One long, steady thrust, Bryn's body opening around him, taking the full length of him in a single slide that drives the breath from Bryn's lungs and pins him against the wall. The stretch is immediate and consuming and perfect and Bryn cries out, sharp and high, and the sound bounces off the corridor walls and comes back to them and he doesn't care who hears.
Ithyris fucks him against the stone wall with a force that shifts Bryn upward on every thrust, his hips driving forward, his hands gripping Bryn's thighs, and the sound of his body meeting Bryn's is obscene, wet and rhythmic, echoing down the empty corridor. Bryn is clinging to the prince's shoulders with his nails in his skin and his legs locked around the prince's waist and he is making sounds he will be ashamed of later and is not ashamed of now because now is the only thing that exists.
"This is what I think about." The prince's mouth is against Bryn's ear, his voice rough and ragged, punctuated by the force of his thrusts. "Every time you argue with a courtier and your hands start moving. Every time you lick your lips while you read. Every time you catch me staring and your face goes red and you look away first. I think about this. About having you against a wall. About being so deep inside you that you can feel me in your throat. About making you come so hard you forget every person who ever made you feel as though you weren't enough."
The words land in Bryn and detonate. The pressure at the base of his spine tightens and his whole body goes taut and his cock is trapped between them, untouched, grinding against the scales of the prince's stomach with every thrust, and the friction and the fullness and Ithyris's voice in his ear are converging into something he can't hold back.
"You are everything." The prince drives in deep and holds, grinding, his cock pressed against that spot inside Bryn, and his voice cracks. "You are everything I have ever wanted and you walk around this palace in my shirts with my marks on your throat and you don't even know what you do to me. You don't know. You read trade law and argue about tariffs and throw bread at courtiers and I am ruined, Bryn. You have ruined me. Completely. Permanently. And I would not change a single thing about you."
Bryn comes.
The prince's voice does it. Not the friction, not the fullness, not the relentless pressure against his prostate. Ithyris's voice. The crack in it, the raw, undone quality, the confession that the prince is ruined and the certainty that he means it. Bryn's orgasm tears through him with a violence that whites out his vision, his cock pulsing between them, untouched, spilling across the prince's stomach and his own, and his body clamps down around Ithyris so hard the prince chokes on a groan and his hips stutter.
Ithyris follows him over. Three more thrusts, hard and uncoordinated, and he buries himself deep and comes with a sound that is barely human, his cock pulsing inside Bryn, the rush of heat flooding him, and the prince's forehead drops to Bryn's shoulder and his whole body shakes.
They stay pinned to the wall. The prince's cock softening inside Bryn, his release trickling down the inside of Bryn's thigh, his breath ragged against Bryn's shoulder. Bryn's legs are locked around the prince's waist and his arms are around Ithyris's neck and the corridor is still empty and dim and the amber sconces cast long shadows and they are a mess, clothes destroyed, skin flushed, covered in each other.
Bryn starts laughing.
He can't help it. It's the absurdity. The crown prince of the Drekian Sovereignty just took him against a corridor wall for the second time today and Bryn came from the prince's voice alone and his shirt is somewhere on the floor ten feet away and if anyone walks around that corner right now they will find the prince's intended impaled on the prince with his trousers around his thighs and there is nothing about this situation that is dignified or appropriate or befitting a potential consort and he laughs because the alternative is admitting that he is falling and he is not ready for that word yet.
Ithyris lifts his head. His hair is disordered and his eyes are hazy and Bryn's laughter makes him blink and then his mouth curves, slow and surprised and genuine, and he laughs too, a low sound against Bryn's throat, and they lean against the stone wall and laugh and the prince's cock slips out of him and his release runs down Bryn's leg and neither of them moves to clean up because cleaning up would require separating and neither of them wants to.
"You are a menace," Bryn tells him.
"You kissed me first."
The prince carries him to the bath. He cleans Bryn up with warm water and careful hands and puts him in one of his shirts and tucks him into bed and climbs in behind him and wraps his body around Bryn's, his chest to Bryn's back, his arm across Bryn's stomach, his mouth against the nape of Bryn's neck.
Bryn lies in the dark and listens to the prince's breathing settle into sleep and thinks about what Ithyris said in the corridor. You have ruined me. Completely. Permanently.
He thinks: I know. I know, because you have ruined me too, and I didn't even notice it happening. It happened in kitchens and libraries and thermal pools and on the back of a dragon in the sky. It happened when you put your hand on the small of my back and when you waited for permission to enter my room and when you told me I didn't have to earn my safety and I believed you.
He thinks: the second trial is vulnerability.
He thinks he is beginning to understand what that means, and the understanding doesn't come from the sex or the bond or the prince's declarations in dim corridors. It comes from the morning tea and the careful hands and the bare feet and the patience. It comes from the fact that Ithyris never asks for more than Bryn can give, and that Bryn keeps giving more anyway, and that the giving doesn't diminish him. It makes him more.More than the boy who held the walls up. More than the scribe with the forged ledger. More than the second son no one wanted.
He closes his eyes. The prince's arm tightens around him. The bond hums, warm and certain.
He sleeps.
Chapter 14
The second trial comes for Bryn in sleep.
There is no warning. No summons from Lira, no descent into the mountain, no ceremonial architecture. One moment he is lying in Ithyris's bed with the prince's arm across his stomach and the bond humming between them. The next he is standing in a hall he recognizes, and the recognition is a knife between his ribs.
The great hall of Everen.
The vaulted ceiling that leaks when it rains. The cracked stone pillars his grandfather's grandfather built. The faded tapestries depicting victories no one alive remembers. The long banquet table, scarred with centuries of use, where his father used to hold court before he stopped holding anything but a wine glass. Every detail is precise, rendered with the merciless fidelity that only dreams achieve.
Bryn is on his hands and knees.
The floor is covered in wreckage. Broken glass, overturned chairs, spilled wine darkening the stone, papers scattered and trampled. He knows this wreckage. He has cleaned it up athousand times. His hands are already moving, picking up glass, stacking papers, righting chairs. The muscle memory is so deep it operates without thought, the way breathing operates, and he has been doing this since he was old enough to hold a broom and he will be doing it until there is nothing left to clean.
He straightens a chair and moves to the next piece of debris and his knees ache on the cold stone and he realizes, with a sick lurch, that he is small. His hands are a child's hands, thin and pale, the knuckles scabbed. The shirt he's wearing is too large, sleeves rolled back, and the hall is enormous around his small body.
The wreckage stretches in every direction. No matter how much he cleans, there is more. He rights a chair and two more fall. He stacks papers and the wind scatters them. He sweeps glass and it multiplies, glittering, and his hands are bleeding now, thin cuts across his palms from the shards, and he keeps cleaning because stopping has never been an option.
