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you face me in my own kingdom, you inhabit my lands, and you breathe at my pleasure.
Like a dark flower, those words unfolded in his mind.
Lazar handed him a full tankard. It had a fly in it.
Breathing was a tight, painful thing.
‘See to my Captain. Tonight he is to have anything that he asks for.’
A glance from him drives men to their knees His sigh brings cities to ruin
The world was not made for beauty like his
The pulse of desire, when it came, was a throb that re-formed blood and flesh, and transformed awareness. He
When this game began, I was younger.
Damen said, with helpless honesty, ‘Laurent, I am your slave.’ The words laid him open, truth exposed in the space between them.
slowly, very slowly, making his height an offering, not a threat,
It felt, in all the lies between them, as if this was the only true thing. It didn’t matter that he was leaving tomorrow. He felt remade with the desire to give Laurent this: to give him all he would allow, and to ask for nothing, this careful threshold something to be savoured because it was all Laurent would let himself have.
His hand had lain there, and pushed up into the soft, warm golden hair. Interrupted, the kiss was alive between them, in dark eyes and heartbeats.
The warm, sweet kiss had been broken in a moment of promise: the first slight parting of lips, the hint that Laurent had been on the cusp of allowing the kiss to deepen, though his body had been singing with tension.
He put the badge down on the table.
‘Adequate.’
For a moment, looking felt like kissing, an exchange in which the distinctions of intimacy blurred.
Laurent was holding himself very still.
Despite the cool tone, he was aware of the extent to which Laurent was holding himself in place, allowing himself to be touched.
This was too convoluted for bed play. Damen listened, satisfied himself that in all of this talking there was no actual objection, then simply applied his mouth.
To get what you want, you have to know exactly how much you are willing to give up.
A kingdom, or this.
Stirring drowsily, Laurent shifted a fraction closer and made a soft, unthinking sound of pleasure that Damen was going to remember for the rest of his life.
He’d never thought Laurent could look like that at anyone.
and there was laughter too, and something akin to happiness that hurt as it pushed at the inside of his chest.
‘No,’ said Damen. ‘No, it’s—’ It’s never like this.
He had come to this fort a slave. He would ride out of it Damianos of Akielos.
It was an honour to serve with you. Those words echoed in his mind. ‘No,’ he said. ‘The honour was mine.’
The herald still held his gruesome trophy. He didn’t know to run when he saw the look in Laurent’s eyes.
‘You can tell my uncle boykiller that he can cut the head off every child from here to the capital. It won’t make him into a king, it will simply mean he has no one left to fuck.’
A fourth son, thought Damen, waiting for someone to notice him.
‘I think it would feel like this.’
‘By dragging them into this endless, childish bid of yours for your uncle’s attention that you call a fight.’
‘Don’t lie to me. Not you.’
Into the long silence that stretched out between them, Laurent said: ‘Like Aimeric.’
When children are moulded that young, it takes time to undo.
the flickering of some internal truth behind the careful lack of all expression.
‘But in the end, the only person on his side was him.’
Damen knew better than to reach out, or to tr...
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‘Old friend, you have come to a place where nothing is as any of us thought.’
And as Damen looked out, the army was dropping to its knees, until the courtyard was a sea of bowed heads, and silence replaced the murmur of voices, the words spoken over and over again. ‘He lives. The King’s son lives. Damianos.’
He was tangled up now. Dark-eyed, as though touch was to him an extreme act.
first spill of tension, Laurent’s fingers on his skin as his heart beat like a bruise in his chest.
but the slower Damen kissed him as they moved together, the more it seemed to take Laurent apart.
Order me to stay, he wanted to say, and couldn’t.
