5. Chapter 5 #2
He lay on his side where the blow had turned him and looked at the wall.
His cheek throbbed. His mouth was bleeding.
The king's scent hung in the air, sharp with contempt, and Lorne breathed it in, and even now, even struck and hurting and stripped of everything, his body did not produce one drop of slick for this man.
The silence went on.
"Worthless." Quiet. Almost conversational. A man writing off a loss. "A worthless omega who can't even get wet for his alpha."
You are not my alpha.
It rose up out of somewhere deep and absolute, and Lorne closed his teeth on it and held it there, because letting it out would be the end of everything.
Aldric stood and pulled his trousers on and laced them with short angry movements, and Lorne understood that the wound here was pride, and that pride was the only wound that would be counted.
The king had expected a pliant, eager omega.
He had expected to sink his teeth and seal the bond and walk into the morning with his consort's scent blended into his own, proof of his dominance for anyone with a nose.
Instead he had gotten an unresponsive body and the humiliation of failing to consummate his own marriage, and the failure could not be his, would never be framed as his, because kings did not fail.
Omegas failed. Omegas were defective. Omegas were worthless.
"Get out," Aldric said.
Lorne got up off the bed. His body ached in three places at once, the deep bruised soreness between his legs, the sharp throb in his cheek, the finer tremor of muscles held clenched so long they shook when he stood.
He gathered his clothes from the floor and held the ivory silk against his chest and did not put it on, because putting it on meant buttons and his fingers were not steady enough for buttons.
He walked to the door.
"Lorne."
He stopped. He did not turn around.
"This stays between us. If anyone asks, the consummation was successful. If I learn that you have told anyone otherwise, you will regret it."
"Yes, Your Majesty."
"Get out."
Lorne got out.
The corridor was empty.
He walked. He did not know where he was going.
His bare feet made no sound on the stone, the slippers left behind somewhere in the king's chamber or the corridor outside it, and the cold of the floor against his soles was the most real thing available to him.
It tethered him. The rest of him had come loose and was drifting somewhere above and behind his own body.
He reached his room without remembering the walk. One moment the corridor, then the door, then the enormous beautiful room that was not his and smelled of rosewater and almond oil and nothing like home.
He went to the basin. The water had been set out hours ago and had gone cold, and he cupped his hands and pressed it to his face, and the cold against his cheek was such a relief that his eyes burned.
He held it there, dripping, breathing shallow, and looked at himself in the mirror above the basin.
The mark was already coming up. A red blotch high on his left cheekbone in the shape of an open hand, the skin hot and tight.
By morning it would be a bruise, blue and purple and unmistakable, and he would have to ask Hanne for a powder, and Hanne would see it and know, and he would have to smile and offer an excuse, and the excuse would be transparent, and Hanne would take it because what else could she possibly do.
Then he raised his hands and began taking the pins out of his hair.
There were more than he had realized. Hanne had set them that morning with such care, one at a time, each loop smoothed and placed, the coronet that was meant to come down under an alpha's hands on the wedding night.
He worked them out one by one and set them on the edge of the basin, and they made a small bright sound against the porcelain, and by the fourth one his hands had steadied, and by the last one he had stopped looking in the mirror.
The braid fell. He combed it out with his fingers.
He washed his face. He washed his hands.
He washed between his legs where the skin was raw and the water stung, and held his breath until the stinging passed.
He dried himself gently and pulled on the white linen shirt out of his traveling case.
His shirt. The one with the broken button and the too-long sleeves.
The soft worn feel of it against his skin was the first kind thing his body had been given since the garden.
He sat down on the edge of the bed.
He did not cry. He wanted to. The pressure behind his eyes was enormous, a great weight of water behind a wall that was cracking, and he could feel each crack open and travel, and he held on, because if he came apart now he would not be able to reassemble himself by morning.
Morning was coming. The king would be there and the court would be there and the life he had agreed to would be there, and he needed to be whole enough to walk into it.
Any omega worth his breeding.
Defective.
Worthless.
He sat with the words. He let them lie against him the way he had let the cold water lie against his cheek, not because he wanted them there but because refusing to feel a thing had never once made it smaller.
His mother had taught him that. Let it hurt, sweetheart.
The things you won't feel don't go anywhere. They just grow roots in the dark.
So he sat with it. The words. The blow. The raw ache of a body opened by hands it had not chosen. And the distance between the life he had imagined, a bond that came on like a season, an alpha his body would welcome the way soil welcomes rain, and the life that had actually arrived.
He thought about a garden. About a lily blooming for nobody. About a voice that had said mate and meant it down in the bone.
You're going to be fine. You're going to get up in the morning and smile and tend this life and it will be enough.
The words felt smaller than they used to.
Morning came the way mornings come in unfamiliar places. Abruptly. The light wrong, the sounds wrong, the smell of the room wrong. Lorne surfaced out of the shallow broken sleep he'd eventually fallen into and lay in the silk-draped bed and felt the bruise on his cheek keep time with his heart.
He got up. He washed. He looked at it in the mirror, purple now and vivid, the shape of a hand softening into something that could, with effort, be blamed on a fall or a door frame. He held a cold cloth to it and thought about this stays between us, and pressed harder.
Hanne arrived with Miri and the morning began. Tea. A light meal he could barely look at. The dressing.
Hanne saw the bruise. Her hands went still for a fraction of a second, the cloth she'd been using to pat rosewater onto his skin hovering just short of his cheek. Her eyes found his in the mirror.
"I walked into the bedpost," Lorne said, and smiled. "In the dark. I'm dreadfully clumsy. You should see me in a greenhouse. I'm a menace to terracotta everywhere I go."
Hanne looked at the bruise. Then at the smile. She lowered the cloth and patted carefully around the color and said nothing at all, and her silence was deliberate and full of things she was not going to say, because saying them would put them both somewhere neither of them could afford to be.
"I have a powder that will help with that," she said.
"That would be wonderful. Thank you, Hanne."
She applied it without hesitating over the technique, without needing to work out how it was done, without once asking what had happened. Lorne watched her hands in the mirror and felt a rush of gratitude so violent it nearly took the wall down behind his eyes.
Miri brought tea, strong and slightly bitter and served with honey, and Lorne held the cup in both hands and let the warmth go into his palms, and the honey tasted like home and the ache in his chest sharpened.
They dressed him in soft blues. The collar was lower than yesterday's, and he was grateful for it.
The high structured collar of the wedding gown had sat on his throat like a cage, a display case for the bond mark that was supposed to be there and was not.
Today's clothes were plainer and easier, and when he looked in the mirror he saw less of an object and more of a person.
"Is there a garden?" he asked. It was out before he had decided to ask it, surfacing from the deep place that knew what he needed well before his mind caught up.
Hanne and Miri exchanged a look.
"There is, Your Highness. Off the east corridor. Though I'm told it's..."
"Neglected. I know." He had been there. He knew. "Thank you."
He waited until they had gone, then left his shoes behind and went barefoot through the corridors, retracing the path from two nights ago.
The castle was quiet, the whole staff moving slowly in the lull after the feast, and the few servants he passed smiled at him and he smiled back and not one of them mentioned his feet.