"Sorry. I haven't... no one has ever kissed me that way before."
Torsten takes this as a compliment.
Evran watches it land, watches the frown smooth out, watches the ego reassert itself, watches the concern transform into satisfaction, and feels something bitter and cold settle in hisstomach. Of course Torsten takes it as a compliment. Of course he hearsno one has ever kissed me that way beforeand interprets it asyou're the best I've ever hadrather than what it actually means, which isno one has ever made me feel this sick with their mouth on mine.The vanity is so complete that it functions as a filter, converting every input into confirmation of what Torsten already believes about himself, and Evran feels a flash of contempt so fierce it nearly reaches his face.
Torsten moves his hand from the front of Evran's tunic to his jaw, his fingers cupping the bone, tilting Evran's head up, his thumb pressing into the soft skin beneath Evran's ear. The grip is possessive, certain, having decided the resistance was merely shyness and that permission to continue has been given.
"Then let me do it again," Torsten says.
He kisses Evran again.
This time Evran closes his eyes. He closes them because he cannot look at Torsten's face, because if he sees the hunger and the entitlement and the casual cruelty of taking without asking, he will lose his nerve. He closes his eyes and he thinks about Vaike, about Vaike's mouth, warm and thorough, the mouth that kisses as though time is infinite and every second of it exists to make Evran feel cherished. He holds the thought of Vaike in his mind, cups it there, protects it, uses it as a shield against the reality of what is happening to his body, and he lets Torsten kiss him, and he does not respond but he does not pull away, and the ambiguity is apparently enough.
Torsten pulls back a second time. His breathing is heavier. His eyes are dark.
"Tomorrow," he says. "Come find me tomorrow."
Evran nods. It is the only thing he can manage, his voice gone, swallowed by the lump in his throat that feels suspiciously as though his heart has climbed into it and lodged there.
Torsten releases him. He steps back, adjusts his tunic, runs a hand through his sweat-dampened hair. The mask slides back into place, the easy smile, the casual confidence, and he gives Evran one last look that is equal parts promise and warning before turning and walking toward the path that leads back to the stronghold.
Evran stands against the stable wall and watches him go.
He does not move for a long time. The clearing is empty around him, the practice swords standing in their rack, the late afternoon light turning golden on the packed dirt. The air is cooling. Somewhere a bird calls, sharp and clear.
Evran's hands are shaking. He presses them flat against the rough wood of the wall behind him and focuses on the texture, the splinters, the grain, the solidness of it, and breathes. He needs something real beneath his fingers, something that is not the heat of Torsten's body or the press of Torsten's mouth, something tangible and honest that belongs to the world he actually lives in and not the performance he has been trapped inside.
He can still feel Torsten's mouth on his, the pressure, the heat, the taste that was not Vaike and therefore wrong, fundamentally and cellularly wrong, in a way that his body understands even if his mind is trying to frame it as necessary and tactical and part of the plan.
His body is not interested in the plan. His body knows it was kissed by someone who had no right and no invitation, and it is responding accordingly, shaking, nauseated, the visceral, full-body rejection that comes not from physical danger but from the violation of something sacred, something that belongs to Vaike and to no one else, something that Torsten just put his hands on and his mouth on as though it were his to take.
He pushes off the wall. He picks up his cloak from where it fell on the log. He wraps it around his shoulders and walks backtoward the stronghold on legs that feel as though they belong to someone else.
The walk back is long, and he barely sees it. The town materializes around him in fragments, the noise of the market, the smell of the tanner's yard, the gate sentries nodding as he passes, and he moves through it present but separated, his body in the world and his mind somewhere else entirely, somewhere cold and quiet where it is trying to process what just happened and put it in a box and close the lid and never open it again.
Chapter 15
He feels as though he is going to be sick.
The corridor swims around him, the stone walls and torches and tapestries sliding past his vision distorted and unreliable. His hands are cold and his face is hot. There is a taste in his mouth that is not his own, a residue that no amount of swallowing can clear, and every time he breathes in he can smell Torsten's sweat on his clothes from where the man's body pressed against his.
He cannot breathe.
He makes it to the hallway outside his and Vaike's room and his knees give out and he collapses onto the bench. The stone is cold and hard beneath him and he grabs the seat with both hands, fingers curling around the edge until his knuckles ache, and he tries to breathe in but his lungs will not expand. They have closed, sealed, locked tight against the air, and each breath he drags in is shallow and insufficient and his vision is going grey at the edges.
Breathe in. Hold. Breathe out. Count the seconds. Focus on what is real. The wood under his hands. The stone under his feet. The braid against his neck.
The braid. He reaches up and grabs it, wraps his fingers around the plaited strands and squeezes until he can feel the beads pressing into his palm, hard and smooth and real. Vaike made these. Vaike's hands carved them. Vaike's hands put them in his hair and said every bead is my oath and Evran is here because he chose to be here, is doing this because he chose it, of his own will, for the man he loves.
But someone else's hands were on him. Someone else's mouth was on his, and the wrongness of it is not just emotional but physical, cellular, a revulsion that lives in the deepest part of his body and will not be reasoned away. He belongs to Vaike. Not as property, not as a possession, but as a choice, freely made, renewed every morning, and Torsten's touch is a violation of that choice in a way that has nothing to do with what Evran allowed and everything to do with what Torsten took.
And Evran stood there and let it happen, and the letting is the thing that makes his stomach clench, because he does not know if he let it happen because it was strategic or because he did not know how to stop it, and the distance between those two things is vast and terrifying and he cannot see the bottom of it.
He knows he is spiraling. He can feel it, the spiral of a panic that feeds on itself, that takes each new thought and twists it darker. And beneath the panic, rising through it, the old familiar voice. The one that saysyou're not enough for this.
You're a weaver. A gardener. A boy from the south who got lucky, who was rescued, who has been playing at being brave for a week and has finally hit the wall of what he actually is.You're not Bran, you're not Leona, you're not Naela. You're not a spy or a seducer or a strategist. You're a man who tends plants and makes cloth and the only reason you're involved in any ofthis is because a predator decided you were pretty enough to pursue.
The thought is an old one, an old crack in old armor, one he thought Vaike's hands had sealed shut. But cracks do not seal, not really, not all the way down. They wait beneath the surface, hairline thin, invisible, until the right pressure finds them and they split wide open and everything you thought you had fixed comes pouring through.
