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“No,” Peter said, and really, he sounded pitiful. Which was an even bigger sign that he was in trouble. “I don’t want Magnus to know about this. I don’t want him to think I’m….”
He didn’t finish his sentence. And whatever his opinion on the matter, Magnus definitely needed to know about this.
“…going to have to manage Sai and the entire Kostya Kingdom if we want to keep the Old Realm at bay,” Magnus was in the middle of saying to Olympus, Ox, and Katrina as Peter and I entered the cottage. The four of them sat around the main room, the fire blazing cheerily, each of them holding mugs of something. They all wore serious looks, though, and Magnus continued before he spotted us with, “I’m disappointed in his abilities as a leader. He gives up too easily and allows men who he sees as more powerful to lead him.”
Peter burst into a sob and turned to sag against me at that statement, even as Katrina started to say, “Doesn’t that work in our favor?”
Whether it did or not, that conversation was effectively over as soon as sound roared from Peter. Katrina sat straighter, and Ox outright jumped and twisted in her chair, as she was faced away from us. Olympus had just taken a sip of his drink and nearly spit it out as he took in the sight of me and Peter naked.
“What’s wrong?” Magnus asked, pushing to stand and setting his mug aside so quickly and without thought that it would have spilled if Katrina hadn’t caught it.
“We need you,” I said.
That was all it took. Without looking at the others, Magnus said, “This meeting is over. I’ll speak to you in the morning. Please leave us.”
Ox and Katrina knew us all well enough to know how serious Magnus was when he said that. They instantly got up and started to leave, abandoning their mugs where they were. Olympus looked confused for a moment, then got up and fled the house with Ox and Katrina.
“What happened at your meeting?” Magnus asked, pulling Peter into his arms the moment he reached us, but keeping his eyes on me.
I opened my mouth, but Peter answered first with, “They’ve betrayed us in the worst possible way. Sebald is unrepentant about enslaving Avenel, and…and then Gennadi said he wanted to be Jace’s pup, and Jace just let him. Just like that, everything we’ve been working for, our whole purpose for being is ruined, shattered. No one is going to take us seriously ever again, nothing is going to change, and we’ll always be seen as nothing more than fuck toys.”
He’d collapsed against Magnus as he spoke, and Magnus folded him in a tight embrace. Magnus still looked at me, though.
I shook my head subtly. “I think there’s more,” I said softly.
“More?” Peter demanded incredulously. “You want more than utter betrayal on the deepest possible level? You don’t know what it’s like to be someone’s slave,” he went on, raising his voice. “You were always Magnus’s lover. You don’t know what it’s like to be made to feel useless and helpless and small. They do, Jace and Sebald do, and they’re thrusting that one someone else, like it doesn’t matter, like it was alright to treat me—to treat someone like that.”
Magnus let out a breath and nodded to me as if he understood my statement that there was more.
“I believe it’s time for the three of us to go to bed,” he said, bending to scoop Peter into his arms like a baby.
My eyes went wide and I followed as Magnus headed to the stairs. “Are you certain you should be carrying him like that?” I asked, hovering behind Magnus like he might trip and fall at any moment. “Your shoulder isn’t fully recovered.”
Magnus made a dismissive sound. “It’s been nearly six months. My shoulder is fine.”
By the time we made it to the room we’d taken at the top of the stairs, I was reasonably certain Magnus’s shoulder wasn’t fine. Before Edik stabbed him, he would have carried Peter all the way to the bed. Now, he set Peter on his feet just inside the doorway and moved toward the bed on his own, unbuttoning his jacket as he went, panting a bit too much.
I swept Peter along in Magnus’s place, pulling back the bedcovers when I reached the bed and nudging Peter to get in. He was back to weeping pitifully now, and he slumped into the bed and curled onto his side with relative ease. It was the most rigid ball I’d ever seen anyone curl into, though.
Even though Peter was clearly still falling to pieces, I felt immediately better as I spooned his rigid body from behind. I felt better still when Magnus discarded his clothes and slipped into bed on the other side. He wasn’t having any of Peter clenching in on himself and pushed at his legs and arms until Peter opened up and allowed Magnus to snuggle against him. As soon as Peter felt the two of us encompassing him, he relaxed a bit.
“I take it the discussion amongst the Sons did not go well,” Magnus said.
Again, he was asking me, but Peter growled, “They should know better. They know what it feels like to be a slave.”
I sent Magnus a look over Peter’s shoulder as if to tell him this was what I’d been dealing with all evening.
Magnus sighed and stroked the side of Peter’s face. “I know your thoughts and feelings on pupdom, my love,” he said in a tender voice, lavishing Peter with affection, whether Peter was fully aware of it or not. “Believe me, I know how you feel.”
“Then you know how horrible they are for changing everything we stand for, for being no better than Edik or Maldurik, or Yuri, for that matter,” Peter growled.
“First of all, my darling,” Magnus said, “Yuri was in a class by himself. Bela as well. And Edik might have ended his life as a self-serving madman, but he was never cruel to Jace. Maldurik was never cruel to Sebald either.”
“Slavery is cruelty,” Peter argued. His body was clenched so tightly that it felt like I was spooning a rock. “Anyone who robs another man of his freedom is cruel. They were my friends. I cannot believe they would be so, so evil.”
Magnus glanced at me again with a look that said we had more on our hands than we had anticipated.
He continued to stroke Peter’s face and spoke softly as he said, “Sebald and Jace are not evil. You know that. They are quite the opposite. They are good, strong men who are trying to be leaders. And they are still your friends. They always will be.”
