Not her voice.

The rehearsed sentences dissolved.

Every eye in the room moved to the chair at the head of the long desk — the chair that should have held Eliantra Westing, the territory’s mistress, the woman they’d come to bury diplomatically under a mountain of legal paperwork.

What was seated in it instead was a man.

Black hair. Purple eyes.

Very still. Very awake. The kind of awake that had not come from sleep but from the other direction — the far side of a long night, body fully used and fully satisfied, operating with the settled, utter alertness of something that had fed.

He was not wearing his coat.

Shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow. Forearms on the armrests with the relaxed, occupying weight of a man who had decided this was his chair and was simply waiting for the room to catch up.

His eyes moved across them.

One face. Two faces. Three.

Like reading a menu.

Mouths that had been opening closed. Feet that had been moving stopped. The room did the collective, involuntary flinch of twelve men’s bodies all identifying the same thing at once and re-sorting the morning’s priorities.

Sweat.

On Renwick’s collar. On the back of Castor Helling’s neck. On Orin Brass’s upper lip despite the cool of the early hour.

"You—" someone started.

"Viktor—"

"Viktor Redwood—"

The old maid’s voice came from the doorway behind them, clear and unhurried as a statement of settled fact:

"Please tell what you have to tell to our Lord. He is the son of Count Redwood and the next ruler of this territory — as the husband of Lady Elena."

Every syllable dropped into the room like a stone dropped into still water.

The men looked at each other. At the old woman. At the man in the chair. Back at each other. The rapid, wordless calculation of people realizing all at once that the field has changed shape since they last looked at it.

’Husband.’

’Next ruler.’

"Viktor Redwood—" Orin Brass began, the name already working in his throat toward some appropriate formality, some diplomatic reshaping of the morning.

"Morning wood is a mesh, right?"

The sentence arrived casually. Not directed at anyone in particular. Viktor said it the way a man says something he finds mildly interesting, looking downward as he said it, and the room followed his gaze.

Below the desk.

Not below it — at it. At the space beneath it. At what was happening in the space beneath it.

The sound had been there since they walked in. They had not registered it consciously — the ear, overwhelmed by the visual recalibration of Viktor in the mistress’s chair, had filed it under background. But now, with the gaze of the room directed at it, it resolved:

A sound. Soft. Wet. Rhythmic.

’Schhlck... slurrrp~♡’

The low, muffled pull of a woman’s mouth working with concentrated effort. The faint, slick noise of suction maintained over a long stretch.

The very occasional, involuntary exhale — "Mmmhnnp... unnmhmghh~~♡♡" — that vibrated through the solid wood of the desk itself.

And beneath the desk, visible now that they were looking —

Two women.

Both of them thick. Both of them plump — the kind of bodies built by years and good eating, full through the hips and chest and thighs, the sort of softness that sits warm against a man’s hands and doesn’t stop moving when he lets go.

Their clothing — or what remained of it — had been pulled down to the waist.

Freed breasts hung full and swayed gently with every movement. The stiff, dark nipples peeked through the damp, translucent folds of their ruined blouses, the undersides of their flesh flushed a deep, feverish pink from the heat and friction of rubbing against the insides of his thighs for the better part of the last hour.

Viktor’s pants were down to his knees.

The first woman — the one with the tear-tracks dried on her cheeks and the glazed, rolled-back quality in her eyes that indicated a body running entirely on sensation rather than thought — had his cockhead between her lips.

Not moving frantically. Moving slowly.

’Chuu~... nggh.♡’

The deliberate, exhausted slowness of a woman who has been doing this long enough that her mouth has stopped asking her brain for instructions and is simply continuing because that’s what it does now.

Her cheeks hollowed with each pull. Her throat worked with each swallow.

’Glp... mnn... slrrrp~♡’

The excess — thin and clear and continuous — ran down her chin and dripped from it onto the swell of her heavy, swaying chest, catching in the valley between her breasts, pooling against her skin.

This was Eliantra Westing.

Mistress of Hartfield territory.

The woman they had come to bury.

On her knees under her own desk with tears on her face and his cock in her mouth and both eyes tilted upward — not at the ceiling, not at nothing. At ’him’.

The expression in them was not what any of the twelve men in the room would have predicted. Not shame. Not horror. Not the expression of a woman being humiliated by a circumstance beyond her control.

Something else.

Something that lived in the same neighborhood as gratitude and exhausted surrender, carrying the specific, bodily relief of a woman who has been shouldering a burden alone for a very long time and has finally — in the strangest possible way — been allowed to put it down.

The second woman worked lower. Softer.

’Hmnn~ slrrp♡’

Her mouth pressed to his balls with the devoted, thorough attention of someone who had been told her job and had decided to execute it flawlessly. Her tongue moved in slow, broad strokes.

Her heavy breasts rested against his inner thigh, warm and damp. The firm peaks left faint, glistening stamps on his skin with each small shift of her body.

Her pussy — visible from the angle of the room, thighs spread, fabric bunched useless around her knees — glistened. Swollen and slick, the lips puffy and dark from a night that had clearly involved rather more than kneeling.

The twelve men stood.

Papers in their hands.

Mouths open.

The old maid closed the door behind them.

Viktor looked at the room.

"Lady Eliantra," he said conversationally, addressing the top of her head, "is occupied resolving a territorial matter for me."

His hand moved. Settled in her hair — not gripping, not forcing.

Simply ’resting’. The casual, proprietary placement of a man who has earned the right to put his hand wherever he wants and has decided to put it here.

Her mouth tightened around him at the contact.

A sound came from her throat — low, involuntary, compressed against his cock, vibrating through the whole underside of it.

"Mmphh!~♡"

Her eyes fluttered.

"So." Viktor looked back at the room. At twelve stunned faces. At the papers shaking slightly in several pairs of hands. "Will you start?"

No one moved.

"Sit," he said.

They sat.

One by one — at the long desk. They pulled out their chairs with careful, tight movements. The stiff caution of men trying not to make any sudden gestures in the vicinity of a predator.

Papers were laid flat. Hands folded. Eyes darting — to Viktor’s face, down to the space below the desk, and back to Viktor’s face again.

The wet sounds continued.

Unbothered. Rhythmic. Honest.

"Schlick... glp... slurrrp~♡"