“These office parties are really something, aren’t they? I’ve found people need a little recreation now and then, and this team has certainly earned it.”

A bunch of engineers and drudges shuffling around drinking themselves into oblivion while their superiors congratulate themselves elsewhere — it’s always raining on Eadu, even when the storm season isn’t tearing through anything not tethered down, and any opportunity for stress relief must be taken when it presents itself.

“I’ve never liked parties much,” Lyra says dryly.

Lyra must have gotten a suitable dress from somewhere, and it suits her, but she must feel exposed — the way she crosses her arms across her chest, the way she glances down the corridor as if willing someone to rescue her. When Krennic singles someone out, cutting them out from the crowd and leading them off to a private corridor, no one with the thinnest allowance of self-preservation will follow.

“Where would Galen be without you? Still sifting through gravel samples on Espinar, hmm? You’re a fine woman, Lyra. You’re no stranger to sacrifice.” Krennic raises his hand to brush the fallen braid back from Lyra’s cheek. “What would you do to protect your husband?

Lyra’s face is a mask of naked disgust. “My husband doesn’t need me to protect him.”

“Ah, but your daughter? We’ve put so much into her education with the Imperial Sub-Adult Program, it would be a shame to uproot her now.”

If the Program could work with a child like Jyn, it should have no trouble turning the difficult offspring of a whole range of valuable dissidents into productive specimens of Imperial progress. Children have a way of persuading their parents, and failing all else, informing on them.

Lyra takes a long step back, reaching for the corridor panel like she’s got some way of defending herself. “You’ve got nothing to do with my daughter.”

“I consider the girl to be my own responsibility. If anything were to happen to you, she’d be in good hands.”

He hasn’t the smallest interest in looking after a child, even Lyra’s child, and if such a thing were to happen the little brat would be foisted on the nearest aide and shuttled off to an Imperial education camp. But Lyra needn’t know that, better to let her wonder.

Lyra’s face has gone cold with fear, her body rigid. “What’s wrong with you? What have I done to merit this?”

“You shot me.”

Lyra begins to laugh, a dry furious sound. “I wish I’d had better aim. I wish I’d shot you in the head.

“You could have saved yourself all this trouble years ago if you’d only opened up to me. I could have given you resources, a position of your own. You’d be an independent woman now and not a prisoner under armed guard.”

“I thought we were your guests, Orson. Or shouldn’t I call you that any more?”

“Your treachery, if I chose to make it known, would sink you and your husband both, not to speak of the girl. I withheld that information from my reports for Galen’s sake. Don’t make me regret it.”

“And your superiors won’t see anything odd in you having held back this information, will they?”

“Just part of doing business, I’m afraid. Too many of the Galaxy’s most brilliant minds have been squandered by association with questionable political stances. Just think what you might have become if you hadn’t been held back by fanatics and malcontents.”

The backs of his fingers ghost down the smooth line of her throat.

“I’ll scream. Everyone at the party will hear me.”

“No, you won’t. Don’t be so boring.

Orson grips a fistful of her hair and twists it, wrenching her head back. Sometime earlier in the evening she must have applied a dab of perfume there at the hollow of her throat; the sweetness of it can still be made out through the cold sweat of fear. His other hand slides up her skirt to dig into her warm inner thigh — underneath she wears only a slip. Some little reward for Galen playing nicely, and a nice surprise for Krennic himself.

“You’d be detained separately, of course, in an appropriate labor camp. Jyn’s still young. She’d forget about you soon enough. I think she has the makings of a fine soldier in her.”

Lyra’s small body twists against him, her hands making fists in the cloth of his uniform. “What do you want from me?

“You’ll be my woman tonight. I won’t tell if you don’t.”

He can feel her tense, then her muscles slacken. Krennic releases her, and she draws back, shuddering.

“Goodness. Is that all?” She’s trying to compose herself, trying to make peace with the idea; that’s good. Lyra smooths her skirt with both hands.

“That’s all. Tell Galen you have a headache, and meet me in the Parallax Suite at midnight.”

