Castian still wasn’t waiting for her at the Dove when she arrived, and adding to her dismay, Delilah was.

“Hi, Maeve,” she said, grinning. “I figured I’d join you in skipping guildwork today to have some girl time. That is, unless you’re busy.”

“Stop it,” Maeve said curtly. “I won’t want to spend time with you if you plan to spend the rest of our friendship harassing me.”

Nevertheless, she sat at the table -- Delilah had ordered her a glass of mead already.

“Sorry,” Delilah laughed. “I just don’t understand why you’re so uptight about this. You know you’re an adult, right? You’re allowed to be in a relationship? None of us would think it’s weird except that you’ve been furiously denying it.”

Maeve winced -- ‘none of us,’ as in, the guild had been gossiping as usual.

“It’s complicated. We’re not…” She couldn’t find the right words. “We’re not. It’s not what you think.”

“So it’s just sex, then,” Delilah said casually.

She flushed. “I -- don’t be so loud! Not… not really. I’m sorry, I really can’t go into it.”

There were echoes of disappointment over Delilah’s face, and Maeve felt guilty. She was Maeve’s first friend in the guild -- in the town, really. And though she’d been hiding a lot about what had ostensibly been a sort of double life, this was the first time she’d had to do so bluntly, to Delilah’s face. Her friends hadn’t pried about how she’d gotten involved with the kidnapping and Ashton, but that, she felt, was their choice to respect her discomfort. This was different.

After a moment, Delilah smiled, a little reserved. “All right. We all have secrets. But I want to be the first to know when you do have something to share.”

Relieved, Maeve smiled back. “What, do you think I’d talk to Grant about something like that?”

Delilah laughed. “That would be pretty funny if you tried.”

Maeve’s mead tasted a little sweeter after that, and they spent the afternoon hours over a pleasant, lazy lunch.

After a bit of time, Delilah looked over to the doors of the Dove -- Maeve followed her gaze and saw Castian, entering.

Delilah quickly took some coin out to leave on the table and moved to leave as he spotted them, smiling and walking over. Maeve wanted to reassure her that she didn’t need to go, but after talking to Sylvia, she really needed time with him alone.

“Thank you,” she whispered, and Delilah winked.

“Hello,” Castian said, approaching the table.

“Hi,” Delilah said, grinning. “Perfect timing. She’s already got some drink in her.”

Damn her. Maeve shot her a glare.

Castian laughed. “Excellent. I’ll need to do the same, then.”

“Bye, Maeve,” Delilah smiled, and quickly left them.

He took the seat across from her, and her pulse quickened.

“So your wits are already dulled enough from mead?” Castian said, smiling, and very suddenly Maeve’s body remembered her unfulfilled desires from the previous night. A part of her wanted desperately just to sink into that, but she needed to focus on what was important.

“I --” Maeve started. “I’m OK. But… I was summoned for an interview. For…”

She was afraid that he would be surprised, or upset, but his expression barely changed.

“I was wondering when they would contact you,” he said. “You’ll have to tell me how it went… somewhere we can have privacy.”

The juxtaposition of nerves from the weight of the topic plus Castian inviting himself up to her room made her heart race as she gathered her things and paid her tab. There was a part of her that was so frustrated she couldn’t just be ascending the stairs with him like any other pair of people, going to have a simple bit of intimacy with no other cares or complications.

Closing the door behind them as they got to the room, Maeve sat on her unmade bed and Castian took the chair in the corner.

“What did they say?” he asked.

She took a breath. “Sylvia -- the mageguard -- she didn’t ask a lot of questions. She knew that I had help getting into Foxtail and guessed it was you -- or, Kairon. But I told her I was the only one who had the transformation potion.”

“Where did you say you got it from?” Castian asked.

Maeve hesitated. “She asked me that as well. I told her I made it.”

Castian nodded. “Did she reveal anything of interest to you?”

Oh -- of course. It had been an opportunity for Maeve to find out information about the investigation as a whole. She’d been so nervous and focused on lying that she hadn’t been able to take advantage of that. She tried to think.

“They’re trying to stay tight-lipped,” she said. “I think they just know anything that Ashton knew, and I’m betting they already had him in a truth spell.”

“Reasonable assumptions,” Castian smiled.

“...You don’t seem worried,” Maeve said quietly.

“Why would I be?”

