Quasimodo's POV

  The candles had burned down to stumps by the time Quasimodo admitted defeat on her face for the seventh time. He scraped the bde ft against the wood, erasing the suggestion of cheekbones he had just carved, and the shavings curled away from the figurine like pale ribbons falling to join the others around his bare feet. The bells hung silent above him, Emmanuel and Marie and Gabriel watching his failure with bronze indifference, and the blue hour glow through the arches had long since faded to bck.

  He had captured everything else. The fre of her skirt mid-spin, the arch of her spine, the way her arms curved overhead when she danced. He had carved the swell of her hips and the tiny coins he imagined braided through her hair. But every time he tried to give her a face, his hands betrayed him. The wood could not hold what he saw when he closed his eyes. Nothing could.

  He heard her footsteps on the secret passage stairs.

  His knife froze against the wood. That rhythm, lighter than Frollo's deliberate tread, quicker than the Archdeacon's shuffle. He had memorized it without meaning to, the way he memorized the particur toll of each bell. His heart smmed against his ribs so hard the sensation bordered on pain.

  He should hide the figurine. He did not.

  She appeared at the top of the stairs, slightly breathless, her hair loose and wild around her shoulders in a way he had never seen it. The simple dark dress she wore clung to her curves, lower cut than her performance costumes but somehow more devastating for its modesty. She carried the smell of the city with her, bread smoke, roast and cold air and something underneath that was just her, and he inhaled it like a man surfacing from deep water.

  Neither of them moved. The silence stretched between them, filled only by the guttering of candle fme and the distant sounds of Paris settling into sleep.

  Her eyes found his. What passed between them was not words but recognition, the acknowledgment of something that had been building since she wiped the garbage from his face in front of the whole city. She did not look away from his ruined features. She looked at him like she was trying to memorize him, every ridge and hollow and asymmetric line.

  She broke first. Her gaze dropped to his hands, to the shavings dusting his knuckles, to the faceless figurine still gripped in his trembling fingers.

  "What are you making?"

  He considered lying. Could not. He turned the figurine toward her with hands that shook.

  She crossed the space between them in three steps and took it from him with a reverence that made his throat close. Her fingers traced the carved lines of the skirt, the suggestion of motion, the bnk oval where a face should be. When she looked up at him, something in her expression shifted, softened and sharpened at once.

  "Why is the face bnk?"

  "Quasimodo cannot... I cannot do justice to it."

  The words came out rough and halting. She studied him for a long moment, then set the figurine down on his worktable with careful precision.

  "Teach me," she said. "How to carve."

  The lesson began with him positioning her hands on a fresh block of wood. Her fingers were so much smaller than his, brown against his pale skin, and when he wrapped his hands around hers to guide the knife angle, he could feel her pulse jumping in her wrist. The sensation of her skin against his sent lightning up his arms and down his spine, pooling low in his belly where something hot and unfamiliar coiled tighter with every breath.

  He had touched so few people in his life. Frollo's cold grip. The occasional brush against a priest in the corridors. Nothing prepared him for the heat of her, the softness over lean muscle, the way her body fit against his chest when he leaned over her shoulder to demonstrate the angle.

  She dropped the knife. It cttered against the table and they both flinched.

  Her breathing had changed. Shorter. Sharper.

  He started to apologize, to pull away, but she caught his wrist and held him there. The pressure of her grip was nothing compared to his strength, but it stopped him more completely than chains.

  "Let me teach you something in return," she said.

  The dance lesson was a disaster from the first step. He did not know where to put his body, how to move it in rhythm, how to do anything but ring bells and climb stone. She was patient. She positioned his hands on her waist and his palms spanned nearly the entire circumference of her, his fingertips almost meeting at her spine. She felt impossibly small and warm beneath his grip.

  She counted beats. He stumbled. She ughed, not at him but with him, and the sound was so unexpected and genuine that he forgot to be ashamed of his clumsiness.

  They tried again. This time she pressed closer, letting him feel the rhythm through her body. Her breasts brushed his chest through the thin fabric of her dress, and his cock stirred, thickened, rose despite every desperate attempt to think of anything else. Cold water. Frollo's sermons. The Latin conjugations he had memorized as a child.

  She felt it. He knew she did because she went still against him, and for one terrible moment he was certain she would recoil, scream, run. Twenty years of Frollo's voice flooded his skull. Monster. Beast. Abomination.

  She did not run.

  She tilted her face up toward his, lips parted, and he read an invitation he never expected to receive. His inexperience paralyzed him. He did not know the mechanics, the angles, the protocol. But his body knew something his mind did not.

  He bent to her. Pressed his mouth to hers.

  The kiss was awkward at first, their noses bumping, his lips too hard against hers. But then she made a small sound in her throat and opened for him, her tongue sliding against his, and something primal took over. His hands tightened on her waist, hauling her up against him, and she wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him back with a desperation that matched his own.

  His hand found her breast through the fabric, heavy and warm and perfectly filling his palm, and when he squeezed, she moaned into his mouth. He fumbled with the ties of her bodice, his massive fingers clumsy but determined, until her breasts spilled free. Golden-brown and tipped with dark nipples already hard and aching.

