Making Amends - Sex Stories

Making Amends

... crumpled to the ground his companions had leapt to his defense and all hell broke loose.

The ensuing skirmish was quick but bloody, leaving two of the foreigners dead and several more men on each side wounded. The emissary had yet to regain consciousness by the time he and his escorts were delivered to the dungeons of Silverwing Keep and Sienna accompanied her knights back to the barracks thinking their mission a success. It wasn't until late afternoon that one of her men, his face pale as the dead, tracked her down in the training yard and told her of their mistake. Immediately she rushed to her father's study in the hopes of a private word with him, but the chamberlain had turned her away and gravely instructed her to prepare for an audience in the throne room an hour later.

As her father's final retainers filtered out of the great hall Lady Sienna was at last left alone with the Duke. His dark eyes bored into her own as they stared at one another until the chamber's heavy doors had slammed shut. He looked tired, in more ways than one, and the loyal daughter felt a deep sense of shame at the position her mistake had put him in. “I am sorry, father.” Her voice was still crisp when she spoke, but not as stiffly formal as it had been before.

“I know you are, Sienna,” the old man answered with a heavy sigh. “Just as you know how little that matters.”

“I do.”

“His Excellency is being treated by my personal physician as we speak.” Duke Theovaire's tone was also ...

... more casual than it had been, but there was an odd stiffness to the old monarch as his gaze strayed to the stained glass windows lining one side of the hall. Sienna realized the day's strain must have been wearing on him even more than she had thought and again she wished she could take it all back. “Thankfully,” he eventually continued, “I am told the wounds you granted our guest seem relatively minor and he is expected to make a full and swift recovery.”

“I am glad to hear it.” That wasn't a lie. While their encounter hadn't exactly left Sienna with a high opinion of her victim, a lack of serious injury to the ambassador meant there was at least a chance of the incident being passed off as an accident and her home spared from imperial retribution. The two men-at-arms her knights had slain would complicate matters, true, but in the grand game of politics the lives of commoners were of far less import than the wellbeing of a highborn diplomat.

“Indeed.” The Duke at last shifted his gaze back to Sienna, locking his eyes on his daughter's. “Presently he is resting in the guest wing. Tonight you will go to him and make amends, ensure that when he leaves here he will have no thought of bringing his master's wrath down upon us all.”

The young knight went stiff at her father's words, a lump suddenly forming in her throat. “To... Tonight? Surely... you do not mean...” her voice faltered, unable to so much as bring the words into existence.

“You will do whatever is required ...