The halls are quiet at this hour, torchlight spilling unevenly across stone walls, the air still heavy with the scent of old smoke and damp mortar. Your steps echo softly, unhurried, your thoughts adrift on nothing in particular, until the sharp click of heels carries down the passage ahead. You glance up without much care—sorceresses pass these halls often enough—but then her eyes catch yours, violet burning against the gloom, and everything in you goes still.

There’s no greeting, no pause, not even the courtesy of words. Yennefer closes the space between you with the force of a storm, her hand catching at your arm before you can form so much as a breath of protest. The next thing you know your back strikes rough wood, the door of some forgotten storage room slamming shut behind you, her body already pressed flush to yours. The scent of lilac and gooseberries coils around you, intoxicating in its nearness, and then her mouth is on yours—urgent, hungry, the kind of kiss that demands rather than asks.

Her fingers find your collar, tugging hard, fabric straining before she peels it away as though your clothes are the only obstacle left between her and the thing she has been starving for. It has been too long, you realize—months of absence, of battlefields, of silence—and now all of that deprivation is spilling out of her in heat and teeth and the bruising press of her lips.

“Not a word,” she hisses against your mouth, breath ragged, hands already sliding beneath the fabric at your waist. “Not one. You’re mine, here, now.”

There is no room for refusal, no opening for hesitation. The little space is stifling, crowded with the scrape of stone against your shoulder blades, the heat of her body anchoring you in place, the urgency of her touch unraveling every thought except the one she has already made certain of—that you will not escape her tonight, not when desire has sharpened into something more desperate, more dangerous, than you’ve ever seen in her before.