Page 13 of Fought it Through the Teeth

He reaches for the hem of Morgan's shirt.

It happens fast. Dade's hands are on the fabric and the man has the strength of every other warrior in this clan behind the motion. One hand is at his hip and one at his ribs, dragging the shirt up his torso with brisk, impersonal force. The fabric scrapes against Morgan's skin, cold air hitting his stomach, his ribs, the bare skin of his chest, and Morgan understands in a single lurching instant that the steward is undressing him.

His body responds before his mind catches up, with a rush of reactions, all of them wrong. The instinct to pull away wars with the instinct to freeze, his arms tangle in the fabric Dade is hauling over his head, and his feet skid on the cold stone as the larger man's grip shifts and tightens. Dade's hands are on him. Dade's hands are on him — on his skin, on his body, touching him without permission, handling him, and the violation of it is so complete and so casual that it hits Morgan with the force of something physical, driving the breath from his lungs.

He makes a sound, small and involuntary, a sharp, bitten-off noise of distress that tears out of him from somewhere below thought, somewhere primal and panicked, before he can clamp his jaw shut around it. He will be furious about it later. He will replay it in his head and hear it again and again and despise himself for making it, for failing to keep his composure when composure is the only weapon he has. But in this moment the sound is out of him and in the room and there is nothing he can do to take it back.

A chair goes over behind him with a crack.

The sound of wood on stone, the percussive snap of something heavy falling hard, is loud, and then Bohdi is there.

He has Dade's wrist in his hand, not the wrist holding the shirt but the other one, the one braced against Morgan's ribs, the hand that has been pressing against his bare skin. Bohdi's fingers lock around bone and he wrenches the steward off Morgan with a single motion that is not fast so much as it is absolute. There is no wind-up and no warning. One moment Dade's hands are on Morgan and the next the man is stumbling backward with his arm extended at an angle that bends wrong, and Bohdi is between them.

Bohdi's violence, when it comes, is not explosive. His body is trained to react before his mind has finished deciding whether a reaction is warranted. Morgan has seen it before. He saw it once in the Keep at Valen, when a visiting merchant's guard put his hand on Morgan's shoulder during a trade dispute and Bohdi materialized from against the wall and removed the hand and the guard's confidence in a single fluid motion. He saw it again on the road to the outer villages, when a beggar lurched toward Morgan's horse and Bohdi intercepted him so smoothly that Morgan hadn't even registered the threat before it was over.

The three of them stand looking at each other for a long minute in complete silence.

Nobody moves. Nobody raises their voice. The overturned chair lies on its side behind Bohdi, one leg still rocking gently against the floor. Morgan's shirt is rucked up to his sternum and he pulls it down with both hands, crossing his arms over his chest, and tries to look composed and does not manage it.

His heart is hammering. He can feel it in his temples, in his throat, in the tips of his fingers where they dig into his own arms. The ghost impression of Dade's hands is still on his skin and Morgan wants very badly to scrub at his own ribs until the feeling is gone and knows that it will not be gone for a long time.

Dade is white around the mouth. His eyes are very wide and fixed on Bohdi's face, and whatever he finds there makes the remaining color drain from the steward's cheeks. The man is broad and strong and accustomed to physical confrontation, a counselor who has earned his place in a warrior's clan, and he looks at Bohdi's face and is afraid.

His wrist is still locked in Bohdi's fist. Morgan can see the tendons standing out in Bohdi's forearm, the tattoos stretched taut over muscle, the knuckles bleached white. The grip is not squeezing. It is holding with a pressure that communicates something very specific: I can break this. I am choosing not to.

"I — I apologize," Dade stammers. The words come out compressed, squeezed through a throat that has gone tight. His eyes dart from Bohdi to Morgan and back, the whites visible, the painted clan markings on his cheekbones standing out stark against skin that has gone the color of old ash. "I overstepped. I — the chieftain —"

He stops and swallows audibly.

"I will see the prince downstairs once he's dressed."

Bohdi holds him a moment longer than necessary, long enough that the silence itself becomes the statement and Dade's wrist in Bohdi's grip is the punctuation at the end of it. He holds for a beat, then two, then three. The steward's breathing is shallow and rapid and the pain from the grip is showing in the clench of his jaw, but he does not struggle and does not pull away, because he understands that struggling would make it worse.

Then Bohdi releases him.

Dade leaves fast. He does not close the door carefully — he pulls it shut behind him with fumbling haste, wanting a barrier between himself and the room, and his footsteps recede down the corridor at a pace that is not quite running but shares running's general philosophy.

The room is very quiet.

Morgan stands with his arms folded across his chest, fingers digging into his own biceps, breathing through his nose. His shirt is rumpled where Dade hauled at it, the fabric twisted against his ribs.

He has dealt with men who assumed they could touch him before. He is the crown prince of Rengara, young and blond and pretty. He has been the subject of wandering hands since he was old enough to be looked at, and he learned, early and thoroughly, how to deflect and redirect and extract himself from situations that other men might have forced. He is not naive about what he is to people who want power or pleasure or both. He has been managing it his entire adult life.

But he has never been stripped. He has never had someone's hands on his clothes, hauling them off his body, while he scrambled and failed to stop it.

Bohdi turns to face him.

Morgan meets his eyes and feels everything he is holding crack along a seam he didn't know was there. The expression on Bohdi's face is not the easy grin and it is not the charm and it is not any of the masks Bohdi wears for the rest of the world. It is something dark and tightly leashed, something that lives behind the performance, and for one unguarded moment Morgan sees the restraint for what it is: an active, physical effort, a thing being held down, gripped by the throat, kept from its natural conclusion by nothing but will.

Then Bohdi blinks, and the mask resettles, and the thing is leashed again.

"A little telling," Bohdi says, "that he'd rather assault the visiting prince of the reigning kingdom than tell his lord his choice of wardrobe is unacceptable."

His voice is light. The lightness does not match a single thing happening on his face.

Morgan huffs out a laugh he doesn't feel. He smooths his rumpled shirt down with hands that are not quite steady and says, "Ivan doesn't strike me as the understanding type."

Bohdi hums agreement. The sound is short and noncommittal. It carries beneath it the weight of everything he is not saying — about Dade's desperation, about what kind of man inspires that level of fear in his own counselor, and the growing evidence that Ivan Wolfe is not merely cruel but methodical in his cruelty.