Chapter 16 #2
"I lied." He fists the prince's hair and pulls his head back and puts his mouth on Ithyris's throat and feels the scales there, smooth and warm beneath his lips. "I want you here. Now. I don't want to wait."
Bryn reaches between them. His hands work Ithyris's laces and his fingers find the prince, hot and hard, and he wraps his hand around him and strokes once and the prince's whole body shudders and his forehead drops to Bryn's shoulder.
Ithyris pulls his hand away. Pins his wrist to the wall above his head.
"If you touch me again," the prince says against his ear, "this will be over before I've gotten inside you. And I have been thinking about being inside you for forever."
The words alone nearly finish Bryn. His body clenches, empty and aching, and the strength of the prince's grip, effortless, one-handed, the certainty that he could hold Bryn here as long as he wanted, sends a rush of heat through him that makes his thighs tighten around the prince's waist.
Ithyris carries him. One arm under his thighs, the other hand still pinning his wrist, walking down the corridor with Bryn wrapped around him, Bryn's cock grinding against his stomach with every step, and the prince's pace is controlled and unhurried.
His chambers. The door kicked shut. The latch catches and the prince releases his wrist and lowers him onto the bed and Bryn drags him down, both hands in his shirt, pulling, and the fabric tears.
He shoves the ruined shirt off Ithyris's shoulders and runs his hands over the scaled skin beneath, the hard ridges of his collarbones, the smooth planes of his chest, the place where scale meets skin at his ribs where the prince's breath hitches.
Ithyris strips him with efficient, devastating hands. Everything gone, and Bryn is naked on the prince's bed and Ithyris is kneeling over him, still half-clothed, and his eyes travel the length of Bryn's body and Bryn should feel exposed.
He feels wanted. The difference is everything.
"You watched me for forty-five minutes," the prince says, his voice a low rasp.
His hand finds Bryn's thigh and pushes it open and his thumb traces the crease where his leg meets his hip.
"From the gallery. I could smell you from the courtyard, Bryn.
Your arousal. Through the stone and the distance and the morning air. "
"Oh gods." Bryn's head tips back against the pillow. The prince's thumb is tracing that crease, maddening, slow, close to where he needs him and deliberately not there.
"I almost came up to get you." Ithyris lowers his head and presses his mouth to Bryn's stomach, just below his navel, and speaks against his skin. "Almost left the ring and climbed the stairs and carried you to the nearest flat surface. I finished the bout with my hands shaking."
His mouth moves lower. Skirting Bryn's cock, pressing to the inside of his thigh, open-mouthed, his tongue tasting, and the proximity to where Bryn needs him is exquisite torture.
"Ithyris. Please."
"Please what?"
"Your mouth. I need your mouth on me."
The prince takes him in. No teasing. He swallows Bryn down and the wet heat engulfs his cock and Bryn's hips jerk off the bed and his hands fly to the prince's hair and the sound he makes is the sound of three days of sustained need meeting the reality of that mouth.
Ithyris works him with devastating thoroughness. Tongue tracing the underside, pressing the sensitive spot below the head, taking him deeper with each stroke. Bryn feels the orgasm building at the base of his spine and yanks at the prince's hair.
"Stop. Or I'm going to..."
The prince pulls off, mouth red and slick, and looks up at him and the expression on his face is feral and patient and possessive.
"Turn over," he says.
Bryn turns over.
The sheets are cool against his flushed skin and his cock presses into the mattress and the prince's hands are on his hips, lifting, angling, and then Ithyris's mouth is on the small of his back, kissing down his spine, and lower, and lower, and his hands spread Bryn open and his mouth finds him and every coherent thought Bryn has ever had leaves his body.
The prince's tongue is thorough and relentless and Bryn presses his face into the pillow and grips the sheets and his hips push back into Ithyris's mouth.
The prince works him open with his tongue, then adds a finger alongside it, the quiet click of retracted claws, and the stretch dissolves into pleasure so fast it makes Bryn's head spin.
Two fingers. Scissoring, curling, finding that spot and pressing until Bryn is grinding back onto his hand and begging in a voice he doesn't recognize.
"Please. I need you, I need..."
The prince withdraws his fingers. The rustle of fabric, the shift of weight on the bed, and then the blunt, hot press of Ithyris against him, and the prince pauses.
He always pauses. Even now, with his body shaking with restraint and the bond between them a white-hot wire, he pauses.
He presses his mouth to Bryn's shoulder blade and his hand finds Bryn's on the sheets and he laces their fingers together and gives him one breath, two, three.
Bryn pushes back onto him.
The stretch is immediate and consuming and perfect. Ithyris slides into him in one slow, devastating thrust and the pleasure registers in Bryn's bones and the prince bottoms out and holds there, buried to the hilt, and the sound he makes is low and broken and reverent.
He moves. Slow at first. Long, rolling thrusts that drag almost out of Bryn and then push back in deep, grinding against that spot on every stroke, and the pleasure builds in waves.
The prince's hand is laced with Bryn's on the sheets.
His mouth is on Bryn's shoulder, his neck, the soft place behind his ear.
