4. Chapter 4 #2
He smelled the moment Lorne picked it up. The shift was slight, a brightening in the honey, the distress note easing back, and then warmth. Real warmth. Not the practiced brightness Lorne wore like plate but something unguarded and sweet and entirely his own.
Don't look. Don't look. Don't you fucking look.
He looked.
One glance, barely a second.
Lorne was holding the pie in both hands.
He had taken a bite, and his tongue slid across the pad of his thumb to catch a crumb of pastry, a small artless gesture so unconscious and so intimate that Valdyr felt it strike at the base of his spine.
And the smile on his face was the garden smile.
The real one. Delight so plain and so undefended that it was almost a child's, the whole uncomplicated pleasure of a kind thing arriving with no price on it.
Lorne's eyes lifted and scanned the table.
Valdyr looked away.
Beside him, Brell did not. She let the prince's gaze find hers and she held it, steady, giving him nothing, and then she turned back to her plate.
"He saw me," she said.
"I know."
"He didn't see you. He saw me. That's the version that survives if anyone asks."
Valdyr said nothing. His hands were shaking under the table where nobody could see.
In his chest the bond surged and settled and put its roots down deeper, storing itself away the way Lorne had said the bulb stored itself, underground, preparing, building toward something that was going to arrive whether anyone was watching or not.
He was in so much trouble.
Fifteen years of service. Seven wounds taken for this crown.
A whole life built on the foundation that duty mattered more than want, and it was all currently in question because a barefoot omega had smiled at a mince pie, and Valdyr had felt it behind his ribs, and there was no version of this that did not end in ruin.
"You're staring at the table again," Brell said.
"I'm staring at my wine."
"Your wine is in your hand. Your eyes are on the head table. Do you want to tell me what's going on, or do you want me to work it out myself? Because I will work it out. I always do."
He said nothing.
Brell was quiet a moment. Then, very softly, in the voice she used on the rare occasions when she was being careful with him, she said, "Is it him?"
The question was so precise, so stripped of everything unnecessary, that it went straight through every defense he had.
He didn't answer. That was answer enough.
Brell let out a slow breath. She picked up her wine. Drank. Set the cup down and stared at it for a long moment.
"Well, shit," she said.
"Yeah."
"How bad?"
His jaw worked. The word sat in his mouth like a coal.
"Bond bad?" She kept it low, angling her body to block the conversation from the rest of the table.
He gave her one short nod.
Brell closed her eyes. When she opened them her face was the face she wore in the field when the situation had gone sideways and the plan was gone and the only thing left was to count the damage and decide.
She was a soldier. She took bad news the way soldiers took it, fast and clean and without the luxury of panic.
"When?"
"Last night. The garden."
"Before you knew who he was."
"Before I knew who he was."
"Does he know who you are?"
"He does now."
Brell glanced down the table, brief and professional, at Lorne sitting with the crumbs of the pie on his plate and his hands folded and his smile back where it belonged. Then she looked at Valdyr.
"You sent him a pie."
"I sent him a pie."
"Because he wasn't eating."
"Because he wasn't eating."
"And you couldn't just let it be. You couldn't sit here and not notice. You couldn't..."
"No. I couldn't."
It came out rough, and it carried more weight than one syllable had any business carrying.
I couldn't. Not I chose to. Not I decided.
The distinction was the entire point. The bond was not a decision.
It was a fact, biological and absolute, and Valdyr could no more ignore that man's hunger than he could ignore his own pulse.
Brell looked at him with an expression he'd seen twice before in all the years she'd stood at his shoulder, the one that meant she was frightened for him and respected him far too much to let it show.
"This is going to be a problem," she said.
"I'm aware."
"This is going to be a catastrophic problem."
"I said I'm aware."
"Because he's the king's, Valdyr. The king's omega. Bond or no bond, if Aldric so much as suspects..."
"I know."
"Do you? Because you just sent the king's new husband a pie at the wedding feast, and you're looking at him the way a drowning man looks at dry land, and if I can see it then others can, and if others can see it..."
"I know."
She stopped. She searched his face, and whatever she found there, whatever combination of anguish and resolve and barely contained fury was written into the set of his jaw, made her exhale slowly and put her hand on the table beside his. Not touching. Just there.
"All right," she said. "What do you want to do?"
"Nothing."
"Nothing."
"He is the king's husband. The treaty holds Aelholm's borders. His family's safety rests on this marriage. He told me so himself. Last night, before he..." His voice caught. He pushed through it. "Before he ran."
Brell said nothing.
"I'm not going to be the reason his family dies," Valdyr said. "I'm not going to be the reason the northern border falls. I've served this king half my life. I don't get to burn it down because my cock has developed opinions."
"This isn't your cock."
"Brell."
"Don't. Don't do that. Don't make it smaller than it is.
I have watched you fuck half the willing bodies in this castle and not once, not once, have I seen you look at any of them the way you just looked at that man.
This isn't lust and it isn't want and it isn't your cock, and if you pretend otherwise then you're a liar and a coward, and you're neither of those things. "
The words landed like blows. Clean, precise, aimed at the places she knew he couldn't cover.
Valdyr looked at her. His second. His oldest friend. The woman who had stood beside him through seven campaigns, who knew him better than anyone living, who was at this moment telling him the truth with the brutal efficiency she brought to everything she did.
"It doesn't matter what it is," he said, and the anger had gone out of his voice, leaving something worse underneath.
Exhaustion. He had found the thing he'd spent his whole life without, and it belonged to somebody else, and there was no work to be done that would change it.
"He's married. It's done. Whatever this is, it ends here. "
Brell looked at him a long moment. Then she picked up her wine and drank and said nothing, and her silence was not agreement, but it was as close to mercy as she knew how to get.
The feast went on. More courses. More wine.
More laughter and the steady relentless performance of celebration.
Valdyr drank and did not taste it and did not let his eyes go back to the head table, or tried not to, and mostly succeeded, and when he failed the bond punished him with a surge of longing that made his ribs ache.
He was aware of Lorne the way a man is aware of a wound. Constantly. Precisely. The scent coming to him in waves across the hall, honey and lavender laced through with something tight and unhappy.
And in four hours it had never once turned toward the alpha sitting beside him.
That was the thing Valdyr could not stop turning over.
He had spent twenty-seven years around mated pairs and he knew what an omega's scent did in the presence of the alpha his body had chosen.
It softened. It reached. It opened by degrees, without instruction and without permission, the way a plant leans at a window.
Aldric had touched Lorne's arm a dozen times tonight.
Had put his mouth to Lorne's ear. Had filled his cup and leaned in close enough that their shoulders met.