10. Chapter 10 #2
Days, now. A fortnight at the outside. His body was already turning over, restless and warm at the edges, and when it struck he would be past command of it, open and desperate and biologically incapable of refusal, and the king would come and take what Lorne's waking mind would never have given him.
The bite. The seal. And then Lorne would be his, permanently and chemically, a claim forced onto him in the one state where consent was not available to be given.
He had read about forced bonds. He knew what came after.
The chemistry rewritten. The instincts retuned to an alpha the body had already rejected, and the dissonance of that grinding away at a person from the inside until there was very little of the person left.
Depression. Dissociation. The slow grey flattening of someone trapped in a body that would insist, every hour of every day, that it belonged somewhere it did not.
It would kill the self he had carried through every blow and every silent ceiling and every morning walk down to the garden. Not quickly. Not visibly. But it would kill it. The one who knelt in dirt and talked to flowers and could not walk past a thing that needed tending.
He thought about his hives in Aelholm, painted blue and yellow. About the way they hummed when they were content. About how they had never once stung him, because they knew he came to them with steady hands and a quiet heart.
He thought about broad scarred hands and a basin of water. About a thumb tracing a bruise without touching it. About you were so wet for me I could smell it for days, and how the words had gone into him like sunlight.
His breath was coming in short hitches. The wall was cracking.
Then he saw someone.
A figure in the stable doorway, half-lit by the grey outside. Tall, broad through the shoulder, cropped dark hair, a scar running ear to jaw. She stood with rain on her shoulders and she saw him, curled in the corner of the stall with his face in his hands and his whole body going, and she stopped.
Brell.
Their eyes met for one charged moment. His face was uncovered, the bruise vivid, the tears he had not noticed starting already down his cheeks, every defense gone. Her gaze dropped to the wrist he was cradling against his chest, where the swelling showed from the doorway.
Her jaw set.
She did not come to him. She did not speak. She looked for three seconds, which was long enough to see and to understand and to decide, and then she turned and went out at speed, her boots sharp on the wet cobbles.
Lorne watched her go and understood, through the fog, exactly where she was going.
She had found the king's omega bruised and crying in a stall and she had gone straight to the one person she trusted with it.
His hands came down from his face. He should get up. He should wash his face and straighten his shirt and rebuild the smile before Valdyr arrived, because if Valdyr saw the bruise, if Valdyr saw the wrist...
The stable door opened.
Valdyr came through it soaked, his hair plastered flat, still in his training leathers, chest heaving. The training yard was a long way from the stable block and he had covered it in under two minutes.
He took one look.
Lorne was sitting in the straw with his knees up and his wrist against his chest and a handprint on his face and his eyes red and his hair a wreck and his feet filthy, and he knew exactly what he looked like. He looked like the thing Aldric kept telling him he was.
Valdyr crossed the floor in three strides. He did not pause in the doorway and he did not assess anything. He came straight in, no deviation, no wasted motion, and was down on one knee in the straw before Lorne had drawn another breath.
One hand came up and cupped Lorne's jaw and tipped his face into the lantern light. The fingers were careful past all reason for their size, finding the unhurt skin, going around the bruise rather than over it.
He looked at the mark. His eyes went across it, tracing the shape and the color and the unmistakable outline of a hand. Then down to the wrist, still cradled, the swelling obvious, the skin already coming up mottled in a way that would be spectacular by morning.
Everything in Valdyr's face went very quiet.
Not blank. Not stone. Something underneath expression altogether. The stillness of a fault about to slip, and Lorne could feel it coming down the bond, the fury, enormous and soundless, filling the man from the ground up the way magma fills a chamber.
His thumb moved along the edge of the bruise. His hand was shaking. Twenty-seven years of standing in front of things designed to kill him, and his hand was shaking against Lorne's cheek.
The scent coming off him was something Lorne had never encountered in his life.
He knew alpha anger, the bitter spike of it, the aggressive musk that goes ahead of violence.
This was deeper than that and much colder.
It poured off Valdyr's skin in waves strong enough that the horses stamped and rolled their eyes and pressed themselves against the far walls of their stalls.