The pace builds. His hand tightens on Bryn's and his hips drive harder and the sounds filling the room are rhythmic and obscene and Bryn is making sounds he will remember later and not regret.
The prince shifts his angle and hits that spot directly and Bryn cries out and his body clamps around Ithyris and the prince groans and presses his forehead between Bryn's shoulder blades.
"I can feel you," Ithyris says, ragged. "Through the bond. What this does to you. How it feels inside you."
The bond is wide open, transmitting everything, their pleasure tangling into a feedback loop that amplifies with every thrust. Bryn can feel what the prince feels: the tight heat of his body.
Ithyris can feel what Bryn feels: the fullness and the sharp, blinding pleasure. The loop tightens and tightens.
Bryn turns his head. He needs the prince's face. Ithyris lifts his head and his eyes find Bryn's and they are wrecked and wet at the edges and the look in them is the one from the dream chamber. The one that says am I enough, except this time the question has been answered.
Bryn comes.
Looking at him. With the prince's name in his mouth and the bond blown wide open.
The orgasm tears through him and through the bond and he feels the moment it breaks Ithyris, his pleasure crashing through the connection, and the prince follows him over with a hoarse, ruined sound, his hips stuttering, filling Bryn in hot, flooding rushes.
Ithyris collapses onto his back. His weight is enormous and grounding and Bryn is pinned, sweating and shaking and full of him, and the prince's hand is still laced with his and his breath is ragged against Bryn's neck.
He presses his mouth to the nape of Bryn's neck. A kiss. Then another. His thumb strokes Bryn's where their fingers are interlocked.
"A detour, hm?" the prince murmurs against his skin.
Bryn laughs. Wrecked and breathless and muffled by the pillow and real, and the prince laughs too, a low vibration against his back, and they lie in the wreckage of the afternoon with light coming through the crystal-veined walls and their hands tangled together.
This is what the absence of armor feels like. Not vulnerable. Not exposed.
Free.
***
Mithri corners him at dinner.
She slides onto the bench across from him and places both palms flat on the table and studies his face.
He is wearing a fresh shirt, his own, with a high collar that does not quite cover the mark below his jaw.
His hair is damp. He is eating with the focused, single-minded appetite of someone who has expended a great deal of energy and requires fuel.
"You missed the afternoon council session," she says.
"I was occupied."
Her eyes narrow. Her gaze moves from his face to the mark on his neck to his damp hair to his appetite and the deduction assembles behind her eyes. "You were occupied."
"Eat your dinner, Mithri."
"You have been occupied a great deal recently. One might say to the exclusion of all other activities, including participation in the governance of the kingdom that is trying to decide whether to keep you."
"The petition is tabled."
"The petition is tabled because your intended threatened to abdicate, not because the elders changed their minds.
" She is right. She is always right. "Bryn.
I am happy for you. But you are going to need to do something other than this.
The third trial is coming. Syreth hasn't stopped.
And the king tabled the petition. He didn't deny it. "
The warmth of the afternoon recedes and the cold edge of reality presses in. Syreth is regrouping. Thalryn is calculating. The third trial is ahead and the trials are the only thing between Bryn and the clause, between Ithyris and the severance that would half-kill him.
"You're right," he says.
Mithri blinks. "I'm sorry, could you repeat that?"
"Don't push it."
She grins. "The library texts on Drekian constitutional law. You've been reading them for weeks. Have you found anything that could counter the Clause of Unfitness?"
He has, actually. A thread. An argument so thin and fragile it might snap the moment he pulls it.
But it is there, buried in a statute from the founding era, and he has been turning it over in his mind between the watching and the wanting and the slow, devastating process of falling in love with a dragon prince.
Falling in love.
The words land in his chest and sit there, warm and heavy, and he does not flinch from them. He does not deflect. He turns them over and looks at them and they are plain and true and he is tired of being afraid of plain, true things.
"I have an idea," he tells Mithri. "But I need more time in the library."
"Then go to the library. Actually go to the library. Not the gallery above the training courtyard. Not the corridor outside the library. The actual library, with actual books."
"How do you know about the gallery?"
"Lira told me."
"Lira told you."
"Lira tells me everything. We have an arrangement." Mithri sips her tea with the serene satisfaction of someone who has built an intelligence network in a foreign court in under a month. "She also told me about the corridor. Both times."
Bryn's face goes hot. "I am going to have a conversation with Lira about professional discretion."
"You are going to do no such thing. Lira is the most valuable asset we have in this palace and I will not have you embarrassing her." Mithri sets down her cup. "Go to the library. Find your argument. Win this. And then you can go back to being occupied as much as you want."
Bryn looks at his sister. Eighteen years old, sharp as a blade, sitting in a dragon's kitchen giving him strategic advice with one hand and protecting his heart with the other. He came here to save her. She is saving him.
"Thank you," he says. Quietly. Meaning it.
Her face softens. The blade banks and she is his little sister, the girl he carried through the corridors of a dying kingdom, and she reaches across the table and squeezes his hand.
"Go," she says. "You've got this."
He goes.