6. Sky
Sky
Four hours after Beatrice walks out of my office, I learn that a Layn prince can obey a boundary and still feel like he is being skinned alive.
The bed still smells like her. Slick and heat.
Vanilla. The sharp, bright courage of her temper.
The nest I built around her has collapsed where she left it, the weighted cloth dragged half off the mattress, one of my shirts twisted into a knot where her fingers held it during sleep.
I should order housekeeping to strip the bed.
I should return to the office below, review the MacArthur situation, stabilize Athena, assess the damage to the Brazil story, and determine how to protect Layn's children without detonating the career of the woman whose mark burns under my skin as if she bit me too.
She did bite me. My shoulder still bears the light crescent of her teeth. The sight should please me. It does please me. That is part of the problem.
I stand beside the bed, staring at the small mark she left on my body, while across the city my mate is in Queens trying to decide whether the bond can be rejected through force of will.
It cannot. This is fact, legal on Layn, older than any treaty between our worlds.
True mates are not arranged. They are found.
The body recognizes what law can only record.
The mark does not invent the bond. It opens the door to what already exists.
I asked. She answered.
Beatrice of Earth…?
Skylor of Layn, bite me.
Memory turns the words over in my mind until they grow edges. Her smile. Her hand on my cheek. The little laugh in her voice. At the time, I thought it was courage. Human levity at the threshold of forever. Now I know she thought I was being dramatic during sex.
I close my eyes.
Shit.
The word has become useful since I arrived on Earth. Efficient. Emotionally flexible. A small linguistic container for catastrophes too large to handle politely.
My ring has pulsed seven times since she left.
Zymlor twice. Bryklor once. An encrypted palace channel I refuse to acknowledge because if my father has felt the royal bond register across distance, I will throw myself into the East River before explaining that my newly marked human wife believes she accidentally married me because she mistook a sacred claim vow for alien dirty talk.
The story sounds worse when summarized.
I ignore every call.
For four hours, I obey. I do not track her phone.
I do not access building cameras. I do not send a vehicle.
I do not ask security for the status report they would give me in under thirty seconds if I let my weakness become an order.
I sit. I stand. I pace. I read the same paragraph of a legal disclosure document twelve times and retain nothing except the fact that English has too many clauses and not enough consequences.
Then the cramps start. Not mine at first. Hers.
The bond delivers them in fragments, not pain exactly, not fully, but enough that my body understands the shape of hers curling inward.
Heat beneath her skin. Restless movement.
A throat tight from tears she refuses to release.
The stubborn pressure of her resistance.
Beatrice trying to endure instead of reach.
My hands close around the edge of the desk. The wood groans. I release it before I destroy another piece of expensive furniture. Earth furniture lacks commitment. It appears sturdy until a prince has one inconvenient emotion near it.
She is in Queens. I know this without searching.
The bond knows direction. East. Away. Too far.
Alive. Hurting. Mine. No, not only mine.
That word is too small for what is happening.
*Mine* sounds like an object one owns. A jewel.
A title. A territory. Beatrice would stab me with a fountain pen if she heard the word in my head, and she would be right to do it.
My wife.
That is worse. Better. Both.
She says it like a trap. I say it like a vow. Neither of us understands the other well enough to survive the word yet.
The fever follows. It begins under my spine, then spreads in a slow, punishing wave.
My skin burns beneath my own shirt. The mark on my shoulder pulses in time with the mark I placed on her throat.
The bed smells too much like her and not enough.
Water tastes metallic. Coffee beans sit untouched in the silver bowl by the bed, medicinal and sharp, irrelevant except for the fact that they remind me of Layn, and Layn reminds me of the thousand urgent reasons I told myself I could make choices around her before bringing them to her finished.
She called me on that. Worse, she was correct.
I can survive being wrong. I have been wrong before. Rarely, but it happens. I cannot survive the memory of her face when she said, You made me your wife in bed and a stranger in the room where my future was being decided.
There are wounds an enemy gives you and wounds you hand to yourself because arrogance has excellent aim. Another wave of her pain crosses the bond. That decides me.