  He stared at them for a heartbeat, overwhelmed by the reality of what he was seeing, then bent and took one into his mouth. The taste of her skin flooded his senses. Salt and warmth and something floral. He sucked hard, harder than he meant to, and she arched against him with a cry that echoed off the bells.

  He switched to the other breast, tonguing her nipple, biting gently, and her fingers cwed at his shoulders through his tunic. The scent of her arousal hit him then, thick and musky, and some animal part of his brain recognized it instantly. Knew what it meant. Knew what to do.

  He lifted her one-handed, effortless, and set her on the edge of his worktable. Carved figures scattered. Tools cttered to the floor. Her skirt bunched around her waist as he pushed between her thighs, baring her cunt to the candlelight.

  She was soaked. Her pussy lips swollen and glistening, a thread of moisture stretching between her folds.

  He dropped to his knees.

  He had only meant to please her, to prove useful in some new way, but he was utterly unprepared for the violence of his own wanting, the way it made the world fall away until only she remained. The moment he dropped to his knees, the rest of the cathedral blurred to insignificance, the cold fgstones and ancient dust and even the bells themselves receding beneath the singur focus of her—her thighs trembling, her hands braced on the worktable's splintering edge, her eyes wide as if she could not comprehend her own hunger.

  He should have hesitated. Frollo's voice still echoed in his head, the constant refrain of sin and perversion, but it seemed to come from another lifetime, some distant cloister of his childhood. The only voice that mattered was hers, and it trembled through her body and into his hands. He kissed the inside of each thigh with reverence, tasting sweat and the faint mineral tang of fear. She shivered when his breath ghosted over her cunt, her hands fisting in his hair as if she could anchor herself with pain.

  A single lick and he was lost. Her taste was sharp and alive, salt and musk and something sweetly metallic that reminded him of biting his own tongue after a fall. He buried his face in her crotch and inhaled, her scent filling his nostrils, igniting something wild and reckless in his veins.

  He licked her in long, deliberate strokes, learning the map of her body the way he had learned the bells: each fold a different note, each shudder a new resonance. When he found the cluster of nerves at the peak of her slit and circled it with the tip of his tongue, she cried out, hips jerking so violently he had to hold her down. She writhed, kicking her heels against his back, and for a moment he worried he was hurting her; but then she gasped, "Don't stop—fuck, don't you dare stop—" and he understood that this pain was different than any he had delivered before, and that she wanted more of it.

  He wanted to give it to her. He wanted to be the cause of every noise she made.

  He slipped two fingers into her without thinking. Her body cmped down, hot and impossibly tight, and he nearly pulled away in fear that he would break her. But she ground down on his hand, greedy for the invasion, and the wet sound of her cunt sucking him in made him dizzy, as if the cathedral itself were spinning around them.

  She was so much smaller than him, and he was always aware of it, but never more than now, with his hand looking massive inside her, thumb pressing firm against her clit as he pistoned his fingers in and out. He moved slow at first, watching her face for pain, but she just got more desperate, her moans less human with every thrust—"ooohhhh," "maaannnnn," "fuuuckkkk."

  He hooked his fingers upward, searching for the secret spot he had heard about in whispered jokes from the guards, and when he found it—where the smooth ripple of her inner wall suddenly gave way to a ridge that made her eyes roll back—she shrieked, arching clean off the table. He worked it mercilessly, curling his fingers in a come-hither motion while his tongue never left her clit.

  She bucked and spasmed, her nails tearing at his scalp, and the gush of liquid that hit his hand shocked him into a groan of his own. She kept coming, again and again, each wave more intense than the st, until she was sobbing and begging him to stop; but even then, her hips chased his mouth as if she would rather die than lose the sensation.

  He did not stop until she colpsed, limp and quivering, her thighs smeared with her own slick and his face drenched. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, the taste of her lingering bittersweet and bright, and looked up at her in awe. He had never seen anything so beautiful as her, ruined and defiled and perfect, sprawled among his scattered carvings.

  She y on his worktable, chest heaving, breasts bare and flushed, her pussy still twitching. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and looked at her with something like wonder.

  Then he saw her expression change.

  Not disgust. Something worse. Confusion. Fear. Not of him, but of herself.

  She sat up abruptly, yanking her dress back into pce, fumbling with the ties of her bodice. "I have to go. Clopin is expecting... there are guards on patrol... I forgot..."

  She could not meet his eyes.

  She touched his cheek once, a gesture that could mean anything, and then she was gone, her footsteps echoing down the passage faster than they came up.

  Quasimodo stood in the silence she left behind. His fingers still wet with her. His cock still hard and aching in his trousers. The taste of her lingered on his tongue.

  He did not understand what happened. He did not know if he did something wrong or if this was simply how it worked. Women taking what they wanted and leaving, the way Frollo always warned they would.

  He looked down at the figurine of her, still faceless on the table, and felt something crack inside his chest.

  He did not sleep. He sat at the window overlooking Paris and watched the lights go out one by one, and he wondered if he would ever see her again.