Iron and smoke and something underneath both, older than language and simpler than thought, which said that an alpha's mate had been harmed and that the harm was owed an answer.
And his hands stayed gentle. Shaking with enough rage to take the roof off, and holding Lorne's face like it was made of petals.
"Who," Valdyr said.
One word, barely voiced, carrying more violence than Lorne had ever heard in a single syllable. He did not finish the question. He did not need to. The word was the whole of it: a name, and a direction.
Lorne's chin trembled against his palm.
"It doesn't..."
"Who."
And then whatever had been holding gave way.
Valdyr came up out of the crouch in one movement that scattered straw across the floor, and his hand left Lorne's face, and the quiet in his expression broke, and what came up through it was not composure. It was intention. Clean and lethal and entirely made up.
"Aldric," he said. The name with no title on it, stripped of every formality, reduced to the name of a man who had put hands on what was his.
He turned toward the door.
Lorne knew. He knew with the flat certainty of a bond that had come wide open, Valdyr's purpose pouring down it like fire down a fuse.
Valdyr was going to kill the king. He was going to walk into the castle and find him and take him apart with his hands, and he did not care in the slightest what came afterward.
Fifteen years of service, the oath, the consequence, the treason.
None of it existed for him. There was the bruise and there was the wrist and there were the tears, and there was the mandate underneath all of it that said destroy the thing that hurt your mate.
Lorne scrambled up.
His hip protested and his elbow throbbed and his wrist screamed when he moved it, and he was up anyway, across the stall in two steps, and his hand closed on Valdyr's arm.
"Valdyr."
He did not stop. His stride was long and settled and his arm was iron and he moved toward the door with the momentum of a decision already made.
"Valdyr. Valdyr. Please."
He did not stop.
Lorne pulled. He was not strong enough to move him and both of them knew it. Valdyr could have dragged him the length of the stable without breaking stride. The pull was not about force. It was about presence, the physical declaration of I am here, I have hold of you, feel me.
"Please."
Two more steps to the door. Then through it, and into the rain, and across the bailey, and it would all be over.
Lorne kissed him.
It was the only thing he could think of. He planted his feet and hauled on the arm and Valdyr half-turned into the resistance, and Lorne came up on his toes and caught his mouth.
The kiss was desperate and badly aimed, his hurt hand fisting in the wet leather of Valdyr's jerkin and the other flying up to the back of his neck, and it tasted of salt off Lorne's face and copper out of his cheek and rain off Valdyr's skin.
Valdyr went rigid.
Every muscle locked. He stood like something carved, his arm still angled toward the door, and for one stretched second Lorne thought it had not worked, that the fury was too big, that he was going to be set aside and left standing in the straw.
Then something in Valdyr gave.
Both hands came up and cupped Lorne's face, careful of the bruise even now, even in the middle of this, and he kissed him back hard enough to take the air out of both of them.
It went from desperate to consuming inside a heartbeat, his mouth thorough and not gentle and somehow reverent anyway, his hands cradling the jaw, his whole body shaking with the effort of holding back the thing that had been walking toward the door.
Lorne's scent came open, helpless and total, the honey going molten, his body doing for this alpha what it did for nobody else.
Weeks of distance and discipline came apart like glass.
His hands knotted in Valdyr's shirt and he pressed himself into that chest and the kiss went deeper, and there was the taste and the scent and the sheer rightness of the contact after so long.
He could feel him hard between them, and the knowledge of it, the plain physical evidence of Valdyr's want even now, even in the middle of fury and grief, sent heat through his belly that took the strength out of his thighs.
He wanted him. He wanted him so badly he could not breathe around it.
He wanted Valdyr's hands on his skin and Valdyr's weight over him and that low rough voice in his ear saying the things the king had never said and would never mean, and the wanting was an ache low in his body where he had already gone wet and open and ready, everything in him saying yes, him, now.
They broke apart, both of them breathing hard.
Valdyr put his forehead against Lorne's. His eyes were shut. His hands were unsteady in Lorne's hair.
He did not do more.