15. Chapter 15 #3
"You told me to come back and ask you when I was clear," he said. "You said I'd have to be able to look at you across a room and choose it in cold blood."
Valdyr made a sound.
"I'm clear. I'm choosing it. Claim me."
"Lorne." Barely a whisper. "The mark is permanent. The scent change will be..."
"Unmistakable. I know."
"The king will know."
"I know."
"Your family. The treaty. Everything you..."
"I know." Lorne's hand tightened on his jaw, and he pulled back far enough to hold his eyes.
"I know every single thing you're about to say, because I've said all of them to myself every night since a stranger walked into a garden and called me beautiful.
I know the risks. I know what it costs. I know exactly what happens when the king sees this on my throat. "
His voice was level. His scent was open and entirely certain.
"I have been that man's property," he said. "I've been his treaty. His defective omega. His broken purchase. I've lain under him and been struck by him and been told I'm worthless, and I have worn his ring and his bruises and smiled through all of it because my family needed me to."
He drew a breath, and the breath was the hinge everything turned on.
"I would rather be your partner."
Partner broke something loose in Valdyr.
Lorne watched it go. The last thread of the restraint that had held since the garden, through the greenhouse and the stable and two days of heat in a woodcutter's hut, snapped, and what was left was not a general or a soldier or a weapon.
Only a man, with wet on his face and his mate in his arms and that word going through him like a struck bell.
He put his mouth to Lorne's throat.
He breathed. The exhale came out ragged and shook against the skin. His hands trembled. His whole body trembled. The moment stretched, one second, two, the last breath before a fall.
His fangs went into the soft curve of Lorne's neck.
And the world reorganized itself around the two of them.
There was no noise to it and no violence.
It was the opposite of an explosion. It was every loose thing in Lorne's body being drawn at once toward a center that had not existed a second earlier and now could never not exist, and it happened faster than thought and more completely than anything he had words for.
He felt his own scent open wider than it had ever opened, the honey and the lavender expanding and going deep, and then, threading down into the foundation of them, permanent and past all argument: woodsmoke.
Iron. Valdyr. Not a trace of him. Not a suggestion.
A fact, worked into Lorne at the level where a body writes itself, as much his own now as the honey that had been there since he was fourteen.
Lorne gasped. His hands clutched at Valdyr's shoulders.
His back arched and the mark burned on his throat and the sensation was heat without fever and fullness without ache.
It was a root finding water at the end of a long drought.
It was the sound a hive makes when the queen comes back and the whole colony understands, all together and all at once, that it is whole.
Valdyr took his mouth away.
His eyes were wet. His hands were shaking.
Lorne's blood was on his lips, and the sight of it should have been frightening and was instead the most sacred thing Lorne had ever been shown.
Valdyr looked at the mark on his throat, the bite, the bruise already darkening around it, the wound that would scar and stay and say what they were to anyone with eyes, and his face was shattered and full and he could not speak at all.
Lorne took his face in both hands.
He kissed him. Tasted his own blood and did not flinch from it. Kissed him deeply and thoroughly with the whole certainty of a man who had just chosen his life and was at peace about it.
"Finally," he whispered against his mouth.
Valdyr's arms came around him, crushing and gentle at once, and he put his face into Lorne's neck against the mark and breathed in great shuddering breaths that were sobs with the sound taken out of them, and Lorne held him and stroked his hair and the bond between them rang and rang.
They made love afterward, and the word was the correct one.
It was not fucking, though Valdyr was still rough with his hands and vulgar with his mouth and consuming in his intensity, because those things were who he was and Lorne loved them fiercely.
There was a tenderness underneath the roughness that nobody else would ever be shown, born out of the mark burning on Lorne's throat.
Every touch was doubled. The bond ran live between them now, carrying sensation both directions, and Lorne could feel echoes of Valdyr's pleasure laid over his own until every touch became a chord.
When Valdyr pressed into him, Lorne felt it from both ends, the stretch and the fullness from his own body and the tight devastating grip and the welcome from Valdyr's, and it was so much that his vision blurred and his voice came apart into sounds that were not words.
Valdyr's mouth stayed at the mark. Not biting. Pressing, kissing, his tongue tracing the raised edges of it, and every pass sent something electric down the bond. Lorne tilted his head and offered it, and the sound Valdyr made against his skin was wrecked and worshipful.
"Mine," he said, hoarse. "You're mine."
"Yours." The word felt like breathing. "And you're mine."
"Yours. Always. Since the garden."
"Since the garden."
They moved together, slow and deep and full, and the bond took the pleasure and shared it out between them until it was one thing building in two bodies, gathering from where they were joined and going outward through everything, their scents, their histories, the whole long road from a ruined flowerbed to this room.
Lorne came apart under him with Valdyr's name in his mouth and the mark bright on his throat, and it was different from every time before it, deeper and more complete, and the bond carried it across so that Valdyr felt it and followed, and they crested together and held on.
Afterward Lorne sprawled across his chest again. His position. His fingers moved idly on the scales, and the mark on his throat throbbed warm and gentle in time with the bond.
"Tell me about the hives," Valdyr murmured.
Lorne smiled. The real one. The garden one. The smile that had taken a war general apart in the dark and would go on doing it for the rest of both their lives.
"Eight hives," he began. "Blue and yellow."
And Valdyr listened with his eyes shut and his hand in Lorne's hair, with the claim mark on his mate's throat and the lavender in the drawer and the rosemary on the table, and the room smelled of everything they were and everything they were going to be.
Outside it, the dawn was coming, and the dawn was going to change all of it.