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“Lucrezia?”
“Is that my brother?”
“Yes.”
“The brother who loves me?”
“The same.”
“Come in, then. See my wedding gown.”
Golden and resplendent, Lucrezia is spilled like sunlight across her bed. The radiance of high noon, all rosy cheek and supple curve. A made-mockery of the tasteless ostentation which ornaments her chambers.
Cesare has dreamt of this sight more times than can be considered decent. What comes after, too: his skin against her skin; his mouth pressed against the curve of her neck; his lecherous want, taken, sated.
But he has never let himself imagine it past lauds—never let his thoughts linger into prime, nor his mind drift. She is his greatest love, but she is his sister foremost. To be taken care of and protected.
Even if that is against himself.
He turns away, back towards the empty corridor. He cannot recall why he knocked upon her door to begin with.
"God—"
As in his dreams, she answers him: "Come closer, brother."
And unable to deny her anything, no matter that he ought, Cesare turns back.
"My gown," she muses downwards, and he realizes for the first time that she is laying atop it, the dress she is to be wed in. Preserving her modesty, only just. Keeping her bodily from him. "Do you approve?"
He sees nothing but her.
"The gold is—divine."
Cesare closes the door before anyone can look in and know it so for themselves. When he again faces the room, she remains, vision made flesh. He half expected to wake, reach out for a woman whose hair had been wrought of the wrong shade of gold, whose features could not hold a candle to those of the sun—put his mouth to her until he could convince himself that it was she who brought him to rousing from sleep.
But there, bare atop her mattress: Lucrezia.
His want unfurls within. Little licks down his thighs, up his spine. Thought of what comes after encroaches, her taste on his tongue, her fine sweat mixed with his—
"I—I should leave, sis."
Lucrezia's eyes sparkle. Quick, a sure parry, a wooden piece slid: "Why? Am I ugly, brother?"
The question confounds him. He ought look away; he ought have already left. But to do so after being asked such would be blasphemous.
"The man who makes that claim will lose his tongue," Cesare tells her. His sight for looking upon her without gratitude. His heart for dimming her bright even a moment's time.
His sister sees as much in his bearing. Calf aloft in the way a hand hovers above a strategy board, she goes on, "My foot. It is ungainly? Too large, perhaps?"
"Your foot is beautiful," he cuts in before she has finished the last word in full.
A smile from her, small and kept and lovely.
Whatever match he entered once knuckle met wood, his every move since seems to have been played to her satisfaction. As though she has seen this all come to pass already—each block, each hesitation, each feint. The keen of wile, even as she looks up at him with the lustrous face of a just-hung star.
"You can't tell from there," she insists. The gown dips low across her front as she pushes forth, then extends her leg out to bridge the space between them. "Feel it."
Steeling himself, Cesare takes a step forth. Another.
He has the curve of her foot snug against his palm before he has made the decision to reach for her. It is softer to touch than any trick of his mind could conjure from the gloaming, free of callus, free of flaw.
Her gaze is intent upon him, so he does his best to keep his eyes from following the natural path up, up her calf, up her thigh, between, where his periphery can just make out the blush-pink of—
Back to her eyes, hasty. "Is this a game?"
"It is a game of want and wanting," Lucrezia intones, pleased as a cat with a mouse by the tail.
Her lips remain parted as his fingers press into the arch of her foot, an effort not to let his hand stray.
"The toes are splayed a little," she acknowledges. Like it is a bad thing, to have room enough for a tongue between. "God has made better feet, I'm sure."
His response is yet again too eager, though he has never paid any mind to the feet of another. "Not that I have found."
His sister giggles, a light, lilting sound, more mellifluous than choir song. It has not changed from their youth, and it eases something in him, to play more simply with her than this confusion she brings to war within him.
"You are a connoisseur of feet," she chimes.
"Yes," he chuckles, a wretchedly breathless quality to it, "and I have found none better."
But the levity is fleeting, and what remains in its wake has pulled itself taut between.
"My calf," she murmurs, drawing his eyes at once to its shapely arch. "Is it elegant?" His fingers twitch along the slender bones of her ankle. Like she knows why, like she wants to draw him out: "Is it smooth?"
