Chapter 3: Confrontation in the Courtyard
The cold of the courtyard stones seeped through the soles of Lucien’s boots, a grounding counterpoint to the fire in his blood. The moon had shifted, carving longer shadows from the statues of his ancestors. Their stony eyes seemed to judge the space where Lysander had stood moments before, where his brother’s quiet voice had sliced through the night with truths Lucien wasn’t ready to hear.
You don’t own him. You just wear the crown that makes him stay.
The words coiled in his gut, venomous. He stared at his own hands, turning them over in the pale light. They were the hands that had traced love poems on Will’s skin, that had wielded a sword in ceremony, that had, hours ago, pinned Will to a windowsill and fucked him until he screamed his ownership. Possession. It had felt like strength in the moment. Now, in the silent aftermath of Lysander’s retreat, it felt like a confession of weakness.
He found himself moving not toward his own chambers, but through a maze of lesser-used corridors, his feet carrying him with a grim purpose. The door he stopped before was simple, unadorned. Will’s music room. A sanctuary Lucien had granted him, a place where the crown’s weight was meant to be left outside.
He pushed the door open. The room was dark but for the moonlight filtering through a high, arched window. Will sat at the clavichord, a small, delicate instrument whose soft voice could not carry beyond these walls. He wasn’t playing. He was just sitting, a silhouette of stillness, head bowed as if in prayer or defeat.
The sight of him there, seeking solitude after the brutality Lucien had inflicted, twisted the knife of guilt deeper.
“Will.”
Will didn’t startle. He’d likely heard the approach. He slowly turned his head. His face was pale in the monochrome light, his eyes dark pools. “Lucien.” His voice was flat, drained.
“I couldn’t sleep,” Lucien said, the lie pathetic even to his own ears. He stepped inside, closing the door behind him. The room smelled of beeswax polish and the faint, clean scent of Will’s soap. “I saw Lysander.”
At the mention of the name, a subtle tension rippled through Will’s shoulders. It was there and gone, but Lucien caught it. The ember of jealousy, momentarily banked, glowed anew.
“Oh?” Will said, turning fully on the bench. “In the middle of the night?”
“In the courtyard. We talked.” Lucien leaned against the edge of a heavy writing desk, folding his arms. A defensive posture. “He’s… concerned for you.”
A hollow, mirthless sound escaped Will. It wasn’t a laugh. “Is that what he called it?”
The response was a bucket of cold water. Lucien unfolded his arms, standing straight. “What does that mean?”
Will looked away, out the window. “Nothing. It’s nothing.” He drew a shaky breath. “He just has a way of seeing things. Things you’d rather he didn’t.”
The silence stretched, taut and dangerous. The memory of the windowsill, of Will’s tears, of his own furious question—Do you do this for him?—hung between them.
Lucien crossed the room in three strides. He knelt before Will, forcing his fiancé to look at him. In the dim light, he saw the remnants of exhaustion, of a soul-deep weariness. He also saw a flicker of something else. Defiance? Fear? It was the same look he’d seen in the library after Will returned, breathless and altered.
“What did he say to you?” Lucien’s voice was low, urgent. “That night. In the library.”
Will’s gaze faltered. “We talked. About the wedding. About my role.”
“Bullshit.” The curse cracked through the quiet room. Lucien’s hands came up to grip Will’s thighs, not hard, but firm. “You came back to me smelling like rain and someone else’s malice. You were trembling. He did something. Said something.”
“He’s your brother,” Will whispered, a plea.
“And you’re my heart,” Lucien shot back, his grip tightening. “And he’s putting cracks in you. I can see it. I can feel it when I touch you.” His voice dropped to a raw scrape. “Did he touch you?”
The question, finally voiced aloud, seemed to suck the air from the room. Will’s eyes widened. He opened his mouth, but no sound came out. That silence was more damning than any confession.
A cold, terrible clarity washed over Lucien. It wasn’t suspicion anymore. It was a knowing. The library. The haunted look. The way Will’s body responded sometimes to Lucien’s touch with a frantic, almost desperate energy that felt like it was meant for someone else. He thought of Lysander’s calm, observant eyes, always watching Will, always a half-step too close.
Rage, white and purifying, obliterated the guilt. He stood up, pulling Will to his feet with him. The clavichord groaned a discordant note as Will’s hip knocked against it.
“Answer me.”
Will shook his head, a frantic back-and-forth motion. “Lucien, don’t.”
“Did. He. Touch. You.” Each word was a stone dropped into a still pond.
