Page 1 of Setting the Break

1

MORGAN

The ledger is wrong.

Morgan knows it's wrong because he wrote the figures himself three days ago, and the numbers on the page in front of him are not the numbers he wrote. Someone has adjusted the grain allocation for the northern trade routes, shaving a half-bushel per shipment across fourteen entries, and the alteration is tidy enough that it was meant to go unnoticed. It will not go unnoticed. Morgan notices everything. It is, depending on whether you’re asking his brother or not, either his finest quality or his most insufferable one.

He tucks the ledger under his arm and walks. Walking helps him think, because if he’s sitting then he’s liable to fall asleep, and he needs to be thinking because the list of problems on his plate keeps piling up.

He has, conservatively, ten things on his mind. The grain is one. The council is pushing for a formal response to the Wolfe clan's fractured leadership, which would be a reasonable request if any of them could agree on what formal response means. Morgan has sat through four sessions of circular argument on the subject and is no closer to a consensus than he was at the start. Three separate disputes from the northern trade routes are sitting on his desk waiting for arbitration, each one more tedious than the last. The merchant guild sent a representative yesterday who used the word compromise eleven times in a single meeting without once suggesting what he himself might be willing to give up. The winter grain audit needs finishing. The eastern watchtowers need staffing approvals. A blacksmith in the lower quarter has filed a complaint against a tanner whose runoff is poisoning his well, and both men have sent Morgan letters of such passionate hostility that he is half convinced they are sleeping together.

The corridor bends ahead past a series of alcoves cut into the stone, remnants of some older architectural purpose Morgan has never bothered to research. They collect shadow and dust in equal measure. He walks past the first without registering it. He walks past the second. He does not notice the shadow against the stone in the third until a hand reaches out and catches his elbow and pulls him sideways into the dark.

His heart leaps. His body goes rigid, his free hand already curling into a fist. Then there is an arm around his waist, pulling him back against a body that is hard and warm and enormous. He smells leather and the incense Bohdi burns in his quarters, and every muscle in him unclenches at once.

He relaxes into Bohdi's arms. Tips his head back against the broad chest behind him. Lets his eyes close for exactly one second, because one second is what he can afford and Morgan has always been meticulous about budgets.

"You weren't paying attention," Bohdi says against his ear. His voice is low and warm with amusement and the shape of his grin is audible. "I could have been anyone."

"You couldn't have been anyone," Morgan says. "Nobody else on this earth smells like a burning apothecary."

"It's sandalwood." Bohdi's arm tightens around his waist and his laugh is a vibration against Morgan's spine. "And you love it."

Morgan does love it. He is not going to say so. He tilts his head to one side, exposing his neck in a way that is not remotely accidental, and says, "You know, you can’t just accost the prince. There are laws, probably."

"Laws," Bohdi repeats, and his mouth finds the side of Morgan's throat. “And I am the paragon of a law-abiding citizen, am I?”

The ledger is still under his arm. The grain stores still need auditing. Three trade disputes are still sitting on his desk. But Bohdi's lips are warm and his teeth graze the tendon below Morgan's ear and Morgan's list of urgent responsibilities takes a sharp and decisive step backward.

"In case you haven’t noticed, we're in the middle of the keep," Morgan says. His voice comes out steadier than it has any right to, given that Bohdi's hand has slid from his waist to his hip and is pressing him back with a grip that is doing destructive things to his higher reasoning.

"Then you'll have to be very, very quiet," Bohdi says against his throat.

Morgan opens his mouth to tell him that being quiet has never been his strong suit and that if Bohdi thinks otherwise then he knows Morgan considerably less well than he claims to, but Bohdi chooses that precise moment to spin him around and press him back against the cold stone wall, and the words fall apart. Bohdi's hands find his jaw, tipping his face up, and his mouth covers Morgan's, and Morgan drops the ledger. He hears it hit the floor and does not care, which is how he knows this clandestine relationship of theirs has ruined him, because Morgan has always historically cared about record-keeping.

His hands go to Bohdi's chest, fingers spreading across the hard shelf of muscle beneath his shirt. He pulls at the fabric because he wants skin and the desire to have him has not once, in their frantic and terrifying month together, diminished. Bohdi crowds him against the wall and gets a thigh between his legs and Morgan's breath leaves him in a rush. He rolls his hips down against the pressure, involuntary and graceless, and Bohdi makes a sound low in his chest that Morgan has catalogued and revisited in private moments more times than he will admit to anyone, including himself.

"Bohdi," he manages. "You can’t fuck me in a stone alcove in the middle of the gods damned day."

"Who said anything about fucking you? You’ve got a filthy mind, my prince."

Bohdi rolls his thigh up and Morgan's breath hitches audibly and the next denial dies a richly deserved death. Bohdi grins at him, that impossible wide grin that makes his eyes crinkle at the corners and makes Morgan want to say things he has spent a long time learning not to say, and then he drops to his knees.

Morgan looks down at him and the sight is, well, a problem. Bohdi kneeling in front of him, his tattooed hands working at the laces of Morgan's trousers with the ease of practice, is the definition of a fucking problem. His eyes are tilted up, catching the thin spill of sunlight from the window, and the expression in them is teasing and self-satisfied in equal measure, and Morgan has to put one hand flat against the stone behind him to stay upright.

"Bohdi," he warns again, and this time it comes out thin. It is, to be fair, not much of a refusal.

Bohdi frees him from his trousers and the cool air hits him and then Bohdi's mouth is on him, and Morgan bites down on the inside of his cheek so hard he tastes copper.

He’s learned several things in the month of sleeping with Bohdi. He’s learned that the man’s stamina is genuinely absurd and that he has no problem keeping up with a lover ten years his junior who has no qualms about being fucked three times in one night. He’s learned that the man's hands are capable of holding him in place with a strength that doesn’t seem to cost him anything and that makes Morgan's knees buckle. And he learned, on their second night together, nearly choking on his own tongue in the process, that Bohdi has no gag reflex to speak of.

The knowledge is a curse. It is a gods damned curse. He thinks about it regularly and seemingly without control. He thinks about it in council meetings and over breakfast and in the bath and once, memorably, while attempting to hold a coherent conversation with the head of the merchant guild about wool tariffs. It is a fact that has rewired something fundamental in Morgan's brain and left him incapable of watching Bohdi eat or drink anything without his thoughts going somewhere that would have him publicly flogged if anyone could hear them.

Bohdi takes him deep, one hand gripping Morgan's hip to hold him against the wall and the other braced on his pale thigh. He knows exactly what Morgan responds to because Bohdi is a man of commitment and dedication who operates by the absolute refusal to do anything by half measures. His tongue presses flat along the underside and his cheeks hollow and Morgan's hand leaves the wall and finds Bohdi's head, fingers curling into the braids, holding on because there is nothing else in the world to hold on to.

Morgan tips his head back against the stone and breathes through his teeth. Sounds are trying to escape him. Small, desperate, undignified sounds that have no business existing in a corridor twenty feet from the main hall of the keep. He presses his lips together and swallows one of them and Bohdi, because he is a bastard and because he apparently takes the suppression of noise as a personal challenge, does something with his throat that punches a groan out of Morgan so loudly that it echoes. He bites his knuckles to shut himself up and the pain only slightly helps.

Morgan is not going to last. He has never lasted under Bohdi's mouth, and he has stopped being ashamed of it because shame requires the capacity for rational thought and Bohdi has systematically dismantled that capacity one encounter at a time. He grips Bohdi's braids and his hips stutter forward and Bohdi takes it, takes all of it, and the vibration of his pleased hum sends Morgan over the edge with his teeth locked together and his spine arching off the wall.