Page 44 of Fought it Through the Teeth

Ivan's face is slack and his eyes are glassy and the blood is darkening as it cools on the stone and Morgan is standing over a man he killed and he can't breathe and he can't think and he can't look away.

Then there are arms around him.

Bohdi's arms. Heavy and unsteady and soaked in sweat, wrapping around him from behind. Morgan feels the heat of Bohdi's body against his back and the roughness of Bohdi's breathing at his ear — labored, ragged, the breathing of fighting the drug in his system with every scrap of consciousness he has left. Bohdi's grip is not gentle. It is desperate — barely upright, using Morgan as an anchor as much as Morgan is using him.

Morgan is being lowered to the floor. His knees fold and Bohdi goes down with him and they end up on the stone beside the spreading pool of blood — Morgan with his back against Bohdi's chest and Bohdi's arms around him, holding on with a shaking, fierce grip.

Morgan grips Bohdi's forearms where they cross his chest. He holds on. His fingers dig into the tattooed skin and he feels the tremor running through both of them and they shake apart together on the floor of Ivan's study with a dead man beside them.

Chapter 20

Bohdi

It takes two hours for Bohdi to become coherent enough to think anything other than fucking fuck, and even then he isn't in a state to plan anything elaborate.

The drug recedes in stages. First the worst of the fog lifts — the smeared vision, the leaden tongue, the sensation of being trapped inside his own skull while his body does whatever it wants. Then the arousal fades, which is a mercy so profound he would thank whatever god was responsible if he could remember any of their names. Then his hands start obeying him again, and then his legs, and by the time the fire has burned down to a faint orange glow in the hearth he can stand without the room tilting and form sentences that contain more than two words.

Two hours. Two hours of sitting on the floor of a dead man's study with the prince of Rengara shaking against his chest and the blood cooling on the stones beside them and the intimate silence of a room that contains a corpse.

The small mercy: nobody has come to check on them.

No guards. No steward. No servant with a tray of refreshments or a message from the yard. The door has remained shut for hours and the corridor beyond it has been silent and the only explanation is that the guards were expecting their chieftain to make a long night of his sexual torture, and Bohdi is not going to examine that blessing too closely. He is going to accept it the way he accepts all unearned advantages — with gratitude, with suspicion, and with the immediate understanding that it will not last.

Morgan has calmed. That is the word Bohdi uses in his own head and it is not the right word and he knows it. Morgan has stopped shaking. His breathing is steady — slow and measured, his body wrestled back under control through sheer force of will. He is sitting against the wall with his head on his knees and his arms wrapped around his shins and his blond hair falling around his face. He does not look like the composed diplomat Bohdi has watched dress down war generals and trade negotiators and visiting dignitaries with a single precisely aimed sentence.

He looks small. He looks twenty years old and exhausted and very, very far from home.

That is worse than the blood on the floor.

Bohdi gets up.

The motion is not graceful. His legs protest and his balance wobbles and he has to catch himself on the arm of the settee — the same settee he was drugged and laid out on, which he will never sit on again for as long as he lives, however long that turns out to be. He stands and the room holds steady and he takes a breath and begins moving.

He crosses to the half-full basin on the side table and dunks his head in it. The water is cold and the shock of it drives through his skull and clears the last of the fog. He comes up gasping with water streaming down his face and into the collar of his shirt and feels, for the first time in hours, like himself.

He takes a few mouthfuls while he is there. The water is the only liquid in this room he is willing to trust. He drinks, wipes his face with his sleeve, and turns.

The room. The problem. The dead man on the floor.

Ivan is where he fell. The blood has stopped spreading — it congealed hours ago into a dark, tacky lake that extends from the body to the leg of the nearest chair. The dagger is still in his neck. His eyes are still open. Bohdi looks at him and feels nothing except the calculation of how much more difficult the body makes their exit.

He goes to work.

He takes Ivan's sword belt off the cold body. The buckle is slippery with blood and his fingers are still not as steady as he'd like, but he gets it loose and pulls it free and straps it at his own waist over his tunic. The sword is a good blade — better balance than anything he has handled in this stronghold, well cared for, with an edge that catches the last of the firelight. Bohdi draws it halfway, checks it, returns it to the scabbard. He isn't a sword man. He has never been a sword man — he is an axe man, a fact his arms know better than his mind, and the axe he has carried since he was sixteen is sitting in his room two corridors away and he will not be going back for it.

That is a genuine grief. A real one. That axe was a gift from Eskil and it has been at his back through every campaign and every fight and every ugly night of work he has done in Eskil's name. Leaving it behind is leaving a piece of himself in this building, and the loss of it settles in his chest and stays there.

It will have to wait. Everything will have to wait. Because the shocked blond sitting against the wall with blood on his hands matters more than the axe and more than the grief and more than anything else in Bohdi's inventory, and the clock that has been ticking since Ivan's heart stopped is about to run out.

He looks at the window. It is large — large enough for a man to fit through, barely. Two stories up, overlooking the inner yard. Too high to jump. Not too high to climb, if they had rope.

They don't have rope.

They have curtains.

Bohdi crosses to the window and wrenches the curtains off the wall. The fabric is heavy — good southern wool, lined, the kind of curtains a wealthy chieftain hangs in his private study to impress visitors and keep out drafts. He tears them down in two pulls, rings and rod and all, and drops them on the floor.

He works fast. Curtains to curtains, doubled and twisted, the knots simple and brutal — reef knots, the kind that hold under load and don't slip, the kind he learned to tie on the rigging of the Valkyr during a storm that nearly killed them all. He lashes the whole ugly rope to the heavy oak desk and tests it. Twice. The knots hold. The frame holds. The rope hangs from the window to approximately six feet above the ground, which is not the ground, but it is close enough that the drop won't kill them.