All the makings of a dream, yet Cesare knows by virtue of the daybright that he is awake—and so he must act conscionably. He withdraws his touch, curling his fingers tight, enough to mark little crescent moons into his palm.
"What is this game, sis?"
A reminder for one and both. It serves.
Leaning her head back into her palm, Lucrezia sighs out a westerly breeze. "My betrothed will not bed me," she laments. "He will not touch me." A seeping disdain as she picks at the threads of her gown. "He is a virgin."
Cesare has no care to think on an untested boy fumbling his Lucrezia in bed, nor that she has already sought it of him. Yet her flippancy, he knows, is its own manner of diversion. One from the sting of this refusal.
With the allurement of her body before him, with the swell of her hip and the dip of her waist on display, he says, "You have the means to change that history, I'm sure."
"Are you sure?" she presses—amorous in tone but insecure in bearing. "That this body has," and his tunic is in her grasp, and his body is bidden forth, and his breath comes as a pant, and he is doing nothing to stop it, "the necessary charms?"
Lucrezia is naked.
No matter that this is a ruse towards reassurance, he would be lying down with her nakedness beyond the cloud-cover of night.
Still—his sister is entreating him to take care of her, as he has sworn to do as her brother. She is looking up at him with eyes round as a lamb and bluer than the heavens.
She needs only to know that she is desirable, venerable, undeniable in her effects. If he pulls back, if he denies her now, it will be only as a confirmation. His leave will be taken, and she will lay here, heartsore and lonely, fighting tears atop the very gown she will wear to wed a boy who cannot appreciate her as a woman.
A woman.
It stuns him, to think of her as such. It is perhaps the first he ever has, despite that she has taken a husband, despite that she has borne a babe. No longer a girl peeping into his windows and rolling green with him in the grass—yet still he knows that she beats with the same maidenheart. Just as when she would take a tumble in her youth, more startle than pain, only a moment of his comfort will make her feel right again.
Cesare settles into bed beside her. She makes a soft, pleased hum into the rustle of his shifting weight. One he does not think her aware of, so enraptured is she in gazing at him.
That simply, his want becomes an ache against the seam of his trousers.
What sort of man could withstand the sight of his Lucrezia thus?
Little more than breath between them: "I am certain."
If she looked down, she would see it so.
"He has made a vow to Saint Agnes," his sister shares, her fingers toying with the fabric at his chest. "The patron saint of purity." A glance up to him, that untouchable bright of her suddenly overcast. "To remain chaste until married."
In the imposed dim, question: Am I not pure enough?
The punishment at his hand would be a forceful, fiery thrill. A satisfaction as great as presenting her with a bloodied blade. The boy's tongue, perhaps. His sight plucked from his head and served to her on a platter.
"Unwise," is all he responds.
Lucrezia delves her hand into his hair, sweeping tingles out along his scalp, then she cradles his jaw. "I am a Borgia," she says, and he hears father in the words, he hears the ghostly impression of Juan. Her fair lashes flutter, lakes of blue glassing over beneath. "And I feel unloved."
Cesare stiffens.
For this crime against her, it will be the boy's unworthy heart, yet beating out its apology.
Simple from his mouth: “Positively foolish.”
He looks to her breastbone and wonders if she would survive it. If she would have it in her untainted heart to forgive him for taking this chosen of hers away, knowing as she does not yet that the boy is simply not man enough to deserve her—and never will be.
"You look," she says softly, voice a heart broken, "but don't touch."
The first tear falls as promised death. He cannot be the reason for the second. Not when he alone has the means to protect her against this pain—he who would worship her to their graves and beyond.
Their mouths meet amidst pants. Her tongue tastes of honeycomb and forbidden fruit. Nearly, he pulls away. Reminds himself that this is no vision in the night. That come next lauds, next prime, he will not be able to keep his thoughts from her, keep his mind from drifting back to this moment, where dream kissed reality.
Then she moans sweet down his throat.
