Page 21 of Fought it Through the Teeth

The men at the table guffaw. Several of them slam their fists or their cups against the wood in appreciative percussion. One of them calls out something lewd that Bohdi doesn't bother parsing.

Bohdi drops into the empty seat beside Ivan, grabs the nearest cup, and grins. "Rode me ragged, chief. I may never walk the same."

The hall erupts. Ivan howls with delight and claps him on the back hard enough to rattle his ribs, and the men around them roar their approval.

He keeps his eyes off Morgan.

He can feel the silence from the other end of the table, cold and specific and aimed. Morgan is sitting with a cup of something he isn't drinking, his posture rigidly correct, his face turned toward the window with precise, studied indifference, performing not-caring with his entire body.

Bohdi doesn't care what Morgan thinks.

But he does, and he hates that he does, and the hatred is a familiar companion at this point — it has been riding alongside him since Valen, settled into the saddle, whispering every mile that the thing he wants most is the thing he cannot have.

The morning drags. When the hall reshuffles and Morgan ends up at Bohdi's elbow, he is flatly, coldly civil to him — passing the bread without looking at him, answering direct questions with monosyllables, maintaining the precise distance one maintains with a foreign dignitary one has been seated beside by accident and intends to ignore by design. He does not say what is wrong or acknowledge that anything is. He simply occupies the air beside Bohdi with frigid, deliberate composure, and his silence is more pointed than speech, and he is absolutely fucking right about it.

Bohdi tries once, in a corridor between the hall and the yard, catching his elbow as they walk. "Are we speaking to each other, or are we performing a tragedy?"

Morgan looks at the hand on his elbow and then up at Bohdi's face with an expression so blank it could be carved from marble. "I wasn't aware there was a difference."

Bohdi knows exactly why.

He knows because he has always known. He has known since the first time a fifteen-year-old Morgan looked at him with something more than childish admiration and Bohdi pretended not to see it. He has known through every year since — through every man Morgan took to his bed who wasn't Bohdi, through every lingering glance Bohdi caught and deflected. He has known it through the midwinter dance, when he held Morgan in his arms and the world rearranged itself around him, and through the night he spent afterward drinking himself stupid trying to put it back. He knows the shape of Morgan's jealousy because he built the framework for it, brick by careful brick, every time he ignored what Morgan felt and let Morgan watch him walk away with someone else.

Bohdi says nothing. He says nothing because saying anything means admitting he knows, and admitting he knows means the whole thing has to be looked at directly. He has built a very functional life on never doing that, on being the man who grins and laughs and never, ever looks at the wound he is pressing on. It is a system. It works. It has kept him alive and sane and in Eskil's good graces, and the fact that it is slowly, methodically destroying a man he cares about more than he has any right to is a cost he has chosen to pay because the alternative is worse.

The alternative is losing everything.

Chapter 9

Morgan

Garrik finds him alone in a gallery off the main hall.

It is a long, narrow room with high windows that let in the kind of thin afternoon light that makes everything look faded and old. There are tapestries on the walls depicting Wolfe victories Morgan doesn't recognize, a stone floor worn smooth by decades of boots, and a bench beneath the windows that Morgan has been sitting on for the better part of an hour. It is the only place in this stronghold where nobody has tried to talk to him, insult him, or dress him in women's clothing.

He has been reading. One of the two books he packed — a treatise on southern trade routes that he selected for its practical value and has been using primarily as a shield against human interaction. He has it open on his knee and he is not absorbing a single word of it, because his mind is stuck on the fact that Bohdi left his room and fucked the first available body who wasn't him.

When the hall laughed this morning, Morgan sat perfectly still at the end of the table and thought very carefully about nothing at all and did not let his face move. He is good at that. He has had practice. You don't grow up as the ornamental younger brother of a warrior king without learning exactly how to arrange your expression when the room is looking at you and expecting a reaction you refuse to give.

He has been telling himself it doesn't matter since breakfast, with dogged persistence. Bohdi can fuck whoever he likes. Bohdi has always fucked whoever he likes — men, women, whoever catches his eye and holds it long enough. Morgan has watched it happen for years, from a distance carefully maintained, and he has never once had the right to mind. He doesn't have the right now either. Bohdi is not his and never has been. The fact that Bohdi's hands were on his skin last night does not change anything about who Bohdi takes to bed.

Morgan turns a page he hasn't read and stares at the next one he won't read either and does not think about it.

The footsteps register before the voice does. Morgan looks up from the treatise and finds Garrik standing at the end of the gallery with one shoulder against the doorframe and an expression on his face that Morgan identifies immediately, because he has seen it on men's faces for most of his life.

It is interest and appraisal, a specific, unhurried confidence — he has decided what he wants and sees no reason not to walk toward it.

"Prince Morgan," Garrik says. He pushes off the doorframe and comes into the gallery with an easy stride, boot heels clicking on the stone. "I was hoping to find you alone."

Morgan closes the book on his knee. "And here I am."

Garrik stops a comfortable distance away — not crowding him, not cornering him. He has done this before, Morgan thinks. He knows exactly how much space to leave so that the approach reads as invitation rather than threat. His short brown hair is swept back from the shaved side of his head and his warrior's markings catch the light from the windows, dark lines across his jaw and temple that frame a face that is, Morgan will admit, well-constructed. He has a strong jaw, steady eyes, and a mouth that knows what it is doing when it curves into that half-smile.

"I wanted to apologize for the chieftain's behavior," Garrik says. He settles against the wall opposite, arms folded loosely across his chest. "He has no talent for courtesy. Or tact."

"No," Morgan agrees. "He doesn't."

"You've handled it well. Better than anyone I've seen."