Tears welled in Will’s eyes, spilling over. He didn’t nod. He didn’t speak. But his crumbling expression, the way his body seemed to fold in on itself, was confirmation enough.
Lucien saw red. A roaring filled his ears. He shoved Will back against the clavichord, the instrument protesting with a jangle of muted strings. He crowded into him, their bodies pressed together, his hands slamming down on the wood on either side of Will’s hips, caging him.
“Where?” The word was guttural. “How?”
“Stop,” Will begged, a sob cracking his voice. “Please, you don’t understand.”
“Make me understand!” Lucien roared. His control was a thread, fraying fast. He grabbed the front of Will’s sleep shirt, his fist twisting the soft fabric. “Did he fuck you? In my library? While I was hosting dignitaries downstairs, was my brother bending my fiancé over a fucking desk?”
Will flinched as if struck. He squeezed his eyes shut, more tears tracing silver paths down his cheeks. His breath came in ragged hitches. Finally, a tiny, devastated nod.
The thread snapped.
Lucien’s world narrowed to a single, scorching point of fury and betrayal. He kissed Will, but it wasn’t a kiss. It was a brand. A violent claiming of his mouth, all teeth and punishing pressure. Will gasped against his lips, a sound swallowed by Lucien’s anger. He didn’t fight. He went pliant, a surrender that felt like its own kind of agony.
Lucien broke the kiss, spinning Will around to face the clavichord. He shoved him forward, Will’s torso folding over the smooth, cool wood of the instrument. “He had you here,” Lucien snarled, yanking Will’s sleeping trousers down around his thighs. The pale skin of his ass was exposed in the moonlight, unmarked. “Was it like this? Did he bend you over something and take what wasn’t his?”
He didn’t wait for an answer. He unbuttoned his own trousers, freeing his cock, already hard with a vicious, unwanted arousal. He spat into his palm, slicking himself roughly. There was no preparation, no tenderness, only the burning need to obliterate the memory, to rewrite the violation with his own.
He pushed inside.
Will cried out, a sharp, pained sound that was swallowed by the thick air of the room. The fit was impossibly tight, dry, burning. Lucien didn’t care. He buried himself to the hilt in one brutal thrust, his body covering Will’s, pinning him to the clavichord. The instrument gave a soft, harmonic groan beneath their weight.
“Is this what he did?” Lucien panted into his ear, his hips already pistoning, setting a ruthless, jackhammer rhythm. The slap of skin on skin was loud, obscene in the sacred quiet of the music room. “Did he fuck you raw, like this? Did he make you come on his cock while thinking of me?”
“No—!” Will choked, his fingers scrambling for purchase on the polished wood.
“Liar!” Lucien hooked an arm around Will’s chest, hauling him up so his back was to Lucien’s chest. The angle changed, going deeper, harder. Will’s head fell back against Lucien’s shoulder, a strangled moan escaping his lips. “You loved it. You got hard for him. My pure, gentle Will.” He bit the juncture of Will’s neck and shoulder, not hard enough to break skin, but enough to mark. “You’re a filthy little slut for my brother’s cock, aren’t you?”
The obscenity, the accusation, seemed to shatter something in Will. A shudder wracked his body. His hand flew back, tangling in Lucien’s hair, not to push him away, but to hold him there. “Don’t stop,” he gasped, the words torn from him, thick with shame and a horrible, undeniable need. “God, please, don’t stop.”
The plea, so abject and desperate, unleashed something feral in Lucien. He drove into him, over and over, the clavichord rocking slightly with the force. He reached around, taking Will’s cock in his hand. It was fully hard, leaking pre-come. The evidence of his arousal, even now, even like this, was both a victory and a deeper betrayal.
“You want this,” Lucien gritted out, stroking him in time with his thrusts. “You want to be used. To be taken. He saw that in you, didn’t he? The thing you hide from me.”
“Yes,” Will sobbed, his body convulsing. “Yes, fuck, Lucien, I’m sorry—”
His apology was cut off by his own climax. He came with a broken cry, his release spurting over Lucien’s hand and the dark wood of the instrument below. The clenching, rhythmic pulses of his orgasm pulled Lucien over the edge. He buried his face in Will’s neck, a guttural roar muffled against his skin as he emptied himself deep inside, his thrusts becoming erratic, possessive jerks.
They collapsed together against the clavichord, a sweaty, trembling heap. The only sounds were their ragged breaths and the faint, dissonant hum of strings they’d disturbed.