Cesare groans. "Shall I tell you," his lips on her jaw, "of your charms?"
"Brother," she gasps, wending her arms about his neck, arching forth.
It should recall him to himself to hear it said, but he cannot think beyond the press of her nakedness to him. Nothing between now but the paltry matter of his clothes.
Bearing down on his nape, Lucrezia guides him atop her so that his torso slots between her parted thighs. The bare heat of her presses against his navel.
He swears beneath his breath. A swallow, collecting himself with the lingerings of her against his mouth.
"Shall I tell you of the shape of your lips?" he continues. "The curve to your neck?"
Lucrezia bares it to him on a whine, so he grazes his lips down her pulse. The supple of her skin pebbles in his wake, and perhaps, if it had not, he would have had the fortitude to stop this here, would have been struck back with the weight of his own shame, to covet his sister as he does. But he can feel each small bump against his tongue, and beneath, the mending of her heart, every beat lighter, faster.
He rounds the slope of her shoulder. Against her flesh: "Shall I tell you of your arms? How elegantly you hold them in dance?"
The crook of her elbow. Across, to her ribs, trembling with the force of her breath. She has her fingers wound up tightly in his hair, as though she would keep him against her by force if she was brought to it. A glance up, and he looks through the pert valley of her breasts, each nipple rosy and budded at their peaks.
Like a street mutt, Cesare seeks relief against the mattress. The sharp jolts through his loins do nothing to abate the agony of this lifelong denial, so close now to purchase. Her legs clasp shudderingly around him, and he knows she can feel it in her body—that his desperate rutting echoes pleasure into her, more rewarding a sensation for him than any he finds on the seat of his trousers.
Are you envisioning it as I am? he wants to ask. Me inside you? Or do you picture your virgin lover cupped by your thighs?
But the words do not come.
"Your waist?" he murmurs instead, running his touch down either side and relishing in the shiver brought about by his hands. "How much envy it stirs—how many eyes it draws?" Near to writhing now. "The women, the men, all of them looking freely the moment you turn away?"
Cowards, one and all. If he were free to look upon her—
But that is a dangerous thought to follow to its end, even now.
Cesare abandons it. He ghosts his palm over her hip, along her thigh and her calf, until he alights upon her ankle at the small of his back. Draws to his knees and guides her foot to his front.
Their gazes tangle, bound tight together as he dips his mouth to press a wet kiss against the flexed arch. This part of her body which the boy she is to marry will never appreciate of her, not if he already takes the privilege to bestow his affections on her for granted. Her toes curl against his temple, then she crooks her leg such that her knee falls aside.
His Lucrezia, as he has never seen her before. All of her laid out before him: a sacred feast before a starving man. Rosy and dewdropped, the petals of her opened to the sun, wet down the center. Just above his navel, the air hits cooler where the cordial of her arousal had been pressed.
There is no disguising his want now, if there ever had been—his chest heaving, his cock straining, his mouth parted. To dip his tongue. Lap her up like ambrosia. Drink, finally, of the divine.
Teeth pillowed on her bottom lip, lids low, Lucrezia lifts her unheld foot and presses it flat against the length of him.
A jolt, then a groan. This contact alone threatens his composure. "Let me," he rasps. Renewed attempt: "Let me tell you of your taste."
Cesare can see it when his sister bears down around her desire, a purchaseless grasp of her inner walls, a care left untended. He could fill it. He could fill her. He would not last long, but basked in the halcyon sun-warmth of her attentions, he would be quick to rouse.
Even if it is another she envisions in his place.
Her toes flex against his weeping cockhead. Breathy, "I would instead know how you feel."
There is nothing he has ever been able to deny her—but this, this is a chasm to fall irreparably to, else cross and find all of creation remade differently on the opposite side. He would never let his sister fall alongside him, yet if they both made it across, if she looked around and found it only his own want which changed them for ever, if she banished him from her presence, a lecherous beast who preyed on her sorrows just before her wedding, who failed unforgivably in his duties as a brother—
How could he live with himself without her, his golden divinity, his resplendent sun? How could he live with himself if he beds her now and earns her scorn? After all, would not even Juan have slammed the door behind him at first glimpse? Roused all of the household with the stir he caused, until Cesare himself came running to intercede?
