat half off and her legs already wrapping my hips because we have been doing this for weeks and our bodies know the motions by now. Her father's tatami. The thought hits and goes, sharp, involuntary. I don't stop. She pulls my shirt over my head and her nails rake my stomach and the sound I make is not dignified and I do not care.

Her skin. Every time, the first touch of her skin against mine shorts out something fundamental in my head. Her stomach tenses under my hand when I slide down and her breath catches, that specific hitch I've memorized. She wants me to keep going.

I keep going.

Her thighs open for my hand and she's already wet, the heat of her against my fingers making my vision blur. Two months of this and I still lose my breath every time. I press into her, two fingers, and she arches off the floor and grabs my wrist and holds me there.

"Don't tease," she says. Not a request.

I don't tease. I fuck her with my fingers, slow, deep, curling against the spot that makes her spine bow and her mouth open. Her hips rock into my hand. Her grip on my wrist tightens. The wet sounds fill the room, obscene and real, and behind the paper walls the garrison is fighting and losing and I know it and she doesn't. I am in her father's house for the last time. Tadasu won't survive the morning. I take every goddamn second.

"Seijiro." My name in her mouth, half-wrecked. Her composure breaking does more to me than her hand on my cock, which is where her hand is now, pulling me free, stroking, her grip tight and certain. My thinking goes sideways. Something about the garrison, the yard. Gone.

The shōji screens rattle when I push into her.

Full. Deep. The sound she makes is guttural, not the controlled gasps from the rented rooms where walls are thin and neighbors exist. Here in her father's house, in the room where she's supposed to be safe, she is loud. Her back arches off the floor and her hands grab my shoulders and I bury myself in her.

I thrust and the screens rattle. The frames knock in their tracks, a steady clatter that keeps time, and somewhere in my head there's a note that says this sound carries, that her father's guards can probably hear it, that the jitō are certainly hearing it, and the thought doesn't stop me. Accelerates me. Every thrust drives her into the tatami and she takes it, meets it, her hips snapping up to match me.

"Harder."

I give her harder. The tatami slides under us. Her nails dig into my back, scoring lines I'll feel for days, and her legs lock around my waist. I can feel her tightening, that gathering tension. She's close, and I am not far behind, because she's looking at me with those dark eyes and her mouth is open and she's flushed and breathing hard and she doesn't know yet. The harbor is gone. I planned every second of this morning, including coming to find her first. I didn't plan how badly I'd want to stay once I had her. I'm the reason her world is on fire.

She comes with her teeth in my shoulder, biting down hard enough to bruise. The pain lights up my spine and I follow her, burying my face in her neck, hips slamming into hers one last time. The shōji screens knock in their tracks. The lantern swings. My own voice, muffled against her skin.

We lie on the floor. The tatami is askew and her robe is a wreck and I can feel her heartbeat through her ribs, still fast, slowing.

The paper walls catch the light.

Not the lantern. The light is coming from the corridors now, warm and shifting, and the smell of smoke is stronger. The crackle of something burning, close now. The fire is in the building.

Saeko tilts her head back, looks at the glowing screens. "That's not the lantern."

"No."

The shōji screen nearest the north corridor brightens, the paper going translucent with heat, and behind it I can see the light moving, room by room, coming this way.

I'm on my feet. I snatch my katana from the wall, drag my coat over one shoulder, and grab her hand. "We need to go."

"The garrison—"

"Won't help." Two words. All I give her. The rest she'll figure out in about three minutes, and I'd rather she do that outside a burning building.

Her eyes sharpen. She pulls her robe closed, ties it, and takes my hand, and we run.