Not because she called. She did not. Not because she asked.
She would rather set herself on fire than ask while angry.
I go because my wife is sick and alone, because I am sick and useless, because space has become a room full of knives, and because I need to learn the difference between respecting a boundary and abandoning the woman who set it while fever eats through her pride.
I dress in the dark. Shirt. Trousers. Coat.
No escort. No vehicle. No ring display. The elevator takes me down through the tower while my skin burns and my ears refuse to hold still.
In the lobby, someone speaks to me. I answer with enough authority that they step back, though I have no memory of the words.
Outside, winter air strikes my face and clears my head for three blessed breaths before the bond drags me east again.
I take the subway. The train is crowded, hot, and aggressively human.
Perfume. Damp wool. Old coffee. Fried food.
Fear. Boredom. A dozen layered desires that are none of my business and none of hers, therefore useless.
I stand with one hand wrapped around the pole while a child in a red hat stares at my ears.
I should tuck them flat, but control has thinned to a decorative concept.
The child waves. His mother pulls him closer.
Beatrice would laugh at that. Not kindly, exactly.
Honestly. Her building is small, brick, narrow, stubborn.
Of course it is. The buzzer panel has worn buttons and one handwritten label where a proper nameplate should be.
I stand under the exterior light, sweating in the cold, and press her apartment number.
No answer. I press again. Silence.
"Beatrice." My voice comes out rough enough to scrape paint from the door. "Open the door."
A window opens somewhere above me. A human man tells me to take my lover's quarrel to a civilized hour. I look up. The window closes. Wise.
My legs weaken. The railing beside the steps bites into my palm as another wave of fever rolls through me. Her fever. Mine. Ours. The bond has no respect for distance or dignity.
"I will not force the door," I say, because the building, the night, and the bond all need to hear it. "But I will sit here until morning if that is what it takes for you to believe I am not leaving you sick behind one."
Nothing.
Then the buzzer sounds. Not immediately. Not graciously. Long enough for my wife to make sure I understand the door opens because she allows it, not because I ache.
Beatrice fills the doorframe on the second floor, in a thin robe, one hand braced against the jamb, cheeks flushed, eyes fever-bright.
Her curls spill wild around her face. The mark at her neck has darkened to purple, the surrounding skin inflamed from separation.
She looks furious, exhausted, soft in ways she would resent me noticing, and heartbreakingly herself.
"Go home," she says.
"You are my home."
Her expression tightens. "Seriously? Is that the best you've got?"
"No." I swallow. "But it is true."
Her gaze drops to the sweat at my temple, the tremor in my hand, the way I lean against the hallway wall like a sick animal. "You look terrible."
"So do you."
Her brows lift. "That was not diplomatic," I admit.
Her mouth almost moves. Almost. The almost is enough to hurt.
I take one careful breath. Her scent is worse up close. Fever-sour beneath the sweetness. Slick beneath the anger. Pain beneath both. "Let me in."
"For what?"
"To take care of you."
Her face changes. Too late, I register the line crossed. Not false. Not even unfair. But too sharp. "Careful," she says.
"No." The word comes out before strategy can clean it.
"No more careful lies while you shake apart in a hallway.
You can hate me after the fever breaks. You can make lists.
You can throw every human law book in New York at my head, and I will stand still for each one.
But I will not stand here while my wife teaches her body pain because she thinks suffering is the same thing as choice. "
Her nostrils flare. "Do not call me that like it settles something."
The fever grips hard. So does the wound underneath it. "It does settle something."
"No, it doesn't."
Good. Bad. I do not know. I am operating on fever, instinct, and the shredded remains of royal training.
"Is being mine truly so terrible?" I ask.
The question leaves before I can stop it.
Too naked. Too young. Not prince, not Alpha, not the male who controls rooms because rooms are easier than hearts.
Just me, standing in a hallway while the woman my body recognizes as home looks at the bond like a locked door.
Her face shifts. "No," she says quietly. "Being yours is not the terrible part."
The relief is so sharp it almost drops me. She continues before I can breathe. "Not choosing the terms is."