Page 26 of Fought it Through the Teeth

Bohdi is performing. Every exchange is managed. He is, with meticulous care, building a version of himself that Ivan can believe he has beaten, and the craft of it is so precise and so deliberate that Morgan feels a swell of something dangerously close to awe.

Then Ivan overcommits and Bohdi moves the way Morgan has seen him move in the yards at Valen when the sparring is real, when Eskil is across from him and neither of them is playing. For a moment the yard goes silent and Morgan's lungs forget how to work. When the noise returns, Morgan exhales. He didn't know he had been holding his breath.

The yard is clearing. Warriors are drifting toward the barracks or the hall or the stables, and a few of Ivan's men cast him glances as they pass — the pale prince, the foreign bride, sitting alone in the dust with nothing to do and no one to talk to. He meets each glance with a pleasantness so thorough it constitutes an act of war.

He should go inside. He should find something useful to do — review the trade correspondence Ivan showed him on the tour, or work on the mental map of the stronghold he has been building since they arrived, or catalog the supply discrepancies he noticed during the tour. The numbers don't add up, and Morgan is very, very good at numbers, and the numbers here are telling him a story Ivan doesn't know he is writing. He should be the diplomat. He should be the spy. He should be the useful, sharp-minded tool his brother sent him here to be.

Instead he sits in the sun and does not move.

He hears the footsteps first. Then the shadow falls across him and Morgan looks up to find Bohdi standing in front of him with his shirt back on, thank every god listening, though it is clinging to his chest and accomplishing precisely nothing in the way of modesty.

Bohdi is wiping sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand, pushing damp red braids out of his face. He grins down at Morgan. "Commentary, your highness?"

Morgan raises an eyebrow. He settles his expression into cultivated boredom, chin still resting on his fist. "About a bunch of men posturing and grunting for approval? No, I don't have anything to add, Bohdi."

Bohdi huffs a laugh. The sound is warm and easy and lands in Morgan's chest and stays there, glowing. "Disparaging comments from someone who couldn't tear their eyes away from said posturing." He tips his head, that infuriating grin spreading. "Got an opinion on my technique you'd like to share?"

Morgan keeps his face absolutely still. Every muscle held in place by sheer force of will. "You're obviously very talented. Your ability to sweat and flex at other men is truly inspiring."

And Bohdi's eyes go half-lidded.

It is a subtle thing. A fractional lowering of the lashes, a darkening of the gaze, a shift in the quality of the grin that takes it from cheerful to something considerably more dangerous. The smile is still there but it has teeth now, and the look he is giving Morgan from beneath those heavy lids has absolutely no business being deployed in a public training yard in broad daylight in front of whatever warriors are still lingering along the fence.

"Oh, my prince," Bohdi says, and his voice has dropped into a register that Morgan feels in the base of his spine. "You'd be surprised exactly how talented I am at making men sweat." He pauses. The grin sharpens. "Not that I expect much out of a scholar who doesn't know which end of the sword to hold."

Morgan feels his whole face go hot.

It happens in an instant — the heat rushing up from his chest to his neck to his cheeks, flushing him the deep, mortifying pink that he has spent his entire adult life training himself not to produce. Because Morgan is blond and pale-skinned and blushes so thoroughly it borders on obscene and there is not a single thing he can do about it except refuse to let a single muscle in his face move.

He stares back. He refuses to blink. He refuses to swallow. He holds Bohdi's half-lidded gaze with every scrap of composure he has left in his battered, aching, stupidly enamored body, and says, flatly, "I've never had any complaints about my technique — or how I hold a sword."

The shot hits exactly where he aimed it.

Bohdi's eyes light up. The smirk becomes a full grin — broad and delighted and incandescent, the grin of having been matched and knowing it and liking it, and the sight of it hits Morgan square in the chest. Something in Bohdi's face opens up — not guarded, not performing, just pleased, genuinely and entirely pleased, and Morgan feels a surge of triumph so fierce it borders on feral.

The triumph lasts approximately three seconds.

"Bohdi! Get over here before the ale gets warm, you northern bastard!"

Ivan materializes, flushed and grinning, and claps Bohdi on the shoulder with a proprietary force that makes Morgan's teeth grind together. He is hauling him away and Bohdi goes, because Bohdi always goes, because that is the job.

But he looks back. One last glance over Ivan's hand on his shoulder, and his eyes catch Morgan's, and the grin is still there — smaller now, private, meant for a different audience than the one Ivan is providing. It lasts a heartbeat. Then he is gone, swallowed up by the shadow of the barracks, and Morgan is sitting alone on the wall again.

The yard is empty. The sun is high and hot and the dust is settling and the air smells of sweat and steel and the dry heat of a southern afternoon that has no resemblance to anything Morgan has ever known.

He sits there. He looks at the place where Bohdi was standing. He thinks about the half-lidded eyes and the low voice and you'd be surprised exactly how talented I am at making men sweat, and his face is still burning and his pulse is still hammering. Somewhere beneath the want and the frustration is the cold, steady reminder of exactly why he is standing in this yard at all.

He is here to be a bride. He is here to sit at Ivan Wolfe's table and smile at Ivan Wolfe's jokes and play his part. He is here because the kingdom needs him here, because the council voted and Eskil conceded and Morgan agreed, and the man waiting for him inside that stronghold is not Bohdi. The man waiting for him is Ivan Wolfe, and the look in his eyes when he studies Morgan across the table is not interest or admiration or desire but something considerably uglier — the cold calculation of deciding how much force it will take to break what is in front of him.

And Bohdi is right there. Ten feet away at any given moment. Close enough to touch and absolutely untouchable, grinning his way through enemy territory with his hands clean and his boundaries intact and his loyalty to Eskil a wall that Morgan has spent years pressing his palms against and feeling nothing give.

He gets off the wall. He brushes the dust from his trousers. He straightens his spine and lifts his chin and walks across the empty yard toward the hall, alone, and the ache in his chest settles into its familiar groove and stays there the way it has always been there.

Chapter 12

Bohdi

The following day, Ivan takes Bohdi out to the southern edge of Wolfe land to show off his holdings, one warrior to another, and Bohdi is politely, enormously impressed in entirely the wrong direction.