The fury drained from Lucien as suddenly as it had come, leaving a cavernous, hollow shame. He was still inside Will, still holding him, their bodies joined in the most intimate way, yet he had never felt further from him. He had become the very thing he feared. He had used sex as a weapon, as a punishment, as a desperate, failing eraser.
He slowly pulled out. Will slumped forward over the clavichord, his shoulders shaking with silent tears.
Lucien righted his own clothes with clumsy hands. He looked at Will—half-naked, exposed, trembling—spent against the instrument he loved. A profound nausea rolled through him.
He reached out a trembling hand, placing it on Will’s bare back. The skin was fever-hot. “Will…”
Will flinched at the touch. He didn’t look up. “Just go,” he whispered, his voice shattered. “Please.”
Lucien’s hand fell away. He took a step back, then another. The distance between them felt impassable, a chasm of his own making. He had sought to purge Lysander’s ghost, and instead, he had invited it into the very center of their relationship, animating his own body with its cruelty.
He turned and left, closing the music room door softly behind him, leaving Will alone in the dark with the echoes of a violence that had, finally, stripped every beautiful lie away.
Will did not move for a long time. The cold wood pressed against his cheek, a stark contrast to the burning ache between his legs. Lucien’s release leaked from him, a warm, shameful trickle down his thigh. His own spend was a sticky patch on the clavichord’s lid. He stared at the grain of the wood, each line a path leading nowhere.
The silence was a physical weight. It was broken by the soft click of the door latch.
He didn’t have the strength to lift his head. Footsteps, hesitant and unfamiliar in this room, approached. They stopped a few feet away. Will heard a sharp intake of breath.
“Oh, Will.”
The voice was not Lucien’s. It was lower, calmer, frayed at the edges with a shock he couldn’t conceal. Blake. Of course. His twin’s quiet presence, always orbiting, always observing.
Will closed his eyes. This humiliation was complete.
Blake didn’t rush forward. He didn’t gasp or utter false platitudes. The rustle of fabric was him removing his own coat. Will felt the heavy, warm weight of it draped over his back and hips, covering his nakedness, the wool scratchy against his oversensitive skin. The simple, practical kindness of it unlocked something in his chest. A choked sob broke free.
“Easy,” Blake murmured. His hand rested, briefly and lightly, between Will’s shoulder blades. “Can you stand?”
Will pushed himself up, his muscles protesting. He clutched the coat around himself, keeping his back to his brother. He couldn’t face him. He stared at the wall, at a framed map of a kingdom that felt like a fairy tale he’d foolishly believed. “What are you doing here?”
“I heard the shouting. From the garden.” Blake’s voice was carefully neutral. “Then I saw him leave. He looked… destroyed.”
A harsh laugh scraped Will’s throat. “He’s destroyed.” He finally turned.
Blake’s face was a mask of controlled stillness, but his eyes gave him away. They held a deep, simmering fury, not at Will, but at the world that had allowed this. He took in Will’s tear-streaked face, the tremble in his hands, the darkening mark on his neck. His gaze dropped to the clavichord, to the evidence smeared on its surface. His jaw tightened.
“Did he—”
“Yes.” Will cut him off, the word final. He didn’t need to relive the specifics. The violation was in the air, in the disorder of the room, in his own shattered posture.
Blake stepped closer. He reached out, his fingers hovering near Will’s cheek before he let his hand fall, unsure. “This isn’t love, Will.”
“I know what it is.” Will’s voice was a dull monotone. He felt hollowed out, scraped clean. “He thought… he found out about Lysander.”
Blake went very still. “Found out what, exactly?”
The question hung there. Will looked at his brother—his twin, his mirror in so many ways, yet so different. Blake, who carried his own silent burdens, who watched Lysander with a hunger he thought no one saw. The confession, when it came, was barely a whisper. “That he fucked me. In the library. That I let him.”
Blake closed his eyes for a second, absorbing the blow. When he opened them, the fury was gone, replaced by a profound, weary sadness. “Oh, Will.” He didn’t ask why. He didn’t judge. He simply took Will’s elbow, his grip firm. “You can’t stay here. Not tonight.”
He guided Will toward the door, supporting his weight. Will leaned into him, the coat smelling of night air and Blake’s faint, familiar scent of ink and leather. It was the smell of home, of a life before crowns and princes and catastrophic love. As they passed the clavichord, Will’s eyes caught on the mess they’d made of it. His sanctuary was defiled. Just like him.
