6. Chapter 6 #2
The crack was enormous in the quiet, followed by the scatter of shards, and Lorne stumbled back from the mess with color flooding his face. Then he hissed and lifted his foot and there was blood on the stone.
A shard had opened the sole of his bare foot. Valdyr could see it from where he stood, a line of red across the arch, not deep but bleeding freely, and Lorne's face came apart.
Not from the pain. From something worse. He had been holding himself together with desperate precision for days and had just, in one clumsy second, lost his grip on it.
"I'm sorry." The words came fast and thin. He was already bending toward the mess. "I'm so sorry, I'm clumsy, I didn't expect anyone to be. I'll clean it up. I'm sorry, I'll..."
Valdyr crossed the greenhouse in four strides.
He didn't decide to. There was no thought between the blood on the flagstones and his body in motion, no more than there was thought between a horn sounding and a soldier moving.
His hands caught Lorne at the waist, both of them, spanning the narrow warmth of him through the linen, and he lifted him off the floor and set him on the workbench in one motion.
Lorne made a startled sound. His hands flew to Valdyr's shoulders, reflexive, fingers curling into the leather of his jerkin, and for one lurching second they were close.
Valdyr's hands at his waist. Lorne's hands on his shoulders.
Their faces inches apart. Honey and woodsmoke, lavender and iron, tangled in the warm air between them.
Valdyr stepped back. Releasing him took a physical effort. His arms dropped to his sides.
"Stay," he said, and went to find water.
There was a basin in the back corner, fed by a hand pump that complained bitterly and then produced. Valdyr filled it, found a strip of clean linen on a shelf meant for tying plants, and carried both back to the bench where Lorne sat with his hurt foot drawn up and his hands gripping the edge.
His cheeks were still flushed. His scent was a tangle of embarrassment and pain and something warm underneath that Valdyr refused to look at directly, because looking at it would cost him whatever self-control he still had.
He crouched in front of the bench.
The posture put his head below Lorne's, which was deliberate, and which he would never admit to.
A crouching alpha was a non-threatening alpha.
A crouching alpha with his head lower than the omega's was an alpha choosing deference, and the fact that the instinct had arrived unbidden in a man built the way Valdyr was built told him more about the depth of the bond than any amount of scent could have.
He took Lorne's foot in his hand.
It was small. Smaller than it had any right to be.
The arch was high, the skin warm and soft everywhere except the ball and the heel, where the calluses were.
Years of walking barefoot through gardens and greenhouses and dirt paths, never once bothering to protect his own feet, because his feet had been busy staying in contact with the ground.
The cut ran across the arch, a clean slice about two inches long, bleeding steadily, with a sliver of terracotta lodged in the deepest part of it. Valdyr cradled the heel in his palm, dipped the cloth, and began washing the blood away.
He was careful. Excruciatingly, deliberately careful, his broad scarred scaled hands working with a precision that had nothing to do with training.
This was Lorne's skin under his fingers.
Lorne's blood on the cloth. Lorne's body handed over to his hands on trust, and he would have taken his own arm off before he added to the hurt.
He found the sliver and got it between his claws, which were good for this when he wanted them to be, and pulled.
Lorne flinched. A small caught sound, bitten off before it finished.
Valdyr paused and looked up.
Their eyes met.
The greenhouse went very quiet.
Lorne was looking down at him with an expression Valdyr could not read and could not stop looking at.
His eyes were too bright, the brightness of water held back by will alone, and his lips were parted, and his scent had gone soft.
Not the deliberate softness of a man managing himself.
The involuntary kind, an omega opening under an alpha's hands because the hands were gentle and the gentleness contradicted every visible fact about the man they belonged to.
And Valdyr saw the bruise.
Left cheekbone. Partly covered, powder applied carefully and well, but at this distance and in this light and with his senses tuned the way they were, it could not be mistaken for anything else. Purple through the center, going yellow at the edges. The shape and size of an open hand.
A strike. Not a doorframe, not a fall, not any of the convenient lies available for a mark in that place and of that shape. Somebody had hit him hard enough across the face to leave that, and it was still vivid two days on.