  ……

  Esmeralda's POV

  The torchlight from the main passage flickered under the curtain that served as her door, casting shifting shadows across the stone ceiling of her quarters. Esmeralda y on her back on the straw pallet, staring at nothing, her body still thrumming with the echo of what happened in the bell tower.

  She could still feel his mouth on her. The impossible pressure of his fingers inside her, stretching her open, finding pces no one had ever found. The way her body had surrendered so completely to his touch, shaking apart on his worktable while carved figures scattered across the floor.

  She had never squirted before. Not with the boys from the Court who fumbled between her thighs in dark corners. Not with anyone. She did not know her body could do that, and the fact that he had drawn it out of her with his tongue and two thick fingers made something clench low in her belly even now.

  The confusion knotted in her stomach. She had left him there without expnation, without even a real goodbye, because she did not trust herself to stay. Because if she had stayed another minute, she would have begged him to fuck her, and then she would have belonged to him in a way she could not afford to belong to anyone.

  'This is wrong,' she told herself. 'He is Frollo's creature. He is a liability. He is deformed and strange and nothing like what you need.'

  But her body did not care about need.

  Her body remembered the size of him against her thigh, the ridge of his cock straining against his trousers when they tried to dance. She had seen enough of his body to know he was proportional to his frame, which meant he was massive, and the thought of taking him inside her made her cunt clench around nothing.

  She touched the marks on her waist where his hands had gripped her. His palms had nearly spanned her entire circumference. The skin there was already tender, and by morning the bruises would bloom purple and green.

  She wanted them to.

  'What is wrong with you?' The question had no answer. Or too many answers. She closed her eyes and saw Phoebus in the tavern, golden and perfect and kissing her with practiced skill, and she had felt nothing. Absolutely nothing. Her body had remained cold and distant while her mind catalogued his technique and found it adequate.

  Then she saw Quasimodo on his knees, face buried between her thighs, groaning against her flesh like she was the best thing he had ever tasted. She had come so hard her vision went white.

  She slid her hand beneath her skirt.

  She was still wet. Had been gushing wet since she left him, the walk through the catacombs a slick torment of arousal. Her fingers found her pussy lips swollen and sensitive, and she hissed at her own touch.

  She did not fight it this time.

  She imagined his hands instead of hers. His massive palms spreading her thighs wide, those calloused fingers pushing inside her, filling her so completely she could not think. She imagined his tongue on her clit, rough and relentless, the way he had groaned against her like she was water and he had been dying of thirst.

  She rubbed her clit in tight circles, hips lifting off the pallet, breath coming in sharp gasps she muffled against her forearm. The pleasure built fast and brutal. She shoved three fingers inside herself, pretending they were his, and fucked herself with a desperation that would embarrass her if anyone could see.

  His cock would split me open, she thought, and the filthy truth of it made her pussy clench. He would fill me up so fucking deep, stretch me until I screamed, and I would beg him for more.

  She imagined climbing onto him, sinking down onto that enormous cock inch by inch while his mismatched eyes rolled back in his skull. She imagined the sound he would make, that rough gravel voice breaking on her name. She imagined riding him until neither of them could remember their own names.

  "Unnnnhhh, fuck, fuck, fuck..."

  She bit down on the meat of her palm to keep from screaming his name. The orgasm rolled through her in waves, her cunt spasming around her fingers, her whole body shaking on the narrow bed. She rode it until the sensation tipped from pleasure into oversensitivity, then pulled her hand free and y there gasping.

  The shame arrived immediately after. Cold and familiar.

  She was not supposed to want this. She was supposed to want Phoebus, golden beautiful Phoebus who represented safety and legitimacy and a future for her people that did not depend on hiding in catacombs. She was supposed to want a man who could walk beside her in the sunlight without drawing screams.

  Instead she wanted a man who had never left a bell tower. A man the world called a monster. A man who looked at her like she was the sun itself come down to touch him.

  'What are you doing?'

  She had no answer.

  She wiped her hand on the sheet and stared at the ceiling until her breathing steadied. Sleep did not come. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw his face. The wonder in it when she did not run from his kiss. The devastation when she left without expnation.

  She should go back. Expin. Tell him that she ran because it was too much, not because it was too little. Tell him that no one had ever made her feel the way he did, and that was exactly why she had to leave.

  She did not move.

  The torches burned low in the passage outside. The Court settled into its uneasy sleep, the sounds of drunken singing and argument fading into snores and silence. Somewhere above, in the city she could not see from here, the bells of Notre Dame hung silent in their tower.

  Esmeralda touched the bruises on her waist. Pressed her fingers into the tender skin until the pain bloomed bright and real.

  She wondered when she became the kind of woman who runs from the things she wants most. She wondered if she would ever stop running.

  She did not have an answer for that either.━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━Author note: This is the st of my backlog chapters for you guys. The next chapter goes live on Monday. This was originally meant to be a short novel and an exercise in writing but I can do something with it to make it more epic, with more room for character development and growth. So will be reworking things a bit. Quasimodo the revolutionary anyone? Anyways thanks for reading.