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My lover sighed in contentment, letting me manoeuvre him into place as I lathered more soap and began to drag a washcloth over each part of his body. First his chest and shoulders, and then his arms, carefully drawing the cloth across his alabaster skin and dipping it back into the warm water. When I parted his knees to clean between his legs, Mathias gave a delighted, breathy moan, which made me linger there longer than I’d intended before instructing him to lean forward.
Wrapping his arms around his legs, my boy rested his chin on his knees and I realised he looked exhausted. His eyes were drooping closed, and he gave a small start at the splash of the cloth dropping into the water after I’d washed his back slowly and reverently. We’d been on the road since dawn, and it was now well past midnight.
Not to mention the pressure of his past colliding with his present, including reuniting with the only people in Mazekhstam who, to my knowledge, had ever given a damn about him.
Mat needed to sleep, and I wanted nothing more than to spend the next few hours just holding onto him as he did so, letting his soothing presence wash away my own exhaustion and fears. So I helped him stand and then as he swayed on his feet, looking like he might pass out any moment, patted his skin dry with a towel. This time my movements were brisk rather than idle, and I quickly ushered us both into his bed, stripping from my own clothes and pulling the blankets up over us both.
I gathered him into my arms, humming out my intent and pressing a kiss to that spot behind his ear that made him whine.
“Try not to worry about anything for a while,” I murmured to him, and on the precipice of unconsciousness Mathias used the last of his energy to smile sleepily at me.
“I don’t need to worry, Ren. You’re here.”
*
Chapter Twenty-Five
The whipping posts stood menacingly in the city square, easy to spot even from the window of my room in the castle high above. Thankfully they remained unoccupied, Stavroyarsk’s citizens rushing past with their heads bowed to the sleety wind and sacks of food tucked in their arms, and seemingly unconcerned about the instruments of torture – and death – that loomed so close. Yet my mind all too easily dredged up memories of the leather restraints cutting into straining flesh, hot blood dripping down into the snow, the agonised screams of the men and women sentenced to the ruthless bite of the whip.
The posts were used for more than sodomy and the other alleged sexual deviancies, but those were the crimes that most frequently saw the death of the person sentenced. I’d never been someone who made a point of watching the floggings being carried out, but fuck, you couldn’t live in this city and avoid such spectacles entirely. I’d been lucky that my old rooms had been situated on the opposite side of the castle, because every time I looked out of the window now, it forced me to confront the grim reminder of how the north judged me and Ren. Of the future the Temarian seer Aksinia had once predicted for me, describing how I’d be outed and dragged to the whipping posts, just as it had played out only a couple of days later. If it hadn’t been for Jiron and Valeri refusing to let the men go through with it, I might not even be standing here.
The north had to change. For everyone. For every child who believed there was something wrong with them, for every unhappy adult chastising themselves for a fantasy. For every person flogged or imprisoned or killed for daring to act on who they were.
There was little else to do but dwell on such things when I was alone like this, the door between our rooms firmly closed while the castle seamstress waited on the prince, because we’d been sequestered in these rooms for days. If it wasn’t for Ren’s company, I would have gone Blessed crazy, and I knew he was only barely keeping it together.
My lover was an extrovert who gained his energy from being surrounded by people. He was also enough of a narcissist to need those people to love him.
And I did love him, so fiercely it hurt, but I wasn’t capable of the same group worship offered by an entire palace. Acountry. Being locked away was a particular kind of torture to a man as gregarious as Renato Aratorre, and I wondered how much of that was by Astrid’s design.
The guards outside our doors had obviously been ordered to give us anything we wanted, for any request we’d made had been fulfilled – Ren had been enthusiastically testing the limits of that generosity by making increasingly absurd demands, but he hadn’t been denied yet – except to allow us to leave our gilded prison cells. Or to see the queen apparently, for while generic holding messages were delivered from her each day requesting our patience, she neither visited nor invited us to do so.
I heard the adjoining door click open and glanced over my shoulder to find Ren slipping through it, his face broadening into a wide smile as he spotted me by the window.
“What do you think,mi cielo?”
My prince performed a flamboyant little twirl in front of me, spinning around on an elegant heel. Complete with an entirely needless and yet fucking sexy flick of his long dark hair.
“Where did all this come from?” I asked. I ran my fingers reverently across the embroidery that hadn’t been on his clothes when I last saw him, the plain Mazekhstani shirt and coat transformed into a whirlwind of colour and intricate shapes that drew the eye. It wasn’t exactly Quarehian dress, but it was far from the usual blandness of northern clothing.
“I persuaded the seamstress to add some necessary style,” he retorted, his eyes glimmering with mirth at the overt mockery.
I raised an eyebrow. “And how much flirting did that take?”
“A good ten minutes. But she didn’t agree until I’d made her come twice, once on my fingers and once on my cock...joking, Nat, joking!” Ren’s voice rose in pitch and he hastily raised his hands in surrender as I swatted at him. “There was only atinybit of flirting. Mostly flattery about her skills...with aneedle,” he added, clearly worried I would try to hit him again, or worse, take a pair of scissors to his pretty clothes. “Did you want to see my latest acquisitions?”
Hiding my grin, I followed him back through the door and dutifully surveyed the new items Ren had piled on top of the table. He’d already collected a hefty stack of books about Onnish cattle farming, a sheath of papers covered in backwards writing, a pot of mustard yellow ink that smelled like it was actually mustard, and a handful of quills from birds whose names began with ‘S’, but since I’d last been in here the prince had apparently received a delivery of new, bizarre…things.There was now a goblet that looked to be entirely carved from ice, a platter of unripe chestnuts, and a framed charcoal drawing of a wolf dressed up in courtly attire.
Dragging my eyes from the realistically drawn slobber drenching a starched collar, I fixed them on the ebullient prince practically bouncing on his toes at my side.
“And why did you need more?” I asked, only for him to dart forward and sweep the whole fucking lot of it off the table. I jumped as it all crashed, thumped, and shattered onto the floor, the mess spilling haphazardly at our feet.
“So I could do that,” Ren declared cheerfully, and then wrapped his arms around my waist and lifted me just high enough to seat me on the edge of the now entirely empty table. “And this.” He leaned in and pressed a demanding kiss to my lips.
The door rattled with three heavy thumps. “Your Highness?”
Ren sighed against my mouth. “Everything’s fine!” he called back, and then groaned, more quietly. “Damn it. If they heard that, they’ll hearyou,Mathias.”
“Hey,” I protested. “I’m not that loud.”
