6. Chapter 6 #3
"I have been alive forty-five years and an alpha for twenty-seven," Valdyr said, low and rough and entirely certain, "and I have never smelled an omega so perfect.
So ready. So fucking drenched that the scent of it kept me awake two nights running.
" His thumb crossed the cheekbone again, pressing just enough to be felt.
"There is nothing wrong with you. There is not one broken thing in your whole body.
Your body simply knows which alpha it wants. "
The silence afterward was enormous.
Lorne stared at him, flushed and wide-eyed and open-mouthed, and then his hand came up, trembling, slow, and his fingers closed around Valdyr's wrist. Not pulling. Not pushing. Holding. Anchoring himself to the one point of contact with a grip that was gentle and fierce and desperate at once.
Neither of them moved.
The bond ran between them, low and deep, vibrating in the space where their bodies did not quite touch.
Valdyr's blood was a roar in his ears. His cock strained against his laces hard enough to hurt.
And he could smell Lorne's slick, right now, in this greenhouse, his body answering Valdyr's nearness and Valdyr's hands and Valdyr's words, sweet and wet and threading through the air between them.
The proof of everything he had just said, irrefutable, biological.
Producing for him what it would not produce for a king.
He could have him. Here, on this bench, in the warm light, with the seedlings Lorne had planted for witnesses.
He could push him back and spread his thighs and taste what Aldric would never taste.
He could bite. He could claim. He could put a mark on that throat that would say mine in a language older than speech.
He could. His body was pleading with him to.
He stepped back.
He took his hand off Lorne's face, and Lorne's grip on his wrist tightened for one fraction of a second before it let go, and the loss of it landed in Valdyr's chest like a boot.
He picked up the basin. He straightened. He looked at Lorne sitting on the workbench with his bandaged foot and his wet face and his crooked ribbon.
"Keep off the foot," he said. Gruff. Steady. Nothing in it giving away that his body was at war with his will and the margin was thinner than a blade. "For the rest of the day. Keep it clean. Change the bandage tonight."
Lorne looked at him.
"Valdyr."
His name, in that voice. Soft and aching and certain. It moved through his chest the way a root moves through soil, finding its way, anchoring, refusing to come free.
"Don't do it again," Lorne said. "Please. The corridors. Looking through me like I'm furniture."
Valdyr stopped with his back half turned.
"You're the only person in this castle who has looked at me and seen anything.
" Lorne's voice was wrecked and level at once, which was somehow worse.
"Two days ago you walked past me in the garden.
I was kneeling in the dirt with a bruise on my face and you looked at me for one second and then you looked away, and I have thought about that second every hour since.
" He drew a breath. "Be angry with me. Tell me it can never happen.
I'll agree with you. I already agree with you.
Just don't do the silence. The silence hurts worse than anything he's done. "
The greenhouse was very quiet.
"Keep off the foot," Valdyr said, and walked out with the basin in his hands and his teeth clenched hard enough to ache.
He made it halfway down the corridor before he had to stop.
He set the basin on a window ledge and put his forehead against the cool stone and breathed through his mouth, because breathing through his nose meant smelling the honey and lavender still on his hands.
His hands. The hands that had held that foot with a tenderness he had not known was in him. That had cupped a bruised face and felt tears run over the fingers and had not killed anyone, which was a feat of restraint deserving some kind of commendation.
Aldric had struck him. The king had hit Lorne across the face on their wedding night because Lorne's body would not make slick for an alpha it had not chosen.
Had tried to force him dry. Had called him defective and worthless.
And Lorne, who was the kindest thing Valdyr had encountered in forty-five years of a hard life, had taken every word of it and believed it, and had sat on a workbench with tears on his face and repeated it back as though it were true, when it was nothing but the temper of a man whose pride mattered to him more than his consort's pain.
The rage was immense, and it was the cold kind.
Not the sort that burns fast and flames out.
The sort that goes into the bone and stays.
Valdyr knew this rage. He had carried it into battle, the crystalline focus that sharpened everything it touched.
But that had been the impersonal anger of a soldier facing an enemy.
This was his mate's blood and his mate's tears, and the man who had caused it was the man he had sworn to serve, and the contradiction was going to take him apart.
He pressed harder into the stone until it bit.
You cannot kill the king. His family. The treaty. The borders. He told you himself, in the garden, before he ran. If the treaty breaks, the northern campaigns reach his parents inside a season.
He breathed.
You are a soldier. You took an oath. Fifteen years of it. You do not get to break it because your blood wants revenge. This is not about what you want. This is about what he needs, and what he needs is for you to hold the line.
He breathed.
Eventually, when the stone under his forehead had gone warm and his breathing had leveled and the worst of it had been compressed into something he could carry, he straightened.
He emptied the basin out the nearest window, returned it, walked to the training yard, picked up a sword, and hit things until his arms would not lift.
Brell found him at dusk, sitting on the equipment bench in the empty yard with his practice sword across his knees and his hands hanging between his thighs.
She sat down beside him without speaking. She just sat, present and steady, the way she had sat after Thornwall and after Cairn and after every other occasion the world had opened him up and he had needed somebody in the vicinity while he closed.
"He's hurting him," Valdyr said. Flat. Empty. The flatness was worse than shouting.
Brell was quiet a moment.
"I know."
He looked at her, and her face was grim and entirely unsurprised, and something in him lurched between relief and fury.
"How long?"
"Since the morning after the wedding. He was kneeling in that ruined bed by the wall when we cut through to the yard.
You looked away. I didn't." She let that sit exactly as long as it needed to.
"There was powder on his cheek and the color was wrong for his skin.
Hanne did what she could with it. And the servants talk.
Not outright. But the silences are loud enough, if you know how to listen to a silence. "
"And you didn't tell me."