Chapter 13
Something has changed between them.
Bryn doesn't know how to name it. It's not the bond, which has been a constant hum since the day he arrived, low and warm and inescapable, a second pulse in his chest that he has stopped trying to ignore because ignoring it is about as effective as ignoring his own heartbeat.
It's not the sex, which has been happening with a frequency that would scandalize the elder council if they knew the half of it, and they probably know at least a quarter because the palace has thin walls and Bryn has lost the ability to be quiet about it.
It's something else. Something that shifted in the pools, in the warm water, in the moment he chose to kneel between the prince's legs and take him apart with his mouth and Ithyris let him.
There is a new weight to the way the prince looks at him.
Ithyris has always watched him. From the beginning, from the great hall, his gaze has tracked Bryn with the focused, consuming attention of a creature who has identified something vital and will not look away from it.
But this is different. This is the gaze of a man who has been given something he didn't expect and is now recalibrating everything he thought he knew about what his mate is capable of, and the recalibration is visible in every interaction, every glance, every point of contact between them.
The prince touches the small of Bryn's back when they walk.
He has done this before. But now his hand stays longer, his fingers spreading wide, his palm pressing flat, and the heat of it seeps through the fabric of Bryn's shirt and into his skin and Bryn feels it for hours afterward, a phantom warmth that pulses in time with his heartbeat.
He has started to anticipate it, to feel the absence of the prince's hand on his back as an incompleteness, and the fact that his body now expects to be touched by this man is both comforting and alarming.
Ithyris's hand lingers at Bryn's elbow when he passes him a dish at dinner.
Not a brush. A hold. His fingers closing around the joint, his thumb settling into the crook of Bryn's arm, and the grip lasts two seconds longer than courtesy requires and in those two seconds his thumb moves, once, a slow circle against the sensitive skin of Bryn's inner arm, and Bryn loses the thread of the conversation he was having with the copper-marked elder and has to ask him to repeat himself and the elder gives him a look that suggests he knows exactly why Bryn lost the thread.
The prince stands too close in the library.
Bryn is reading, or trying to, seated in his usual alcove with a text on Drekian mineral rights that is genuinely interesting and deserves his full attention, and Ithyris leans over his shoulder to look at the page and his chest presses against Bryn's back and the heat of him is staggering, volcanic, and Bryn can feel the prince's breath on his neck and his heartbeat through the thin fabric between them and he reads the same sentence seven times without absorbing a single word of it.
The mineral rights of the eastern provinces could be the most fascinating subject in the history of governance and he wouldn't know because the prince is breathing on his neck.
When Bryn reads, Ithyris watches his mouth.
Bryn discovers this by accident, glancing up from a passage about thermal irrigation and catching the prince's gaze fixed on his lips with an intensity that makes his face flush hot from the collar up.
He licks his lips, reflexive, and the prince's eyes track the movement and his jaw tightens and Bryn looks back at the book and his hands are not steady on the page.
When Bryn argues with courtiers, Ithyris watches his hands.
He is making a point about grain tariffs during a particularly tedious council session, gesturing because he always gestures when he's passionate about something, his hands cutting through the air the way they used to when he was explaining figures to Everen's merchants, and he catches the prince staring at his hands with an expression that has nothing to do with grain tariffs and everything to do with the memory of where those hands have been on Ithyris's body.
Bryn loses his point mid-sentence. The courtier looks confused. The prince looks satisfied.
When Bryn catches him staring, the prince doesn't look away.
This is the part that undoes him. Other men would flinch, would redirect, would have the decency to pretend they weren't cataloging every movement of Bryn's body with the devotion of a scholar studying sacred text.
Ithyris holds his gaze. Those dark amethyst eyes, steady and unashamed, and the look in them says I see you and I want you and I am not embarrassed by either of those things.
He holds and holds and holds until Bryn is the one who breaks, face burning, body sweltering, unable to sustain the weight of being wanted that openly by someone that beautiful.
