Chapter 37: Underneath

Chapter 37: Chapter 37: Underneath

The shower helped.

That was not the same as making Sebastian feel normal.

Warm water ran over the back of his neck and shoulders, loosening muscles that had spent the last several hours clenched hard enough to ache, while diluted blood threaded down his chest and disappeared through the narrow drain beneath his feet. Steam gathered slowly across the glass enclosure, obscuring the bathroom beyond until the pale stone and black fixtures became softened shapes rather than sharp lines.

Sebastian kept one palm against the wall.

Not because he was going to fall.

He had promised Nero he would call if he thought that might happen, and despite the considerable temptation to redefine the terms afterward, Sebastian intended to keep his word.

He simply felt strange.

There was no dizziness now and none of the crushing pressure that had preceded the collapse in the council chamber. His lungs filled properly. His vision was clear. Even the deep ache beneath his ribs had receded enough that breathing no longer felt like something his body needed to negotiate.

The wrongness was somewhere else.

Deeper.

A warmth had settled beneath his skin, concentrated along the base of his throat and spreading slowly through his chest, while his pheromonal glands seemed simultaneously numb and oversensitive. Every few minutes, he became aware of Nero through the closed bathroom door with startling precision, not merely as a distant field keeping his system regulated but as a presence his body had apparently decided it should locate.

Sebastian disliked that development enormously.

He tipped his head back beneath the water and closed his eyes.

Nothing hurt badly enough to justify calling Nero.

—

On the other side of the door, Nero had his own problem.

His shirt had dried against him.

Sebastian’s blood had soaked through the white fabric from collarbone to stomach before beginning to dry during the drive and flight, leaving large sections stiff enough that removing it required actual care rather than simply pulling it over his head.

Nero stood beside the bed and unfastened the remaining buttons one by one.

His jacket had already been abandoned across the back of an armchair, and his cuffs lay on the low table beside his phone, which continued vibrating every few minutes with updates he had no interest in reading yet. Somewhere farther forward in the aircraft, Hale was managing Sahan security, Claude was probably becoming increasingly offended by Sebastian’s impossible monitoring data, and two royal households were preparing to announce an engagement that had taken seven years and a medical catastrophe to obtain.

Nero should have been dealing with all of it.

Instead, he was staring at his own shirt.

The fabric peeled away from his chest with an unpleasant pull where the blood had dried against his skin.

Nero grimaced and removed it completely.

For several seconds, he simply held it.

The metallic smell was strongest, sharp enough that any ordinary person would have noticed nothing else.

Nero was not ordinary.

He lowered his face almost without thinking and inhaled.

Blood.

Soap from the palace.

The faint trace of the suppressant Sebastian had used earlier.

And underneath all of it, almost buried beneath everything Sebastian had spent years putting between himself and the world, was Sebastian.

His actual scent.

Nero closed his eyes.

There it was.

Faint, because Sebastian’s secondary system was exhausted and because dominant alphas instinctively controlled their pheromonal presence around other powerful dominants, but Nero would have recognized it anywhere.

He had recognized it when he was eighteen.

He had recognized it in crowded royal halls, military receptions, weddings, funerals, and every miserable formal event where Sebastian stood twenty meters away pretending Nero’s existence meant nothing.

Seven years.

Nero had spent seven years learning how to be satisfied with distance.

He had learned which rooms Sebastian preferred at family gatherings without deliberately watching him, which wine he reached for when he was tired, how his voice changed when he was annoyed but too polite to show it publicly, and precisely how much darker his green eyes became when Nero succeeded in provoking him.

None of that had been useful.

Nero had kept every detail anyway.

He lowered the shirt slightly and looked toward the closed bathroom door.

The shower was still running.

Sebastian was on the other side of it.

His fiancé.

Possibly.

Provisionally.

Under medical duress, according to Sebastian.

Nero smiled.

He had been called obsessive before.

Usually by Hale.

Occasionally by his father, which was spectacular hypocrisy.

Christopher preferred hopeless.

All of them were correct, although none had ever appreciated the degree of the problem.

Nero was a yearner through and through.

He could threaten governments without hesitation, arrange political traps elaborate enough that ministers noticed only after signing themselves into them, and destroy someone socially with the same pleasant expression he used at charity dinners.

Sebastian had always reduced him to wanting.

Wanting a glance.

Wanting a conversation Sebastian had not been obligated to have.

Wanting Sebastian to walk toward him first because seven years ago Nero had sworn he would never make that move again and had been too proud to break his own word even while engineering increasingly ridiculous circumstances around it.

Now Sebastian had touched his face.

He had said do it.

He had buried his nose against Nero’s neck afterward and breathed his pheromones as though they were the first pleasant thing his body had encountered in months.

Nero looked down at the bloodstained shirt again.

"This is pathetic."

The observation did nothing to make him release it.

He inhaled once more, slower this time.

Beneath the blood, Sebastian’s scent seemed different.

Not dramatically.

Nero would not have noticed the change if he had not spent years memorizing something he was rarely allowed close enough to breathe.

There was a softness beginning around the edges of it, an unfamiliar depth where Sebastian’s dominant-alpha pheromones should have resisted Nero’s presence. It was not an omega scent yet and would not become one for months, but Nero could feel the direction of the change.

His body reacted before his mind finished processing it.

The enigma inside him tightened with hungry satisfaction.

Not sexual hunger exactly, although attraction certainly lived within it.

This was older and far more possessive.

Mine.

Nero’s jaw tightened.

He disliked how easily the instinct arrived.

He disliked even more how natural it felt.

The shower stopped.

Nero immediately looked toward the bathroom.

Silence followed.

He counted without meaning to.

Five seconds.

Ten.

Fifteen.

At twenty, he moved closer to the door.

Then Sebastian’s voice came through it.

"If you are standing there counting, stop."

Nero paused.

"I wasn’t."

"You’re a terrible liar."

"I’m an excellent liar."

"Not with me."

Nero looked at the door and smiled despite himself.

There was movement inside, the faint slide of the shower door followed by the sound of a towel being pulled free.

"You feel all right?"

Sebastian took a moment before answering.

"Strange."

Nero’s amusement disappeared.

The bloodied shirt fell forgotten onto the chair.

"Define strange."

"Not falling."

"That was not the question."

"I know."

Nero put one hand against the bathroom door but did not open it.

Sebastian had set a boundary.

Nero was going to respect it even if every instinct he possessed wanted visual confirmation.

"My glands feel wrong," Sebastian said eventually. "Warm. My chest too. Not painful."

Nero exhaled slowly.

"That may be the transition."

"I assumed."

"If it worsens, call me."

"I promised."

"Yes."

There was another pause.

Then Sebastian added, "You can stop hovering outside the door."

Nero looked down at his bare feet, which were currently less than two inches from it.

"I’m not hovering."

"You are practically haunting it."

Nero smiled.

"You can come verify that yourself."

The bathroom became suspiciously quiet.

Nero waited.

Sebastian finally said, "Put on a shirt."

Nero looked down at his bare chest.

His smile widened.

"You don’t want to watch?"

"Nero."

The unmistakable threat in Sebastian’s voice settled something warm and painfully content inside him.

Nero turned toward the wardrobe built into the wall of the cabin.

"Fine."

Behind the bathroom door, Sebastian muttered something that sounded distinctly like an insult.

Nero had never been happier to hear one.