5. Chapter 5
The king's chambers were vast.
Lorne stood just inside the door and took the room in the way he took in any unfamiliar space, carefully and quietly, noting exits and angles and the quality of the light.
Not from any training in strategy. From a lifetime of stepping into greenhouses and apiaries where a careless foot meant a shattered pot or an angry hive.
The ceiling was high. The walls were hung with tapestries of hunts and victories, men on horseback with swords raised, stags brought to ground, the same iconography of dominance that decorated every surface in Thessmere.
The bed took the center of the room, enormous and canopied in deep blue silk, and the sight of it settled into Lorne's stomach like a swallowed stone.
Aldric was already inside. He had dismissed the servants with a wave and stood by the window with a goblet of wine, formal jacket off, shirt unlaced at the throat.
In the lamplight he was handsome. Lorne could acknowledge that the way he acknowledged any fact, honestly and without feeling.
The king was tall and golden and well made, and by every objective measure an attractive alpha at the height of his power.
Lorne's body did not care.
It did not care that the king was handsome.
It did not care that he was powerful, that he was wealthy, that he commanded armies and held borders and could hand the youngest prince of a minor province a life of security he'd never have reached on his own.
His body kept its own counsel and applied its own criteria.
It had returned its verdict two nights ago in a moonlit garden, and the verdict was not this one, and no amount of reasoning was going to overturn it.
"Come here," Aldric said.
Lorne went. He crossed the stone floor and stopped an arm's length away and stood with his hands folded and his chin up and his scent held carefully, desperately flat.
Aldric set down his wine. He took Lorne's jaw in his hand, the same grip from the chapel, and turned his face one way and then the other in the lamplight. Looking. Assessing.
"You'll do," he said, the way a man concludes a private deliberation. "You're pretty enough. Soft. That's good. The court likes a soft omega."
"Thank you," Lorne said, because he had nothing else, and politeness was the only defense in reach.
"Take your clothes off."
Flat and practical. A man used to issuing instructions and having them carried out. There was no seduction in it and no warmth and no acknowledgment that the person in front of him had a heartbeat and a nervous system and a name.
Lorne's fingers went to the buttons at his throat. They were the small silk-covered kind that needed precision, and his hands were shaking, and the shaking made them impossible, and he fumbled the first one and felt his face go hot.
Aldric watched him the way a man watches a servant lay a table.
Lorne managed the buttons. The ivory silk slid off his shoulders and pooled at his waist and then at his feet, and he stood in his underclothes and his skin prickled in the cool air.
He was slight under the silk. He had always known it and had never minded it, because his body had been built for kneeling in gardens and reaching into hives and doing the slow careful work of tending, not for the kind of power alphas prized.
Under the king's inspection he felt it as a failing.
"All of it."
Lorne took off the rest. He stood naked in the king's chambers and did not cross his arms over his chest, because crossing his arms would read as reluctance, and reluctance was not something this alpha would tolerate.
His hair was still braided. The omega's coronet, wound around his head with its careful loops and pins. The braid that was meant to come down under the alpha's hands. A tradition. An intimacy.
Aldric never touched it.
The king crossed to the bed, sat on the edge, and began unlacing his trousers with the brisk indifference of a man getting ready for sleep.
He was already half hard. Lorne could see it, could smell the spike of alpha arousal in his scent, sharp and commanding, and the sight and the smell of it should have started something. The warming. The softening. The slick.
Nothing started.
"On the bed."
Lorne lay down. The sheets were cool against his bare skin and the pillows carried the king's scent, heavy and sharp, and he breathed it in and waited for his body to answer it.
He was dry. Completely, uselessly dry. His skin stayed cool, his scent stayed flat, and the omega instincts that were supposed to soften and open and flood him with readiness were not fighting.
They were not resisting. They were simply absent, as though they had looked at the situation and concluded it had nothing to do with them.
And he knew exactly why, and he could not say it.
He had been on the same dose two nights ago.
The same tablet, the same tin, the same chalk-and-iron taste at the back of his throat.