Bryn breaks first. Every time. The prince knows it. Bryn knows the prince knows it. And still, every time it happens, something in his chest cracks a little wider, another fracture in the architecture that used to keep him sealed and safe and unreachable.
Mithri notices.
"You're flushed," she says one afternoon, studying him across the table in the kitchens where they've taken to having lunch together, a daily ritual that Bryn looks forward to more than he's willing to admit.
"You're always flushed now. You've been flushed for days.
You look as though you've been standing near an open flame. "
"The palace is warm."
"The palace has been warm since you arrived. The flush is new." She tilts her head, her grey eyes sharp and knowing. "He's staring at you right now, isn't he?"
Bryn doesn't turn around. He doesn't need to. He can feel the prince's gaze on the back of his neck, warm and heavy, and the bond pulses in confirmation.
"He's always staring at me."
"Yes." Mithri picks up her cup of tea. "But you're staring back now. That's the difference."
He opens his mouth to deny it. He closes it.
She's right. She's right and he doesn't have a rebuttal because the evidence is written across his face in a permanent flush and a tendency to lose his train of thought whenever a specific dragon prince enters his peripheral vision.
The boy who used to run a kingdom on arithmetic and composure now can't complete a sentence about grain tariffs because Ithyris is looking at his hands.
"Eat your soup," he tells her, which is not a denial but is at least a change of subject, and Mithri grins into her cup and doesn't push, because she knows she's won.
***
This morning he went to the prince's room.
He doesn't know what possessed him. He woke before dawn in his own chambers, the bond humming low and warm in his chest, and he lay in the dark and thought about the prince's mouth and his hands and the sounds Ithyris makes when Bryn touches him and he was hard and restless and instead of doing the sensible thing, which would be to go back to sleep, or the moderately sensible thing, which would be to take care of it himself, he got up and walked down the corridor to the prince's door in his smallclothes and bare feet and let himself in.
Ithyris was asleep.
Bryn had never seen him asleep before. The vulnerability of it stopped him in the doorway, held him there with a force that had nothing to do with the bond and everything to do with the simple, devastating reality of seeing this man unguarded.
The prince was on his back, one arm above his head, the sheets tangled at his waist, and in sleep his face lost the careful control he wears during the day and became something softer, younger, the hard lines of his jaw relaxed and his mouth slightly parted and the tension gone from his brow.
The violet scales at his throat were muted in the dark, their usual shimmer dimmed to a soft glow.
His chest rose and fell, slow and deep, and the room smelled of cedar and warmth and the faint mineral tang that is uniquely Ithyris and that Bryn's body has learned to associate with safety, which is the most dangerous association he has ever formed.
He climbed into the prince's bed.
Ithyris stirred when the mattress shifted.
Made a low sound, more vibration than voice, and his arm moved, reaching for Bryn instinctively, his hand finding Bryn's hip before his eyes opened.
The bond between them pulsed, recognition, and Bryn felt the moment the prince registered his presence, the way his body shifted from sleep to awareness without ever passing through alarm.
There was no startle, no tension, no moment of who is in my bed.
Bryn was a familiar thing in his bed. Expected, even.
The prince's hand on his hip said: there you are.
Bryn pulled the sheets down.
The prince was half-hard already, from sleep or the bond or both, his cock thick and heavy against his thigh, and when the cool air hit his skin he stirred again, his eyes cracking open, hazy and confused, still caught between sleep and waking.
Bryn wrapped his hand around him and felt the prince twitch and thicken in his grip and Ithyris's breath caught.
"Bryn?" His voice was rough with sleep, barely there. "What are you..."
Bryn put his mouth on him.
No preamble. No warning. He lowered his head and took the swelling head of the prince's cock between his lips and sucked and Ithyris's whole body jerked, his hips lifting off the bed, and the sound the prince made was strangled and raw and gratifying in a way that Bryn is only beginning to understand the depths of.
He is learning that he loves making this man lose control.
He is learning that the sound of the prince's composure breaking is his favorite sound in the world, above the crackle of a good fire and the scratch of a pen on ledger paper and Mithri's laugh, and that ranking concerns him not at all.