CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE #2
Another glance passed between the pair, and then Ryu shifted restlessly in his seat.
He was wearing a button-down shirt, but he’d eschewed a tie today, the weather hot, and there were no official duties scheduled for the rest of the day that required more formal attire.
But as he turned his head to the side, Maro caught a glimpse of something he’d missed before.
A split second of disbelief rushed through him, before all the pieces suddenly clicked into place.
“Oh, thank the Goddess!” he blurted out in relief, before he could think better of it. “Well, it’s about bloody time.”
Ryu stared at him in surprise. “What’s about time?”
Immediately, Maro felt himself turn red – something he hadn’t done in years.
“I’m so sorry,” he apologised immediately.
“I meant no offence. I just couldn’t help but notice…
” He vaguely waved his hand in the direction of his own neck.
Peeking out from beneath the collar of his shirt, Ryu’s scent gland was just about visible, and to Maro’s keen eyes, the colour of that discreet mark was significantly darker than it had been the last time he’d seen it.
Ryu slapped a hand over the mark. “Fucking hell, I…” He hastily adjusted his shirt collar. “Shit…”
“Oh, it’s quite all right,” Maro assured him, all too familiar with the automatic embarrassment of youth.
“It’s not a huge drama. A little imprudent on your part, perhaps, but I think we’re well past the days when everyone had to wait until they were married to start getting intimate with their soulmate. ”
Before his eyes, Ryu’s face turned a couple of shades paler. “Yeah, but that’s the thing,” he muttered, once more a bashful youth, rather than a proud king. “I’m not going to marry my soulmate.”
Maro simply stared at him, his mind completely blank. “You’re what?” he asked dumbly.
“Kentario and I are getting married,” Ryu said, staring at the edge of Maro’s desk. “I love him. I have done for years.”
“Well, yes…” Maro hedged. Then Ryu’s words caught up to him. “For years? Really?”
Ryu nodded, and Maro wondered how in the world he’d managed to miss that little gem.
But apparently, that was not the only thing he was missing.
“I’m confused,” he admitted. He glanced at Kentario again.
The man was staring back at him like he was a cockroach crawling over his dinner.
“You… uh… Who… If I may ask an extremely indelicate question,” he said slowly, “and I apologise for any offence, but… who marked your scent gland?”
“Kentario did,” Ryu said.
“Right. But you said you’re not marrying your soulmate?”
“That’s right. I’ve asked Kentario to marry me.” Ryu was also speaking slowly, and Maro couldn’t tell whether it was because Ryu thought he was an idiot or because he was afraid of making him angry.
But if anything, that odd declaration only made Maro more confused.
“Just to be clear, you two slept together, correct?” If he was anyone else, he would likely have been swiftly sacked for asking such an audacious question.
But given his long-running history with the royal family, and Ryu’s recent emphatic endorsement of his qualifications for his job, he might just get away with it.
“Yes,” Ryu said. He’d apparently got over the bashful stage and was once more looking Maro in the eye, steel in his spine, determination in his voice. “And I don’t much care what the public has to say about it. I don’t care if we’re both alphas. I don’t care if-”
“Yes, yes,” Maro butted in, once more breaking protocol by interrupting the king. “But you’re… You’re marrying Kentario?”
“Yes,” Ryu repeated, looking a touch confused himself now.
“And you agree to this?” Maro asked the bodyguard, just to be clear.
“Absolutely.” It was the first thing Kentario had said since he’d entered the room, and the cool declaration left no room for doubt.
He looked from one to the other, trying to figure out what the hell was going on.
All at once, he remembered his own fumbling forays into physical intimacy, back when he was a youth. But Kentario was twenty-one. Surely he couldn’t be so na?ve as to think that…
“You have actually seen each other’s soul marks, haven’t you?” It seemed to be the day for blurting out things without thinking them through. Both young men looked equally stunned, and Maro suddenly had to work very hard to keep himself from laughing.
But a moment later, Ryu leapt to his feet, undoing his pants where he stood.
Maro’s eyes opened wide, but thankfully, the king managed to remember at least a little decorum.
He pulled his pants aside just far enough to expose his soul mark, nestled in against his hip bone, without giving Maro an eyeful of anything he really shouldn’t be seeing.
