Chapter 18 #2
Not fast. Slow. Deliberate. Each thrust a complete sentence, a rolling movement that starts at his hips and drives through his body and into Bryn's, pressing him upward against the stone, grinding deep before withdrawing and driving in again.
He watches Bryn's face. His eyes are locked on Bryn's and they are dark and wet and blazing and he watches every sound he pulls from Bryn, every gasp and shattered breath, and the attention is as devastating as the act.
His hands hold Bryn's thighs open. His thumbs press into the soft skin of Bryn's inner thighs and the pressure is grounding and possessive and Bryn is spread wide around him, held against the wall by nothing but the prince's strength and his cock and Bryn is making sounds he has never made, raw and high and uncontrolled, because Ithyris is hitting that spot on every stroke and the pleasure is building in waves that crash and rebuild and crash higher.
"My husband." The prince says it against Bryn's mouth, between thrusts, and his voice cracks on the word. "Mine. You said it in the water. You said forever. You said yours. And I am going to hold you to that, Bryn. Every word. Every promise. You are never getting free of me."
"I don't want free of you." Bryn's voice is barely there.
His arms are locked around the prince's neck and his body is trembling and the pleasure is cresting and he can feel the prince's pleasure through the bond, the feedback loop, their sensation amplifying each other in a spiral that tightens with every thrust. "I want this.
I want you. I want... oh gods, Ithyris, right there, don't stop, please. .."
The prince doesn't stop. He drives into Bryn with the same devastating rhythm and his mouth finds Bryn's throat and his hand works between them and wraps around Bryn's cock and the dual sensation converges into a peak so sharp it whites out Bryn's vision.
He comes in the prince's fist. The orgasm tears through him and he clenches around Ithyris and the sound he makes is the prince's name, broken and repeated, and Ithyris feels it through the bond because his rhythm shatters and his hips drive forward hard and he buries himself deep and comes with a groan that vibrates through Bryn's whole body, his cock pulsing inside Bryn in hot, flooding waves, and his forehead drops to Bryn's shoulder and his arms lock around him and they are shaking, both of them, pinned together against the wall.
He holds Bryn there. His cock softens and his release trickles down Bryn's thigh and his breath is ragged against Bryn's shoulder. Bryn holds the prince's head against him, his fingers in the wet hair, and feels the aftershocks rolling through them both through the bond.
The prince starts to pull out.
Bryn slides down the wall.
Ithyris's arms loosen in surprise and Bryn slips from his grip, his feet finding the floor, and he goes to his knees on the warm stone.
The prince looks down at him and his expression shifts from confusion to understanding to something raw and disbelieving as Bryn settles between his legs and looks up at him and wraps his hand around the base of the prince's cock, slick with his own release.
"Bryn. You don't have to..."
"I know I don't have to." He holds the prince's gaze. The cock is softening in his hand, still thick, still warm, and he strokes once, slowly, and watches the prince's stomach clench. "I want to. I want the taste of you in my mouth. Let me."
The prince's hand finds Bryn's hair. His fingers thread through the wet strands, gentle, trembling, and he nods, once.
Bryn takes him in his mouth.
The prince is sensitive from coming. Bryn feels it in the way his body jerks at the first touch of tongue, the way his thigh muscles lock.
Bryn is gentle. Slow. He tongues the head, tasting them both, the salt and the musk and the faint mineral trace of the sacred water.
Ithyris twitches in his mouth, thickening, the softness giving way to renewed hardness as Bryn works him with his tongue and his lips, unhurried, thorough.
The prince's breathing fractures above him. Short, harsh gasps, and his hand in Bryn's hair tightens and loosens in a rhythm that matches the rhythm of Bryn's mouth. Bryn takes him deeper, swallowing around the length of him, and the sound Ithyris makes is guttural and helpless.
He works the prince with the obsessive, systematic attention he brings to everything he's decided to master.
The flat of his tongue along the underside.
The pressure at the frenulum. The hollowing of his cheeks when he pulls back to the tip.
He has mapped Ithyris. He knows the sounds each touch produces, the specific catch of breath that means close and the specific groan that means more and the specific silence, the held breath, the locked muscles, that means the prince is trying not to thrust because he is always conscious of the damage he could do.
Bryn pulls off long enough to say, "You can move. I can take it."
The prince's eyes, fixed on Bryn's face with the intensity of a man witnessing something sacred, go wide.
Then dark. Then his hips move, a shallow, careful thrust, and Bryn opens his throat and takes it and the sound Ithyris makes is ruined, the composure crumbling to nothing, and his hand fists in Bryn's hair and he thrusts again, deeper, and Bryn swallows around him and the prince breaks.
He comes in Bryn's mouth with a shattered cry, his cock pulsing against Bryn's tongue, and Bryn swallows and swallows and holds the prince's hips as they stutter and jerk, and Ithyris empties himself with a thoroughness that leaves him hollow, his body sagging, his hand loosening in Bryn's hair, and the sound of his breathing in the quiet antechamber is the most beautiful sound Bryn has ever heard.
Bryn rests his forehead against the prince's hip.
Ithyris's hand strokes his hair, slow, rhythmic.