Blake led him not toward the royal wing, but down a servant’s staircase, narrow and dark. “My rooms are closer,” he said, his voice echoing softly off the stone. “No one will bother us.”
They didn’t speak again until Blake had him inside his modest chambers, the door bolted securely behind them. A fire glowed in the grate. Blake guided Will to the edge of the bed. “Wait,” he said, and disappeared into the adjoining washroom.
Will sat, the coat still wrapped tightly around him. He stared at his own grimy hands. He could still smell Lucien on his skin, sex and anger and rosewater. He began to shiver.
Blake returned with a basin of warm water and a soft cloth. He knelt on the floor before Will, his movements deliberate and gentle. “Let me,” he said, his voice leaving no room for argument.
He took Will’s hand and began to clean it, wiping away the dried, sticky evidence. The water was soothing. The care in Blake’s touch was unbearable. Will watched his brother’s bent head, the focused line of his brow. This was a kindness he did not deserve.
Blake moved to his other hand, then to his face, carefully dabbing at the tear tracks. He didn’t flinch from the bruise on Will’s neck. He simply cleaned around it, his touch feather-light. “You need to bathe,” he said finally, his voice rough. “Properly. Can you manage?”
Will nodded, mute.
Blake helped him stand, steadying him. He didn’t let go until Will was inside the small washroom, the basin of fresh water and a clean robe waiting for him. “Take your time,” Blake said through the door. “I’ll be right here.”
Will shed the coat and his ruined clothes. He looked at his reflection in the silvered glass. The man staring back was a stranger—pale, haunted, marked. He washed himself mechanically, scrubbing at his skin until it was pink and raw, trying to erase the feeling of Lucien’s hands, his accusation, his possession. The water swirled cloudy.
When he emerged in the robe, Blake was stoking the fire. He had set a glass of amber liquor on the bedside table. “Drink it,” he said, not turning around. “It’ll help you sleep.”
Will obeyed, the liquor burning a path of false warmth down his throat. He sat on the edge of the bed again. Blake finally turned, leaning against the mantle. The firelight cast moving shadows across his face.
“You have to leave,” Blake said. The statement was quiet, absolute.
Will looked at the liquid in his glass. “The wedding…”
“Is a trap.” Blake’s knuckles were white where he gripped the mantle. “This isn’t a misunderstanding, Will. It’s a pattern. It will get worse.” He pushed off from the fireplace and came to stand before him. “He used you. To punish Lysander. To punish you. To prove a point to himself. That’s not the man you agreed to marry.”
“I betrayed him,” Will whispered.
“You made a mistake,” Blake countered, his voice fierce. “One mistake. He just committed a crime against your body and your spirit in a room you built for beauty.” He knelt again, forcing Will to meet his eyes. “Listen to me. The boy who played duets with you in our mother’s garden is gone. The crown ate him. What’s left is something that hurts you and calls it love.”
The truth of it was a cold stone in Will’s gut. He thought of Lucien’s eyes, once bright with mischief, now dark with a jealous fire that consumed everything. He thought of the windowsill, the music room. The progression was clear.
“Where would I go?” The question felt pathetic.
“Anywhere.” Blake’s hand covered his. “I have money put aside. Not much, but enough. You could go to the coast. Lose yourself. Just for a while. Let him… let the court forget.”
The idea was a sip of air to a drowning man. Freedom. Silence. A room without ghosts. He looked at his brother, saw the fierce, protective love there, and something broke open inside him. The dam holding back his terror and grief shattered.
He began to cry, not silently this time, but with great, heaving sobs that wracked his whole body. Blake moved instantly, climbing onto the bed and pulling Will into his arms. He held him tightly, his chin resting on Will’s head, letting him shake apart.
“It’s okay,” Blake murmured into his hair, a repeated mantra. “You’re okay now. I’ve got you.”
Will clung to him, fingers digging into the fabric of his shirt. He cried for the loss of Lucien, for the violation by Lysander, for the future that lay in ashes, for his own fractured self. He cried until he was empty, until the sobs subsided into shaky breaths.
Eventually, Blake loosened his hold, guiding him down onto the pillows. He pulled the blankets over him. “Sleep,” he said, his voice firm. “We’ll figure the rest out in the morning.”
Exhaustion dragged Will under almost immediately. As he drifted, he felt Blake’s weight settle on the floor beside the bed, his back against the mattress, a steadfast sentinel in the dark. It was the last thing he knew—the solid, quiet presence of his brother, guarding him from the nightmares that surely waited. And for the first time in months, Will felt something akin to safety.