Bryn is walking the corridor after dinner, one of the quieter ones that connects the library wing to the residential quarters. The amber sconces are dimmed to a low glow and the palace has settled into its nighttime hush, the distant sound of the thermal vents and the faint creak of volcanic stone cooling in the evening air. He is thinking about the second trial, about what vulnerability means, about how Lira told him the trials test trust, vulnerability, and truth and he survived the first but the second feels closer, pressing in, and he doesn't know when it's coming or what it will ask of him.
He rounds a corner and walks into Ithyris.
Literally. Chest to chest. The prince catches him by the waist before he stumbles, his hands gripping Bryn's hips, and Bryn collides with the wall of the prince's body and the impact sends a shock through him that has nothing to do with the physical force and everything to do with the sudden, complete proximity. The corridor is narrow here, one of the older passages, and the amber light is low and the stone is warm and they are very, very close.
The prince's breath comes hard.
Bryn can feel it against his forehead, hot and unsteady, and Ithyris's fingers are flexing on his hips, gripping and releasing, as though the prince is trying to decide whether to pull Bryn closer or let him go and the decision is physically painful. His thumb traces Bryn's hipbone through his shirt. Slow. Deliberate. A circle, then a stroke, then another circle, and the muscle beneath Bryn's skin twitches and clenches and his breath catches in his throat.
"You're the most beautiful creature I've ever seen."
The prince's voice is low. Rough. It comes from somewhere deep in his chest, almost involuntary, as though the words were pulled from him by the proximity and the dimness and the heat of Bryn's body against his. His eyes are dark, the amethyst swallowed by his pupils, and he is looking at Bryn with that focused, consuming attention that Bryn has been trying and failing to withstand for days.
Bryn's voice comes out embarrassingly rough. "You don't mean that."
The prince's eyes flare.
His grip tightens. Not enough to hurt. Enough that Bryn feels the strength of his hands, the size of them spanning his hips, the restrained power in his fingers. Ithyris's jaw works and something shifts behind his expression, a door opening, a decision being made, and when he speaks his voice is different. Lower. Darker. Stripped of every courtesy and every restraint.
"I want to take you apart."
Bryn's lungs stop working.
"Piece by piece. Until you're shaking. Until you're sobbing. Until you can't remember your own name and the only word left in your mouth is mine. I want to put my hands on every inch of your body and my mouth on every place that makes you tremble and I want to fuck you until you are begging me, not to stop, notto go harder, just begging for my touch because you cannot bear to exist without it."
The corridor is very quiet. Bryn's heartbeat is very loud. The prince's thumb is still tracing circles on his hipbone, slow and steady, a maddening contrast to the violence of what he's saying.
"No one else will ever touch you." Ithyris's voice drops to a register that Bryn feels in his teeth and his spine and places considerably lower. "No one else will ever know what you sound like when you come. No one else will ever see what your face looks like when I'm inside you. Those things are mine. You are mine. And I have never meant anything more in my life."
Bryn can't breathe.
He literally cannot draw air. His chest is locked, his lungs are frozen, his entire body is suspended between the wall of the corridor and the wall of the prince's chest and every nerve he owns is screaming and he is hard, achingly, painfully hard, his cock straining against his trousers from nothing but the prince's voice and his hands on Bryn's hips and the dark, possessive certainty in his eyes. He is aroused to the point of pain from words alone and the realization would be humiliating if he had the capacity for humiliation, which has been burned out of him by the look on the prince's face.
He kisses him.
He surges up and fists the front of Ithyris's shirt and drags the prince's mouth down to his and kisses him with everything he has, with all the days of charged glances and restrained touches and the slow-building heat that has been compounding since the pools. He kisses him open-mouthed and desperate and the prince's hands grip his hips hard and Ithyris lifts him, bodily, and pins him against the corridor wall and Bryn wraps his legs around the prince's waist and they are pressed together from chest to groin and he can feel Ithyris's cock, hard and thick through his trousers, grinding against his own.
He works his hands under the prince's shirt. The scales at Ithyris's stomach are smooth and warm under his palms and the muscle beneath them is taut and trembling. He drags his hands up the prince's chest, fingers splayed, learning the geography of him through touch, the ridges of his ribs, the hard planes of his chest, the places where scale transitions to skin and the texture changes and Ithyris shudders when Bryn finds those borders, sensitive, and Bryn files that away and presses harder.
The prince pulls back from the kiss long enough to grip the hem of Bryn's shirt and haul it up and over his head and throw it down the corridor. The stone wall is cool against Bryn's bare back and the contrast with the furnace heat of the prince's body against his chest makes him gasp. Ithyris's mouth finds Bryn's throat. His teeth scrape and his tongue soothes and he sucks a mark below Bryn's jaw that will not be able to be hidden and Bryn doesn't care. Let the whole court see. Let Syreth see. Let every elder and courtier and servant in this palace see that the prince's intended has been claimed and has no interest in being unclaimed.
"Here?" Bryn manages. His head is tipped back against the stone and the prince's mouth is on his collarbone and Ithyris's hips are rolling against his and the friction is maddening, layers of fabric between them and nowhere near enough contact. "Anyone could..."
"Let them." The prince doesn't lift his mouth from Bryn's skin. His hands work between them, unlacing Bryn's trousers, shoving them down his thighs, and the cool air hits Bryn's cock and he hisses and then the prince's hand wraps around him and the sound Bryn makes is not dignified and is not quiet and carries down the corridor in both directions. "Let them see. Let every person in this palace know what I do to you. What you let me do to you."
Ithyris frees himself. Bryn hears the rustle of fabric and then feels the prince, the blunt, hot press of his cock against the crease of Bryn's thigh, and Ithyris is thick and hard and leaking and Bryn's body clenches in anticipation, remembering, wanting. The prince shifts his weight against the wall, one arm hooked under Bryn's thigh, spreading him, and his other hand reaches between them.
His fingers find Bryn. Two, pressing in, and Bryn is still loose from this morning, still slick with the remnants of what the prince left inside him at dawn. The prince's fingers slide in easily, the claws retracted, and Ithyris groans against Bryn's throat at how open he is and curls them once, pressing against that spot, and Bryn's hips jerk and his cock jumps between them.
"Still wet from this morning." The prince's voice is guttural. "Still open for me. You've been walking around the palace all day with my release still inside you and sitting in council meetings and arguing about grain tariffs and the whole time you were full of me."
"Oh gods." Bryn's voice breaks. "Oh gods, please..."
"Please what?" Ithyris pulls his fingers out and positions himself and the head of his cock presses against Bryn, hot and insistent, and he holds there, not pushing in, waiting. Even now. Even in a corridor with Bryn pinned against a wall and both of them desperate, the prince waits. "Tell me what you want."
"You." The word comes out wrecked. "I want you. Inside me. Now. Please, Ithyris, I need..."
The prince pushes in.
