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"We've destroyed this room," Morgan says.

Bohdi feigns a look of innocence. "You started it."

"I most certainly did not. I wanted a bath. You wanted—" He gestures between them, at the tub they are still sitting in. "This."

"You gave me bedroom eyes in the hallway. I can't be held responsible."

Morgan pushes his wet hair out of his face and winces as he lifts himself off Bohdi's cock, and the sound of it in the empty tub is obscene enough to make them both look at each other and then look away.

They get out of the tub. The stone floor is completely wet and Bohdi nearly goes down on the first step, catching himself on the rim, and Morgan, the bastard, laughs at him. Bohdi grabs a linen off the rack and throws one at Morgan and uses the other to dry himself, standing in the wreckage of what was formerly a civilized bathing chamber.

Morgan dries his hair, then his chest, then gives up on thoroughness and wraps the linen around his waist. He is swaying slightly on his feet. The energy that carried him through the ride and the gate and the bath is finally guttering. Bohdi can see it going out of him in real time, the sharpness in his eyes softening, his shoulders rounding forward, his weight settling into his heels. He has burned down past the wick.

Bohdi dries himself and drops the linen and comes up behind him. He puts his hands on Morgan's shoulders, steadying.

"Bed," Bohdi says. “Council later.”

Morgan nods. He heads out of the bathing chamber and into his bedroom. He turns toward the bed and then stops and turns back, and there is something on his face that Bohdi has not seen before. Uncertainty. Not the political kind, where Morgan is weighing options. The personal kind, where he wants to ask for something and is not sure what it will cost.

"Stay," Morgan says. "For a little while. Just—stay until I fall asleep."

It lands in the center of Bohdi's chest and sits there. The quiet way Morgan says it. Not asking for more than he thinks he is allowed. Not asking for what he wants, which is stay, just stay, but for the lesser version he has already made peace with. Just until I fall asleep. As though half a night is a thing to be grateful for.

And then something else surfaces, rising up through the last few days. Morgan at the fire three nights ago, dark-eyed and too thin, saying it without any weight on it at all: I haven't been sleeping. Dropped between two other sentences as if it did not matter, the way Morgan drops everything that matters most.

He has not been sleeping. And he is asking Bohdi to stay until he does, and he is braced for no.

"Yes," Bohdi says. No hesitation. Nothing to think about. "I'll stay."

Morgan looks at him. Something moves across his face, quick and unguarded, and then he masters it and turns toward the bed before Bohdi can get a proper look. But Bohdi saw it. He saw the relief. He saw what it cost Morgan to ask and what it gave him to hear yes and how quickly he hid both.

They fall into the sheets still damp. Bohdi pulls the covers up and Morgan rolls into him immediately, pressing his back against Bohdi's chest and pulling Bohdi's arm around him and keeping hold of it. Bohdi wraps around him. His knees fit behind Morgan's knees. His nose finds the damp hair at the nape of Morgan's neck. Morgan's fingers lace through his where they rest against his sternum.

The fire is burning low. The room is warm and dark and smells of soap and woodsmoke and sex, and the floor in the other room is still flooded, and neither of them cares.

Morgan's breathing evens out. His grip on Bohdi's hand loosens by degrees, finger by finger, and every finger takes its own time about letting go. His body goes heavy and warm, sinking into the mattress and into Bohdi, and inside of three breaths he is gone.

Bohdi lies there. He listens to Morgan sleep and feels his heartbeat against the inside of his wrist and stares at the dark ceiling. His eyes close. He does not mean for them to. His body has been running on adrenaline and fear for days and the debt is calling itself in all at once. Morgan is warm and breathing slow against his chest, and the fire is low, and the room is dark, and Bohdi's last conscious thought is that he will get up in a few minutes. He just needs to close his eyes for a moment. Just a moment.

⁂

He wakes in the deep of the night with the fire burned to embers and the room in near-dark.

For a few seconds he does not know where he is. His body knows before his mind does. There is heat all along the front of him and something solid and alive pressed against him from chest to knee, and his arm is wrapped around a waist, and his face is buried in hair that smells of soap.

Morgan.

Morgan, soft and warm and languid against him, his body slack with sleep and fitted to Bohdi's at every point there is to fit. His breathing is deep and even. One of his hands is curled loosely around Bohdi's forearm where it rests across his ribs, holding it even in sleep, as though some part of him has been keeping watch all night to make sure Bohdi does not leave.

The thought arrives whole.

He is in Morgan's bed. In the Keep.

He has woken up beside this man before. On the road, in rented rooms with thin walls, in camps. He has opened his eyes to Morgan where they were just two men traveling, and what they did behind a bolted door was between them and the mattress.

But never here. Never in the Keep. Here there are roles and titles and thirty years of history in the corridors outside this door, and Bohdi is the king's right hand and Morgan is the prince, and Bohdi's room is two floors up and a wing away, where it is supposed to be. He has come to Morgan in these rooms before. He has had him in this bed before. But he has never stayed. He has always gotten up in the dark and dressed and checked the corridor and gone, and Morgan has always let him, and neither of them has ever said out loud that it costs what it costs.

He is still here. The sun has not come up and nobody has knocked and he has not crept out with his boots in his hand. This has never happened. Not once.