Page 36 of Fought it Through the Teeth

But if Fenris is alive and can be found and positioned as a legitimate alternative then the clan fractures. Loyalty divides. Warriors who would follow Garrik without question have to choose between the ward and the blood, and that choice paralyzes an army faster than any sword.

They don't need to send an army south to destroy the Wolfe clan. They need to send a name.

Morgan walks through the corridors of the Keep and feels the plan forming in his chest — small at first, tentative, feeding on the scraps of information he has been gathering since they arrived, and then stronger, brighter, building toward something that has heat and shape and purpose. He has been the decoy bride, the soft target, the man Ivan tried to dress in women's clothes and paraded through civilian quarters and plans to break in. And now, for the first time since they crossed the border, Morgan has something that none of them expected him to have.

He has a genuine spark of triumph in his chest.

He has a weapon that Ivan gave him without knowing he was giving it, because Ivan looked at the blond prince across his breakfast table and saw a pretty, biddable thing to be managed. He did not for one moment consider that it was reading him and finding every clause that could be used against him.

Morgan rounds the final corner and sees Bohdi leaning against the wall outside his room, arms folded, one boot propped behind him, waiting. Bohdi's eyes find him and Bohdi reads his face and his posture shifts — the easy lean becoming attentive, the folded arms loosening, alert, having spent a decade reading Morgan and recognizing the expression he is wearing.

"You look like you found something," Bohdi says.

Morgan walks past him and opens his door. "Ivan's son might be our way in."

Bohdi follows him inside and Morgan tells him everything.

Chapter 16

Bohdi

The heat of the bath is good and pales beside the sight of Morgan sitting beside him.

His hair is tied up on the back of his head. Not braided — gathered, twisted, pinned with what Bohdi thinks might be a piece of twine salvaged from breakfast. The knot sits at the base of his skull and leaves his shoulders and the back of his neck bare — a long, clean line of pale skin that runs from the soft hair at his nape to the ridge of his collarbone and down to the water. The amount of unmarked skin on display is a genuine test of Bohdi's character.

Bohdi has been tested before. He has been tested in battle, in negotiation, in the cold dark of a northern winter with an axe in his hand and the breath of a dying man on his face. He has been tested by Eskil, who tests the people he loves through impact, through pressure, through the daily grinding friction of proximity to a man who demands the absolute best and will not accept less. Bohdi has passed every test he has ever been given.

This one might be the death of him.

Morgan is gorgeous glaring at the king over a manifest. Undressed and flushed with steam, sitting close enough that Bohdi can count the individual drops of water beading on his collarbone, he is breathtaking. The heat has brought color to his face and the steam has loosened the fine blond hair at his temples into damp curls that frame his face. His shoulders are lean and defined, not the heavy slabs of a warrior but the clean lines of a body built by riding and walking and the physical labor of sitting upright in a library for sixteen hours without complaint. His chest is smooth. His skin is pale where the sun hasn't touched it, which is most of him, and the water laps at his ribs and the hollow of his stomach and Bohdi is very carefully looking at the far wall.

The far wall is safe. The far wall is not going to ruin his life.

"I guess it's fortunate Ivan's not capable of consummating the relationship," Morgan says.

His voice is conversational. Light. He brushes a wet strand of hair off his neck as he says it, a gesture so casual and so distracting that Bohdi's jaw tightens involuntarily. Morgan's fingers trail down his own throat and drop back into the water and he seems completely unaware of what that looks like from where Bohdi is sitting, which is either genuine obliviousness or the most sophisticated form of torture a man has ever devised.

"He doesn't strike me as the kind of man to wait until the wedding night," Morgan continues. He tips his head back against the stone rim and looks at the ceiling, profile sharp and clean against the steam.

Bohdi grins. The grin is automatic — his first, best, most reliable defense against everything — and he aims it at the water. "Far easier to kill him while his pants are down."

Morgan grimaces. "I'd rather not be in that position, regardless of its tactical merits." He pauses. A beat of silence that has weight in it, consideration. "It's bad enough I'm looking over my shoulder for his ward."

Bohdi's grin slides off his face.

The motion is involuntary and total — the grin doesn't fade, it disappears, the way light disappears when you blow out a candle. One moment it is there and the next it is gone and what is left is Bohdi's real face, the one he doesn't show to anyone if he can help it, the one that Eskil sees in war councils and enemies see in the last seconds of their lives.

"Garrik?" he says. "What about him?"

Morgan shrugs. The motion disturbs the surface of the water around his arms and sends small waves lapping against Bohdi's. "He propositioned me. Implied that, unlike his warchief, he was very capable of satisfying me."

Bohdi goes very still.

He doesn't know what his own face is doing. He can feel it doing something and he has no control over it, which hasn't happened since he was seventeen. That was the day Eskil told him his mother had been found dead on a road south of the mountains, and Bohdi's face had done whatever it wanted for a full thirty seconds before he got it back under command. He doesn't know what Morgan is seeing right now but it is clearly readable, because Morgan scoffs at it.

"I told you I know how to handle men." Morgan's tone is dry, unbothered. He has been deflecting unwanted attention for most of his life. "I don't need you displaying a show of dominance or anything."

"These aren't your dalliances in the market, Morgan," Bohdi tells him.