It hurts. Much worse than having her underclothes torn off.

She needn't have worried that she might not like to be hurt.

"Please, my lord, fuck me."

"Not often I hear a girl say that."

He lets go of her hair, wraps his hands around her thighs, picks her up and pins her against the wall beside the window.

"I think I like it. Say it again."

"Please fuck me, oh, please, I want you, I've wanted you since the first time you touched me, I want you to take me, I want you to hurt me, I want -"

She can have what she wants. Hard, fast, violent. He can hear her bones crack when he slams her into the wall.

It's perfect.

"Thank you, my lord," she gasps, and then her head hits the wall a little too hard and she's too dizzy to put words together anymore.

When he's done, he sets her gently back down in the chair where she was working when he found her, and he runs his bloodstained hands through her hair and heals her cracked bones and bruised head and bloody wounds.

"I like it up here," he says. "I wonder where you'll lead me next."

And he puts an illusion over his crumpled, bloodstained clothes, and turns and leaves the room.

She sits there in a daze, feeling his seed trickle out of her, remembering that he always murders his girls with spectacular violence on the rare occasion that he gets one pregnant. She'd better start drinking contraceptive tea every morning.

That... was much better than she could possibly have hoped for. He healed her. He values her. He likes that she wants him.

Well. Time to arrange her entire life around that, then.

Her shift and wraps are irrecoverable; she uses them to wipe most of the rest of the blood off herself. Her dress, although spotted with blood and soaked in ink, is at least structurally intact; she puts it back on. Her day's work is also a total loss. She dutifully reports her inexcusable clumsiness to the junior clerk, who looks at her bedraggled state and sighs and tells her that given her flawless record she's allowed to fall down the stairs once in a while without getting whipped for it. She skips dinner and stays up half the night rewriting everything she was supposed to have done that day, and by the next morning she's caught up.

She seeks out interesting places to hide. Different parts of the eastern towers; secluded gardens; a portrait gallery only accessible by an awkwardly cramped spiral stair from a small and mostly useless corridor behind the main dining hall... she wonders what that one's about, when she finds it. There's a room past the far end of the gallery with a lovely comfortable window seat that gets excellent light all day and offers a beautiful view of the woods to the south. After spending one afternoon there, she hauls a folding desk up the awkward stair and starts doing all her work in that window seat, with her ink bottle securely seated in the round well at the corner of the desk. Her lap-desk is still more comfortable for most purposes, but she's not going to lose another entire day's work and set of clothes unless the Emperor deliberately decides to ruin them.

And, three days after their last encounter:

"There you are! Well done. I haven't seen this place in centuries."

He sits next to her on the window seat and runs his fingers through her hair.

She carefully caps her pen and puts it down and nudges the desk away.

"Good morning, my lord," she murmurs.

"You like your privacy, don't you? Take off your dress."

"Yes, my lord."

She wriggles out of the dress, leaving her in a plain white shift with nothing at all underneath it.

He laughs. "Have you been leaving your loins bare all this time just to stop me from ruining another set of underwear for you?"

"Yes, my lord," she admits.

"But you still wear this," he tugs on the shift, "because...?"

"It would be noticeable if I went without, and who am I to deprive you of the pleasure of tearing my clothes off?"

He gathers her into his lap. "Very thoughtful of you," he says. "As for me, I wore illusions today."

In the half-second it takes him to tear the shift off her body and drop it on the floor, all the many formerly solid layers of his clothing turn to insubstantial vapour. Wreathed in dissipating glamour-mist, he pulls her down onto his cock.

"Oh, my lord..."

"What a lovely creature you are."

This time, he fucks her slowly. The only pain is the bruises his fingers press into her hips.

She liked being violently raped but she likes this, too, the not-quite-gentleness, the inescapable strength of his hands, the way he feels inside her.

"Thank you, my lord," she breathes.

"You haven't mentioned our little trysts to anyone, have you. Are you ashamed of yourself, Niamira?"

Her breath catches; she shivers with fear.

"Y-yes, my lord," she manages, because what else is she going to do? Lie? She does still value her life. She just hopes he's not offended.

"Why? It's not like you had a choice. I hold the power of life and death over you and every other human in the world. If you displease me I could put out your eyes and cut off your hands and feet and have you strung up outside to be eaten alive by crows."

She shivers again.

"I'm - I'm ashamed of wanting you," she whispers. "I don't want anyone to know -"

He laughs.

"If I wanted to," he says, squeezing her hips, "I could have you in my lap like this in my throne room. Everyone at court could see the way your face looks when I fuck you. Everyone could see you sitting on my cock, naked and willing, begging me to hurt you. Everyone could hear the beautiful sounds you make when I crack your ribs. Would you still want me after that, my lovely Niamira?"

"Yes, my lord," she says, shuddering. "I - please don't do that, please..."