Chapter 9
Eleven seconds.
That's how long Bryn gets before the world reassembles itself and the reality of what just happened settles over him and the warm, perfect feeling in his chest turns to ice.
Ithyris pulls out of him. Slowly, carefully, and Bryn feels the drag of the prince leaving his body and the sudden, aching emptiness where he was and the hot, wet spill of the prince's release running out of him and onto the moss beneath his thighs.
The sensation is intimate and obscene and Bryn is processing all of it with a brain that has been thoroughly dismantled and is only now beginning to reassemble itself into something functional when he notices.
Ithyris is still hard.
The prince pulls free and he is still fully erect, his cock flushed and slick, and the size of him is just as devastating outside of Bryn's body as it was inside it.
He is on his knees between Bryn's spread legs and he is still aroused, still wanting, and the sight of it hits Bryn with the force of a physical blow, landing square in the center of his chest where the warm feeling was.
He wasn't enough.
The thought arrives fully formed, clean and sharp and familiar, cutting through the afterglow with the surgical precision of a blade that knows exactly where to go because it has made this cut before.
Many times before. The prince came inside him and he is still hard.
He had Bryn, all of Bryn, everything Bryn had to give, and it wasn't enough to satisfy him.
Bryn gave him his body and his sounds and his first time and the most vulnerable he has ever been in his life and the prince is still erect and wanting and Bryn was not enough.
The math is simple. The math has always been simple, and the answer is the same one it has always been.
Syreth's voice slithers through his mind, cold and precise. A warm, pliant body. Hunger, not desire. A biological imperative he did not choose.
Of course. Of course he wasn't enough. He has never been enough.
Not for his father, who wanted a different son.
Not for his mother, who wanted a dead one.
Not for Everen, which needed a king and got a boy with a ledger and a talent for lying.
And now not for this, the one thing his body should have been able to provide, the most basic and animal function of a mate, and he has been brought forward and found lacking.
Again. Always. The pattern is so consistent it would be admirable if it weren't destroying him.
The inadequacy hits him with the blunt force of something he should have seen coming and didn't because he was too busy being happy, which is a mistake he knows better than to make and made anyway.
He sits up. The movement is too fast and his body protests, sore in places he has never been sore before, a deep, intimate ache that radiates outward from his center, and he feels the evidence of the prince leaking from him as he moves and he wants to be sick.
Not from disgust. From shame. From the dawning, nauseating certainty that he has just given the most powerful man in this kingdom the one thing he had left to offer and it was not good enough, the way nothing about him has ever been good enough for anyone.
Ithyris sees the change on his face. Bryn watches it register, the shift from satisfied to concerned happening in real time across the prince's features, his blown-dark eyes sharpening, his hand reaching toward Bryn.
"Bryn?"
He can't tell him. He cannot sit on this forest floor, naked and leaking and bruised with the prince's fingerprints on his hips, and explain to the dragon prince of the Drekian Sovereignty that he feels like a failure because Ithyris's cock is still hard.
The humiliation would end him. It would be the thing that finally, irreversibly breaks him after six years of bending without snapping, and he refuses to break where the prince can see.
He has broken in exactly two places in his life: his bedroom in Everen with the door locked, and the back of a dragon during the flight through the chimney.
He is not adding a forest floor to the list.
He reaches for his clothes.
"Bryn, what's wrong?"
He pulls on his trousers. His hands are shaking and the fabric sticks to his damp skin and he yanks it up and doesn't look at the prince.
He finds his shirt and drags it over his head and it's inside out but he doesn't care enough to fix it.
He needs to be covered. He needs fabric between the prince's eyes and his skin because he is too exposed and too raw and if Ithyris touches him again with those careful, reverent hands he will shatter, and he does not shatter where people can see.
"Bryn." The prince says his name low and careful, the way you'd speak to something you're afraid of startling, and Bryn hates it.
He hates the gentleness. He hates that Ithyris can tell something is wrong and he hates that the prince cares and he hates, most of all, that ten minutes ago he was the happiest he has ever been in his entire life and now he is this.
This person. This boy on a forest floor in an inside-out shirt with his first lover's release still wet between his legs and the familiar, crushing weight of not enough sitting on his chest where the happiness was.
He stands. His legs barely hold. There's a soreness between his thighs that is going to get worse before it gets better and every step sends a reminder through his body of what they did and what he wasn't enough for, and the physical evidence of the prince inside him is a humiliation he can't outrun because it's inside him, literally, and will be for hours.
"I'm going back," he says. His voice is flat.
Controlled. The voice he uses when he's balancing ledgers that don't add up, when he's reporting crop failures to a court that doesn't care, when he's holding together because the alternative is falling apart and there is no one to catch him.
He has used this voice a thousand times.
It has never failed him. It is the voice of a boy who learned early that showing pain is an invitation for more of it.
"Wait. Please. Tell me what I..."
Bryn walks away. He doesn't look back. He picks a direction that feels like down, toward the mountain path, and he walks into the trees with his shirt inside out and the prince's release still wet between his legs and his eyes burning and he does not look back because looking back is something he promised himself he would stop doing when he left Everen and he meant it.
***
Ithyris follows him.
Not on foot. Bryn hears the shift behind him, the compression of air and the rush of displaced wind, and then a shadow passes over the canopy, massive and dark, blocking the sun in intervals as the dragon circles above the forest. He doesn't land.
He doesn't swoop down and carry Bryn back to the palace, though he could and Bryn knows he wants to.
He just flies, circling in wide, patient arcs, a warm shadow against the sky, and the restraint of it is the same restraint the prince has shown him from the beginning.
Protecting without pushing. Present without demanding.
Bryn cries on the trail.
He is furious with himself for crying and the fury makes it worse because anger and tears feed each other in a cycle he has never been able to break.
The tears are hot and silent and he wipes them with the back of his hand and they keep coming and he walks and cries and walks and hates himself for all of it.
For the tears. For the wanting. For the way his body still aches with the memory of the prince's hands and the prince's mouth and the fullness of Ithyris inside him and the eleven seconds where he felt as though he belonged somewhere.
Eleven seconds of peace after eighteen years of earning his right to exist, and he couldn't even hold onto that without his brain finding a way to poison it.
The trail winds down the mountain through old-growth forest, under canopies so dense the light comes through in scattered fragments, and across thermal streams that steam in the cool air and smell of minerals.
His legs shake with every step. The soreness deepens into a persistent, low throb that he feels in his hips and his lower back and the tender places inside him where the prince was, and the wetness between his thighs is a constant, humiliating reminder that won't dry and won't be ignored.
Above him, Ithyris's shadow circles. Constant.
Patient. Never landing. The dragon follows him the entire way down the mountain and Bryn doesn't look up at him, not once, but he knows the prince is there and the knowledge sits in his chest next to the shame and the grief and the confused, terrible gratitude of being followed by someone who won't leave even when Bryn walks away from him.
By the time he reaches the palace he is empty.
Hollowed out, wrung dry, operating on the residual momentum of a body that has learned to keep moving long after the person inside it has stopped.
It's a skill he developed in Everen, this ability to function without being present, to walk and breathe and navigate corridors while the actual Bryn is somewhere far away behind his own eyes, watching from a distance.
He uses it now. He walks through the palace corridors and servants move out of his way and he doesn't see them.
He goes to his chambers. He closes the door.
He strips off his clothes and leaves them in a heap on the floor and walks into the bathing room and lowers himself into the thermal pool and the heat of the water hits every sore and tender place on his body at once and he hisses through his teeth and sinks until the water reaches his chin and closes over his shoulders and hides the bruises the prince left on his skin.
***
He scrubs.