Bryn presses his mouth to the hard ridge of the prince's hipbone and closes his eyes and they stay, Bryn on his knees and the prince standing above him, the warm stone beneath them and the mountain breathing around them, and the silence is the most full silence Bryn has ever known.
***
The prince takes him to bed.
Not carries. Takes. His hand in Bryn's, leading him through the corridors that Bryn now knows by heart, and the palace is quiet in the deep hours and the amber sconces cast long shadows and they are naked beneath the robes Lira left draped over the antechamber bench, which means she anticipated this, which means Lira anticipates everything, which is a thought Bryn files away without examining.
The prince's chambers. The familiar scent of cedar and smoke and the warmth of volcanic stone and the bed, wide and soft, the sheets cool and clean.
Ithyris pulls back the covers and draws Bryn in and wraps his body around him, chest to back, his arm across Bryn's stomach, his mouth against the nape of Bryn's neck, and the position is so familiar now, so practiced, that Bryn's body settles into it the way water settles into a vessel, finding its shape.
Skin to skin. The prince's chest against Bryn's back, the scales at his sternum smooth and warm, the hard planes of his body cradling the leaner lines of Bryn's. His arm is heavy across Bryn's stomach. His hand spreads wide over Bryn's ribs. His breath is slow and warm against Bryn's hair.
"You are mine," the prince says. Quiet. Absolute. The words pressed into Bryn's skin through the press of his mouth.
Bryn closes his eyes. Feels the prince's heartbeat against his spine, steady and slow.
"You are mine," he says back.
The breath Ithyris takes is deep and shaking.
His arm tightens. His whole body curls around Bryn fractionally closer.
He has heard Bryn say I love you. He has heard husband.
But this, the claiming given back, the possessive returned in kind, cracks something open in him that even the pool did not reach.
"Say it again," he whispers.
"You are mine. My husband. My mate. Whatever word this kingdom uses for the person you cannot live without. That is what you are to me."
The prince's face presses into Bryn's hair. Bryn feels the wetness on the nape of his neck and doesn't comment on it because some things don't need words. He finds the prince's hand on his ribs and laces his fingers through and squeezes once and Ithyris squeezes back.
Bryn falls asleep.
He doesn't mean to. The warmth of the prince's body and the weight of his arm and the steady rhythm of his breathing and the deep, settled certainty of the bond between them, sealed and whole, conspire against him.
His body, which has been through a sacred trial and a wall and a stone floor and the most emotionally obliterating night of his life, surrenders.
He sinks into sleep the way he sank into the pool, all at once, held and warm and unafraid.
He sleeps without nightmares for the first time in years.
The empty hall does not come. The wreckage does not come.
The child with glass in his palms does not come.
There is only warmth and dark and the steady pulse of the bond and the faint, distant sound of a heartbeat that is not his own but has become as essential to his body as his own, and the sleep is deep and dreamless and the sleep is a gift he did not know he needed.
***
Ithyris does not sleep.
Bryn learns this later, in pieces, from the way the prince looks at him in the morning light.
From the shadows beneath his eyes that have nothing to do with exhaustion and everything to do with the specific, deliberate choice of a man who decided that sleep was less important than watching the person he loves breathe.
The prince held him all night. His arm across Bryn's stomach, his body curved around Bryn's, his mouth against Bryn's hair.
He listened to Bryn's breathing slow and deepen and settle into the steady rhythm of dreamless sleep and he felt, through the bond, the absence of nightmares, the quiet, the unprecedented peace, and he stayed awake to guard it.
Not from threats. Not from the council or the agents of foreign kingdoms. From the fear that it might end.
The irrational, bone-deep terror of a man who has waited four hundred years to be chosen and cannot quite believe the choosing has happened and is afraid that if he closes his eyes, if he sleeps, if he lets his attention waver for a moment, the boy in his arms will dissolve into the dream he has always feared this was.
He watched Bryn breathe. He counted his heartbeats.
He held him the way you hold something that might disappear, carefully, desperately, with the full attention of every sense he possesses.
His hand on Bryn's ribs tracked the rise and fall of his lungs.
His nose in Bryn's hair catalogued every shift of his scent, the salt of the pool fading, the copper fading, until all that was left was the warm, clean smell of skin and sleep.
He did not sleep. He did not need to. He had the boy from the dying kingdom curled against his chest, breathing steadily, sleeping without nightmares, wearing his marks and his warmth and the word husband on his lips, and the boy was staying.
In the morning light, when Bryn stirs and turns and opens his eyes and finds the prince's face inches from his, tired and unguarded and luminous with a tenderness so vast it fills the room, he knows.
He sees the shadows under Ithyris's eyes and understands that the prince chose this, chose wakefulness, spent the night holding Bryn the way a man holds the thing he has waited centuries for.
He presses his mouth to the prince's jaw and says, rough with sleep: "You didn't sleep. "
"No."
"Why?"
Ithyris looks at him with those dark amethyst eyes and says, simply, as though the answer is obvious, as though it requires no explanation because it is the most self-evident truth in the world:
"I didn't want to miss any of it."
Bryn does not cry.
He presses his face against the prince's chest and breathes and Ithyris's arms tighten around him and outside the mountain breathes with them and the bond hums, steady and certain, and he thinks: this is what it feels like to be enough.