14. Chapter 14 #2
Then he stood, and came down two steps of the dais, and stopped in front of Lorne, and breathed in.
Lorne did not move.
It was deliberate, the same assessing inhale from the chapel on their wedding day, an alpha taking the measure of an omega's scent.
Lorne stood with his head lowered and let the king read him: the residual heat, thinned and sated.
The exhaustion. And underneath all of it, unmistakable at this distance, another alpha.
Woodsmoke and iron worked down into the base of him where three days of contact had put it.
He watched the king's face out of the bottom of his vision.
Aldric was pleased.
Of course he was pleased. He had ordered this.
He had stood in this hall four nights ago and instructed his general to take his consort in hand, and here was the proof of it, carried in on the omega's own skin, exactly as commissioned.
The single piece of evidence that would have cost them both their heads was the evidence the king had asked for by name.
He stepped back with the faint satisfaction of a man whose instructions have been carried out to the letter.
"Good," he said, and it was warm, directed at Valdyr with the casual largesse of a king rewarding a reliable animal. "I knew you'd handle it. You've always been dependable."
Valdyr said nothing, because a soldier receiving commendation does not make conversation.
But Lorne, who had spent weeks learning the small movements of that face, caught the tightening at the corner of his mouth.
So slight that nobody in the room who was not looking for it would have seen anything at all.
The king turned back to him.
"I hope the lesson stays with you." Pleasant. Conversational. A man addressing a minor problem now resolved. "Three days in the forest with my general ought to have clarified where you stand. And what follows when you defy me."
Lorne lifted his head. Only enough. Enough to let the king see the lowered eyes and the chastened mouth and the absence of the bright warm smile he wore everywhere else in this castle. The absence was the point. The absence said you have broken something.
"Yes, Your Majesty." Thin and subdued. "I understand."
Aldric studied him, searching for defiance, for any trace of the quiet stubborn thing that had flashed at him across the study the day he struck him over the petitions.
He found nothing at all.
"Good." He waved a hand. "Return to your chambers. Hanne will attend you. I expect you at dinner."
"Yes, Your Majesty."
Lorne bowed deeper than protocol asked for, which was the last brushstroke on the portrait, and turned and walked out with his head down and his steps measured, every line of him saying what the king wanted said.
He did not look at Valdyr. Valdyr did not look at him.
The king had no idea what he had done.
He did not know that his general had held his omega through two days of heat with a tenderness that would have burned the world down for one smile.
He did not know that Lorne's body had opened for another alpha the way it would never open for him, which was the whole difference between a forced bond and a true one, rendered in the most physical and least deniable terms available.
He did not know that his most loyal soldier had knelt on a dirt floor and washed his face and fed him out of his own bags and then fought the strongest instinct in his body, for three nights running, to keep from claiming what was already his.
And he did not know that he had scented all of it standing two feet away, and called it obedience.
He had sent the most dangerous man in his kingdom to his own bonded mate and called it punishment.
He had put the two people most capable of ending his reign in one room for three days and filed it as correction.
He had handed Valdyr the one thing Valdyr would die for and ordered him to break it, and Valdyr had held it instead, and the holding had made something that was no longer secret and stolen and fragile.
The king had no idea.
The castle did.
Greta left a plate on the worktable, warm and generous, with a mince pie tucked beside the bread. Hanne drew the bath and said nothing whatsoever about the woodsmoke in his hair.
Lorne pressed his face into his pillow and breathed.
The pillow smelled of lavender. His own lavender, the English variety, grown from the seeds Valdyr had brought him and tended on the windowsill until the purple came.
And through the lavender, unmistakable, was Valdyr.
Woodsmoke and iron, pressed into Lorne's skin for two days and not yet released by it, clinging to his hair and his throat and the insides of his wrists.
He breathed it in, and for the first time since the carriage, since his father's arms at the door and the long ride south through country that got stranger every mile, he felt that he belonged to somebody who deserved him.
Not owned. Belonged. The distance between the two was a canyon.
Owned was what the king had offered, possession and control and the reduction of a person to a function.
Belonged was what the shelter had given him, the choosing and the being chosen, two people who had looked at each other and said yes, you.
His body was sore. His scent was soft on the pillow. He put his palm flat to his chest where the bond sat and thought about a voice in the dark saying I'm not taking you anywhere, and meaning it in every sense the words had.
The king did not come to his chambers that night. The heat was over and the omega had been dealt with and the matter could wait. There would be another heat. The king was patient. The king had time.
Lorne closed his eyes, and slept deep and without dreaming, and in Aelholm the bees went on humming in their blue and yellow hives, entirely unaware that their keeper had finally learned what it meant to bloom.