Kentario took one look at the mark and swore like a seasoned sailor. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!”
“It’s the same as yours?” Ryu asked, looking utterly poleaxed. “You can’t fucking tell me that you’re actually my soulmate?”
Kentario muttered another curse, his hands reaching for his own belt. But then he paused, a rare moment of embarrassment crossing his features, and Maro remembered, from way back when Kentario had been a mere babe, just where his soul mark was located – smack in the centre of his right buttock.
He cleared his throat, then abruptly stood up and turned around, facing the wall behind his desk. Behind him, he heard the rustle of fabric, then the quiet but indelicate curse of, “Odin’s fucking balls…”
There was a little more rustling, then Kentario said, “You can turn around now.”
He did, tentatively taking his seat again when Ryu did the same. One did not sit down before the king, after all. Even if said king had just undone his pants in front of you…
“We’re soulmates,” Ryu said, as if it was the most baffling idea in the world. “How can we be soulmates? Why would we be… Odin’s fucking balls,” he cursed suddenly. “My parents knew, didn’t they?”
“Of course they knew,” Maro agreed. “They’d known since the moment you were born.
Danag was your father’s bodyguard. Your two families have always been very close.
So Sou had plenty of opportunity to see Kentario’s soul mark when he was a baby, and the instant you were out of your mother’s womb and cleaned up a tad, it was as obvious as the nose on your face. ”
“So that’s why they didn’t want me to know,” Ryu said, his tone turning both sharp and bitter. “That’s why they kept trying to get me to find someone else. They didn’t want us to get married.”
“What?” After a brief moment of clarity, Maro suddenly felt logic escaping out the window again. “What on earth are you talking about?”
“Every festival we had, they kept telling me to go dance with someone else. An Amagarda and an alpha is not a suitable match for the Crown Prince of Galandeen. Were they even going to let me register my soul mark when I turned eighteen?” he asked, suddenly angry.
“Were they ever going to actually tell me? Tell us? Or were they going to find some other excuse to keep me guessing for a couple more years?”
“Whoa, hang on, slow down,” Maro interrupted. “Where on earth do you get this idea that they wanted to keep you apart?”
“They both flatly refused to let me register my soul mark, and they kept insisting that knowing who my soulmate was would be bad for me. I was supposed to ‘learn to be myself’, or some such crap, even when I kept telling them I just wanted to know who it was. And he was sitting in the same damn room the whole time!”
“Your parents had every intention of telling you both that you were soulmates,” Maro said firmly.
“Yes, they insisted that you wait until you were eighteen. Maybe if you’d actually told them you were in love with Kentario, they would have told you earlier.
But think back to when you were in your early teens.
You two played together as children and got along well enough, but the instant Kentario hit thirteen, things went south. ”
“True enough,” Kentario said, seeming oddly calm for all the unexpected revelations going on here.
“I spent a couple of years thinking you were too young and therefore beneath me, and you spent that time resenting that fact that I got to do things you were too little to be allowed to do. Riding a horse, going on training trips with the Guard, learning to use knives as weapons. There were a good few years there when we almost hated each other.”
“How would that have gone, knowing you were soulmates?” Maro asked, pausing to let both of them reflect on those troublesome years.
“You both had a huge weight of responsibility on your shoulders. As it stands, you were both able to grow up, learn a little independence, and decide that in the end, you’d rather be friends.
But if you’d known, back at that early age, that you were going to be forced to live with each other for the rest of your lives, how do you think you’d have reacted? ”
“We’d have flatly refused,” Ryu said, finally seeing the wisdom of his parents’ decisions. “And we’d probably never have got around to seeing the positive side of it all.” He gave a wry chuckle. “It really sucks when your parents end up getting things right.”
Maro laughed, glad Ryu could see the funny side. “So you intend to announce your engagement to the public, then?” he asked. That was why they’d come here, after all.
“Yes. We do.”
“Well, I dare say it’ll cause a bit of a stir regardless, but I’m rather grateful that we get to announce that you’re marrying your soulmate, no matter how unusual a pairing that might be.
After the number of shocks they’ve had recently, I think the masses would likely have started a riot if the new king announced he was throwing the Goddess’s blessing back in her face. ”
Ryu smirked. “So this way, if anyone causes a fuss, I just fall back on the sturdy excuse that I’m obeying the Goddess’s wishes?”
