Mandrake - Yield all
Valerian - I yield

One pair was from Valerian House, kneeling abeyante with lowered heads. One pair was from Mandrake House, faces hidden behind domino masks.

- Kushiel's Justice

He has known her flechettes to part his skin like silk and the brush of a lash to burn like a kiss and leave him aching for more. But this, surely this, must be the choicest and most consummate of her tortures. The ones she devises only for him.

Cersei makes him watch.

Not bound to the wheel nor chained at her feet, either. "You will watch because I bid you to," she had said, trailing her pointed, scarlet nails along his shoulders, "and surely my pleasure should be above your own?" Viciously, she twists his wrist. "Cripple," she hisses. She has never forgiven him for losing his other arm, for marring his beauty and becoming less like her. His stump revolts her, she is not shy to remind him.

And before he could reply, she had begun to move her hips, her scented golden hair falling over his face and he found he could not speak at all.

The boy she has brought has scarcely come of age, some nineteen years out of swaddling and with a belly full of young cock-of-the-walk desires. A tuft of dark hair falls into his laughing black eyes. A well-made lad, he has to admit, with a face made for smiling. He smiles very widely when he sees Jaime lounging on the couch. Jaime wishes for nothing so much as a sword, even a hammer will do, to smash those pretty white teeth and carve the boy a red smile.

"Brother," Cersei says, smiling creamily. The damn bitch has the temerity to dimple at him. "Will you not greet our guest? This is Theon, a scion of House Greyjoy."

He raises a hand in languorous indifference to the stripling. His good one.

Cersei clucks, determined to leech him to the very last drop. "That was ill done, Jaime. Lord Theon will think we have no manners at all."

Slowly he rises and sweeps the boy a bow so elaborate as to be farcical. "Be welcome to my sister's cunt, Lord Theon Greyjoy," he says, gritting out every word. "Tight as silk and sweet as honey." Cersei opens her mouth, no doubt to bid him kneel to greet their guest, lick his boots to a shine perhaps. "Don't push me, sweet sister," he says quietly. "Lest I call upon my own signale."

He has never used the signale with her before. Never, even though the marks of her love have been seared into his body. Somehow they both know that when he finally does, nothing will ever be the same between them again.

The boy raises his brows at Cersei. "Will he be here throughout?"

"He will," Cersei murmurs.

Now the boy looks uncertain. He had not thought past the savor of bedding the Golden Lady of House Mandrake, not as a supplicant as but as a master. Of flaunting it in her brother and lover's face and bragging to his young companions of how the lion sat in silence and let him maul his mate. Cersei no Mandrake cared naught that to his lord father, he was but a pale ghost of the sons he had lost. Cersei no Mandrake had chosen him above all others.

She cups his cheek. "Nothing is free in life, sweet. You ought to have looked more closely into our contract."

"I-I did but I thought you were not serious about this."

"I never jest," she says dryly. "Not where business is concerned. Or," she says, with a nod to Jaime, "desire."

"I thought that you would submit yourself to me!"

"I will. It is not my wont," she says. "I prefer to... shall we say, dominate? I am of Mandrake House, just as my sweet brother is of Valerian. We are well mated in our desires. I make an exception tonight, though." Her green eyes flash and she puts him in his place neatly. "For my brother's sake, not yours."

The boy scowls and tries to stand up straighter, to look more the man and less the trivial worm he really is, caught and crushed between two overpowering desires. "Your signale is Joffrey, Madame."

"My son's name," she says. A fatherless son. She has never revealed his parentage to the world, to do so would bring shame and damnation to them all, even in Terre D'Ange where love is the only canon.

"I am well aware of that and of the other stipulations of our contract." He grows hotter and more flushed with embarrassment by the moment, her cool composure discomfiting him even further. This is a boy touchy of his honor, one who does not like to be played for a fool. "Shall we begin?"

"I thought you would never ask." She inclines her head gravely and Jaime grits his teeth as she slides her arms out of her loose green silk robe. She unknots the darker green sash and it slithers down the length of her body. In the candlelight she is incandescently beautiful and every fiber of his being is screaming at him to take her away, to cut Theon Greyjoy's lecherous eyes out of his face for daring to look at her so, to lay her on the couch and use her until she cannot help but scream for release and mercy, until her whole world is only him...

But he makes himself watch, because Cersei has bidden him to. His sister knows her game too well.

"Use me as you will, my lord," she murmurs, shaking out her golden mane. "Let us begin."

Theon Greyjoy needs no second bidding. With a laugh, he slaps her face so hard her head snaps back and then grabs her by the hair forcing his tongue into her mouth. Yet even as he uses Cersei, even as Jaime's hands ball into fists and his nails leave welts in his palms, she manages to turn her head the tiniest angle and wink at him. And even as she lets her pliant body yield, she lets him know exactly who is in charge.