Lyra’s husband has already got his hands full with a full slate of visitors from the CFP’s resource allocation division, and is anxious to make the best of it — Brierly is overseeing him tonight — keeping him from putting his foot in his mouth too deeply or boring the delegation stiff with the intricate details of power bank formation. No doubt Galen will be relieved to know his wife is no longer underfoot. He might not be the most socially astute individual on Krennic’s staff, but he can tell when he’d been handed an opportunity. If only his wife were so clever.

*

“Why not make yourself a little more comfortable?

The executive suites on dreary Eadu are modeled shamelessly on the office blocks the project once occupied on Coruscant, like a wholesale transplant — their starkness is uninviting by design, but Krennic has requisitioned this particular suite for encounters requiring more finesse than the blunt instruments of the ISB can muster. Lyra loosens the sash of her coat but makes no further gesture toward the nature of their meeting — the slim heels of her shoes make no sound on the polished floor, but their effect on her figure and the way she carries herself is exquisite, turning her from a rough and ready farmer’s wife to a lovely piece of sculpture, about to totter. Krennic watches her take in the stark interior, the dark mirrored surfaces and tasteful severity — the banks of filtered windows looking out onto nothing but night sky and inky storm clouds.

“This is where you take your women?”

“Of course.” Obviously. Black leather couch, all the fittings polished to a mirror shine, not a single datapad or unlocked console. Krennic goes to fix her a drink, and Lyra withdraws to the far wall to sulk.

The silence is broken only by the thin sound of a laserpick gouging through ice — there’s something pleasing about doing things the old way, and at the end of a long session of planning retrospectives it feels good to cut something into pieces. He’d ordered himself a stock of Savareen brandy using company credits — if Tarkin’s little auditors ever catch that one it’ll be too late. Executive uses and all that, as if anyone’s inviting that withered old relic out to celebratory drinks, and as if Tarkin doesn’t arrange his own trysts on far more compromising terms.

Krennic hands off a drink and takes a seat with his own. Lyra pointedly leaves her glass on the counter. Her loss.

Krennic palms at his glass, watching her keep her distance; it’s easy now to imagine what’s under her clothes, to anticipate her nakedness. “How are you finding your quarters? You must be spending a lot of time alone these days.”

“If you’re going to rape me, I’d prefer you got on with it. I don’t need the prelude.”

“Drink your brandy, sweetheart. You’ll need it later.”

Lyra takes her glass and overturns it onto the floor. She’s only inconveniencing herself — there isn’t a surface in this room that can’t be rendered spotless again.

Still, Krennic makes a face. “You are impatient, aren’t you? You want to live a quiet life with your husband and your daughter. I could give you that. If you were to prove yourself trustworthy you might even find employment of your own, instead of stagnation. Consider this a trial run.”

Krennic lets his knees fall apart, settling back into the upholstery. Lyra might be an incurable dissident and a religious fanatic but she knows what powerful men expect in return for their tolerance.

His boots are polished to a mirror shine; every pressed crease and crisp closure is up to standard. There’s power in an Imperial uniform — Krennic could walk into the lowest cantina in the Outer Rim and command the respect of anything sentient enough to recognize the ranking plaques on his chest. A damned Pantoran could wear this uniform and still command respect.

Lyra is between his knees, there on the floor. Krennic palms at his erection, watching the discomfort on her face.

She’s a proud woman, and she thinks her crystal trinkets and colorful sashes will protect her. It would all be so much easier if only she weren’t so insufferably stiff-necked, but then her very arrogance is the site of her appeal. Even now she hasn’t accepted that he has her and her fragile little family in his grasp.

Lyra lowers her head and takes him in her mouth. She’ll never forgive herself for it. That’s what makes this so sweet.

This much is only preliminary — there’s something pretty in the way she grimaces, the way pressing her down on his cock makes her mouth run wet and her throat tighten. He lets her direct the action, enjoying her uneasy hesitance and the way she obliges him — if he needed any help getting hard for her the soft miserable sounds of her breath hitching would do the trick nicely. It’s the sort of thing he’ll remember later in his own quarters when he thinks of her and all the ways she’s tried to spite him over the years.

When he’s had enough and the time seems right, he places a soft hand on her head, urging her silently to draw back.

The look in her face is half confusion, half horror. “Are you satisfied?”

“You just can’t resist trouble, can you? You little bitch.” Smiling, Krennic strikes her across the face.