“I’m well aware of the irony,” Maro agreed, “given that you came in here dead set on doing the exact opposite. But I doubt the Goddess will hold it against you. I’m told she has rather a dry sense of humour.”
“So, just to make sure we’re all clear on what’s going on,” Kentario interrupted suddenly, “are there any other secrets we should know about? Long lost members of the family? Secret identities? Hidden crimes from years ago?”
“Well, since you mention it,” Maro began, causing Ryu to curse softly.
“Seriously?” the young man asked. “Isn’t this enough yet?”
“Just one more thing,” Maro said, knowing he was trying Ryu’s patience.
“Now that you both know you’re soulmates, I can finally tell you why you were taken off duty when Ryu’s kidnapping threat came in,” he said to Kentario.
“And I assure you, it’s absolutely nothing to do with any doubts about your ability to keep him safe.
The simple truth is that when intelligence confirmed the threat, you were two weeks out from Ryu’s eighteenth birthday.
It was the first real threat you’d ever faced in your role as his bodyguard.
King Sou couldn’t bear the thought that you might be killed without you two ever finding out you were soulmates and without having the chance to enjoy your time together, even for a little while. ”
Kentario scowled. “I wasn’t aware the king particularly cared about my safety.”
“He didn’t,” Maro admitted. “But he cared very much about Ryu’s happiness.
And it’s difficult to be happy when your soulmate is either maimed or dead.
For what it’s worth, I strongly objected to his plan to send me instead.
I warned him that it could cause a lot of resentment on your part and that it might even create a rift between you and Ryu, depending on how things panned out.
But he insisted. And I couldn’t tell you the exact reason why until you’d found out about your soul marks. ”
“Exactly how many people knew we were soulmates?” Ryu asked. “Because that has got to be the best kept secret this place has ever seen.”
“There have been seven, over the years. Both your parents, Ryu. Kentario, your mother and father knew, of course. And then there was me, Ryu’s nanny, when he was a baby, and Helbert, your steward.”
Helbert, thankfully, had survived the attack on the palace, though he’d now been given a month’s leave to recover from the ordeal.
Apparently, he’d ended up huddled in a storage closet with two maids and a gardener, one of the maids bleeding profusely, and an armed man outside, threatening to shoot the lock if they didn’t open the door.
One of Maro’s guards had arrived at that point, shooting the attacker, but the four staff had been quite traumatised by the whole event.
“Your parents tried to keep the number of people who knew to a minimum. Less chance of the truth slipping out that way.”
“So many things make sense now,” Ryu muttered, no doubt putting together a whole raft of puzzle pieces, things his parents had said and done over the years that only now were being given a context. “So now what? We just announce that we’re soulmates and get married?”
“For the sake of simplicity, it’s probably best that we make an appointment for you both with SoulWorks. They’ll scan both your soul marks, match you up and make it all official. It’s not much more than a formality but it makes the paperwork a lot easier down the track.”
“I’m already registered,” Kentario said. “My parents did mine when I was five. So it’s just Ryu who needs… What?” he asked suddenly, seeing the look on Maro’s face.
“Your soul mark was never registered,” Maro said, bracing himself for Kentario’s displeasure. “Your father told you it had been in order to keep you from running off and registering it yourself. Given that you were going to turn eighteen sooner than Ryu, it seemed the simpler option.”
“That’s bullshit,” Kentario told him. “My father signed the account over to me when I turned eighteen. I signed the paperwork and everything.”
“You might have signed it, but he never registered it with SoulWorks.”
“Goddess alive,” Ryu muttered, rubbing his eyes. “Are there any more secrets we should know about?”
“No, that’s the last one. At least, the last one that I know about,” Maro said.
“But I do have just one more question.” He paused, wondering if he was going to regret what he was about to say, then decided to just say it and hang the consequences.
“I just have to ask; how on earth did you two manage to have sex without seeing each other’s soul marks? ”
Ryu’s cheeks turned red as he looked everywhere but at Maro’s face. He shrugged helplessly. “It was dark.”
“Well, that’s a good enough excuse, I suppose,” Maro said, relieved that the answer was both lacking in details and nothing overly misguided. “Moving right along, let’s talk about when you’d like to make this momentous announcement…”