Page 40 of Fought it Through the Teeth

Bohdi

Fuck. He is in over his head.

Not the manageable kind of over his head — not the kind he has been navigating since they crossed the border, the tactical complexity of a hostile stronghold and a warchief who needs killing and a timeline that keeps contracting. That kind of over his head is work. That kind he can handle. He has been handling it since Eskil first put him in a room full of problems and told him to solve them.

This kind is different. This kind has blue eyes and a sharp tongue and the taste of him is still on Bohdi's lips and his body is still singing with the memory of Morgan in his lap. He can't get over the weight of him, the heat of him, the sounds he made—desperate and open and so fucking beautiful that Bohdi's hands are shaking as he pulls his shirt over his head and he has to pause and press them flat against the stone wall until they stop.

He kissed Eskil's little brother.

He didn't just kiss him. He grabbed him by the hair and put his mouth on him and hauled him into his lap and ground against him and would have fucked him if the gods hadn't intervened. He had Morgan naked and shaking and begging in his arms and for one long, weightless moment he had completely forgotten that Morgan is off limits. That Morgan has always been off limits. That the boundary Bohdi drew for himself two years ago was incinerated the instant Morgan's composure snapped and he looked at Bohdi with those wet, furious eyes and asked what do you care.

He cares. He has always cared. Time hasn't changed that. Nothing has changed that — not the distance, not the discipline, not the two years of carefully curated indifference that Bohdi has maintained with grim, relentless efficiency, building a dam against a flood he knew was coming. Even if there weren't ten years between them there is absolutely Eskil between them. There has always been Eskil between them.

And Bohdi is loyal. He has been loyal since the first time Eskil looked at him and saw not a stray but a brother. That loyalty is the only thing about himself Bohdi has ever been sure of. Everything else is built on it — every campaign, every kill, every ugly decision made in the dark on Eskil's behalf that Bohdi carries so Eskil doesn't have to. Without it he is nothing. Without it he is the boy who learned early that the people who are supposed to stay don't always.

He cannot piss it away because a pretty prince with blue eyes has a crush.

Except it isn't a crush. It hasn't been a crush in years, if it ever was. Bohdi knows what a crush looks like — he has fielded enough of them, from barmaids and soldiers and stable hands and visiting dignitaries' sons who took one look at him and decided they wanted a night with the king's tattooed second. A crush is a candle. It flares and it gutters and it goes out when the wind changes.

What Morgan has for him is not a candle. What Morgan has for him has been burning without fuel, without encouragement, without a single scrap of kindness to feed on, and it has only gotten stronger. Morgan has loved him through years of being ignored and through every day in this stronghold where Bohdi has watched him be brave and sharp and brilliant and has given him nothing — not a word, not a touch, not a single honest acknowledgment of the thing between them.

And Morgan has never once asked him for anything he couldn't give. Until today. Until please fuck me, said with his hands on Bohdi's face and his eyes wide open and nothing between them but water and want and years of silence.

Bohdi drags a hand down his face and makes himself focus.

So they don't talk about it.

On the way to Ivan's study, neither of them mentions a single thing that happened. The silence is not the comfortable kind they have shared before — it is pressurized, a held breath that makes Bohdi's skin prickle with the awareness of how close the man ahead of him is and how badly he wants to close the distance.

It is going to bite them. He knows that. The thing that happened in the bath is not the kind of thing that can be ignored with any success, and Bohdi is many things but stupid is not one of them. But he has never met a problem he couldn't ignore, and that is the path he selects, the one that has always served him faithfully and is now, he suspects, about to fail him entirely.

Tomorrow's problem. Everything is tomorrow's problem. Tonight's problem is Ivan.

When they reach the study the lanterns are low. The fire is banked to embers, throwing uneven shadows across the walls, and the room has the dim, close quality of a space designed for private conversation. Ivan is in his chair and there are two guards. Only two, standing at the door, the same configuration as before.

Bohdi is unarmed. His axe is in his room. His belt knife was surrendered at the study door, the way Ivan requires in private — the same condition, the same disarming, the same performance of trust that is not trust at all. He walks into the room with nothing on him but his clothes and his grin and the knowledge that if the opportunity presents itself he will have to kill Ivan with his hands.

But the guards.

Two men. Armed. Alert. Positioned between Bohdi and the door, which means between Bohdi and the only exit, which means that killing Ivan puts him in a room with a dead chieftain and two armed warriors and a locked-in prince and no clear route to the gate. He can take two men. He has taken more than two, under worse conditions, with worse odds. But taking two men bare-handed takes time, and time is noise, and noise brings more men, and more men means the alarm, and the alarm means the stronghold locks down and every gate closes and Morgan is trapped inside a nest of eighty armed soldiers who have just watched their chieftain die.

Ivan gestures them toward the seats. "Come. Sit. Drink."

His voice is warm and expansive and completely, utterly unaware that the man he is welcoming into his study spent the last hour with his tongue in his bride's mouth. Bohdi grins and crosses the room and drops onto the settee and accepts the cup Ivan offers him.

"Once we're settled I'll send the men out," Ivan says, waving a hand toward the guards. "What I want to discuss tonight is between us."

Bohdi thinks that is the most generous thing the man has ever done for him. He hears the words and the calculation runs — guards dismissed, Ivan alone, unarmed, close enough to reach — and feels the opportunity crystallize in his mind with sharp, bright clarity. If Ivan sends the guards out, Bohdi can do it. Tonight. Right now. End it in this room with his bare hands and get Morgan to the stables and the horses and the gate before anyone finds the body.

He throws back his drink in one go.

Ivan pours for Morgan. Morgan takes the cup and holds it, watching the ale settle in the vessel, and does not drink. Bohdi notices this the way he notices Morgan do everything — peripherally, constantly, with the background awareness of having tracked the prince's movements for years and being unable to stop even when it serves no tactical purpose.

Morgan holds his cup. Bohdi has already emptied his.

He settles into the cushions. The room is warm. Ivan is talking — something about the alliance, about how Rengara will benefit from Wolfe numbers, about the combined strength of a northern kingdom and a southern clan united by marriage and purpose. The words wash over Bohdi and he processes them with the front of his mind while the back of it runs scenarios.

Then the room tilts.