Ten #2
What Cin saw was blood, pooling as his victim’s heart beat its last. But what he thought of the matter was a different thing, one he could perhaps explain in a way the prince would understand.
“I think the people Plumed Menace kills—any who are truly bastards, anyway—deserve to be brought to justice, and the watch isn’t doing that.
” Under the warmth of Prince Lorenz’s gaze, admitting his own struggle to parse his beliefs felt far easier than he’d expected.
“I don’t think the solution is to praise the Menace though, or to make the watch more like them.
I just know something is wrong, and we should be doing more to confront that, whatever that doing may be. ”
All Cin knew was how to climb the fences that bastards used to hide their sins and slide a blade into flesh. To become a sinner for the sake of others. With every body that dropped to his feet, he knew it wasn’t the solution. But it was a solution.
Maybe that was why he kept tucking the blade into his belt, kept stalking the cruel and the greedy until they proved their atrocities to him. Or maybe he just couldn’t feel safe himself without it. Cin could never decide.
The prince nodded, slowly, his gaze distant and deep, iced over in a way that Cin couldn’t read.
But as he spoke, he sounded thoughtful, not judgmental.
“I certainly would not praise the Plumed Menace either. What they are doing is wrong—I can see no way around that— but the watch clearly isn’t helping in that.
They would never make it outside the capital if not for their investigations of the Menace’s killings.
Perhaps my family has benefited from the extra guard.
They are no more useful to the kingdom then the Menace is. ”
It was the but that Cin clung to, hiding it deep inside his chest. Perhaps the prince held no love for the blood on Cin’s hidden blade, but he too knew the system they had now was no good. Someday, it would be him who had to deal with that. Him and his future partner.
Carefully, Cin asked, “Do you think they’ll ever catch the Menace?”
The prince’s expression soured, though perhaps it was the flickering of the light and the tipping away of his face that just made it appear so, because his voice was steady when he answered.
“I don’t have much hope for that.” He shrugged, like he was pushing the idea away, trying to keep it at arm’s length.
“It’s my parent’s obsession, anyway. They’re the ones who have to believe the Menace took my brother from us.
They need someone to fight, someone to blame.
Otherwise, it’s them who let him go on that diplomatic journey in the first place, and they can’t bear to doubt themselves like that.
” The weak smile he gave was more like a grimace.
“They are the king and queen, after all.”
“You don’t need to be the rulers of a country to cling to your own reasoning over the truth,” Cin muttered, thinking of the times his blade had been unsheathed because someone couldn’t let go of their own folly at the cost of the flesh and bones of those they had once loved. “But you’re not as certain as them?”
“No.” Prince Lorenz shook his head, quick and sharp, and his hand went to the center of his chest, his fingers curling against his heart.
“His disappearance doesn’t fit the Plumed Menace’s pattern.
Every other victim has been of middling or lower status, the body unmoved from the place they were killed.
” He sounded pained but distant, as though he were looking through the endless pool of his own gaze to see that loss, instead of living it himself.
“Parts of the forest between Hallin and Falchovari are dark places—who knows what one might stumble across there... What might follow you out, if you’re not careful. ”
Cin pressed his hand to the prince’s arm. “Thank you for telling me.”
Prince Lorenz gave him a weak smile, shallow and a little haunted. “It’s not something I’d like shared around, if you please.”
“Your secrets are always safe with me,” Cin promised. He smiled back, hoping to offer a little joy back into the conversation. “Who else would I even tell them to? The birds?”
“See, that I cannot possibly believe,” the prince said, but he sounded more teasing, the somber tension fading from his voice. “How do you not have a line of suitors—friends, if you’d rather—trailing us down the steps?”
“People don’t usually notice me.” Cin shrugged, but the motion shifted his feathered cape and he chuckled. “I’m not often dressed like this, though.”
“I’d notice you dressed in anything. Or nothing.” Prince Lorenz smirked. “Nothing would be preferable.”
It was such a ridiculous line that Cin couldn’t help snorting a laugh. “But why?”
“Well...” Prince Lorenz wrapped one arm around Cin’s shoulders.
As he spoke, he trailed his fingers across Cin’s back, along his neck and through his hair, the touch so soft that it should not have left such a fire in its wake.