And in a ruined garden, on his knees in the dirt, a stranger had told him he was beautiful and Lorne's body had gone slick in the space of a breath.
The suppressant had not stopped it. The suppressant had never had anything to do with it.
His body had chosen. It was not going to unchoose.
Aldric came over him. The king's weight pressed him into the mattress and the king's scent was everywhere, and the king's hands moved across him with the confidence of a man expecting welcome.
He palmed Lorne's thigh and pushed it open and put his hand between his legs, and Lorne felt the touch and waited.
Nothing came.
Aldric's fingers searched. Found dry skin. Pushed harder, and Lorne's body clenched shut against it, not out of will, not out of defiance, only the plain involuntary refusal of flesh that had not been readied for anything.
He pressed a finger into him dry and Lorne gasped.
The sound was not pleasure. It was pain, sharp and bright and immediate, unprepared flesh forced open by an impatient hand, and everything in him locked tighter in answer, a wall of muscle closing, and his breath went ragged and his fists knotted in the sheets.
"Relax." The first edge of annoyance in the king's voice. Not anger yet. The irritation of a man who expected a mechanism to work and has found it jammed.
"I'm trying." It came out barely above a whisper. "I'm sorry. I'm trying."
He was. He was trying with everything he had, willing his body to soften, to open, to cooperate, because this was his husband and his duty and the thing he had agreed to, and he wanted to be good at it.
He wanted to be the omega this king had been promised.
He wanted to be worth the alliance his body was supposed to seal.
He tried to think of nothing. He tried to breathe.
He tried to clear his mind and let instinct take over the way the physicians' manuals promised it would, the omega's body will respond naturally to the alpha's proximity, producing slick and relaxation in preparation for claiming, and his body lay under the king and clenched and stayed dry as chalk.
Aldric pulled his hand back and sat up on his heels and looked down at him, and the annoyance had hardened into something colder.
"What's wrong with you?"
"Nothing. I'm. Nothing. I just need a moment. I'm nervous. It's my first..."
"You're an omega. Your body is supposed to do this on its own."
"I know. I know, I'm sorry, I only..."
"Any omega worth his breeding would be slick and begging by now."
The words dropped into still water. Each one a weight. Each one going down. Lorne lay on his back in the king's bed and felt them settle into the soft places and begin to bruise.
Any omega worth his breeding. As though his body's refusal were a fault in the manufacture. As though he had arrived damaged, a purchase that failed to meet its specification.
"I'm sorry." His voice was thin. "Please. If you could give me a moment."
Aldric tried again. His patience had never been generous and it had narrowed now to a blade. He forced Lorne's thighs apart rather than asking and pushed into him again, dry, and Lorne made a sound too tight to be a cry and too loud to be silence, and his body seized around it and his eyes stung.
It hurt in a way that was specific. He lay very still and breathed through it and did not ask him to stop, because asking him to stop felt like a worse failure than the pain.
Aldric pulled out of him, took his hips, dragged him down the bed, and positioned himself.
Lorne felt the blunt press of him and everything locked, every muscle, an involuntary wall, and Aldric pushed and Lorne was so tight and so dry and so completely unready that the king could not get inside him at all.
He tried. He pushed harder, grinding against a body that had closed itself, his frustration climbing toward fury, and Lorne's vision blurred and his hands twisted in the sheets and the sound that came out of him was not a moan.
Aldric pulled back.
He looked down with an expression Lorne recognized the way you recognize a storm from the color of the sky. Not the shape of it yet. Only the certainty that it was on its way.
"Defective," Aldric said.
Cold. Clinical. The verdict of an inspection.
"You're defective. I was promised an omega of breeding age, capable of bonding. What I have been given is this."
"I'm not. Please. It's only nerves, I..."
The blow came fast.
Aldric's open hand caught the side of his face hard enough to snap his head around.
The sound of it was flat and final in the quiet room, and the pain that came after was nothing like the pain below.
It was bright and ringing, spreading from his cheekbone to his temple to the base of his skull, and copper bloomed on his tongue where his teeth had opened the inside of his cheek.
Lorne went very still.