The prince's hand moves from Bryn's hair to his face. His thumb traces Bryn's lower lip, swollen and wet, and the touch is gentle enough to make Bryn's chest hurt.
"Where did you learn that?" Ithyris asks. His voice sounds as though it's been dragged over gravel and left there.
"I didn't."
The prince stares at him. Bryn stares back from the cradle of his thigh, his chin wet, his eyes watering, his hair ruined, and he watches Ithyris process the fact that Bryn just took his cock down his throat and swallowed his release and it was his first time doing any of it. The expression that moves across theprince's face is so layered and so devastating that Bryn has to close his eyes against it because looking at it directly feels too much, the way looking at the sun feels too much.
Ithyris slides back into the water. He gathers Bryn against his chest and holds him, his arms wrapping around him from behind, his chin on Bryn's shoulder, and the warm water covers them both and the cavern is quiet except for their breathing and the soft drip of condensation from the crystals overhead.
They float in the silence. The prince's heartbeat is steady against Bryn's back. The bond hums between them, warm and low and satisfied, and Bryn leans into him and lets the water hold them and feels wrung out and raw and oddly, unexpectedly, proud.
He wanted to do that. Not because the prince asked. Not because he owed Ithyris anything. Because he wanted to take the prince apart the way Ithyris takes him apart, and he did, and the power of it is a revelation. The power of choosing. The power of kneeling not because someone expects it but because you want to see what happens to a man's face when you give him something he didn't dare ask for.
After a long time, Ithyris presses his mouth to Bryn's ear.
"You said if," the prince says.
"What?"
"If you were my husband. You said if." His thumb traces Bryn's collarbone beneath the water. "I noticed."
Bryn looks at the steam rising from the surface. He thinks: when. Not if. When.
He doesn't say it. He's not ready. But he thinks it, and the prince's arms tighten around him as though the bond carries thoughts too, and Ithyris presses his mouth to Bryn's temple and holds him in the warm water and doesn't ask for more than Bryn can give.
He never asks for more than Bryn can give.
That's the part that's going to break him.
Chapter 13
Something has changed between them.
Bryn doesn't know how to name it. It's not the bond, which has been a constant hum since the day he arrived, low and warm and inescapable, a second pulse in his chest that he has stopped trying to ignore because ignoring it is about as effective as ignoring his own heartbeat. It's not the sex, which has been happening with a frequency that would scandalize the elder council if they knew the half of it, and they probably know at least a quarter because the palace has thin walls and Bryn has lost the ability to be quiet about it. It's something else. Something that shifted in the pools, in the warm water, in the moment he chose to kneel between the prince's legs and take him apart with his mouth and Ithyris let him.
There is a new weight to the way the prince looks at him.
Ithyris has always watched him. From the beginning, from the great hall, his gaze has tracked Bryn with the focused, consuming attention of a creature who has identified something vital and will not look away from it. But this is different. This is the gaze of a man who has been given something he didn't expectand is now recalibrating everything he thought he knew about what his mate is capable of, and the recalibration is visible in every interaction, every glance, every point of contact between them.
The prince touches the small of Bryn's back when they walk. He has done this before. But now his hand stays longer, his fingers spreading wide, his palm pressing flat, and the heat of it seeps through the fabric of Bryn's shirt and into his skin and Bryn feels it for hours afterward, a phantom warmth that pulses in time with his heartbeat. He has started to anticipate it, to feel the absence of the prince's hand on his back as an incompleteness, and the fact that his body now expects to be touched by this man is both comforting and alarming.
Ithyris's hand lingers at Bryn's elbow when he passes him a dish at dinner. Not a brush. A hold. His fingers closing around the joint, his thumb settling into the crook of Bryn's arm, and the grip lasts two seconds longer than courtesy requires and in those two seconds his thumb moves, once, a slow circle against the sensitive skin of Bryn's inner arm, and Bryn loses the thread of the conversation he was having with the copper-marked elder and has to ask him to repeat himself and the elder gives him a look that suggests he knows exactly why Bryn lost the thread.
The prince stands too close in the library. Bryn is reading, or trying to, seated in his usual alcove with a text on Drekian mineral rights that is genuinely interesting and deserves his full attention, and Ithyris leans over his shoulder to look at the page and his chest presses against Bryn's back and the heat of him is staggering, volcanic, and Bryn can feel the prince's breath on his neck and his heartbeat through the thin fabric between them and he reads the same sentence seven times without absorbing a single word of it. The mineral rights of the eastern provinces could be the most fascinating subject in thehistory of governance and he wouldn't know because the prince is breathing on his neck.
When Bryn reads, Ithyris watches his mouth.
Bryn discovers this by accident, glancing up from a passage about thermal irrigation and catching the prince's gaze fixed on his lips with an intensity that makes his face flush hot from the collar up. He licks his lips, reflexive, and the prince's eyes track the movement and his jaw tightens and Bryn looks back at the book and his hands are not steady on the page.
When Bryn argues with courtiers, Ithyris watches his hands.
He is making a point about grain tariffs during a particularly tedious council session, gesturing because he always gestures when he's passionate about something, his hands cutting through the air the way they used to when he was explaining figures to Everen's merchants, and he catches the prince staring at his hands with an expression that has nothing to do with grain tariffs and everything to do with the memory of where those hands have been on Ithyris's body. Bryn loses his point mid-sentence. The courtier looks confused. The prince looks satisfied.
When Bryn catches him staring, the prince doesn't look away.
This is the part that undoes him. Other men would flinch, would redirect, would have the decency to pretend they weren't cataloging every movement of Bryn's body with the devotion of a scholar studying sacred text. Ithyris holds his gaze. Those dark amethyst eyes, steady and unashamed, and the look in them says I see you and I want you and I am not embarrassed by either of those things. He holds and holds and holds until Bryn is the one who breaks, face burning, body sweltering, unable to sustain the weight of being wanted that openly by someone that beautiful.
Bryn breaks first. Every time. The prince knows it. Bryn knows the prince knows it. And still, every time it happens, something in his chest cracks a little wider, another fracturein the architecture that used to keep him sealed and safe and unreachable.
