Page 41 of Fought it Through the Teeth

It is subtle at first. A wrongness in his vision — the edges of the lantern flame smearing, the shadows on the wall going soft, the lines of Ivan's face blurring and swimming. He blinks and the wrongness doesn't clear. He blinks again and it gets worse.

Heat. Not the warmth of the fire — a different heat, internal, spreading from his gut outward, blooming. His face flushes. Sweat prickles at his temples, his upper lip, the backs of his hands. His blood is moving faster than it should, his pulse rising, and there is a pressure building in his groin that has to do with whatever is happening to his body.

He is aroused. Viciously, involuntarily aroused — the kind of arousal that doesn't build but arrives, fully formed, a switch thrown rather than a flame kindled. His cock hardens in his trousers with a speed that would be alarming under any circumstances and is terrifying under these, because he hasn't touched anyone, hasn't looked at anyone, hasn't done anything except sit in a chair and drink a cup of ale.

The ale.

The understanding arrives all at once, total, the full weight of it landing in a single devastating stroke. Whatever he drank was spiked and he drank it in one swallow. He is the predictable, habitual, reliable creature that Ivan has been studying for a week and that Bohdi has been performing for exactly as long.

He presses a hand to his forehead. The room is swimming. The lamplight has become a smear of amber and gold and the fire is too hot and too close and his thoughts are fragmenting, scattering, and he is trying to hold them together and they won't stay. His tongue is lead in his mouth. He wants to speak — wants to say drugged, get out, run — and the words won't form. They are there, in his head, but the distance between his brain and his lips has become an ocean and he is drowning in it.

The guards are gone.

He registers this dimly, through the haze. At some point Ivan dismissed the guards and now it is just the three of them. Ivan. Morgan. Bohdi.

Ivan is still talking. His voice has shifted — slower, more deliberate, words chosen with rehearsed care, enjoying the delivery. He is talking about a show of strength. About obedience. About what it means to be a bride of the Wolfe clan and what is required of a man who takes that title.

"I will not marry a bride who cannot be brought to heel," Ivan says. "I require a demonstration of your obedience, prince. A proof. A showing."

Bohdi wants to tell him that if he is shopping for obedience he has requested the wrong fucking bride. He wants to tell him that Morgan has more spine than any man in this stronghold and that breaking him would require an army that Ivan does not have and a cruelty that even Ivan has not yet demonstrated. He wants to stand up and close the distance and crush Ivan's windpipe with his bare hands and paint the wall behind him red.

His legs won't move. His hands won't close. His body is betraying him and his mind is a narrowing corridor of light with the dark closing in from both sides.

The last coherent thing in his head, before the drug pulls him under entirely, is the understanding that he is a complete fucking idiot. That Ivan played him the way Bohdi plays everyone else and that the man who prides himself on reading every room he enters didn't read this one until it was too late.

Chapter 19

Morgan

Bohdi is laid out on the settee, sweating and flushed and glazed, and the cold dread settles over Morgan before Ivan even moves.

Something is wrong. Something has been wrong since the first five minutes, when Bohdi threw back his drink and Ivan watched him do it with an expression that Morgan cataloged and couldn't place — satisfaction, maybe, or anticipation, his plan entering its next phase.

Now Bohdi is horizontal. His eyes are half-open and seeing nothing, pupils blown wide, his chest rising and falling in a rhythm that is too fast and too shallow. Sweat tracks down his temples into the braids at his ears. His hands are open at his sides, fingers twitching, and there is a visible, unmistakable erection straining against his trousers that Morgan looks at and looks away from and feels a wave of nausea so fierce he has to swallow twice to keep it down.

Ivan chuckles.

The sound is low and comfortable and completely at ease, settling into his evening entertainment, and it rolls across the room and lands on Morgan with physical weight. Ivan is standing by the fire with his cup in his hand, unhurried. Then he turns to Morgan.

"Get on with it then," Ivan says, gesturing toward Bohdi with his free hand. "Ride him while I watch."

The words enter Morgan's ears and his mind stops receiving them. They are sounds. They have shapes and consonants and they were spoken in a language Morgan understands, but the meaning won't land. It bounces off his comprehension — contact without penetration, impact without purchase. He hears the words and cannot make them mean what they mean.

He manages to stammer out, "What?"

Ivan repeats himself slowly, as though he's speaking to a child — patiently, indulgently, without a trace of irritation. "Take off your clothes. Get on him. Ride him while I watch."

Morgan's stomach drops through the floor.

"Are you mad?" Morgan asks, mouth numb.

The words come out before he has assembled the diplomatic version. Before he has weighed the consequences or calculated the cost or found the careful, precise language that a decade of political training has given him for situations where a direct refusal means danger. The words come out raw and immediate and absolute, the way a body flinches from fire, and there is nothing measured about it.

"I will not force myself on him while he's incapacitated," Morgan says. "He doesn't want this. He can't agree to anything in this state, and I won't pretend he has."

He hears his own voice — steady, clear, functioning — and does not understand how it is doing that when every other part of him is coming apart.

Ivan's face changes.