"That’s because your reactions are so delicious."
Liam turned his head just enough to look at him, and the expression he gave him should have burned through silk, marble, and princely arrogance alike.
"That," he said, voice low and beautifully offended, "is a deeply incriminating thing to say inside a palace."
Arik’s mouth curved.
"Yes."
Liam should have been used to it already, to the maddening way Arik took a sentence that ought to have been humiliating, reckless, or socially fatal and wore it as if it were rely another layer of expensive tailoring. Liam could feel the prince’s warmth even after the hand on his back moved lower and then finally pulled away. The loss of it should have been a relief. It was not. It was only noticeable, which was worse for his thoughts.
Liam hated noticing.
He hated even more that Arik seed built to make things noticeable.
They stepped out of the Sun Room with George a few paces ahead, moving with the pleased, proprietary confidence of a man who believed he had just arranged fate with the correct amount of royal timing. The corridor beyond was flooded with white-gold light from the long palace windows, the polished floor gleaming beneath it in useless elegance. Everywhere Liam looked, Wrohan was still trying too hard. Gold leaf in the molding. Imported crystal fitted into decorative sconces. Ether-lit accents built into pale marble that already had enough light to flatter anybody with a crown and not nearly enough sha.
George belonged here.
That was not praise.
Arik did not.
That, Liam found far more irritating.
Because Arik made the corridor feel smaller, less like a palace theater and more like a place forced to acknowledge a more ancient type of power. The white and gold on him did not look ornantal. It looked effortless. It was as if the room had been built badly and was only now, because of so strange mix of blood and unfair bone structure, figuring out what its proportions had been trying to beco.
Liam was in a terrible mood.
This did not improve it.
George turned halfway back with a smile that made Liam want to push him into the nearest gilded wall and ask whether decorative impact cracks improved the architecture.
"I trust," the king said, "that the two of you found a useful understanding."
Liam did not even try to make his face polite. "I trust very little in this palace."
George laughed.
It was the wrong response, but then George’s whole existence had been one long investnt in the wrong responses. He turned forward again, apparently satisfied with himself, and continued down the corridor.
Arik remained at Liam’s side.
Not touching now.
Which should have made things easier.
It did not. The absence of contact was its own form of awareness, a small, persistent space between them that felt less like distance and more like a pause.
Liam wanted to get out of the palace.
That impulse was clean. Imdiate. It made sense. He wanted out of the sunlight, out of George’s smiling orbit, out of the polite suffocation of marble and gold and "productive" royal language. The palace tasted wrong. Too curated. Too certain that it could dress and rot in light and call it order.
He also wanted to go to Lab V.
That impulse was not clean at all.
It cut through everything else like a blade.
The gate.
That stupid, buried, offensive structure that had ignored him for years. Years. He had tested it through resonance, through field pressure, through the Vanguard load, through harmonic mapping, through every thod short of setting the entire lower chamber on fire out of spite, it had remained exactly what it had always been: inert, wrong, arrogant architecture with a pulse too faint to classify and too stubborn to be useful.
Then Arik entered the chasm, and the gate had answered.
Liam wanted to think only about that and ignore all the drama around him.
Unfortunately, Arik kept existing beside him and making the thinking much less disciplined than it ought to have been.
"You’re thinking too loudly," Arik said.
Liam shot him a look. "And you keep saying unsettling things with your whole face."
"Well, your reactions are worth it."
Before Liam could decide whether that deserved offense or violence, Arik reached again for the small of his back.
This ti the touch was not accidental enough to pretend otherwise.
It settled there with maddening confidence, warm through the fine fabric of Liam’s coat, not pressing, not pushing, just claiming the line of him as if Arik had already decided Liam’s body was a reasonable place to rest his hand.
Liam looked at it.
Then up at Arik.
That golden-eyed bastard had the nerve to look calm.
Worse than calm.
Pleased.
"Let’s have lunch together first," Arik said.
Liam blinked once.
"First."
"Yes."
"As in before the gate."
"Yes."
"No."
Arik’s mouth curved. "Yes."
Liam stared at him.
Lunch.
Lunch.
As though the prince had not just detonated half of Liam’s political life in one sunlit room. As though George were not still sowhere ahead poisoning the corridor with his satisfaction. As though Felix’s silence over the last ten days had not beco stranger by the hour. As though the gate had not finally, offensively, catastrophically answered Arik after years of giving Liam nothing but faint pulses and contempt.
Lunch.
"That," Liam said, his voice flat with disbelief, "is an absurd proposition."
"Why?"
"That sounds like jealousy."
Before Liam could turn and smack the absolute princely arrogance out of the hand still resting at his back, he was hit by two obstacles at once.
The first was scent.
Arik’s.
Warm stone, clean sunlight, and that faint ruinous undercurrent of caral that his body had already proven itself far too willing to rember. It hit harder in the narrower corridor, caught between marble and gold and filtered air, close enough now that Liam’s nerves registered it before his pride could organize a proper objection.
The second obstacle stood at the far end of the hall.
White hair.
Soft purple eyes.
Elegant clothes over a body Liam had spent years learning to read the way other people read weather patterns and structural cracks.
Felix.
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