“Because it seems like they want to find you, and…” Her throat tightened with the unspoken fear of him being somehow taken, detained away…

Castian’s grin edged towards a knowing sort of cruelty. He stood, and walked towards her, sitting next to her on the bed, so close. She looked up at him with wide eyes, her breath beginning to come shorter.

“You’re worried for me,” he murmured, bringing a hand up to stroke her hair, and through the gentle touch she could feel the facsimile of kindness. “You’re the one in danger right now, sweetheart, and I’m the one holding the cards. And yet you’re trying to be so careful to protect me…”

His words were starting to tingle inside of her, alongside shame and confusion. How was she more in danger than him? What had she done? What did Castian know that she didn’t?

“What -- what…” She tried to talk but his hand was sliding down her neck, his thumb grazing over her collarbone.

“Think about this, Maeve.” He started leaning in, brushing his nose against the side of her cheek so his lips sat near her ear, intimately. “You don’t really know who I am. You don’t even know where I live, what I do. You don’t know how much I already know about this case.”

Though she was already feeling tingles curling in her stomach, the truth of his words drove a spike through, and twisted. The gooey warmth she’d been feeling at his hints towards domesticity grew brittle.

He was right. They had never been equal partners in this adventure. Even if Sylvia ultimately made her speak the truth -- what would she say? That she was a helpless, fawning pawn to a man she knew next-to-nothing about? It would put her in danger of being found out, and drive him away.

Castian’s lips dragged across her ear, his hands each moved to her sides, following the curve of her waist down with a stronger touch.

“You’re so keen to help me,” he murmured. “I can and will feed you lies to guide what you say and do here. Will they put you in peril? It hardly matters, because you’ll agonize over what the right choice is and ultimately decide to do what I say so you can keep me.”

Maeve was gasping, yielding too easily as he roughly pushed her down, climbing on top of her.

“Do you want to know why?” His voice was getting rougher, and to her horror he was untying his pants, pushing them down -- she wasn’t undressed at all -- looking away -- “Because I’m the only one who can give you what you need.”

He was right -- he was right --

Castian had stopped undressing to lean down and catch her lips, hard, making her suck in a breath through her nose. He bent back up, towering over her, the both of them fully clothed except for his pants pushed askew down his hips, revealing the cotton of his undergarments the lacing on which he began to pull loose.

He extended his hand in front of her face, and her body flooded with arousal in anticipation -- arcane glow surrounding it, tightening of desire between her legs --

“Nothing is stopping you from going out to find someone else,” he said, “and they’d bring a pretty thing like you to their bed, strip you down, touch you, kiss you… But you’d be faking all of your little moans and whimpers, making excuses for why you’re not wet.”

She could barely even imagine becoming intimate with another person, and the disappointment echoed in the fantasy of someone who handled her tenderly and straightforwardly, who spoke sweetly to her, who asked instead of took --

Castian wasn’t releasing the control magic, just holding it there to twinkle in front of her eyes, following his gently swaying fingers and feeling her brain wanting to just absolutely suck it in. Two points on her body radiating yearning: the space behind her eyes, and between her legs. In her chest was a vicegrip.

“You’re an addict, Maeve,” he said, light and patronizing. “You’ll never be able to have sex again without being desperate for cruelty and control. Ruined for everyone else.”

She moaned, the first sound pried from her, and he made an appreciative noise in kind. The desperation he spoke of was already on her lips --

“Say ‘please,’” he said, smiling, moving his glowing fingers back and forth across her vision. “Prove me right. Surrender to the truth --”

“Please,” Maeve whimpered. “Please --”

The spell cast, blue-white light engulfing her vision as though clouding her eyes with an arcane film, and sinking in to the exact spot that she had been craving it, behind -- the enchantment beginning to settle in, numbing her deliciously, sparks of pleasure deep within her skull at the feeling of getting what she needed -- then even that, everything dulling to a hum perfectly tuned to blanking her thoughts --

Her breaths were no longer tight, but easy, chest rising and falling, swimming in control and relief.

Still.

“Yes,” Castian hissed.

Her enspelled eyes were fixed on the place where his hand was, now seeing his face unfocused, barely even processing what she saw. Little pulses of pleasure at his expression, not understanding but just automatically reacting. His hand reached into his loosened pants and pulled out his cock, wrapping around it and beginning to stroke, fast.

