“Well, yes…” Maro hedged. Then Ryu’s words caught up to him. “Foryears? Really?”
Ryu nodded, and Maro wondered how in the world he’d managed to miss that little gem. But apparently, that was not the only thing he was missing. “I’m confused,” he admitted. He glanced at Kentario again. The man was staring back at him like he was a cockroach crawling over his dinner. “You… uh… Who… If I may ask an extremely indelicate question,” he said slowly, “and I apologise for any offence, but… who marked your scent gland?”
“Kentario did,” Ryu said.
“Right. But you said you’renotmarrying your soulmate?”
“That’s right. I’ve asked Kentario to marry me.” Ryu was also speaking slowly, and Maro couldn’t tell whether it was because Ryu thought he was an idiot or because he was afraid of making him angry.
But if anything, that odd declaration only made Maro more confused. “Just to be clear, you two slept together, correct?” If he was anyone else, he would likely have been swiftly sacked for asking such an audacious question. But given his long-running history with the royal family, and Ryu’s recent emphatic endorsement of his qualifications for his job, he might just get away with it.
“Yes,” Ryu said. He’d apparently got over the bashful stage and was once more looking Maro in the eye, steel in his spine, determination in hisvoice. “And I don’t much care what the public has to say about it. I don’t care if we’re both alphas. I don’t care if-”
“Yes, yes,” Maro butted in, once more breaking protocol by interrupting the king. “But you’re… You’re marrying Kentario?”
“Yes,” Ryu repeated, looking a touch confused himself now.
“And you agree to this?” Maro asked the bodyguard, just to be clear.
“Absolutely.” It was the first thing Kentario had said since he’d entered the room, and the cool declaration left no room for doubt.
He looked from one to the other, trying to figure out what the hell was going on.
All at once, he remembered his own fumbling forays into physical intimacy, back when he was a youth. But Kentario was twenty-one. Surely he couldn’t be so naïve as to think that…
“You have actually seen each other’s soul marks, haven’t you?” It seemed to be the day for blurting out things without thinking them through. Both young men looked equally stunned, and Maro suddenly had to work very hard to keep himself from laughing.
But a moment later, Ryu leapt to his feet, undoing his pants where he stood. Maro’s eyes opened wide, but thankfully, the king managed to remember at least a little decorum. He pulled his pants aside just far enough to expose his soul mark, nestled in against his hip bone, without giving Maro an eyeful of anything he really shouldn’t be seeing.
Kentario took one look at the mark and swore like a seasoned sailor. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!”
“It’s the same as yours?” Ryu asked, looking utterly poleaxed. “You can’t fucking tell me that you’re actually my soulmate?”
Kentario muttered another curse, his hands reaching for his own belt. But then he paused, a rare moment of embarrassment crossing his features, and Maro remembered, from way back when Kentario had been a mere babe, just where his soul mark was located – smack in the centre of his right buttock.
He cleared his throat, then abruptly stood up and turned around, facing the wall behind his desk. Behind him, he heard the rustle of fabric, then the quiet but indelicate curse of, “Odin’s fucking balls…”
There was a little more rustling, then Kentario said, “You can turn around now.”
He did, tentatively taking his seat again when Ryu did the same. One did not sit down before the king, after all. Even if said king had just undone his pants in front of you…
“We’re soulmates,” Ryu said, as if it was the most baffling idea in the world. “How can we be soulmates? Why would we be… Odin’sfuckingballs,” he cursed suddenly. “My parents knew, didn’t they?”
“Of course they knew,” Maro agreed. “They’d known since the moment you were born. Danag was your father’s bodyguard. Your two families have always been very close. So Sou had plenty of opportunity to see Kentario’s soul mark when he was a baby, and the instant you were out of your mother’s womb and cleaned up a tad, it was as obvious as the nose on your face.”
“So that’s why they didn’t want me to know,” Ryu said, his tone turning both sharp and bitter. “That’s why they kept trying to get me to find someone else. They didn’t want us to get married.”
“What?” After a brief moment of clarity, Maro suddenly felt logic escaping out the window again. “What on earth are you talking about?”
“Every festival we had, they kept telling me to go dance with someone else. An Amagarda and an alpha is not asuitablematch for the Crown Prince of Galandeen. Were they even going to let me register my soul mark when I turned eighteen?” he asked, suddenly angry. “Were they ever going to actually tell me? Tellus? Or were they going to find some other excuse to keep me guessing for a couple more years?”
“Whoa, hang on, slow down,” Maro interrupted. “Where on earth do you get this idea that they wanted to keep you apart?”
“They both flatly refused to let me register my soul mark, and they kept insisting that knowing who my soulmate was would be bad for me. I was supposed to ‘learn to be myself’, or some such crap, even when I kept telling them I just wanted to know who it was. And he was sitting in the same damn room the whole time!”
“Your parents had every intention of telling you both that you were soulmates,” Maro said firmly. “Yes, they insisted that you wait until you were eighteen. Maybe if you’d actually told them you were in love with Kentario, they would have told you earlier. But think back to when you were in your early teens. You two played together as children and got along well enough, but the instant Kentario hit thirteen, things went south.”
“True enough,” Kentario said, seeming oddly calm for all the unexpected revelations going on here. “I spent a couple of years thinking you were too young and therefore beneath me, and you spent that time resenting that fact that I got to do things you were too little to be allowed to do. Riding a horse, going on training trips with the Guard, learning to use knives as weapons. There were a good few years there when wealmosthated each other.”
