12. Chapter 12 #3
He was barely conscious. His clothes were soaked through with sweat and stuck to him, and his skin was flushed deep pink across his face and throat and the bare skin of his arms where the sleeves had been shoved up.
His hair was plastered to his neck. He was trembling continuously, his muscles clenching and letting go in waves, and his scent filled the small room like something poured into it.
Valdyr crouched at the threshold and came in low and slow, every movement announced.
"Lorne. It's me."
Lorne's eyes flew open.
Terror.
What spiked off him cut straight through the sweetness, acrid and sharp, pure animal fear. An omega in heat who did not know who had found him, who had run from the worst thing in his life and expected it to have followed him into the dark.
His body curled tighter. His arms came across his chest. His breath went short and ragged and his eyes were glassy and unfocused, searching the doorway for the shape of the threat.
Then he found Valdyr's face.
The terror dissolved. Not by degrees. All at once, the way frost goes in sunlight, and what came up underneath it was so nakedly relieved that Valdyr felt it land in his chest. Lorne's whole body uncurled.
His hand shot out and closed on Valdyr's wrist with a strength that surprised them both, locking around the bone, not asking. Holding on.
"Don't take me back."
His voice was wrecked. Barely recognizable as the one that talked to lilies and hummed at bees.
"Please, Valdyr. Don't take me back to him."
Valdyr looked at him. Shaking and burning and soaked through, alone in a woodcutter's hut in the middle of a forest, gripping his wrist with a strength that had not come from muscle.
Something in Valdyr locked into place. Not a decision. The last movement of a mechanism that had been turning since the garden, since the greenhouse, since the stable, since every bruise and every night he had watched this man walk back toward that wing of the castle.
"I'm not taking you anywhere."
Lorne's grip tightened. His eyes were glassy with the heat but the comprehension in them was clear, and whatever had been clenched in his body since he ran let go by a fraction.
Valdyr sat down beside him and did not touch him.
Every part of him was screaming. The scent at this range was a physical assault and his instincts were a solid wall of take, claim, breed, and he put all of it down with the discipline of a man who had spent his whole adult life training a body to obey a will.
"I'm here. I'm not going anywhere. Nothing happens that you don't ask for."
Lorne was still shaking, the heat rolling through him in visible waves, but his eyes stayed on Valdyr's face and his hand stayed on Valdyr's wrist and the fear did not come back.
For a while there was only his ragged breathing, and the forest outside, and the candle.
Then Lorne said his name. Soft and broken and certain.
His fingers slid off Valdyr's wrist and moved up his forearm, over the scales, slow and deliberate, and Valdyr felt it in every nerve he had.
It was not the mindless clutching of a heat-drunk body.
It was intentional. His grip tightened, and then he pulled.
Not hard. Not frantic. A steady deliberate pull that said come here.
"Please. I want you."
Valdyr did not move.
"Lorne. Look at me."
He did, with an effort that cost him.
"You know what he was waiting for. You know why. You've said it to me yourself, in the stable, in the rain. That when it came you wouldn't be able to say no to anything." Valdyr's voice was low and did not shake. "So I need it from before. Not from now. Tell me from before."
Lorne's eyes came into focus, and for a moment the heat went out of them entirely, and what was left was the man who knelt in dirt and talked to flowers and had never once in his life said a thing he did not mean.
"Since the garden," he said. "The first night.
Before I knew your name, before I knew what you were to me, before any of this.
I wanted you on my knees in the dirt with a flower in my hand and I have wanted you every single day since, and I am not saying it now because my body is telling me to.
I ran here. I got on a horse in the dark and I ran, and I did that before the worst of it hit me, and I ran to be away.
" His breath caught. "You came anyway. So no. Not from now. From then."
Valdyr's composure came apart.
He had held it through the hall. Through two miles of forest. Through fifty yards of scent that had nearly put him on his knees. Through sitting beside his mate in heat and not reaching.
"All right," he said. "Then hear the rest of it, because I'm only saying it once."
Lorne waited.
"I won't bite you. Not tonight. Not while you're like this.
" He took Lorne's face in both hands, careful, the way he had in the greenhouse.
"You'll ask me for it before the night's out.
You'll beg. Your body will make you and you won't be able to help it, and I am telling you now, while you can still hear me, that the answer is no.
When you're through this and you're clear and you can look at me across a room and choose it in cold blood, then you can ask me again. "
Lorne's eyes filled.
"Everything else is yours," Valdyr said. "That one thing you have to come back for."
He let himself be pulled down.