Chapter 13 #2
He worked the prince with his mouth the way he learned in the pools, slow and thorough, tonguing the underside, sucking the head, taking him deeper with each stroke.
Ithyris went from half-hard to fully hard in his mouth, the length and thickness of him growing against Bryn's tongue, and the sensation of the prince filling his mouth, of being the thing that made him hard, was heady and addictive and Bryn is starting to suspect he could become a person who does this every morning if given the opportunity.
The prince's hand found his hair. His fingers threaded through the short strands, gripping, and this time he didn't apologize.
He held Bryn's head and Bryn could feel the restraint in his grip, the control it took not to thrust up into Bryn's mouth, and Bryn rewarded that control by swallowing him to the root and the prince's restraint dissolved into a groan that vibrated through the bed frame.
"You walked into my room." Ithyris's voice was shattered, his hand tight in Bryn's hair. "At dawn. To wake me up with your mouth. You... Bryn, who are you? What have you done with the boy who blushed when I touched his hand?"
Bryn pulled off long enough to say, "He's busy," and took the prince back in and Ithyris laughed, breathless and broken, and the laugh became a moan and the moan became Bryn's name and Bryn sucked him until the prince's thighs were shaking and his hand was clenched in Bryn's hair and his hips were making those small, desperate movements that meant he was close.
Ithyris pulled him off. Bryn made a sound of protest that he will deny until his death, and the prince dragged him up the bed and flipped him onto his stomach and pinned him and Bryn felt the hot, blunt press of Ithyris's cock against him and he arched back into it, greedy and shameless, and the prince pushed inside in one long stroke that punched the air from Bryn's lungs and pressed his face into the pillow.
The prince fucked him slow and deep and thorough in the grey dawn light, his chest against Bryn's back, his mouth on Bryn's neck, his hands laced with Bryn's above his head.
He rolled his hips in a rhythm that was unhurried and devastating, grinding against that spot on every stroke, and Bryn came with his face in the prince's pillow and Ithyris's name in his mouth and the prince's body covering his completely.
Ithyris came inside him in a hot, pulsing rush and didn't pull out for a long time.
Stayed buried in Bryn, his forehead between Bryn's shoulder blades, his breath ragged, and when he finally slipped free Bryn felt the warm trickle of the prince's release and he didn't clean up.
He pulled on his trousers and the prince's shirt and went to breakfast and he carried Ithyris inside him all day and every time he sat down he felt it and thought of the prince and the fact that he is the kind of person who does this now, who walks around a palace with the evidence of his lover inside him and argues about grain tariffs and drinks tea with his sister and doesn't apologize for any of it.
***
It happens in the evening.
Bryn is walking the corridor after dinner, one of the quieter ones that connects the library wing to the residential quarters.
The amber sconces are dimmed to a low glow and the palace has settled into its nighttime hush, the distant sound of the thermal vents and the faint creak of volcanic stone cooling in the evening air.
He is thinking about the second trial, about what vulnerability means, about how Lira told him the trials test trust, vulnerability, and truth and he survived the first but the second feels closer, pressing in, and he doesn't know when it's coming or what it will ask of him.
He rounds a corner and walks into Ithyris.
Literally. Chest to chest. The prince catches him by the waist before he stumbles, his hands gripping Bryn's hips, and Bryn collides with the wall of the prince's body and the impact sends a shock through him that has nothing to do with the physical force and everything to do with the sudden, complete proximity.
The corridor is narrow here, one of the older passages, and the amber light is low and the stone is warm and they are very, very close.
The prince's breath comes hard.
Bryn can feel it against his forehead, hot and unsteady, and Ithyris's fingers are flexing on his hips, gripping and releasing, as though the prince is trying to decide whether to pull Bryn closer or let him go and the decision is physically painful.
His thumb traces Bryn's hipbone through his shirt.
Slow. Deliberate. A circle, then a stroke, then another circle, and the muscle beneath Bryn's skin twitches and clenches and his breath catches in his throat.
"You're the most beautiful creature I've ever seen."
The prince's voice is low. Rough. It comes from somewhere deep in his chest, almost involuntary, as though the words were pulled from him by the proximity and the dimness and the heat of Bryn's body against his.