“You know when someone just calls to you? Their body, their bones—it’s like magic.
It’s a magic that makes me want to see inside you and be inside you all at once, and I could give you a thousand reasons why, but they’d all be insufficient. ”
Cin tried to fight back the yearning that feathery caress had left in his core, to focus on the words instead—words that worried him. “That sounds suspiciously like love, Your Royal Highness.”
“Oh, bah! I’ve never been in that kind of love.” Prince Lorenz scoffed, his arm slipping down and around Cin’s waist. “My heart has never fluttered for anyone. I’m not swooning over you—no offense. Whoever I end up with, I won’t swoon over them either. It’s simply not in me.”
Cin took that in slowly, thoughtfully, trying to find the differences between his own experience and the prince’s, and those portrayed by the great lovers of the world.
But he’d witnessed—if only in passing—the existence of both great sexual partnerships and deep friendships amongst those living in his town, and who was he to count them as something more or less than any romance?
Besides, knowing the prince would not accidentally fall for him was better for them both.
“Heart flutters are for the weak,” Cin said.
The prince’s honesty made it easy to keep talking, slowly unraveling a part of himself he’d never had someone to share with before.
“I’m not certain I’ve ever felt one either.
Though I suppose I’ve had far less opportunity than you to discover what swooning is like.
I just know enough to be aware that it isn’t this. ”
“This is a different kind of spark,” Prince Lorenz agreed, pulling Cin closer. He licked his lips, purposeful in a way that was excruciating to watch. “But I do make you feel something , too?”
“You make me feel many a fiery thing,” Cin murmured, one hand pressed to the prince’s arm. Slowly, purposefully, he lifted himself, onto the tips of his toes and—
Prince Lorenz caught Cin’s mouth with his in an instant, both arms suddenly around Cin’s back as he pulled him closer.
Cin could feel so much of the prince, his fingers grasping muscles, the press of jewelry or armor—or some other metal—over his heart beneath his jacket, his hips ground against Cin, one of his thighs wrapping around the side of Cin’s leg, his nose tucking against Cin’s cheek, and his mouth—his mouth .
Their first kiss had been a simple brush of lips, but this was an act of devouring, teeth and tongue and reckless flurries of nerves so aggressive that Cin barely knew what to do with it but to moan and melt into the attention, letting Prince Lorenz take a small portion of what he had been asking for since the moment they met.
It should have hurt more than it did—Cin’s ribs already aching, his binding cutting off his breath—but the spark deep inside him seemed to rage over the pain, pushing it aside, for better or for worse.
Quietly, gently, as to not be intrusive, Cin brushed one hand up into Prince Lorenz’s hair, gliding his fingers through the soft strands as the prince sucked on his lower lip so hard that the place between his legs seemed to catch fire.
He swore he could feel the bundle of his want solidifying just as he caught the very obvious rise of the prince’s—hard and long and bringing flashes of when Prince Lorenz had held it in his own hand last week on the balcony.
“I want to touch you,” Prince Lorenz whispered, and it was a plea, but it was more than that: dark and low and heavy with lust.
“You want to do what?” Cin taunted, barely getting the words out into the crook of the prince’s shoulder as he sucked gloriously on Cin’s neck.
“I want,” Prince Lorenz growled this time, his hand grabbing Cin’s ass as he pulled Cin against him, rocking his hard bulge into the taut and ready point between Cin’s legs in a way that birthed fire deep inside Cin. “I want to press my fingers between your... folds? Do you have folds, or—”
“Yes,” Cin cut him off, laughing and groaning at the same time.
“I want to run my nails over the tenderest parts of you until you scream. I want to feel you come around my fingers and beg for more after.” He ground against Cin as he said it.
Cin’s lashes fluttered and his hands grabbed the prince’s clothes on instinct, needing something, anything, to keep himself stable against the desire wracking through him.
“Yes,” Cin said again, and again as Prince Lorenz popped open the front buttons of Cin’s pants and pressed in his hand, rubbing downward with such purpose that Cin’s hips bucked into him, and again when he found Cin’s sweet spot with his thumb, rolling it as he sucked on Cin’s neck.