Page 33 of Fought it Through the Teeth

His ears are ringing. There is a roar inside his skull — static, white noise, a mind that has received information it cannot process and is holding everything in suspension until it can. He is aware of the fire and the chair and the cup in his hand, and of the fact that his hand has not moved and his face has not moved. Ivan is looking at him with the calm, expectant air of having asked a reasonable favor and waiting for the reasonable answer.

"What?" Bohdi asks, mouth numb.

The voice that comes out of his mouth is calm and mildly curious and belongs to a man who has perhaps misunderstood an unusual request, and it bears no resemblance whatsoever to anything happening inside him. He is hoping to have misheard. He is hoping he is drunk. He is hoping, with a desperation that borders on prayer, that the Wolfe mead has done something creative to his comprehension and the warchief is actually asking him to do something — anything — that is not what he just heard.

"The prince needs to be shown his place," Ivan explains. "He's too willful. Too proud. He needs to understand what's expected of him before the wedding, and I'd rather it be done by someone I respect." He leans forward. "Someone who knows the boy's body. His limits. Someone who can make him understand the shape of the life he's walking into." He pauses. "And I'd like to watch it done properly."

The fire pops. A log shifts. The embers rearrange.

Bohdi's mind is a flurry. Rage — first and loudest, a red-black surge that fills his skull and makes his vision narrow and his hands clench around the cup hard enough that the pewter creaks. Horror — running underneath the rage, cold current beneath hot, the sick, vertiginous understanding that this man has sat across a fire from him and asked him to take Morgan and break him while Ivan watches from his chair and drinks his fucking mead.

His mind is already running his options before the words have settled.

The door is behind him. Morgan's room is far. Too far to reach at a sprint before the alarm is raised. The gates are manned at night. The stables are guarded. The horse is stabled three buildings away.

How many men would he have to kill to get out of this stronghold tonight with the prince alive?

More than two. More than ten. Possibly more than twenty, depending on the night watch rotation that he has been mapping since they arrived and that puts between fifteen and twenty-five armed warriors between here and the front gate at any given hour after dark.

He keeps his face pleasant.

"I'm flattered, chief. Truly." The word comes out of his mouth with warmth and genuine appreciation and a slight, sheepish hesitation that is calculated to the syllable. "Under other circumstances, I'd consider it an honor." He pauses, rubs the back of his neck, lets the sheepishness deepen. "But I don't fuck men. Never have. Don't know that I'd be able to get it up for one."

Which is a lie, of course. Bohdi fucks men eagerly and often and with considerable enthusiasm. He has fucked men in barracks and in camps and in the back rooms of inns across two kingdoms. The last man he fucked was a blacksmith in Valen with shoulders built for the forge, and he enjoyed it immensely and would do it again given the opportunity. But Ivan does not need that information.

Ivan accepts this. He accepts it with an ease that puts ice in Bohdi's veins — having asked a question and received an answer and already moving on to the next solution. He nods. He drinks. He says, casually, "I appreciate your honesty. I'll find someone else."

Bohdi's stomach twists.

He'll find someone else.

Bohdi finishes his drink. Ivan refills it. They talk for a while longer about nothing that matters — the weather, the horses, a hunting trip Ivan wants to organize before the snow. The conversation has the surreal, ordinary quality of a dream in which terrible things happen between stretches of mundane normalcy. Bohdi participates in it with his grin and his easy laugh and the charm that has never once failed him, and behind all of it his mind is running a single calculation on repeat.

They need to engineer an opportunity with Ivan without his guards in the room. They need to do it fast because something unforgivable is going to happen in this house if they don't, and Bohdi will not be the man who let it.

Ivan stands. "Get some rest, Bohdi. You've earned it."

He collects his belt knife from the guard at the study door without breaking stride and goes straight to Morgan's room.

The corridor is dark and quiet. The torches are guttering in their brackets and there are no guards on this stretch of hallway at this hour, which is either an oversight or evidence that Ivan doesn't consider the northern prince worth guarding. Bohdi adds it to the list of things he is going to make the man answer for. He reaches Morgan's door and knocks, three quick raps, low on the wood.

A pause. Then footsteps, light and careful, and the door opens.

Morgan is in his sleep clothes. His hair is down around his shoulders and his feet are bare and he blinks at Bohdi — not asleep, not surprised to find trouble at his door at this hour, because he is living in enemy territory and has not been sleeping well since they arrived. He looks at Bohdi's face and the expression sharpens.

"What happened?"

Bohdi steps inside and closes the door behind him.

"My attempt to get close to Ivan has worked too well. We had a drink, we had a laugh, we commiserated about his impotence together. And normally, I'd say what a blessing," Bohdi says, "but then he asked me to fuck you for him while he watches. To show you your place."

Morgan stares at him almost uncomprehendingly. His face doesn't change. His eyes don't change. He stands in the middle of his room in his bare feet and his sleep clothes and he receives the information, and the only thing that moves is his breathing, which stops for a beat too long and then resumes at a rate that is slightly too fast.

Then, just like that, he can't look at Bohdi.

His eyes fix on a point somewhere past Bohdi's left shoulder — the wall, the shutter, the dark corner of the room — and they stay there. Morgan's jaw is tight and his hands are at his sides and his fingers are curling into his palms slowly, with the deliberate control of choosing very carefully what to do with his fists.

"Well," Morgan says. His voice is steady. "I suppose I should be flattered he thought to pick someone familiar to break me in. I'd hate to have it auctioned off to the highest bidder."