There was one detail he left out. He wasn’t nervous about sharing it—that wasn’t quite the right emotion. Yet he still felt the cell narrowing, the space shrinking down until the focus was only on the two of them.
Ehlian glanced at Hayce, trying to catch his eyes. “Daribon also thinks I could get released early for good behaviour.”
Hayce didn’t lift his eyes from the book. And his reaction… it wasn’t what Ehlian expected, maybe even hoped for.
No disappointment.
No disapproval.
Something.
Anything.
“Good behaviour?” Hayce scoffed, the indifference in his voice was almost offensive. “This Daribon guy clearly knows nothing about you.”
Ehlian slapped his arm playfully. “Shut up.”
But he didn’t feel that playfulness inside. He was an idiot for expecting more.
Something had shifted between them in the last few weeks. It wasn’t the same anymore, not since they’d nearly bonded. Hayce was distant, curt, more controlled, and Ehlian felt unseen. Cruelly invisible.
Clapping his book shut, Hayce set it on the nightstand. “The month is up.”
“As if you didn’t break my rule nearly every day,” Ehlian said, sliding flat on the bed as Hayce rolled over him.
Ehlian’s head tipped back against the pillow, throat exposed, the skin at his neck stretching—sensitive and shamelessly tempting, the first place Hayce would always go for.
But Hayce held himself above him, with an unreadable, quiet air around him. He finally met Ehlian’s eyes. “If you have a chance to leave this shithole early, you’d be a fool not to take it, Ehlian.”
“I know,” he said. He did want to leave. He truly did. But Hayce telling him to go, so easily and so casually, stung a little. “What about you?”
Hayce broke eye contact, mouth descending on the stretched, sensitive skin of Ehlian’s neck. “Focus only on yourself.”
It was so fucking hard, especially when Hayce’s lips brushed the edge of his bond point, like he was trying to claim him, mark him with his power. But he never really touched it anymore, just as he never held eye contact for too long. It annoyed Ehlian to no end. Hayce didn’t have to behave like this… like Ehlian were some weak, desperate idiot who was hopelessly, irrationallyattached to him. Like he blamed him for their nearly bonding, like he didn’t trust Ehlian to control his own instincts. Ehlian had more than enough self-control. That near-bonding accident had been… an innocent accident, nothing more.
Ehlian sank his fingers into Hayce’s hair, gripping, urging him to kiss him rougher. “You could always try to escape,” he whispered.
Pulling his shirt lower, Hayce’s teeth sank into the softness of Ehlian’s shoulder before licking over the faint mark. “Still think my power has no limits?”
Ehlian shook his head softly, voice throaty. “It doesn’t seem like it.”
“I can’t stop an army of guards.” Hayce finally found the bottom edges of Ehlian’s shirt and pulled it over his head. “A handful? Maybe. But not an army.”
Ehlian cupped Hayce’s jaw, forcing him to look at him again. “Will you ever be free?”
Hayce held him with dark, inscrutable eyes for a breathtaking moment. The amber flecks in them flared like smouldering embers, and fuck, Ehlian felt that terrifyingly strong pull again. Even with everything screaming inside him that he shouldn’t, he wanted to lose himself in those magnetic depths again, pulled under with their force.
One. Two. Three seconds.
Hayce looked away, sharply severing the connection between them, but the shadow never quite left his eyes.
“Will you…?” Ehlian whispered his question, but the words dissolved into a moan as Hayce pulled down his trousers, the slide of his hand delicious against Ehlian’s cock. The burning caress dipped lower into the shadows between Ehlian’s legs, seizing his every thought, his question forgotten.
Even hours later, lying wide awake in Hayce’s arms, he still didn’t have an answer.
Chapter 15
Everything happened so quickly Ehlian barely had time to process it.
