Page 59 of Fought it Through the Teeth

Bohdi pushes the horse hard. Not cruelly — he knows the animal's limits, reads them in the rhythm of its stride and the labor of its breathing, and he pushes right up to the edge of what it can give without going over, because a horse ridden to death is a horse that stops and a horse that stops means walking and walking means slow and slow means gone. He keeps his breathing steady. He keeps his left hand firm on the reins and his right arm clamped against his side where the shoulder has swollen to the point that moving it sends white fire through his collarbone and down into his fingertips.

He doesn't care. He has fought with worse. He has fought with a broken hand and a fever and three days without sleep, and none of those fights had Morgan at the end of them, and Morgan at the end of this one makes every previous injury he has ever sustained irrelevant.

And while he rides he thinks about Morgan.

Morgan's face in the bed that morning. His thumb tracing Bohdi's cheek, following the line of the tattoo with devoted attention, reading the ink beneath the skin. Not just a lover's touch. An archivist's touch. Morgan catalogs the things he loves and handles them with reverence, knowing they can be taken away, and that thumb on Bohdi's cheek was both worship and inventory, and Bohdi felt every inch of it.

And then the devastation in Morgan's voice when he asked whether Bohdi wanted him at all or only the prince. That terrible, practiced control. Spoken as though those were the only two options. As though it had never occurred to Morgan that there might be a third — that Bohdi could want him desperately and specifically and in every way imaginable and still refuse to have him, not because of Morgan but because of everything around Morgan, the crown and the brother and the loyalty and the cost.

And that fucking nod when Bohdi told him he couldn't have him. Not arguing, not begging, not fighting it. Accepting. Morgan has been accepting less than he deserves from Bohdi for years and has gotten so practiced at it that the resignation barely registers on his face anymore. It's just there. Woven into the fabric of who Morgan is around Bohdi, the carefully maintained distance, the sharp tongue deployed where a confession should go, the studied indifference that covers half a decade of devotion so perfectly that anyone who doesn't know Morgan would believe it.

Bohdi has always known Morgan. And that is the thing that makes Bohdi realize, with the force of a mace to the skull, that he has been wrong.

He has been wrong for two years.

He told himself the distance was for Morgan's protection. He told himself the wall was for Eskil's trust. He told himself the boundary was about duty and loyalty and the sacred, unbreakable bond between king and second that does not survive the complication of the king's brother in the king's second's bed. He told himself all of it, and he believed all of it, and the believing was comfortable and the comfort was the lie.

The truth is simpler and uglier and has been waiting for him at the bottom of every drink and the back of every grin and the core of every sleepless night.

He was afraid.

Not of Eskil. Not of the cost. Not of the political complication or the broken trust or the conversation that would have to happen in the war room with the king's eyes on him and the king's voice asking him what the fuck he thinks he's doing with his brother. Bohdi has faced worse than Eskil's anger. He has faced worse than losing his position. He has walked into battles he did not expect to walk out of and he did it with the grin on his face and the axe in his hand and the ferocious joy of having nothing to lose.

But Morgan is not nothing.

Morgan is everything.

And the fear is the fear of having and losing. Of holding something so precious it cannot be replaced and feeling it taken. Of loving someone with the whole of himself and watching the love be destroyed by the same forces that created it — the crown, the kingdom, the blood and the politics and the relentless, grinding machinery of a world that does not care what two men feel about each other in the dark.

Bohdi has lost everything before. He built himself back by the grace of Eskil's family and Eskil's loyalty and the stubborn choice to be useful rather than loved, because useful was reliable and loved was a thing that could be taken.

Morgan cannot be taken. Losing Morgan would be losing the life he's built. The person he's become. The man who grins and fights and serves and protects and has, underneath all of it, a heart that beats for two people and only two, and one of them is screaming his name from the back of a horse.

That realization is the thing that puts the last plank of Bohdi's restraint through the floor.

He rides harder. The horse responds, surging forward, and the wind is cold against his face and his shoulder is a solid block of pain and he doesn't care. He doesn't care about the arm or the ribs or the road or the odds. He cares about Morgan. He cares about getting to Morgan before the Wolfe clan gets him back behind those walls, because if Morgan goes back behind those walls he is dead.

He catches them at a river crossing.

The road descends through a break in the trees and opens onto a wide, shallow ford — ankle-deep water running over flat stones, the kind of crossing that slows horses and requires care. They've stopped. The riders are dismounting, letting the horses drink, and the brief halt has turned into the natural, undisciplined pause of men who believe they are safe and see no reason to rush.

Bohdi pulls up in the trees above the crossing and reads the scene.

Morgan is sitting on the bank. His hands are bound behind his back and his head is down, blond hair hanging in his face, and even from fifty yards away Bohdi can see the way he's holding his body — curled inward, protecting the ribs, the posture of pain after hours of bouncing on the back of a horse.

Two warriors are with the horses at the water's edge, tending to bridles and checking hooves. A third is crouched near Morgan and he's saying something that Bohdi can't hear from this distance. Something that makes Morgan flinch away from him.

The fourth is upstream, walking the bank, probably checking the crossing for depth.

Four men. One of him.

He doesn't plan it.

He doesn't weigh the odds.

He comes out of the treeline at a dead gallop.

The horse explodes from the cover of the trees and Bohdi takes the man near Morgan first — the one crouched beside him, the one who said something that made Morgan flinch. The man hears the hooves and turns and his face is still registering surprise when Bohdi's sword takes him across the neck in a backhand stroke delivered from the saddle at full speed. The cut is deep and decisive and the man goes into the river and doesn't come up.