Breaths made magically even, watching and only getting the barest recognition of it, feeling her consciousness shrink even further inside, thoughts blanking.

The hand pleasuring himself glowed again, tuning the spell, and she felt it clench harder around her mind, squeezing a noise out of her mechanistically as her eyes seemed to fully blank out into swirling blue magic --

Totally subsumed into the enchantment --

Body moving, unaware --

Gone --

Maeve awoke from the spell to a dark room, realizing that her body was stiff and aching -- she was sitting up, her back arched to push out her chest. As she started to remember what had happened, she let her spine collapse and go convex, finally resting, feeling soreness in her lower back.

Castian had left some time ago, it seemed, and by the look of it, it was past nightfall now.

…He had -- he had --

She flushed deeply. The memories of what he did after enchanting her were a haze, but she knew what had happened. He had used the sight of her, enspelled, for his own satisfaction.

Despite the turmoil he’d sewn in her, manipulating her doubts and emotions about the very real danger of what was to come with the continued investigation, the fact that he could find that satisfaction simply by controlling her was sinuously and deeply thrilling.

He had surely been counting on her being so aroused by that. It only served to prove him right about her lack of desire for any other intimacy -- a crushing thing to admit. There were awful little wonderings of what she’d do if he was gone -- if he was captured, if she broke free of him, or if he decided to --

Maeve needed to go to bed.

She began stripping off her leathers and clothes. As she moved to pull off her shirt, her hand brushed against a part of the fabric in the front that was wet, and sticky.

At once, she gasped, torn instantly and intensely between twin desires to rip it off of her and cast it far away, and to slide her own hand down between her legs.

Ultimately, shaking, she carefully peeled it off and laid down to shut her eyes, tightly.

It was Maeve’s first day back to work since the trip to see her parents, and truthfully, she’d been really looking forward to it. She didn’t do well just sitting around, and she especially didn’t want to spend another day waiting for something else in her life to go askew.

“Look who’s finally joining us,” Grant said as she came in, and Maeve couldn’t help but smile.

“We don’t have a lot today,” said Haggr, who was at the postings board with Delilah.

“I really don’t want to take a low ranked job,” Delilah complained.

“Well, what is there?” Maeve asked, joining them.

The only job at their rank was one of the ones that came in ever so often by a poster too lazy to hire an actual private adventuring group. It was a request to accompany them to one of the snowy peaks a week’s travel out, essentially serving as bodyguards for a pleasure trip. The coin it offered -- 150 gold -- seemed like a lot at first glance but was well underpaying for something of that scale.

No one was keen on it.

“Well, what is there for others?” Maeve asked, glum as the rest of them now.

‘MOVING’

‘I need some help relocating all of my belongings to a new house, and could use some help packing and transporting everything across town!’

‘25 gold’

“At least she’s not underpaying,” Delilah grumbled, and took the parchment off the board.

Realistically, it would have made more sense for the four of them to split up and take different jobs, and everyone knew it. But they’d all gotten very used to spending their work together, and so the overly-equipped band of them showed up at the nice old human lady’s house to help her move some crates and boxes.

It ended up being worth it, though, because she had quite a bit crammed into her small cabin, and one of the group constantly needed to be doing the job of listening to her reminisce about each item that they packed and moved.

You win some and you lose some in guildwork, Maeve figured, and this was at least a charming way to lose one. Tomorrow, there’d be another set of jobs.

They finished up around dusk and went their separate ways -- Maeve wanted to bathe the sweat off of herself -- but they agreed to meet for drinks at Snowfall later.

“Maeve Loravyr,” called the innkeeper as she walked in the Dove.

She winced. For once, she desperately hoped that this was an inane letter from her parents.

Instead, on the envelope was the wax seal of the Academy. When she opened it at a table, the parchment glowed faintly with a spell.

Fuck.

‘Maeve,’

‘It’s been a long time, and I truly hope you’re doing well. Your parents mentioned that you were in the city last week; I hope you enjoyed your visit.’

‘I’m writing because I’ve been made aware of something that we need to discuss. I’m worried for you, Maeve, and I hope it is just a simple matter of putting an old man’s fears to rest. Please -- come visit the Academy in the next few days, if you can.’

‘Aelth Wynoake’

As her eyes passed across the familiar name of her old teacher, the spell activated and the words disappeared, leaving her holding a blank piece of parchment.