Krennic kicks her to the floor, slipping down after her while Lyra reels — her dress tears easily beneath his hands, as much from her own struggle as from him subduing her. He’s still wonderfully hard, and the sight of red marks on her skin sets the blood singing in his ears, sets him off into the thrilling electric hunger that comes only from absolute control. She can scream all she likes — she can struggle, she can strike him, she can acquiesce and save herself, but none of it matters because he’ll have her just the same anyway. She can’t deny him anything now, and she’s already broken her own principles without him having to raise a hand against her.

“You’re pathetic,” Lyra snarls, with blood reddening her lips. “You’re nothing but an impotent little prick.”

“Someone should have taught you your lessons long ago. Do you still think crystals and monks will save you? Did you ever think of becoming a nun? I’ve heard they have to be good at taking discipline.” Krennic digs into her soft outer thigh with his fingers for a bruising pinch. "You see now, I don’t really want to harm you. What would be the pleasure in that? I only want to teach you. The sooner you obey me, the less this has to hurt.”

Hauling her over the couch doesn’t take much effort after that, and bent over Lyra presents a prettier target — the first swat makes her hiss with outrage and twist underneath him, the next makes her hips hitch upward, flashing the pretty dark thatch between her legs.

A flat hand smarts more on impact, and it’s pleasing to hear the sharp crack of skin on skin, to feel her skin flush and redden under his palm. The skin of her ass and thighs takes a beautiful scarlet print. She’s shaking beneath him, trembling with uncontrollable little shudders, and from her pitiful pained gasps emerges the sound of laughter. There’s a hysterical edge to it, like a woman under torture, a woman on the brink.

“Is this all? I thought I was supposed to take you seriously.

“You’re my lover for tonight. You should be begging me to fuck you. Now, beg me.”

Lyra laughs and presses herself back against him with taunting brazenness. “You need to feel wanted, do you?”

For that, Krennic pulls her hair until she screams.

What would it take to make her weep? She’ll cry about it later, of course, but she doesn’t want to give him the satisfaction even as she’s given him everything else he could possibly take from her. Krennic presses inside her, relishing the friction of that tight resisting hole — Lyra mutters some curse but he drags her hips closer, pressing against the softness of her backside.

“Am I hurting you, Lyra? Would you like me to stop?”

“Damn you,” Lyra spits, scrabbling to keep her forearms under her and her face from pressing into the floor. Somehow it’s hard to imagine Galen taking her like this, maybe nobody’s fucked her at all in a long time.

He fixes his teeth against her shoulder, sucking a hard bite from the smooth skin there — beneath the loose drapery of her bodice he can feel the softness of her small breasts, and pinch the stiffening nipples hard enough to make her hiss and grimace. Her body is a blank canvas, a swath of unexplored territory, and he’ll take great pleasure in leaving it marked. A woman like this is wasted on any other man — it’s all he can do to pace himself. He’s going to fuck her until she can’t walk and then send her back to her husband.

He sheaths himself deep in her, as she struggles against him, as the muscles of her thighs go taut and resistant with pain — it’s an unbearably tight fit, and the initial pain as he begins to move in her only excites Krennic further. Inside she’s warm and close and the sharp pained pitch of her breathing betrays what her ridiculous scruples won’t allow her to show — if she won’t allow herself to beg, then this serves her right.

He rocks against her, steadying his thrusts with a fistful of her hair to stabilize himself — his elbow pressing into her back, pinning her there beneath him like a recalcitrant prisoner. She won’t fight him, not if she wants to keep her daughter, but her body can’t help how it reacts to him.

A cry escapes her, not of pain exactly but something near it — her body is betraying her, and pressing a hand between her thighs confirms it, the slick wet heat of new arousal. Krennic twists his fist to wrench Lyra’s head to the side. Her cheeks are wet, her mouth a tight trembling line.

“I wish your husband could see you like this. You’re beautiful, Lyra. You’ll go home to him tonight with my come still inside you.”

“I’ll kill you,” Lyra hisses, with the conviction of all her faith. Krennic doubts she will.

He spills himself between her legs, pulling out to paint her pretty gash. Krennic kneels against the small of her back, feeling her shudder beneath him. “Tell your husband I give him my commendations for his latest work. I’ll tell you when I want you back here again.”