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“You called, my liege?” Kiyan leaned against the doorjamb, all lean muscles and pointed ease, a smirk playing around his mouth.
Adrien carefully put down the book he’d been perusing and lounged back on the chaise, raising one eyebrow. “I am certain I asked you to come into my chambers.”
Kiyan pretended to think about it for another few seconds, letting yet more warm air escape into the draughty corridor. “I don’t know,” he said, just as Adrien was ready to get up and physicals pull him into the room. “I don’t think your messenger relayed that part.”
Adrien narrowed his eyes in response.
Kiyan grinned, his sharp teeth gleaming in the flickering firelight, but finally entered the room proper and sunk into soft loveseat across from the chaise. “So eager to see me?” he asked teasingly.
He was a sight for sore eyes, hale as far as Adrien could tell and with his hair grown out so it just brushed his shoulders, loose and freshly washed and oiled. But admitting such would be a weakness unbecoming of a prince, even if it relaxed something inside Adrien that he liked to pretend wasn’t coiled whenever Kiyan was gone.
“You didn’t come to me.”
It wasn’t an accusation or a plea, but Kiyan’s striking features softened nonetheless.
“I came in rather late, and in rather dire need of a bath. It didn’t seem sensible to disturb you then.”
Adrien arched one eyebrow. “Since when have you cared about sensibility?”
“I may not care, but your servants had other opinions.”
Adrien grimaced and pushed himself up to pour the tea he had ordered when word had reached him of his visitor. He would have to talk to them about sending Kiyan his way immediately, propriety be damned; he’d rather be improper than worry longer than necessary that this would be the time Kiyan didn’t return from his Witchering business.
“How long are you to stay?”
Kiyan accepted the cup and took a sip that would have burnt an ordinary man’s mouth. But he wasn’t ordinary, and Adrien felt a different heat spread through him at the reminder. He pushed it down. Plans had to come first; there were a myriad of things he wanted to do, but which and their order depended on how much time they had together.
“Winter is bad for business,” Kiyan said, carefully nonchalant.
Adrien stopped breathing for just a moment until he had himself under control again. “Is that so?”
“The cold makes everyone sluggish, not just you humans. I could… be persuaded to stay. Until spring, even.”
To a casual observer, Kiyan was the epitome of relaxed and unconcerned. Adrien wasn’t a casual observer, though, and so he saw the fraying edges, the seams of Kiyan’s composure threatening to split apart.
“Is that so?” he asked again, voice carefully neutral. He’d been rebuffed once, after all, and he wasn’t in the habit of committing the same mistake twice.
Kiyan drained his cup and shrugged as he placed it on the side table. “Dembich is also looking for crew.”
It took every ounce of Adrien’s will power not to hurl his own cup across the room. Instead, he set it down with carefully precise movements before he crossed over to the loveseat.
“You will not hold that bastard over my head again,” he hissed, looming over Kiyan to the best of his abilities.
The Witcher only raised a mocking eyebrow, his green eyes gleaming like those of his clan’s namesake. “Or?”
“Or you will not be welcome here again.”
There was an even chance it was an empty threat, and they both knew it. He had tried, more than once, to keep Kiyan away, but his resolve had never lasted until the Witcher had shown on his doorstep again, sometimes bloodied, sometimes thin, often cocky and with a frantic energy thrumming under his skin that resulted in an excellent performance between the sheets. Not that Adrien was in the habit of telling Kiyan that.
Kiyan met his gaze lazily. “You’re pretty when you make such threats,” he drawled.
Before Adrien could come up with a reply, Kiyan’s hands shot out, pulling him into the Witcher’s lap like he weighed nothing. His rage morphed dizzyingly into lust – or fused, rather, still broiling under the surface but with a different flavour of it.
“So pretty,” Kiyan purred, “and all for me.”
Adrien wanted to argue, but found that to be rather impossible with Kiyan’s mouth on his, sharp teeth nipping at his lips just shy of actual pain. What other recourse did he have but funnel all this turmoil inside him into the kiss?
It was messy; angry and harsh and desperate, months of pent up lust and infuriating worry pouring into the space between them, breaking through in the form of hands pulling on hair and nails raking over skin. It hurt – it was heaven. Adrien relished in the permission to give as good as he got – to give everything he had with no regard for the consequence, because Kiyan was a force of nature, an immovable object, unflappable until he came apart underneath Adrien’s hands.
They lay together afterwards, still on the cramped loveseat, bodily fluids cooling uncomfortably between them.
“If this was your persuasion,” Kiyan said after a while, his nails scritching through Adrien’s hair and leeching all motivation to move out of him, “consider it successful.”
Adrien growled and bit the Witcher’s throat, for all that it was ineffectual and would be healed too quickly regardless. “You should beg me to stay here.”
Kiyan remained quiet for a while but continued his petting, and Adrien didn’t have it in him to stay angry at the attempted extortion.
“Cats don’t beg,” Kiyan finally said quietly, not so much meekly as deferring to the intimacy of their position. “And we don’t stay where we’re not welcome. If I remain here for the winter, it will be by choice, not out of necessity.”
Adrien’s hands clenched on Kiyan’s skin in a way that would have left bruises on anyone else. He didn’t say ‘You’re mine,’ or ‘I command you to stay.’ It would only make Kiyan get up and leave, return weeks later if not months. It wasn’t only that Cats did not beg or stay where they weren’t welcome. They also eschewed anything resembling chains, and that had been a painful lesson but one that Adrien was disinclined to require twice.
“I distinctly remember you begging rather beautifully for me on the Solstice,” he said instead.
Kiyan laughed. “We don’t beg for scraps,” he amended.
His arms were heavy and warm around Adrien, and it almost made the words palatable. “Your chambers are open if you want them.” He scraped his teeth over Kiyan’s collar bone, sucking the skin into his mouth to get rid of the taste. “And so are mine.”
“See,” Kiyan said, like he had any claim on the high ground here, “was that so hard?”
Adrien bit down until he tasted blood.
Kiyan laughed again, but it sounded slightly strangled. “If this is supposed to be punishment, I’m not sure it’s working,” he said, baring more of his throat for Adrien.
“Then maybe it wasn’t,” Adrien said huskily, which apparently was all the invitation Kiyan needed to leave such unpleasant topics behind.
It wasn’t until much, much later that he remembered the pumpkin pie the servants had prepared. The cream was melted by then, but it was well worth it, in Adrien’s not at all humble opinion.
They had months of good food and each other’s company ahead of them, and what was one bowl of whipped cream in the face of that?
Four weeks later, they received word that the Flying Stag, vessel of the esteemed Captain Dembich, had run into a freak storm and sunk, leaving no survivors.
Adrien didn’t bother with pretence; he clung to Kiyan and let himself be held in return and couldn’t help but think about how close he’d come to losing him, just because neither of them could outright ask for what he wanted.
“So,” Kiyan said, much later, once they’d both stopped shaking, “about that bodyguard position…”