Page 12

The last time Eskil gave Indrie an order about an enemy combatant was in this same study, over a Jakadi prisoner in the cells. Indrie came asking to tend the man's wounds and Eskil told him no, in the voice of the king, the one that gives commands and expects them obeyed. And he watched Indrie shrink. Watched the light go out of him. Watched him lower his head and drop his gaze and say yes, your majesty in a voice so small it did not sound like him, and then walk out with his shoulders curled in and his hands shaking at his sides.

Eskil sat behind this desk afterward trying not to break it. Not from anger at Indrie, but from the understanding, which arrived all at once and without mercy, that he had just spoken to the man he loved the way the people who owned him had spoken to him. He did it once. He saw what it did. He is never doing it again.

The man in front of him now has steel down his spine and no intention of being told who he can heal. He walked into this study having already worked out the shape of the argument and already decided its outcome, and he is standing here not to negotiate but to inform. He is standing in the eye of a storm and demanding that it go around him, because he is not moving. It has been a full decade since anyone spoke to Eskil that way. His own brother does not speak to him that way.

He is being told off in his own study by a man he could carry under one arm, and he is aroused by it, and he is thirty-three years old and a king and apparently this is his life now.

Eskil does not correct the misunderstanding. The speech was never about whether Indrie should treat enemy combatants. The speech was about the fact that Indrie was alone in a building with said enemy combatant and Eskil did not know about it until the man was already in his study. The real grievance is fear. It has always been fear. But he would rather lose an argument he is not having than sit in this room and explain that for a second time, because the first time cost him more than Indrie knows.

"Is that so," Eskil says.

"It is," Indrie says.

His voice does not waver and his chin does not drop. He comes around the desk to stand in front of the King of Rengara with his shoulders squared, having survived enough to know exactly what he will and will not tolerate. Eskil wants to put his mouth on him so badly his jaw aches.

Eskil looks at him and lets the silence stretch, taking in the stubborn angle of his jaw, the dark eyes holding his without a trace of the deference that used to live there, the quiet certainty in his stance that was not there six months ago and is not going anywhere now.

"Maybe I want to argue," Eskil says.

Indrie gives him a look that declines the bait, because he knows exactly what Eskil is doing and is not impressed by it. Then the corner of his mouth twitches, and something warm creeps into the stern set of his face, and he steps forward and rises on his toes and kisses the tip of Eskil's nose.

Eskil growls. The sound comes from somewhere deep in his chest, rough and unplanned, and his hands move before the rest of him has decided what they are doing. He catches Indrie around the waist and pulls him forward and sits back in his chair in the same motion, and Indrie lands in his lap with a soft sound of surprise that Eskil swallows with his mouth against Indrie's throat.

Then Indrie goes still. Whatever he expected to come down on, it was not the hard line of Eskil's cock underneath him.

"Oh," Indrie says.

His mouth closes. It opens again. He bites his lower lip and a smile creeps in around the edges of it, shy and pleased and a little wicked all at once. Pink climbs his neck, starting at the collar of his shirt and rising in a slow, gorgeous flush that Eskil has catalogued and committed to memory and still finds enticing every single time. Indrie's weight settles more firmly into his lap. His eyes drop, briefly, to the point of contact between them, and then they come back up and he is looking at Eskil from under his lashes, which is a weapon he does not know he has.

"Do you," he starts. His voice has shifted lower, softer, carrying the breathless quality that tells Eskil he is not the only one interested here. The smile gets worse. He is biting his lip and the heat is still climbing his throat and his hips have not moved, but Eskil can feel the precise, excruciating awareness in both of them of where their bodies are touching. "Do you like when I talk back to you?"

Eskil's hands tighten on his waist. His cock throbs against the seam of his trousers, pressed right up under the warm weight of Indrie sitting on it, and his whole body has gone still with the effort of staying where it is. The shy tilt of that smile, the bitten lip, the color high on his throat, and his little lover has no idea what he does to him. He has never had any idea. He stood on the deck of a ship three seasons ago and looked up at Eskil in the moonlight without knowing that the sight of him could bring a king to his knees. He is sitting in Eskil's lap right now without knowing that defiance and sweetness together are the single most dangerous thing in Rengara.

Eskil leans forward and bites him. Not gently. He gets the tendon at the side of Indrie's throat between his teeth and bears down, and Indrie's whole body jolts in his lap, a sharp breath punching out of him, his hands flying to Eskil's shoulders. The sound he makes is not a word. It is helpless and startled and desperately aroused all at once, and the vibration of it runs out of Indrie's body into his and settles burning at the base of his spine.

"You know I fucking do," Eskil says against his skin, low, rough, the words buzzing against the mark he has just left. "You walked in here with your chin up and told me no and I've been hard since before you sat down. Don't look at me like you're surprised."

Indrie laughs.

The sound is bright and disbelieving and it breaks something open in the room, some tension that has been building since the meeting began, and then the laugh becomes something else midway through. Something warmer. Something with heat in the belly of it and knowledge in the curl of it.

Then he rolls his hips, slow and deliberate, a long dragging grind across the hard length of Eskil's cock, and Eskil's breath leaves him through his teeth. Indrie does it again, settling into it, finding the angle that pulls the seam of his trousers along the whole of him, and his own breath catches at the friction.

"I was only asking a question," Indrie says, with an innocence that would be more convincing if he were not actively grinding on the King of Rengara's cock.

"You were asking for trouble." Eskil's hands find Indrie's hips and grip, thumbs digging in, and he pulls him down harder on the next roll and meets it with a thrust of his own, and the sound Indrie makes is not innocent at all. "And you're about to get it."

Indrie laughs again, but this one is shorter and breathier and edged with something that is no longer disbelief. The color deepens. He glances toward the door.

"Here?" Indrie says. "The door isn't even locked."

"Who's going to come in?" Eskil says. "Bohdi?" He runs his thumbs along the crease of Indrie's hips, slow, proprietary. "He's already seen you in my lap."

Indrie's mouth falls open. He pushes at Eskil's chest with both hands, not hard enough to mean it.

"That doesn't mean I want Bohdi to see me–" Indrie starts, and then he stalls. The blush has gone from pink to red. He tries again. "To see me..."

He cannot get the rest of it out. Eskil watches him try with a feeling in his chest so fond it hurts.