13. Chapter 13 #3
The heat would come back. It would cycle through them for days, wave after wave, and Valdyr would be there for all of it. He would hold him through the burning. He would feed him out of the bags. He would put his mouth on Lorne's throat a hundred times and every single time he would not bite.
He had said so before he touched him. He had known when he said it what it was going to cost, and he had underestimated it considerably.
The instinct did not negotiate. His fangs pressed at his gums until his jaw ached. His hindbrain howled at him to put his teeth into the soft skin under his mouth and seal it, make it permanent, make it visible, mark this man in the one language every living creature could read.
And there was the other reason, the cold practical one that sat underneath the promise.
A claim mark could be seen. The scent change would be permanent and unmistakable.
Every soul in Thessmere would know that the king's omega had been claimed by another alpha, and it would not be Valdyr who paid for that.
It would be Lorne. The treaty. The family.
The borders of Aelholm. Every single thing Lorne had asked him in the rain to protect.
He would not put a brand on this man that announced to the king exactly what had happened.
So he held on. He held on and he loved him and he pressed his mouth to that throat and breathed and did not bite, and it was a particular species of agony, having everything he had ever wanted in his arms and refusing himself the one thing that would make it permanent.
The heat crested again. Lorne stirred against him, warming, his scent thickening, and his eyes opened glassy and wanting and his hand found Valdyr's face.
"Again. Please."
And Valdyr, who had never in his life been able to refuse this man anything, gathered him in and gave him everything he asked for.
The heat broke on the morning of the third day.
It went out the way it had come in, in waves, each smaller than the last, the intervals stretching, the intensity thinning.
Lorne lay in the nest of blankets, wrung out and shaking, his body slowly becoming his own again.
The fever-flush drained out of his skin.
The consuming need that had run him for two days softened into an ache, and then a warmth, and then a settled quiet.
He was lying against Valdyr's chest. The arms around him were solid and warm and the heartbeat under his ear was slow and steady and the scent of woodsmoke and iron was in the blankets and on his own skin and in the air of the small room that had become the entire world.
He touched Valdyr's face. Traced the jaw, the rough grain of the beard, the arch of the cheekbone.
Valdyr's eyes were shut. He looked exhausted past the physical, into something further down.
The particular weariness of a man who has spent two days and three nights refusing the strongest instinct his body contains, having promised out loud that he would.
Lorne had known it was coming. That was the part that undid him.
He had been told, before anything happened, in a voice that did not shake.
And then he had felt it, over and over, in the moments between waves when his mind came up out of the fog.
The tension in Valdyr's body every time his mouth found Lorne's throat.
The tremor in his jaw. The war going on against Lorne's skin in a pair of lips that opened and did not close.
And the bond between them roaring for completion the whole time, demanding the thing that would have finished it, and Valdyr denying it.
Every wave. Every cycle. Every moment when Lorne was under him and the instinct was at its worst and the bite would have been the easiest movement in the world.
He had begged for it. Somewhere in the second night, out of his mind with it, he had begged, exactly as Valdyr had said he would.
And Valdyr had said no, and held him through it, and had not once been unkind about it.
The cost was written on him. The lines around his eyes were cut deeper. His jaw was set even in sleep. His hands, resting on Lorne's back, still carried a fine tremor of what he had spent.
Lorne traced the arch of a horn, gently, the smooth dark curve sweeping back from the temple, warm under his fingertips.
"You kept it," he said. His voice was wrecked from two days of sounds he had never made before. "I asked you to break it and you kept it."
Valdyr turned his mouth into Lorne's palm. A press of lips against the skin. He said nothing at all.
Lorne's eyes burned, and the tears came slow and quiet, and they had nothing to do with sadness.
He pressed his face into Valdyr's chest and breathed him in. Woodsmoke and iron and the new deeper thing underneath that was the two of them, beginning to blend from three days of closeness. Not permanent. Not what a claim would have done. A suggestion of it. A promise.
"Thank you," he whispered.
Valdyr's arms tightened. His lips found the crown of Lorne's head.
And his silence was not emptiness. His silence was the loudest thing Lorne had ever heard.