The light in the east wing always found Stiles first.

She stood in front of the tall gilt mirror while two maids worked around her, one on her knees fastening the last pearl button at the back of her thigh, the other holding the tray of jewelry. The dress was new. Deep claret silk, so fine it clung like wet skin. The bodice stopped just beneath her nipples. Two pale, heavy tits sat pushed up and together, the dark pink of her areolas half-visible when she breathed. The skirt was little more than two panels of fabric that started below her navel and ended high on her thighs. When she walked, the inner curves of her ass showed. When she sat, anyone standing close enough could see she wore nothing underneath.

She never did.

“Tighter,” she said, not looking at the girl on her knees.

The maid pulled. The silk bit into the soft underside of Stiles’s ass. She watched herself in the mirror and smiled, slow and private. Thirty years old and still the most expensive thing in the palace. White skin, pink mouth, a body that looked like it had been built for one purpose only. She turned a little so the light caught the heavy sway of her tits.

Behind her, the connecting door opened.

King Jackson came in already dressed for court, a stack of papers in his hand, talking before he even looked at her.

“The northern grain stores are low again. I told them last month—” He stopped. His eyes flicked over her and then away, the way they always did. “Must you wear that? The ministers will be here in an hour.”

Stiles laughed, soft. She walked to him, the silk whispering. She took the papers from his hands and set them on the nearest table without glancing at them.

“They’ll look at the papers, husband. Or they’ll look at me. Either way the work gets done.”

He frowned, that familiar dull crease between his brows. “You shouldn’t speak like that.”

She rose on her toes and kissed the corner of his mouth. Chaste. Wifely. He relaxed immediately, the way he always did when she touched him like a good queen instead of what she actually was.

“Go eat something,” she murmured. “You forget when you’re thinking about grain.”

He left. He always left.

The second the door closed she let the smile drop. One of the maids was still on her knees, staring at the floor.

Stiles hooked two fingers under the girl’s chin and lifted it.

“You. The new one. What’s your name?”

“Hana, Your Majesty.”

“Hana. Lock the door. Then get on the bed and take your mouth out of that uniform.”

The girl hesitated only a second. They never hesitated longer than that.

By the time the first bell for morning court rang, Stiles had come twice—once on the maid’s tongue, once with three of the girl’s slim fingers buried in her cunt while she pulled her own nipples and watched herself in the mirror. She left the girl panting on the sheets, wiped herself with a scrap of the same claret silk, and walked out into the corridor as if nothing had happened.

That was how the day started.

Court was a long marble hall with too many windows. Stiles sat on the smaller throne beside her husband, legs crossed high, one pale thigh fully exposed. The silk panel of her skirt had slipped. She did not fix it.

Minister after minister approached. Trade. Borders. A dispute over a bridge. Stiles listened with her chin in her hand, looking bored, until the old treasurer began to stammer about the deficit.

She uncrossed her legs.

The movement was small. Deliberate. The treasurer’s eyes dropped for half a second to the shadowed place between her thighs and stayed there a heartbeat too long. Stiles’s voice came out sweet.

“The deficit can wait until after luncheon, I think. You look tired, Lord Adams. Come to my solar at two. We’ll… review the figures privately.”

The old man swallowed. “Yes, Your Majesty.”

Jackson nodded, pleased that his wife was taking an interest in the accounts.

Stiles smiled at her husband like a saint.

At two o’clock Lord Adams lasted six minutes. He came with a broken sound against the inside of her thigh while she sat on the edge of her desk, skirts rucked to her waist, one hand in his thinning hair. She didn’t come. She rarely did with the old ones. She only needed them obedient.

When he left, shaking, she called for the young page who had been waiting outside with a letter.

The boy was nineteen. Scared. Hard the moment she told him to lock the door.

She let him fuck her over the same desk, one hand braced on the ledgers, the other reaching back to spread herself for him. He was clumsy and fast. She came anyway, biting her own wrist so the sound wouldn’t carry. Afterward she patted his cheek, told him he had served the crown well, and sent him out with the letter he had originally been meant to deliver.

That was how a kingdom was ruled.