His eyes are dark, the amethyst swallowed by his pupils, and he is looking at Bryn with that focused, consuming attention that Bryn has been trying and failing to withstand for days.
Bryn's voice comes out embarrassingly rough. "You don't mean that."
The prince's eyes flare.
His grip tightens. Not enough to hurt. Enough that Bryn feels the strength of his hands, the size of them spanning his hips, the restrained power in his fingers.
Ithyris's jaw works and something shifts behind his expression, a door opening, a decision being made, and when he speaks his voice is different.
Lower. Darker. Stripped of every courtesy and every restraint.
"I want to take you apart."
Bryn's lungs stop working.
"Piece by piece. Until you're shaking. Until you're sobbing.
Until you can't remember your own name and the only word left in your mouth is mine.
I want to put my hands on every inch of your body and my mouth on every place that makes you tremble and I want to fuck you until you are begging me, not to stop, not to go harder, just begging for my touch because you cannot bear to exist without it. "
The corridor is very quiet. Bryn's heartbeat is very loud. The prince's thumb is still tracing circles on his hipbone, slow and steady, a maddening contrast to the violence of what he's saying.
"No one else will ever touch you." Ithyris's voice drops to a register that Bryn feels in his teeth and his spine and places considerably lower.
"No one else will ever know what you sound like when you come.
No one else will ever see what your face looks like when I'm inside you.
Those things are mine. You are mine. And I have never meant anything more in my life. "
Bryn can't breathe.
He literally cannot draw air. His chest is locked, his lungs are frozen, his entire body is suspended between the wall of the corridor and the wall of the prince's chest and every nerve he owns is screaming and he is hard, achingly, painfully hard, his cock straining against his trousers from nothing but the prince's voice and his hands on Bryn's hips and the dark, possessive certainty in his eyes.
He is aroused to the point of pain from words alone and the realization would be humiliating if he had the capacity for humiliation, which has been burned out of him by the look on the prince's face.
He kisses him.
He surges up and fists the front of Ithyris's shirt and drags the prince's mouth down to his and kisses him with everything he has, with all the days of charged glances and restrained touches and the slow-building heat that has been compounding since the pools.
He kisses him open-mouthed and desperate and the prince's hands grip his hips hard and Ithyris lifts him, bodily, and pins him against the corridor wall and Bryn wraps his legs around the prince's waist and they are pressed together from chest to groin and he can feel Ithyris's cock, hard and thick through his trousers, grinding against his own.
He works his hands under the prince's shirt.
The scales at Ithyris's stomach are smooth and warm under his palms and the muscle beneath them is taut and trembling.
He drags his hands up the prince's chest, fingers splayed, learning the geography of him through touch, the ridges of his ribs, the hard planes of his chest, the places where scale transitions to skin and the texture changes and Ithyris shudders when Bryn finds those borders, sensitive, and Bryn files that away and presses harder.
The prince pulls back from the kiss long enough to grip the hem of Bryn's shirt and haul it up and over his head and throw it down the corridor.
The stone wall is cool against Bryn's bare back and the contrast with the furnace heat of the prince's body against his chest makes him gasp.
Ithyris's mouth finds Bryn's throat. His teeth scrape and his tongue soothes and he sucks a mark below Bryn's jaw that will not be able to be hidden and Bryn doesn't care.
Let the whole court see. Let Syreth see.
Let every elder and courtier and servant in this palace see that the prince's intended has been claimed and has no interest in being unclaimed.
"Here?" Bryn manages. His head is tipped back against the stone and the prince's mouth is on his collarbone and Ithyris's hips are rolling against his and the friction is maddening, layers of fabric between them and nowhere near enough contact. "Anyone could..."
"Let them." The prince doesn't lift his mouth from Bryn's skin.
His hands work between them, unlacing Bryn's trousers, shoving them down his thighs, and the cool air hits Bryn's cock and he hisses and then the prince's hand wraps around him and the sound Bryn makes is not dignified and is not quiet and carries down the corridor in both directions.
"Let them see. Let every person in this palace know what I do to you. What you let me do to you."