7. Chapter 7 #3
The blow came faster than last time. The same side of his face, the same cheekbone, where the bruise had finally gone yellow-green and nearly vanished, and the pain went off white and bright and left his ear ringing.
"You don't tell me how to touch what's mine."
Lorne lay very still. His cheek throbbed. The cut inside his mouth had opened again and the taste of copper was becoming something he recognized.
The king stood up. When he looked down, the frustration had settled into something more deliberate.
"It's the suppressants."
Lorne's blood went cold.
"Years of them. Dulling everything down." Aldric's voice had gone clinical, a man reading out a diagnosis. "You've suppressed yourself into uselessness. Your body has no idea how to answer an alpha because you've spent a decade drugging it quiet."
"That isn't how they work."
And Lorne knew it wasn't. He knew it with a certainty that sat in his throat like a stone, because eleven days before this he had knelt in the dirt of a ruined garden with the same dose in his blood, and a stranger had told him he was beautiful, and his body had gone slick inside the space of a single breath.
The suppressant had done nothing to stop it.
The suppressant had never had the first thing to do with any of it.
He could have said so. He could have opened his mouth and handed over the one piece of evidence that proved the fault was not in him.
He would have had to say whose garden. And whose voice.
He said nothing.
"I don't care how they work," Aldric said. "I care that my omega cannot perform his single basic function. The physician's report came with you from Aelholm. Cresswell will collect the tin in the morning."
The panic arrived all at once, ice water straight through him, and his voice came out reedy and nothing like the pleasant even tone he had been using since the day he arrived.
"No. Please. I need them. My heats without them are..."
"Are what? Inconvenient?" The king's mouth twisted. "You're an omega. Heats are what you are for. And when yours arrives, your body will do what it was built to do, and biology will overrule whatever defect in you has been rejecting me."
"Please..."
"This is not a discussion."
He crossed to the door, paused with his hand on the frame, and turned back, and the satisfaction in his face was complete.
"When your heat comes," he said, "I'll bite you. The bond takes whether you want it or not. That is how biology works. Even yours."
The door closed.
Lorne sat on the edge of the bed.
The room was very quiet. The candles had burned down and their flames were small and unsteady and threw shadows that moved on the walls like living things. The king's scent hung in the air, fading, clinging to the sheets and the pillows and Lorne's own skin.
Without the suppressant his heat would arrive inside a few weeks.
His body, let off the chemical leash it had worn since he was seventeen, would return to its own rhythm with an urgency that years of suppression would only sharpen.
The physicians in Aelholm had told him as much when he started, and he had filed the warning under things he would never need and forgotten it inside a month.
A heat would take everything. Composure.
Control. The capacity to say no. His body would flood and his scent would scream and the king would be there, and the king would take what Lorne's conscious mind had refused him, and the bond would seal.
Teeth in his throat. A mark he had not agreed to.
A permanent alteration of his scent and his biology and his self, and no part of him left with the standing to refuse it.
He would be claimed by a man who struck him and called him worthless and handled him like faulty goods. A man his body clenched away from. A man who was not his and never would be, and who would bite him regardless, because the law permitted it and biology would make it stick.
His vision blurred.
He pressed his palms into his eyes. The pressure was familiar now. The gesture had become a ritual, palms to sockets, holding himself in place from the outside because nothing on the inside was doing the job.
He thought about his father's arms around him at the carriage door.
About Ronan's letter. If he's unkind to you, send word.
I'll come get you. I don't care about the treaty.
About his mother holding his face in both hands the night before he left and saying, You were never made for a place like that, sweetheart. Take your bees with you in your head.
He thought about the treaty. About the borders. About the northern campaigns reaching his family inside a season if this fell apart.
He thought about broad scarred hands washing blood out of a cut on his foot. About a thumb tracing the edge of a bruise without once touching it. About a low rough voice saying there is nothing wrong with you and meaning it all the way down.
He sat on the edge of the bed and he sobbed, quietly, with both hands over his face and his shoulders going, and he kept the sound small.
Even here. Even alone. Even coming apart, he was careful not to wake anybody.