The pace builds. His hand tightens on Bryn's and his hips drive harder and the sounds filling the room are rhythmic and obscene and Bryn is making sounds he will remember later and not regret. The prince shifts his angle and hits that spot directly and Bryn cries out and his body clamps around Ithyris and the prince groans and presses his forehead between Bryn's shoulder blades.
"I can feel you," Ithyris says, ragged. "Through the bond. What this does to you. How it feels inside you."
The bond is wide open, transmitting everything, their pleasure tangling into a feedback loop that amplifies with every thrust. Bryn can feel what the prince feels: the tight heat of his body. Ithyris can feel what Bryn feels: the fullness and the sharp, blinding pleasure. The loop tightens and tightens.
Bryn turns his head. He needs the prince's face. Ithyris lifts his head and his eyes find Bryn's and they are wrecked and wet at the edges and the look in them is the one from the dream chamber. The one that says am I enough, except this time the question has been answered.
Bryn comes.
Looking at him. With the prince's name in his mouth and the bond blown wide open. The orgasm tears through himand through the bond and he feels the moment it breaks Ithyris, his pleasure crashing through the connection, and the prince follows him over with a hoarse, ruined sound, his hips stuttering, filling Bryn in hot, flooding rushes.
Ithyris collapses onto his back. His weight is enormous and grounding and Bryn is pinned, sweating and shaking and full of him, and the prince's hand is still laced with his and his breath is ragged against Bryn's neck.
He presses his mouth to the nape of Bryn's neck. A kiss. Then another. His thumb strokes Bryn's where their fingers are interlocked.
"A detour, hm?" the prince murmurs against his skin.
Bryn laughs. Wrecked and breathless and muffled by the pillow and real, and the prince laughs too, a low vibration against his back, and they lie in the wreckage of the afternoon with light coming through the crystal-veined walls and their hands tangled together.
This is what the absence of armor feels like. Not vulnerable. Not exposed.
Free.
***
Mithri corners him at dinner.
She slides onto the bench across from him and places both palms flat on the table and studies his face. He is wearing a fresh shirt, his own, with a high collar that does not quite cover the mark below his jaw. His hair is damp. He is eating with the focused, single-minded appetite of someone who has expended a great deal of energy and requires fuel.
"You missed the afternoon council session," she says.
"I was occupied."
Her eyes narrow. Her gaze moves from his face to the mark on his neck to his damp hair to his appetite and the deduction assembles behind her eyes. "You were occupied."
"Eat your dinner, Mithri."
"You have been occupied a great deal recently. One might say to the exclusion of all other activities, including participation in the governance of the kingdom that is trying to decide whether to keep you."
"The petition is tabled."
"The petition is tabled because your intended threatened to abdicate, not because the elders changed their minds." She is right. She is always right. "Bryn. I am happy for you. But you are going to need to do something other than this. The third trial is coming. Syreth hasn't stopped. And the king tabled the petition. He didn't deny it."
The warmth of the afternoon recedes and the cold edge of reality presses in. Syreth is regrouping. Thalryn is calculating. The third trial is ahead and the trials are the only thing between Bryn and the clause, between Ithyris and the severance that would half-kill him.
"You're right," he says.
Mithri blinks. "I'm sorry, could you repeat that?"
"Don't push it."
She grins. "The library texts on Drekian constitutional law. You've been reading them for weeks. Have you found anything that could counter the Clause of Unfitness?"
He has, actually. A thread. An argument so thin and fragile it might snap the moment he pulls it. But it is there, buried in a statute from the founding era, and he has been turning it over in his mind between the watching and the wanting and the slow, devastating process of falling in love with a dragon prince.
Falling in love.
The words land in his chest and sit there, warm and heavy, and he does not flinch from them. He does not deflect. He turns them over and looks at them and they are plain and true and he is tired of being afraid of plain, true things.
