Mithri notices.
"You're flushed," she says one afternoon, studying him across the table in the kitchens where they've taken to having lunch together, a daily ritual that Bryn looks forward to more than he's willing to admit. "You're always flushed now. You've been flushed for days. You look as though you've been standing near an open flame."
"The palace is warm."
"The palace has been warm since you arrived. The flush is new." She tilts her head, her grey eyes sharp and knowing. "He's staring at you right now, isn't he?"
Bryn doesn't turn around. He doesn't need to. He can feel the prince's gaze on the back of his neck, warm and heavy, and the bond pulses in confirmation.
"He's always staring at me."
"Yes." Mithri picks up her cup of tea. "But you're staring back now. That's the difference."
He opens his mouth to deny it. He closes it. She's right. She's right and he doesn't have a rebuttal because the evidence is written across his face in a permanent flush and a tendency to lose his train of thought whenever a specific dragon prince enters his peripheral vision. The boy who used to run a kingdom on arithmetic and composure now can't complete a sentence about grain tariffs because Ithyris is looking at his hands.
"Eat your soup," he tells her, which is not a denial but is at least a change of subject, and Mithri grins into her cup and doesn't push, because she knows she's won.
***
This morning he went to the prince's room.
He doesn't know what possessed him. He woke before dawn in his own chambers, the bond humming low and warm in his chest, and he lay in the dark and thought about the prince's mouth and his hands and the sounds Ithyris makes when Bryn touches him and he was hard and restless and instead of doing the sensible thing, which would be to go back to sleep, or the moderately sensible thing, which would be to take care of it himself, he got up and walked down the corridor to the prince's door in his smallclothes and bare feet and let himself in.
Ithyris was asleep.
Bryn had never seen him asleep before. The vulnerability of it stopped him in the doorway, held him there with a force that had nothing to do with the bond and everything to do with the simple, devastating reality of seeing this man unguarded. The prince was on his back, one arm above his head, the sheets tangled at his waist, and in sleep his face lost the careful control he wears during the day and became something softer, younger, the hard lines of his jaw relaxed and his mouth slightly parted and the tension gone from his brow. The violet scales at his throat were muted in the dark, their usual shimmer dimmed to a soft glow. His chest rose and fell, slow and deep, and the room smelled of cedar and warmth and the faint mineral tang that is uniquely Ithyris and that Bryn's body has learned to associate with safety, which is the most dangerous association he has ever formed.
He climbed into the prince's bed.
Ithyris stirred when the mattress shifted. Made a low sound, more vibration than voice, and his arm moved, reaching for Bryn instinctively, his hand finding Bryn's hip before his eyes opened. The bond between them pulsed, recognition, and Bryn felt the moment the prince registered his presence, the way his body shifted from sleep to awareness without ever passing throughalarm. There was no startle, no tension, no moment of who is in my bed. Bryn was a familiar thing in his bed. Expected, even. The prince's hand on his hip said: there you are.
Bryn pulled the sheets down.
The prince was half-hard already, from sleep or the bond or both, his cock thick and heavy against his thigh, and when the cool air hit his skin he stirred again, his eyes cracking open, hazy and confused, still caught between sleep and waking. Bryn wrapped his hand around him and felt the prince twitch and thicken in his grip and Ithyris's breath caught.
"Bryn?" His voice was rough with sleep, barely there. "What are you..."
Bryn put his mouth on him.
No preamble. No warning. He lowered his head and took the swelling head of the prince's cock between his lips and sucked and Ithyris's whole body jerked, his hips lifting off the bed, and the sound the prince made was strangled and raw and gratifying in a way that Bryn is only beginning to understand the depths of. He is learning that he loves making this man lose control. He is learning that the sound of the prince's composure breaking is his favorite sound in the world, above the crackle of a good fire and the scratch of a pen on ledger paper and Mithri's laugh, and that ranking concerns him not at all.
He worked the prince with his mouth the way he learned in the pools, slow and thorough, tonguing the underside, sucking the head, taking him deeper with each stroke. Ithyris went from half-hard to fully hard in his mouth, the length and thickness of him growing against Bryn's tongue, and the sensation of the prince filling his mouth, of being the thing that made him hard, was heady and addictive and Bryn is starting to suspect he could become a person who does this every morning if given the opportunity.
The prince's hand found his hair. His fingers threaded through the short strands, gripping, and this time he didn't apologize. He held Bryn's head and Bryn could feel the restraint in his grip, the control it took not to thrust up into Bryn's mouth, and Bryn rewarded that control by swallowing him to the root and the prince's restraint dissolved into a groan that vibrated through the bed frame.
"You walked into my room." Ithyris's voice was shattered, his hand tight in Bryn's hair. "At dawn. To wake me up with your mouth. You... Bryn, who are you? What have you done with the boy who blushed when I touched his hand?"
Bryn pulled off long enough to say, "He's busy," and took the prince back in and Ithyris laughed, breathless and broken, and the laugh became a moan and the moan became Bryn's name and Bryn sucked him until the prince's thighs were shaking and his hand was clenched in Bryn's hair and his hips were making those small, desperate movements that meant he was close.
Ithyris pulled him off. Bryn made a sound of protest that he will deny until his death, and the prince dragged him up the bed and flipped him onto his stomach and pinned him and Bryn felt the hot, blunt press of Ithyris's cock against him and he arched back into it, greedy and shameless, and the prince pushed inside in one long stroke that punched the air from Bryn's lungs and pressed his face into the pillow.
The prince fucked him slow and deep and thorough in the grey dawn light, his chest against Bryn's back, his mouth on Bryn's neck, his hands laced with Bryn's above his head. He rolled his hips in a rhythm that was unhurried and devastating, grinding against that spot on every stroke, and Bryn came with his face in the prince's pillow and Ithyris's name in his mouth and the prince's body covering his completely.
Ithyris came inside him in a hot, pulsing rush and didn't pull out for a long time. Stayed buried in Bryn, his forehead betweenBryn's shoulder blades, his breath ragged, and when he finally slipped free Bryn felt the warm trickle of the prince's release and he didn't clean up. He pulled on his trousers and the prince's shirt and went to breakfast and he carried Ithyris inside him all day and every time he sat down he felt it and thought of the prince and the fact that he is the kind of person who does this now, who walks around a palace with the evidence of his lover inside him and argues about grain tariffs and drinks tea with his sister and doesn't apologize for any of it.
***
It happens in the evening.
