Page 54 of Fought it Through the Teeth

He has no framework whatsoever for the man shaking against his chest.

He doesn't know the vocabulary. He knows how to hold a weapon and how to hold a line and how to hold his nerve when the fighting turns ugly. None of those skills translate to holding a young man who has just killed for the first time and is drowning in the aftermath. Morgan is not a soldier. Morgan was never supposed to be a soldier. Morgan was supposed to be the one who read the contracts and tallied the grain and sat in comfortable rooms using his beautiful, devastating mind to solve problems that didn't require bloodshed. Instead he's sitting on the edge of a rented bed with a dead man's face behind his eyes and the memory of the blade going in written into the muscle of his right hand.

Bohdi holds him and doesn't know what to say and says nothing, which is either the right choice or the only one available to him and he can't tell the difference.

Morgan's face is pressed against Bohdi's chest and his fingers are still dug into the skin of Bohdi's back, and his body is heavy with the boneless exhaustion that comes after a storm has passed through and left wreckage behind.

He speaks into Bohdi's skin. His voice is muffled and wrecked and Bohdi feels the words as vibration before he hears them as sound.

"He wasn't going to kill me," Morgan says finally. "He was going to rape me to show me my place."

Bohdi's arms tighten around him.

For a long moment there is nothing. Nothing except the feel of Morgan's wet face against his chest and the sound of Morgan's rough breathing and the words that have just been spoken into the air of this small, warm room and cannot be unspoken. His lungs have quit. His heart has quit. Every system in his body that isn't required to keep Morgan upright has shut down to redirect his energy to the single, all-consuming process of receiving what he has just been told.

He knows this already. Ivan told him, sat across from him in his study and asked Bohdi to be the instrument of it. But hearing Morgan say it. Hearing it in Morgan's voice, thin and wrecked and pressed against his skin, the words coming out of him as though each syllable costs something to produce. Hearing the prince of Rengara name what was almost done to him in a room where no one can hear it except the one person he trusts.

Bohdi almost cannot breathe around the rage that goes through him.

It comes as a physical event. Not the slow burn of anger but the instantaneous, total conflagration of something that has been soaked in fuel and touched with a spark. It fills his chest and his skull and his hands and his arms, and his vision narrows to a point and the muscles in his forearms lock and his fingers tighten on Morgan's back hard enough to dimple the skin. He is holding Morgan and simultaneously constructing, in perfect detail, the image of what he would do to Ivan Wolfe if the man had the courtesy to still be alive.

He would take his time. He would make it last. He would use his hands because hands are personal and Ivan's crime was personal, and he would break the man apart, methodically, thoroughly, with the patient, focused cruelty that Bohdi reserves for men who touch what is his. And Ivan's death would not be quick and it would not be clean and it would not be the mercy of a warrior granting a warrior his end. It would be ugly. It would be the ugliest thing Bohdi has ever done, and he would do it with his full attention and he would not look away.

Then he puts it down.

He puts it down because Morgan needs him clear-headed and there is nowhere for the fury to go. The man responsible is dead. Morgan killed him. Morgan put a dagger in his neck and that has to be enough, because it is all they have. The alternative, the fantasy of a revenge that can never be enacted on a corpse, serves nothing and no one, least of all the man pressing his face into Bohdi's chest and trusting him to be steady.

Bohdi takes Morgan's face in both hands.

He tips it up. Gently, firmly, his palms against Morgan's jaw, his thumbs against his cheekbones, one on the bruise, carefully, barely touching, and he brings Morgan's face up until their foreheads press together. Morgan's eyes are closed. His lashes are wet and dark against his cheeks and his lips are trembling and the marks on his throat are livid against the pale skin, and Bohdi looks at all of it from two inches away and holds it.

"He's dead, Morgan," he says, as gently as he can manage with his blood on fire. "He can't touch you."

"You saved me." Morgan's voice is barely above a whisper. His hands come up and grip Bohdi's wrists, not pulling his hands away, holding them there, anchoring himself to the contact. "If you hadn't been there⁠—"

"Morgan—"

"What if you hadn't found out about the Jakadi? What if I had agreed to marry him?" Morgan's grip tightens on his wrists. His eyes are open now, wide and bright and swimming, and the question pouring out of him isn't rhetoric — Morgan has run the numbers on his own near-destruction and cannot stop running them. "What if you weren't there⁠—"

"Morgan, listen to me," Bohdi says.

He says it with his hands on Morgan's face and his forehead against Morgan's forehead and his eyes fixed on Morgan's eyes, and he does not continue until those eyes come into focus and hold. Until the spiral breaks. Until Morgan is looking at him and hearing him and not the voice in his own head telling him all the ways it could have been worse.

"Eskil was never going to let you marry that man," Bohdi says. "You have to know that. He would have gone to war with the Wolfe clan and taken their resources by force before he agreed to an alliance that married you off."

Bohdi watches the words arrive, watches the shift in Morgan's expression, the flicker of recognition, the stillness that means Morgan is processing new information and integrating it into the framework of what he already knows. Eskil would have. Of course Eskil would have. Eskil, who killed men in the great hall when Morgan was a child to protect the throne and the boy attached to it. Eskil, who carried his brother through famine and war and taught him to read because he couldn't teach him to fight and loved him with a ferocity that has shaped every decision the king has made for twenty years. Eskil would have burned the Wolfe clan to the ground and scattered the ashes before he handed his brother to Ivan.

"And I would have been right there beside him," Bohdi tells him, voice certain. "Do you understand? Neither of us would have given you up."

Morgan swallows thickly. He nods. His grip on Bohdi's wrists loosens by a fraction.

"Yeah," Morgan whispers. "Yeah, I know."

Bohdi stays where he is, standing in a rented room with his hair dripping on the floor and Morgan's tears drying on his chest, and the absurdity of the picture is not lost on him. The king's second and the crown prince, battered and exhausted and clinging to each other in an inn above a village that neither of them will ever see again. Nothing about this is how it was supposed to go. None of this was in the plan.

He doesn't let go until Morgan's breathing is even and his hands are steady and his eyes are dry.

"Get some sleep," Bohdi says. His voice has gone hoarse and his hands are reluctant to leave Morgan's face and the reluctance is visible and he doesn't care. He lets his thumbs trace Morgan's cheekbones one more time, the bruised one and the unbruised one, and then he drops his hands.