What sort of man is he to feast on the sight of his sister thus?
Lucrezia presses down with her heel, low enough that he winces.
"Sis," he scolds, half-hearted, unmoored.
But his focus renews at once, for her gaze is again glassed with tears.
"Perhaps you speak untruthfully of my charms," she says thickly, "if you look now upon my naked want and find it so easy to resist."
"Easy," Cesare huffs. "You are a temptation I must fight every day I wake, and here you lay before me like the sun come down to earth." His voice is hushed, frayed; he asks it genuinely, like the answer could deliver him: "What of that can be considered easy?"
A search of her eyes along his, flicking back, forth. Divining some answer from them, she drifts her lithe fingers down along her abdomen, delving low into the coronet of her sex.
Breath catches. Eyes darken. Sunlight gilds her threefold, else she has begun glowing in her own right.
Lucrezia parts herself, two fingers down the center, revealing the glossy pink of her channel. Her arousal runs down from it, glistening like spun gold along the fine hairs below. He cannot look away, nor bring himself to ease his hold on her calf.
"Then fight not the easy path, Cesare," she bids him.
With a surety that speaks of practice, his sister crooks a finger inside of herself. Withdraws it slow, so that he can see how it shines past the knuckle, then presses the second alongside with a sigh.
Afterwards, when he finds himself caught in the half-step muzziness before sleep, where his guilt cannot plague him and his shame cannot sink its teeth, Cesare will wish he had done things differently: that he had stripped himself of his clothes so that he could have felt the slap of her skin against his; that he had flipped her above him, so as to watch her body work, so as to be curtained in the drape of her mane while she found her pleasure; that he had taken her slowly, gently, with the same reverence as he mapped her body with his mouth, and had chosen his words with more care.
But his restraint snaps with blinding force, the recoil on it like a cannon fired.
There is, in succession: a yank at his trousers to see his cock sprung free, his hands, hers; joyous exultation as he presses his crown to her entrance: yes, brother, yes, yes, yes; her heels at his back, urging him deep, deeper yet; the fit of her tight enough to topple him, a forearm braced beside her head the only thing to keep his weight from overwhelming her—yet still she pulls at him like he is not close enough, kisses fluttered on his face like butterfly wings.
For the first time in his life, Cesare knows God.
"He does not deserve you," he says, strained, punctuated with every thrust. "He cannot take care of you—not as I have."
The He of which Cesare speaks splits into a triumvirate: the father, the brother, the boy. None of them worthy of one such as her.
Lucrezia mewls something against the shell of his ear. It is an incoherent response, unintelligible, and he will imagine every horror from her mouth in the days to come—but in the now, it only renews his vigor. Her eyes roll back to the whites, the stuttering pulse of her walls around him giving enough warning that when she cries out her release, he can clamp a palm over her mouth.
Barely does he manage to pull out and spill on the mattress instead. His own shout spatters bloody against the backs of his teeth as he bites down on his tongue to keep himself quiet.
Time slows to a grinding halt yet hastens into disorienting triple-time.
Cesare watches his sister rear up in dazed affront, cheeks flushed, lips swollen, and hasten a glance down between their bodies. He has no time to tuck the ignominy of his spent cock away before she does, but that is not what she looks to. Instead, she looks to the mess of him seeping dark into the fine fabric below. She shudders at the sight.
The sight of her brother's spend, staining her wedding gown.
He falls back—away, landing jarringly on his palms amongst the glaring haze of her bed. His breath comes in quick, sharp, a surge of lightheadedness dizzying him. He hears his name, but he cannot bear to look upon her now, see the truth in her eyes: that even she of pure heart cannot forgive him, especially not for something like this.
His own words cuffing his ears. We're Borgias. Blood on his hands. Hot. Fresh. We never forgive. Yet another of his kin, lost.
Cesare stumbles from the bed and out of the chambers, unable to glance back at his once-bright sister, eclipsed by his exposed want of her.