Chapter 8 #2
The moss is soft beneath Bryn's back, cool against his overheated skin, and the forest canopy wheels above him, green and gold and dappled with light that shifts as the breeze moves through the leaves.
Ithyris is above him, braced on his forearms, and the prince looks down at him with dark, depthless eyes and his gaze moves over Bryn's face, his throat, his chest, his stomach, tracking each detail with a hunger that is methodical and devastating, as though he is memorizing every inch of Bryn's body and cataloging it the way Bryn catalogs trade routes and fortifications.
Except Bryn catalogs things to survive them.
Ithyris is cataloging Bryn because he wants to remember him.
"You're shaking," the prince murmurs.
"I'm aware."
"Are you afraid?"
"Yes." Bryn swallows. The honesty costs him something but he gives it anyway. "But don't stop."
Ithyris lowers his head and presses his open mouth to Bryn's collarbone and Bryn arches off the ground.
The prince's tongue traces the ridge of bone, hot and wet, and his lips drag down over Bryn's sternum with a slowness that is deliberate and devastating.
He takes his time. Every inch of skin gets his attention, his mouth open and tasting, his breath warm, his fingers tracing the lines between Bryn's ribs with a delicacy that is at odds with the strength Bryn knows those hands hold, the same hands that took Syreth by the throat, the same hands that gripped the arms of his throne until the wood cracked.
Those hands are tracing the ridges of Bryn's too-visible ribs with the careful, reverent touch of someone handling something precious and breakable, and the contrast is doing things to Bryn that he doesn't have vocabulary for.
Ithyris finds his nipple and closes his mouth over it and sucks and Bryn's back bows off the moss and his hand flies to the prince's hair and grips and the sound that comes out of him is sharp and startled and raw and he would be embarrassed by it if he had any capacity left for embarrassment, which he does not.
The prince stays there, works him with his tongue, with the careful edge of his teeth, while his other hand finds the other nipple and rolls it between his fingers, and Bryn is gasping and squirming and pulling at Ithyris's hair and his hips are lifting off the ground, seeking friction, seeking the prince, and he can feel how wet he is at the tip of his cock, smearing against his own stomach, and the desperation of it is humiliating and intoxicating in equal measure.
Ithyris's mouth moves lower. Down Bryn's stomach, his tongue dipping into the hollow of Bryn's navel, his hands gripping Bryn's hips to hold him still because Bryn can't stop moving, his body operating entirely independently of his will.
The prince reaches the waistband of his trousers and looks up at him and the sight of Ithyris between his legs, dark-eyed and flushed and devastatingly beautiful, his mouth inches from where Bryn needs him, nearly finishes him right there.
"Ithyris." The prince's name comes out broken.
Bryn doesn't recognize his own voice. It sounds nothing like the dry, controlled, strategically composed voice he's used for six years to hold a kingdom together.
It sounds desperate and young and honest and it is the sound of a person who has never asked for anything for himself and is asking now. "Please."
Ithyris pulls Bryn's trousers down. Slow, deliberate, peeling the fabric off his legs with a care that makes the act feel ceremonial rather than practical, and Bryn is bare beneath him, fully exposed, and the forest air touches his skin and the vulnerability of it is enormous and total.
He is hard and leaking and trembling and the prince looks at the whole of him with an expression that is reverent and hungry at the same time, and the combination of those two things on Ithyris's face, the worship and the want existing simultaneously, does something to the structure behind Bryn's ribs that he will never fully recover from.
"Beautiful," Ithyris says, low and rough and certain in the way he's certain about everything. "You are the most beautiful thing I've ever seen."
"You don't have to..."
"I do." He presses his mouth to the inside of Bryn's thigh and Bryn jerks and gasps. "I have to. You need to hear it, Bryn, because I don't think anyone has ever told you and that is a failure on the part of everyone who has ever looked at you. You're beautiful. Every part of you."
He wraps his hand around Bryn's cock. His palm is hot and rough and his fingers close around him with a grip that is firm and sure and Bryn cries out and his hips buck up into the prince's fist. Ithyris strokes him once, slow, root to tip, his thumb dragging through the wetness at the head, spreading it, and the pleasure of it after the prolonged buildup of the flight and the kissing and the prince's mouth on every inch of his skin is so sharp that Bryn's vision goes white at the edges and his hands fist in the moss.
