The Bull of Min by Lavender Ironside

the entryway, the braziers stoo d cold and unlit on their thin legs. Thutmose peered into darkness. The air inside was dense with its own silence, pressing a great weight upon his body. He shivered at the sensation.
    Thutmose turned toward the hallway where he’d run the day before. He had no reason to think he would see Neferure there again, but some faint whisper in his heart hoped that if he went back to the storeroom door, the gods would work some unseen power for him, producing Neferure from the darkness the way a court magician produces a live cobra from the folds of his sash.
    The storeroom was closed, the door barred. He glanced this way and that, bouncing on the balls of his feet, at a loss. A faint scraping sounded from further down the hallway, the scuffling of sandals on stone. He made his way toward the noise, trailing his fingers along the wall to guide his steps through deep shadow. He was close enough now to the source of the scuffling that he could make out the rhythm of footfalls: the stride of a person of small stature, feet dragging under the weight of a burden. Thutmose stepped carefully, slowly, lifting and placing his feet with exaggerated care, toe to heel, soundless as a cat.
    His fingers found the wall’s sharp corner; the hallway intersected another, and suddenly the footsteps were upon him. In a heartbeat he saw the form in white linen emerge from the darkness, stooped under the bulk of a large, rough sack. He recognized her face at once, even turned down toward the sandstone floor and half lost in dimness. Thutmose seized her arm; she yelped and dropped the sack. It clattered when it fell, and the pungent scent of raw myrrh filled the hallway.
    “It is you. I knew I saw you yesterday.”
    She shrank away from him. “Let me go or I’ll scream.”
    “You won’t, by order of the Pharaoh.”
    “Thutmose.”
    He dragged her back down the hallway, pressed her into the recessed doorway of the storeroom. Outside the temple, dawn had come. A cold gray light suffused the hallway, barely brightening the interior. It limned Neferure’s face with a soft sheen. She was as beautiful as she had ever been, fine-featured, dark-eyed, solemn, but she was thinner, too, and her arm, fully encircled by his grip, felt wiry and strong beneath his hand. Touching her gave him a queer thrill – partly the dark compelling arousal he’d felt whenever he had taken her before, and partly the chilling presence of divinity she had always worn about her like some brilliant shawl. That air of holiness and unreasoning self-assurance was thicker than he’d remembered. Perhaps the temple magnified it. She shifted against the storeroom door, and the tense muscle of her little arm writhed like a captured snake. The strength of her body seemed to him an outward manifestation of her holy power. Almost, he released her in fear. Then he recalled that he was the Lord of the Two Lands, and he dug his fingers into her flesh until she cringed.
    “I should kill you,” he growled, “I know it. For what you did to Senenmut – for what you did to Hatshepsut.”
    She stared up at him defiantly. His insides vibrated with the sudden force of her stare, the black shimmer of her eyes leaping at him from the soft perfection of her face. He recalled, against his will, the way she had gazed up at him in the field of emmer, a little girl standing on her toes to stroke the head of a quivering white bull.
    “And yet you will not,” said Neferure.
    “You seem very confident of that.” His voice was a croak, and he cursed the dryness of his throat.
    “You are too devout. You would never harm a vessel of the gods.”
    “Neferure…”
    “My name is Satiah. Neferure is no more.”
    He shook her, furious and helpless before her stare. “Neferure stands before me, guilty of murder.”
    “Murder? Not I. I made a sacrifice.”
    Thutmose’s grip loosened without his permission. She tugged her arm free but made no move to leave the alcove of the