3. Chapter 3 #2
The chapel stood at the end of the north corridor behind a pair of enormous oak doors, thrown open now and hung with garlands.
The air inside was heavy with incense and beeswax and the concentrated perfume of too many bodies in formal dress, alpha and beta and omega scents mingling in the warmth.
The pews were full. The court of Thessmere had turned out in force, dressed to the teeth, faces turned toward the aisle with the satisfaction of people attending something they considered both important and inevitable.
Lorne was led to the front and placed at the altar with Maddox's characteristic precision.
"Here, Your Highness. Facing the doors. Hands at your sides. Chin up."
Then Maddox withdrew, and Lorne stood there in his ivory silk and his silver braids and looked down the length of the aisle at the open doors and waited for his future to walk through them.
His hands were steady. His scent was smooth. His smile was in place.
Underneath all of it his heart was hammering hard enough that he could hear it.
You are going to be fine. You are going to stand here and say the words and it will be done, and then you will find a way to make it good.
You will tend this marriage the way you tend everything, with patience and the stubborn belief that things can grow in difficult soil.
You will learn his name and his habits and his preferences and you will find common ground, because common ground is only another garden, and you have never met a garden you couldn't love.
The doors opened.
The retinue came first. Soldiers in ceremonial armor, polished and gleaming, boot heels striking the stone in unison. Courtiers in formal dress arranged by rank, faces composed, scents controlled. The abbot in white and gold, carrying the ceremonial text.
And then the king.
Aldric of Thessmere was tall and golden.
That was the first impression, height and gold, broad through the shoulders, a strong jaw, hair the color of burnished wheat falling to his collar.
He wore deep blue embroidered with silver and he crossed the chapel with the stride of a man who had never in his life questioned his right to a room.
His scent arrived ahead of him, alpha-sharp and commanding, the particular musk of a powerful alpha in his prime.
Lorne's body did nothing at all.
No warmth. No recognition. No shift. His omega instincts, which had been a full symphony in the garden the night before, reaching and opening and singing, were silent.
Utterly silent. The king's scent washed over him and his biology filed it the way it would file any alpha in any room. Present. Acknowledged. Irrelevant.
Lorne kept the smile where it was and did not let the absence show.
But his eyes, his traitorous, stupid, desperate eyes, were not on the king. They were scanning the faces behind him, the retinue, the soldiers flanking the aisle, and.
His heart stopped.
The man from the garden was standing at the king's right hand.
Two horns curving back from his temples.
Scales on his forearms, dark and close-set, visible above the line of his ceremonial gauntlets.
Dark hair to his chin. A well-kept beard framing a jaw that might have been cut from granite.
Formal armor, black, polished to a mirror.
A ceremonial sword at his hip. His expression carved out of stone.
Lorne could not breathe.
The world narrowed. The chapel, the candles, the garlands, the court, the incense, all of it pulled back like a tide, and at the center of what was left stood one alpha, three paces behind the king, in the full formal regalia of a war general.
And Lorne knew.
He knew suddenly and horribly and completely.
That was not a wandering soldier. That was not a guardsman out for an evening walk.
That was Valdyr. General Valdyr, the demon war general of Thessmere, the most feared warrior in the kingdom, the king's right hand for fifteen years, a name Lorne had heard spoken in Aelholm since he was a boy and had never once attached to a face.
Valdyr. Now he had it. Now, at the altar, in silk, with the whole court watching.
The man he had teased about naked flowers.
The man whose wrist he had touched. The man he had tipped his chin up to and smiled at with intent.
The man whose mouth he had opened under, whose tongue had slid against his own, whose hands had cradled the back of his neck while he melted into him like candle wax.
His scent had bloomed for this man. He had gotten slick for this man. He had felt the bond lock into place with a certainty that had remade him from the bone out, and the alpha who had done it was standing at the right hand of the man he was about to marry.
The mortification hit like a blow.
It started in his chest and went outward, a hot sickening wave that flooded his skin and closed his throat and made his controlled scent waver, barely, a hairline crack in the wall he had built around himself.