Valdyr's hands went still on the linen.
Something inside him went very quiet. Not calm. The opposite of calm. The silence before a detonation, when the fuse is lit and the fire is traveling and there is nothing left between now and the blast except a measurable amount of time.
His eyes moved from the bruise to Lorne's. Lorne saw him see it. Something crossed his face, fear, shame, the fast arithmetic of a man deciding whether to lie, and then it settled into something resigned and exhausted and very young.
Valdyr reached up. He moved slowly, telegraphing it the way he'd approach a frightened animal, and cupped Lorne's face in his palm.
His thumb rested beside the bruise. Not on it.
Beside it. Close enough that the heat of his hand would reach the damaged skin.
Close enough to say I see this, and I see what was done to you.
"Who did this?"
His voice was quiet. It was the quietest it had ever been, and the quiet was not gentleness, or not only gentleness. It was the sound of a man holding something enormous that would be loud and irreversible if he let go of it.
Lorne's breath shook against his palm.
He didn't answer. He didn't need to.
There was exactly one person in this castle who would dare strike the prince consort.
One person whose position and power and legal authority put Lorne's body inside his rights.
One person who had been alone with him behind a closed door on their wedding night, where nobody could see and nobody could intervene.
Lorne watched him arrive at it. Watched the quiet in his face shift from containment into something with a floor under it that had begun to give way.
And the tears came without warning, as though being known, having the thing witnessed by somebody who cared, had dissolved the last of what was holding him upright.
"It's my fault," Lorne said.
Barely a whisper. The tears tracked down his face and over Valdyr's thumb.
"I'm broken. I'm a terrible husband. I'm a worthless omega. He said..."
"Stop."
Soft, and absolute, and not a request.
Lorne's mouth closed. His eyes were wide and wet.
"Why would you say those things?" Valdyr's thumb traced the edge of the bruise, feather light. "Those words. Where did they come from?"
Lorne's gaze dropped. His lashes were wet. The color came up hot and splotchy across his cheeks, nothing like the blush in the garden, and his voice went small and wretched.
"We couldn't. The wedding night. We couldn't consummate the marriage."
Valdyr's hand did not move. His face did not change. But something behind his eyes shifted, plates of fury grinding along plates of restraint.
"Because my body is broken." His voice cracked on it.
"I don't. I can't." He pressed his lips together, drew a breath, and made himself go on with the agonized determination of a man setting down something that had been eating him from the inside.
"I don't get slick. For him. My body won't respond.
He tried, and I was dry, and tight, and he couldn't." The flush had gone all the way to his ears and his voice was barely there.
"He said any omega worth his breeding would be. And I couldn't. I can't. And he..."
He gestured at his own cheek. At the evidence.
Valdyr was silent a long moment.
His hand stayed where it was. The greenhouse was warm and still and the light came down through the glass in gold columns, and the air held earth and green things and honey and woodsmoke, and between them the bond ached.
He did not kiss him. He wanted to. The wanting was a physical fact, a pressure behind the sternum, every cell in him leaning toward that mouth.
Lorne's scent had gone soft and open against his palm, blooming with a sweetness that was involuntary and devastating, and every instinct he had was screaming at him to close the distance and take what was his.
He held. Because he had to. Because Lorne belonged to the king and Valdyr's honor was the only thing standing between this moment and a catastrophe.
His thumb moved along the curve of the cheekbone, slow and deliberate, and the touch was more intimate than a kiss would have been, because it was chosen, and because it stopped.
Because it said I am here, and I want you, and I am not taking.
"You're not broken," Valdyr said.
Lorne's breath caught.
"Do you know how I know that?"
Lorne shook his head. The tears were still coming, slow and quiet, running silver down his face and over Valdyr's hand.
Valdyr wiped one away with his thumb. His eyes held Lorne's, and his expression was stripped of every pretense he owned.
"Because you were so wet for me that night in the garden that I could smell it for days."
Lorne's lips parted. A small sharp intake of breath.