Then the prince replaces his hand with his mouth.
Bryn stops breathing. Ithyris's lips close over the head of his cock and the heat and the wet and the suction are overwhelming, a pleasure so concentrated it borders on agony, and the prince takes him deeper, his tongue working the underside, his hand gripping the base, and Bryn is fisting the moss and arching off the ground and making sounds he will never be able to unhear and will certainly never be able to deny.
Ithyris works him with the same devastating thoroughness he applies to everything, patient and relentless and entirely focused on taking Bryn apart, and Bryn can feel the orgasm building at the base of his spine, a tightening, a gathering, and he yanks at the prince's hair with fingers that are shaking.
"Stop. I'm going to... stop, I want..."
Ithyris pulls off. Looks up at Bryn with those blown-black eyes and his mouth wet and swollen and red and Bryn almost comes from the sight alone, his cock jerking against his stomach, and he bites down on his own lip hard enough to taste copper to keep himself from tipping over the edge.
"What do you want?" The prince's voice is destroyed. Barely above a whisper, rough and dark and stripped of every layer of composure and authority until there's nothing left but the raw material of the man underneath.
"You." Bryn doesn't have the capacity for cleverness.
His body has overridden his brain in a coup so complete that the strategic mind he's relied on for six years has been deposed entirely and what comes out of his mouth is honest and desperate and stripped of every defense he owns. "I want you. All of you. I want..."
He can't say it. His face is burning and the words won't form and the gap between what he wants and what he can articulate is vast and humiliating and Ithyris must read it in his expression because something in the prince's jaw shifts and his eyes go impossibly darker and he presses his forehead to Bryn's stomach and breathes, one ragged inhale, steadying himself against Bryn's skin.
"I need to open you up," Ithyris says against his skin, the words warm against Bryn's stomach. "I won't hurt you. I'll go slow. I'll stop the moment you tell me to."
He shifts down between Bryn's legs and pushes his thighs apart and Bryn lets him, trembling, heart pounding so hard he can feel it in his vision, and the prince looks at the whole of him spread open and the sound Ithyris makes is low and gutted and reverent, the sound of a creature seeing something it has spent its entire life carrying the shape of.
He presses his mouth to the inside of Bryn's thigh.
Then lower. His tongue traces a line down and then he licks over him, flat and wet and deliberate, and the sensation is so strange and so intimate and so overwhelmingly good that Bryn makes a sound that is almost a sob and his hand flies to the prince's hair and grips.
He works Bryn open with his tongue. Slow, patient, thorough, pressing inside him, getting him wet and relaxed while his hands grip Bryn's hips and hold him steady because Bryn is shaking apart beneath him.
The sensation is nothing Bryn could have imagined, nothing his strategic mind could have predicted or prepared for, the intimacy of it, the vulnerability, the prince's mouth on the most private part of him and the pleasure of it building in slow, liquid waves that roll through his body and leave him gasping.
His hand is in Ithyris's hair. His thighs are trembling where they're spread around the prince's shoulders.
He is making sounds he will deny to his grave, small and broken and pleading, and he doesn't care because caring requires a level of self-awareness that has been stripped from him along with everything else.
When the prince's finger replaces his tongue Bryn tenses.
Ithyris feels it immediately, stills, waits.
Bryn hears a faint, quiet click and glances down and sees that the prince's claws have retracted fully, drawn back into his fingertips until his hands look almost human, blunt-nailed and careful.
The gesture is small and deliberate and it says more about the prince's awareness of Bryn's body than any words could.
He presses one thick finger in slowly, and the intrusion is strange, a fullness and a stretch that borders on discomfort and hovers there.
"Breathe," Ithyris murmurs against his thigh. "Breathe for me, Bryn."
He breathes. The prince works his finger deeper, slow and careful, and the discomfort shifts and changes and when Ithyris curls his finger and presses against something inside him the pleasure that shoots through Bryn's body is so sudden and so intense that he arches off the ground and cries out and his cock jerks and leaks against his stomach.
"There," Ithyris says, and does it again, and Bryn nearly screams.