Chapter 50

Even by the standards of a prince renowned for icy pragmatism, it was an exceptionally cynical and brutal assessment.

Standing silently before the desk, Gosrick recalled the beleaguered prince’s wife.

More than a decade younger than her gluttonous husband, she had been named the royal prince’s official fiancée before she was even born. Secure in that ironclad political arrangement, the King’s eldest son had spent years wallowing in unchecked debauchery, casually excusing his vile conduct with the flimsy claim that he was merely waiting for his betrothed to come of age.

By the time the wedding finally took place, the prince had already fathered at least seven illegitimate children. Lady Airi had possessed every legal and moral justification required to exercise her aristocratic authority and reject the tainted marriage.

Yet she had not rejected him.

Endless, venomous whispers had predictably followed the impossibly grand royal wedding. Most of the gossiping court claimed that Lady Airi, once renowned for her unshakable strength of character, had simply coveted the glittering promise of becoming the future Queen.

On that particular wedding day, however, Gosrick had seen nothing more than a terrified and overwhelmed child standing at the altar, and he severely doubted he had been alone in that impression.

Stripped of her jewels and silks, she had looked exactly like a young girl making a catastrophic, life-ruining decision, utterly carried away by the blinding illusion of first love.

Almost every child in the world made some painful variation of that same mistake. Lady Airi’s supreme misfortune lay entirely in her elevated station, which had transformed an ordinary heartbreak into a political decision with kingdom-shaking consequences.

“The human heart does not always obey our logical wishes, does it?” Gosrick ventured, his tone deliberately cautious.

The prince’s sharp eyes widened for the briefest instant. He stared at his adjutant as though he had just heard something utterly preposterous. Then a soft and dangerously deceptive smile touched Lucien’s lips.

The royal prince rarely smiled in that particular, lethal manner at anyone outside his innermost circle of assassins and confidants. Every muscle in Gosrick’s aging body tightened involuntarily.

“Has that pathetic loss of control happened often to you?” Mockery dripped like slow poison from each measured word. “Has your fragile heart frequently refused to obey your superior intellect?”

Of course, Gosrick thought wearily. Naturally, that venom is exactly what would come out of his mouth.

The veteran adjutant stared at his royal liege in prolonged silence. Governed by the tangled and bastardized logic of royal blood, Lucien was technically some convoluted manner of nephew to him.

It had become terribly easy to forget the difference in their ages now that the young prince had grown into such a coldly composed and terrifyingly imposing man. Yet Lucien was barely a few years older than the tragic Lady Airi.

Choosing wisely to ignore the vicious barb, Gosrick bowed and turned toward the heavy oak doors. “One encounters all manner of unpredictable things over the course of a long life, Your Highness. With your royal permission, I shall take my leave.”

“Wait.”

The command stopped him at once.

Lucien’s voice sounded tight, despite the aggressive disinterest he had displayed toward continuing their conversation only a heartbeat earlier.

“That…”

He drew out the single syllable through a clenched jaw, hesitating with a fractured uncertainty entirely unlike his usual commanding manner.

Gosrick paused and glanced back over his shoulder. “Is something wrong, Your Highness?”

“Could you discreetly obtain some manner of medicinal draught for erectile dysfunction?”

“I beg your pardon?”

Gosrick’s stoic expression contorted violently, as though he had just been forced at sword point to hear a forbidden and accursed secret.

Breaking eye contact, Lucien turned toward the flickering fireplace in an exceptionally rare display of physical discomfort. Genuine shame seldom troubled the ruthless prince, but even he found it nearly impossible to raise such a humiliatingly personal subject aloud. Still, if there was a single soul in the blood-soaked capital whom he could trust implicitly with a matter this sensitive, it was Gosrick.

“Do you require the medicine for yourself?” Gosrick’s voice became utterly flat and professional. “Are you currently experiencing unexpected difficulties with your royal sexual function?”

“No.”

Lucien scowled, then closed his eyes in pure irritation. Impotence would have been vastly easier to manage if that had been the actual problem.

“I require the exact opposite. I am asking you to procure a drug that suppresses the function entirely rather than restoring it. I need something that chemically prevents an erection.”

The adjutant’s horrified expression did not improve in the slightest. “Forgive my boldness in overstepping, Your Highness, but why in the name of the heavens would a healthy young man willingly require such a crippling thing? If you merely need a discreet and silent partner who will leave no political complications behind…”

Once base sexual desire has been properly satisfied, it generally subsides to a manageable level, Gosrick reasoned. Besides, was a calculated degree of romantic profligacy not actively encouraged in virile men of royal blood?

“When did I ever say I needed a bed partner?” Lucien snapped, sweeping his dark hair back from his forehead in glaring displeasure.

As though he did not already know the simplest biological remedy to his problem.

