2. Chapter 2 #5
"You're very intense." The omega's tongue darted across his lower lip, unconscious, nervous, and Valdyr's gaze tracked it. "Has anyone ever told you that?"
"Everyone. Constantly. I don't give a shit."
Something in the stranger's expression shifted. Not away from fear, because there had been no fear to begin with. Toward something brighter.
"It's a lot," the omega said. "You're standing there being very. You." He gestured at Valdyr, that helpless sweeping motion, and his hand trembled.
Valdyr caught it.
His fingers closed around the omega's wrist. Not rough, he was capable of gentleness when it mattered and it had never mattered like this, but firm, his thumb settling over the pulse point where the heartbeat hammered fast and light and alive.
The contact sent a jolt through both of them. The omega gasped. His scent surged.
Valdyr pulled.
The omega came without resistance. He rose out of the dirt, drawn up by Valdyr's hand, and Valdyr's other hand found the small of his back and brought him in, and his body fit against Valdyr's chest so exactly that Valdyr's next breath went out of him and did not come back.
The omega's hands came up. His fingers curled into the front of Valdyr's shirt and gripped, and his eyes were wide and wet and bright and his lips were parted and his whole body was trembling and his scent was a storm.
Valdyr kissed him.
He took the omega's mouth directly, without apology, without preamble, and the omega made a sound, soft and desperate and wrecked, and then went liquid in his arms. Melted.
Dissolved. His body pliant and yielding, his fingers tightening in Valdyr's shirt, his lips parting, and Valdyr deepened the kiss and tasted honey.
Tasted sweetness. Tasted the warm slick perfect interior of this man's mouth, and it was the single most devastating thing he had ever experienced, and he had experienced a great fucking deal.
The bond went off like ordnance.
Heat and certainty and belonging. A hook behind his ribs that sank deep and locked and would not come free, not now, not ever. Mine, mine, mine, the word beating through him in time with his heart, with the pulse under his thumb, with the trembling body pressed against his own.
He kissed this stranger, this omega, his mate, the person who had been a void in his life for twenty-seven years and was now the only solid thing in it, and the kiss was thorough and deep and consuming.
His hand splayed across the small of the omega's back and pressed him closer.
His other hand slid up to cup the back of his neck, fingers threading into that silver hair, and the omega arched into him with a softness that was pure instinct, and the taste of him was honey and his scent was home and Valdyr was drowning in it and had no intention of surfacing.
He pulled back. Not far. His forehead rested against the omega's. His breathing was ragged. His voice, when it came, was stripped down to something naked.
"Come to my rooms."
The omega's breath hitched. Valdyr pressed closer, his mouth brushing the omega's temple, breathing him in.
"I can tell how wet you are. I can smell it from here. Can smell how much you want it. I know what this is. I know you can feel it." He pulled back enough to see those eyes. "This isn't attraction. This isn't want. You know what this is."
The omega's chest rose and fell against his. His pupils were blown wide. His scent was a wreck, desire and sweetness and the rich unmistakable evidence of slick, and his fingers trembled where they gripped Valdyr's shirt.
"Say it," the omega whispered.
"Mate," Valdyr said.
The word landed between them with the weight of a world being remade.
The omega went still.
It happened all at once. The warmth drained out of his face like water from a broken vessel.
The sweetness in his scent, that gorgeous devastating honeyed warmth, curdled.
Turned sharp. Turned thin. Distressed. The shift was so sudden and so wrong that every protective instinct in Valdyr's body lunged to the surface, teeth bared, snarling at the source of the pain before he had identified what it was.
The omega stepped back.
He pulled himself out of Valdyr's arms and the loss of contact was a physical wound, a tearing, something severed that was never meant to be severed. Valdyr's hands reached after him, involuntary, helpless, and then stopped, because the look on the omega's face was devastation.
"I can't," the omega said.
His voice cracked. Split down the middle like dry wood. His eyes were bright with tears that hadn't fallen yet, and his hands had released Valdyr's shirt and were pressed flat against his own chest as though he were holding his ribs together.
"I can't. I'm promised. I'm here to be married. Tomorrow. The alliance, my family, I."
Each word hit Valdyr clean and precise, finding the gaps in his armor with a marksman's accuracy.
"I'm sorry. I shouldn't have. I don't know what came over me. I shouldn't have let you. I'm so sorry."
He was backing away. Each step widened the distance and the bond screamed, a silent tearing agony under Valdyr's ribs.
"I'm sorry," the omega said one final time, and his voice broke, and the tears fell, and he turned and ran.
He ran through the garden. Barefoot on the gravel. Silver hair streaming. And Valdyr stood there in the dark and did not follow, because following an omega who had just said no was not a thing he would do. Not now. Not ever. No matter what the bond demanded.
Married. Tomorrow. Promised.
Silver hair. Brell had said it that morning, standing in the yard with her gauntlet off, and Valdyr had said riveting and gone back to his armor straps. The men had said it again over supper. Silver hair, down past here. Never been out of Aelholm in his life.
Lorne. That was the name they'd been passing around the barracks all evening, and Valdyr had heard it and let it go past him like weather.
His mate was the king's betrothed.
Valdyr stood in the empty garden. The lily bloomed in its corner, unobserved. The scent of honey faded off the air, slow and agonizing, and he breathed it in and held it and felt the last of it dissolve.
His hands were shaking.
He looked down at them. These hands that had held swords and shields and dying men and never trembled, not once, not in the whole long span of his service.
Shaking. And they smelled of honey and lavender and they would smell of honey and lavender for hours, and he pressed them to his face and breathed in the scent of his mate and stood there in the dark with the bond pulsing in his chest, steady and certain and permanent, pointing toward a room somewhere in this castle where a barefoot omega was lying awake and alone and promised to the wrong alpha.
There was nothing to be done.
He walked back to his quarters. He did not sleep.
He sat on the edge of his bed and pressed his elbows to his knees and stared at the floor and thought about the fact that in roughly twelve hours he was going to stand at his king's right hand and watch his king marry his mate, and there was not one single solitary fucking thing he could do about it.
Twenty-seven years unbonded. Twenty-seven years of silence and emptiness and the hollow space where the bond should have been. He'd made his peace with it. He'd decided it didn't matter. He'd built a life around the absence, and the life was fine, it was functional, it worked.
And now this — a stranger in the dirt. Green eyes and honey and bare feet and a smile that had taken the carefully constructed nothing of Valdyr's inner life and demolished it in the span of an hour.
He pressed his palms against his eyes.
"Fuck," he said, to the empty room.
The empty room, wisely, did not respond.