He had flirted with the king's general. He had knelt in the dirt and talked about naked ladies and asked about his horns and blushed when the answer was I can feel everything and looked at that mouth and wanted it on his own.
He had kissed the king's general. In the king's garden. On the night before the king's wedding.
And the general had kissed him back and called him mate, and his voice had been rough and raw and honest, and Lorne had run.
He felt Valdyr's attention on him. The bond drew taut across the length of the chapel, real and present and catastrophic, and Lorne could feel the man's awareness of him the way he'd feel a hand at the back of his neck.
He could not look.
He looked at the altar. At the flowers. At the abbot's text. At the floor and the walls and the vaulted ceiling painted with battles and blessings that blurred together in his vision. He looked at everything else in the room.
When he finally risked it, a flicker, a stolen glance from under his lashes, Valdyr was not looking at him.
Valdyr's jaw was set and his eyes were fixed on the far wall.
His face held nothing. No warmth, no recognition, no trace of the man who had held Lorne in the dark and said I've never seen anything more beautiful in my life.
He looked like exactly what he was, a soldier at a ceremony, standing where duty had put him.
He refused to look at Lorne at all.
The relief was dizzying. It swept through in a cold rush and loosened the vise around his chest just enough to let him breathe. He isn't going to acknowledge it. He isn't going to give us away. He is going to stand there and be stone, and so will I, and nobody will ever know.
Then the relief curdled, because that refusal could be discretion or it could be disgust, and Lorne could not tell which and did not know which would be worse.
Discretion meant Valdyr was protecting them both, holding the line, being the honorable soldier he so plainly was.
Disgust meant the morning had changed things.
It meant he had learned who Lorne was and regretted all of it, that mate had been the heat of the moment and the cold dawn had burned it out of him.
Lorne's chest ached.
"Your Highness."
The king was in front of him.
Lorne blinked and the world rushed back, the chapel and the candles and the weight of every eye in the room, and Aldric stood there with his hands out and his expression warm and composed and kingly, and Lorne took them, because that was what he was supposed to do.
The king's hands were large and dry and strong. His grip was firm. His scent hit at close range, concentrated and commanding, and Lorne's body gave him nothing.
Worse than nothing. There was an active refusal in it.
Some part of him he had never had cause to consult before had looked at this alpha and shut a door, quietly and permanently, and he could feel the door being shut and had no say in it whatsoever.
His skin didn't flush. His scent didn't move.
The king's pheromones came off him in waves and slid past like rain off stone.
Aldric inhaled. It was deliberate, an alpha taking the measure of an omega's scent, tasting it, reading it, and something in his expression settled.
Pleased. He was pleased. Whatever he found in that dampened, locked-down sweetness satisfied him, and Lorne understood with a lurch that the king was smelling a scent flattened by suppressant and terror and reading it as pleasant omega, when what it actually said was my body has already chosen and it did not choose you.
The abbot raised the text.
"Do you take this alpha as your bond and your lord?"
"I do."
"Do you offer your throat, in trust and in submission?"
"I do."
"Do you accept the claim that will be made upon you, in this life and in whatever follows it?"
"I do," Lorne said.
His lips were numb. His voice was steady, because he made it steady, because he had always been able to hold his voice level even when everything behind it was coming down, and the words came out clear and composed and he heard them the way you hear someone speaking from the far end of a field.
He did not look at Valdyr. He could feel him. The bond hummed and ached and pulled, a compass needle straining north, and Lorne held still and did not turn and did not let his scent slip and said the words that bound him to the wrong man.
The king kissed him.
Aldric cupped his jaw, not roughly, but with a proprietary confidence, a hand closing on something purchased and delivered, and pressed his mouth to Lorne's.
The kiss was firm and claiming. His tongue pushed past Lorne's lips, brief and dominant, and his fingers tightened, and his scent filled Lorne's nose and mouth, and the taste was wrong.
Not bad, not unpleasant — wrong, in the deep biological sense of a body refusing what it had not chosen.
Lorne's body flinched inward.