The gardener was later, in the west rose walk, when the afternoon heat made everyone slow. He was sixty if he was a day, knees stained with earth, hands that smelled of soil and cut stems. Stiles had the footmen sent away. She leaned against the stone wall, one foot on the low bench, and pulled the silk aside.

“You have ten minutes before someone comes looking,” she said. “Don’t waste them talking.”

He didn’t. He dropped to his knees like a man at prayer and ate her until her thighs shook. When she pulled him up by the hair and turned around, he fucked her standing, one rough hand on her hip, the other covering her mouth. She came with her forehead against the warm stone, laughing under his palm.

He zipped himself with shaking fingers. She straightened her dress, kissed his cheek the way a queen kisses a loyal servant, and walked back toward the palace as if she had only been inspecting the roses.

No one who mattered knew.

They heard rumors, of course. Servants talked. A stable boy had seen something. A lady-in-waiting had found a stain that wasn’t wine. But rumors were only rumors, and the queen was beautiful and generous and the king was happy. That was enough for most of them.

Derek Hale was not most of them.

He had been the king’s minister for seven years. He was thirty-five, taller than almost every man in the palace, shoulders built from years of riding and the kind of work ministers weren’t supposed to do themselves. He dressed in dark, severe coats. He spoke only when he had something useful to say. He believed in order, in loyalty, in the difference between a throne and a brothel.

He also believed the queen was a problem he could not yet prove.

He had heard the stories. The page who came out of her solar looking wrecked. The gardener who suddenly had extra coin and a dazed look. The way certain older lords left her presence walking carefully. Derek had looked. He had asked quiet questions. He had found nothing that would stand in front of the king without looking like treason and slander.

So he said nothing.

He sat through court with his jaw tight and his eyes on the papers.

He noticed everything anyway.

The way her dress today left the underside of her breasts bare when she leaned forward. The way she said “privately” like it was a joke only she understood. The way she looked at him, sometimes, when the king was reading and not paying attention—slow, considering, as if she were deciding which part of him she wanted first.

After court she found him in the corridor outside the council chamber.

The king had already gone ahead to luncheon. The hall was almost empty.

“Minister Hale,” she said.

He bowed. Correct. Distant. “Your Majesty.”

She stepped closer than protocol allowed. The claret silk brushed his sleeve. Up close she smelled like roses and something warmer underneath, like skin that had been used.

“You look tired,” she said, voice low. “All that loyalty must be exhausting.”

“I am well, Your Majesty.”

She smiled. It was not a court smile. She reached out as if to adjust the medal on his coat and let her fingers drag down the front of his chest, slow, stopping just above his belt.

“You never look at me properly,” she murmured. “Everyone else does. Even the old ones. But you—” She tilted her head. “You look at the wall behind my head. It’s almost rude.”

“I look where it is appropriate.”

“Mm.” She stepped in another inch. Her tits pressed against his arm, soft and heavy and barely contained. “And if I told you it would please your queen if you looked lower?”

He did not move. His voice stayed even.

“Then I would remind Her Majesty that I serve the crown, not her amusement.”

Stiles laughed, quiet and delighted, like he had given her a gift.

She turned as if to leave, then paused, her ass brushing the front of his trousers as she passed—deliberate, a slow grind that lasted two full seconds. He felt the heat of her through the thin silk. He felt himself thicken against his will, sudden and humiliating.

She glanced back over her shoulder, eyes dropping to the line of his cock, and her pink mouth curved.

“How loyal,” she said softly. “And how hard.”

Then she walked away, hips swaying, the two panels of her skirt flashing pale ass with every step, and left him standing in the corridor with his hands clenched and his pulse in his throat.

Derek stayed where he was until he could walk without it showing.

He went to his office. He sat behind the desk. He stared at the same report he had already read twice.

He told himself, again, that she was the queen.

He told himself that rumors were not proof.

He told himself that the next time she pressed that body against him he would step back, bow, and leave.

His cock was still half-hard when the afternoon bells rang.

Somewhere in the palace, Stiles was already late for her next appointment.

She was never really late.

She just had better things to do with her holes than sit through another lecture about grain.