Page 64

"I know." Indrie's thumb goes across his cheekbone. "I knew the whole time."

He kisses him again, harder, and three days of rage and terror come through the kiss with it. Indrie meets him and does not flinch. He opens his mouth and pushes up against Eskil's chest, and Eskil runs his hand down the whole length of him, over his ribs, the dip of his waist, his hip, the long heat of his thigh. When Eskil's hand finally closes around him, Indrie comes off the bed with a cry that goes up into the rafters.

Eskil strokes him slowly, twisting his fist on the upstroke the way Indrie likes, smearing the wetness at the head down the shaft until his cock is wet and shiny in Eskil's grip. He opens his mouth to say something crass, because that is what he does.

He talks filthy in bed. He always has. Filth is easy. You say what you are going to do to a man and then you do it, and there is nothing in any of it that costs you a thing. Indrie loves it. He makes those broken, desperate little noises. Eskil has been saying the worst things he knows into this man's ear for a year because it works and because it is safe.

What comes out of his mouth tonight is something else.

"Fuck," Eskil says. His voice comes out wrecked and short of air. "Indrie."

Indrie's eyes open.

"You're the most beautiful thing I've ever seen." He does not know where it is coming from. He cannot seem to stop it. His thumb drags over the head, pressing into the slit, and Indrie shivers hard, a fresh bead of precome welling up over Eskil's thumb. "I've taken cities. I've had the best of everything there is to have and I took all of it with my own hands, and not one piece of it ever did anything to me." His voice goes somewhere he does not like and he keeps going. "You look at me and I lose the end of my sentence."

Indrie's mouth parts, surprised, his cheeks burning.

"I don't tell you your worth," Eskil says, his other hand gripping onto Indrie's slim hip. "I think it every day. Every single fucking day. I went into a dying kingdom and I came out of it with you, and I did not earn that. I know I did not, but I kept you anyway."

Indrie makes a sound Eskil has never heard out of him before.

Eskil has never talked like this in his life. Words are Morgan's. They are for the council chamber and the treaty table and the people Eskil pays to be clever on his behalf. Every time he has ever needed to say something true to somebody he loved, he has hit something instead, or walked out of the room, or said nothing at all and let them work it out. He is thirty-three years old and he has not once put a thing like this into the air on purpose.

It turns out he can. It turns out it is the hardest fucking thing he has ever done, harder than any wall he has ever gone over, and he keeps doing it anyway.

"You're strong," Eskil tells him. He works him slow and firm, nothing fancy, nothing kind enough to let him hide in it, his fist wet now, the sound of it damning in the quiet room. "You don't even know it. You think you're small and you think you're soft, and there is a spine in you I couldn't break with both hands." His mouth is at Indrie's temple now, the words going in hot. "You're the strongest person I know. You're stronger than me."

"Eskil—"

He catches the wrist when Indrie throws an arm across his eyes and draws it down, not rough, not asking. "I've fought wars. I've put kings in the ground. I've burned cities and walked through what was left of them and not once looked back. Nothing has ever put me on my knees. Nothing." His hand tightens, just enough, thumb grinding over the head until Indrie's breath breaks apart. "And you smile at me across a supper table and I'm on the floor."

Indrie's hips jerk up into his fist. The heat has gone all the way down his chest. His breath is coming in short broken pieces, and he is looking at Eskil now because he has not been given a choice, and that is somehow worse, and somehow the only thing Eskil can stand.

"I don't deserve you." It comes out ugly, and it is true. His fist does not stop. "You deserve a man without blood on his hands. Someone better." A breath, dragged in through his teeth. "But I will be damned if I let anyone else touch you. I will break the hand of any man who dares to lay a hand on what's mine."

Indrie leaks into his fist, sudden and helpless and warm over Eskil's knuckles, and his hands clench in the sheets hard enough that his knuckles go white.

Eskil sees it. Of course he does. He has been watching this man for nearly a year.

"You know that, don't you?" It is not quite a question. His thumb drags through the wetness and spreads it down the shaft, and he watches Indrie's mouth fall open around nothing. "That you're mine. That I would burn the fucking world down just to have one more day with you."

Indrie's breath hitches. His hips jerk up into Eskil's grip, and he breathes Eskil's name with no air behind it.

Eskil leans down and kisses him and licks into his mouth and works him through it, and Indrie comes with a moan into his mouth, back bowing clean off the mattress, the sound breaking apart between them. He spills hot and thick over Eskil's fist and his own stomach, pulse after pulse, his cock kicking in Eskil's grip, and Eskil swallows the moan and strokes him all the way through it and does not look away.

He pulls back. Indrie's eyes are wet and wrecked, his mouth red, his chest heaving, come striping his belly in messy white ropes, and he looks ruined in a way that has very little to do with Eskil's hand. Eskil brings his knuckles to his mouth and licks Indrie's release off them, slowly, holding his eyes while he does it. Bitter. Salt. Him. He gets every drop, sucking his fingers clean, and then he leans down and drags his tongue through the mess on Indrie's stomach, lapping it up, following a stripe of it up to his navel and dipping in. Indrie makes a noise that is equal parts outrage and want and goes somehow even redder, a flustered mess, still twitching in the sheets, his spent cock giving a helpless little jump against Eskil's chest.

"You're terrible," Indrie gasps.

Eskil grins at him, and leans down, and kisses him deep enough that Indrie can taste himself on Eskil's tongue. Indrie whimpers into it, and his hands go from Eskil's hair down his back, nails dragging, and Eskil growls against his mouth and catches his lower lip in his teeth and tugs.

"I'm going to put my mouth on you," Eskil says against his mouth. "I'm going to eat you until you cry. Then I'm going to fuck you until you can't remember your own name."

Indrie's breath catches. He searches Eskil's face for a moment, and then he nods, already coming apart again, and Eskil's grin goes mean.

"Turn over."

Indrie rolls over onto his stomach. Eskil puts a hand flat between his shoulder blades and presses him gently down.