Lucien understood the mechanics of his own body perfectly well. One of the unspoken requirements for being officially acknowledged as the rightful heir to any feudal lord involved definitive proof that one’s sexual function operated normally. For the heir to a reigning king, the matter was a thousand times more important.

He simply did not want to have sex at present. He refused to couple with anyone at all.

“That damned mage keeps asking to see me alone at night. What the hell am I supposed to do?” Lucien glared at his adjutant, his eyes burning with exhausted fury. “I would far rather take a crippling medicine than lose control.”

“I apologize for my confusion, sire, but which mage do you mean?”

“Is there some other captive mage residing in my palace whom I could possibly be referring to?”

Thus, despite desiring the beautiful mage with terrifying intensity, Lucien harbored no intention whatsoever of sleeping with him, or with anyone else. Clinically acknowledging the existence of a violent, potion-induced sexual urge and surrendering his iron will to satisfy it were entirely different and mutually exclusive matters.

To be perfectly honest with himself, the humiliating problem had consumed a considerable portion of his waking thoughts lately. It had perhaps distracted him even more than the intricate and bloody schemes he was devising to assassinate his half-brothers one by one.

The original incident that had begun this mess, that singular and unforgettable mistake in his bedchamber, had not been an especially pleasant or romantic experience.

On that particular fateful day, Lucien had mistaken the intruder for a high-priced male prostitute sent as a bribe by one of his rival half-brothers. Under that assumption, the prince had been more than willing to use him brutally. The overwhelming and toxic effects of the goddamned potion had almost certainly stripped away the last remnants of his royal restraint.

Lucien did not ordinarily prefer rough or bruising sex.

Nevertheless, he had judged with perfect aristocratic coldness that there was no harm in behaving selfishly toward a purchased sex prostitute who had supposedly arrived for that express and sordid purpose. A single look at the man’s breathtaking face had even driven the usually patient prince into frantic impatience.

The startling discovery that the supposed prostitute was male had disconcerted him for only a fleeting moment. Aside from that minor detail, sex was merely sex.

If Lucien tried the boy once and found his body satisfactory, he had reasoned, he could simply keep him tied securely to the bedposts rather than return him to Bastian’s faction. He could lock the beautiful creature permanently inside his private chambers, then arrange matters so seamlessly that the outside world believed the prostitute had vanished into the night.

If Bastian misunderstood the silence and concluded that Lucien had ruthlessly murdered the man, that violent assumption would serve as a perfectly acceptable diplomatic outcome as well.

Then, to Lucien’s mounting horror, he discovered that the mage had not come disguised as a sex prostitute at all.

Even the famously unflappable and cold-blooded prince had been thoroughly caught off guard by the revelation.

No, Lucien thought, a sour taste coating his tongue. In all honesty, rape has never held the slightest appeal for me.

“If a catastrophic accident like that happens again, it will create enormous political and personal problems in more ways than one,” Lucien muttered into the quiet room.

The true difficulty lay in the terrifying fact that he could no longer guarantee his own sovereign self-control.

Like most arrogant nonhumans dealing with mortal men, the mage possessed a maddening habit of charming people without the slightest restraint, and his breathtaking, unearthly beauty provided him with more than enough lethal ammunition to sustain that appalling tendency.

Had the lunatic not walked straight up to Lucien and brazenly kissed him when the sleeping draught caused trouble the last time?

Of course, that unexpected and intoxicating boldness had prompted Lucien to continue the physical habit selectively ever since. Kissing amounted to little more than wetly sucking at each other’s mouths in the dark. It pleased them both, remained strictly within his physical control, and was highly unlikely to leave any lasting bitterness or resentment between them.

Anything beyond that boundary, however, crossed a far more dangerous and irreversible line.

Regardless of his surging desires, Lucien had found himself trapped in a precarious balancing act. He needed to coax the captive mage gently, win his unwavering trust with care, and meticulously engineer circumstances that would make the nonhuman fall completely and hopelessly in love with him.

“I will quietly investigate the apothecary networks, Your Highness,” Gosrick finally replied, looking utterly exhausted by the conversation. “Though I cannot say with any certainty whether such a heinous and counterintuitive medicine even exists.”

Did virile men not generally wish to keep their cocks hard even while bleeding out at death’s door?

In all his long decades of service, Gosrick had never encountered a healthy man who actively wished to smother that most primal biological instinct through chemical force. He could not help thinking that chemical castration was hardly the wisest or most sustainable solution to the prince’s romantic predicament.

Only a few tense moments earlier, the arrogant prince had viciously mocked him by asking whether his heart often refused to obey his logic. Now, in a stroke of brilliant cosmic irony, Lucien’s own royal body stood in open and undeniable rebellion against his conscious wishes.

Gosrick grumbled inwardly as he suppressed a weary sigh.

My master may look dignified and terrifying enough in the throne room, but beneath all that cold political calculation, he is still not particularly old at all.

***