Hart of Winter

by Parker Foye

  Lentowicz cursebreakers.

  Only Rob’s quick actions stopped Luc falling off the bed as he braced Luc with an arm across his chest. “Hang on just a second—”

  For a wild moment Luc almost bit Rob’s arm to get him to release him. A shred of rationality stopped him. He grabbed the staying arm and held on, ordering his galloping heart to calm and making sure his black fingernails couldn’t be seen. Rob had arranged them at the head of the bed with Luc sitting between Rob’s legs. Luc remembered feeling protected by Rob’s embrace, but in the present moment, he felt exposed. Like Rob held him in place.

  Luc took in a huge breath and held it, glancing toward the window as he did. The sun still sat high, and there were many people on the piste. He had hours until sunset. He let out his breath slowly and realized everyone in the room waited on him. Heat rushed to his cheeks, and he wrinkled his nose.

  “Hi,” he managed to say.

  Behind him Rob’s chest moved like he held in a laugh. Luc discreetly elbowed him. A sudden image flashed to mind, and he looked down, but at some point Rob had gotten dressed. Damn it.

  “Are you planning to react poorly again?” the older woman asked, the camera tracking her as she walked around the bed.

  Luc hesitated. “Are you—are you speaking to me?”

  She shook her head. “To my son.”

  Luc tried to still his expression even as his heart beat frantically against his sternum. Meeting the famous cursebreaking parents already. Awesome. Definitely something he was prepared to do less than twenty-four hours after his curse exploded. Super great.

  As if sensing Luc’s distress, Rob tightened his arm around him. He moved his other hand to Luc’s hip and smoothed circles there with his thumb. Luc wanted to be annoyed but couldn’t be.

  “If you hadn’t blasted in, I wouldn’t’ve ‘reacted poorly,’” Rob said. “You’re the one who taught me to defend myself.”

  “I’m also the one who’ll be paying for the damage, I suppose,” his mother replied. Without waiting for a response, she circled the bed again and waved at their audience. “You won’t be needed, it seems. And, Portia, before you go, may I see the camera?”

  Portia, the camerawoman, handed it over with a resigned expression. “Just don’t damage it too bad this time, okay?”

  “Yes, yes.”

  Withdrawing the thing from her hair—definitely a stiletto knife—Rob’s mother tapped the camera with it while muttering something under her breath that made magic prickle over Luc’s skin like an all-body attack of pins and needles. Pressure built in the room and pressed at his temples until it suddenly released in a pop as a small curl of smoke puffed from the camera. Portia winced but took her camera back and nodded to Luc and Rob before leaving the room, the other Lentowicz following her out and closing the door behind them.

  The door, Luc noticed, didn’t quite fit back on the frame. And it bore a large scorch mark in a shape reminiscent of Italy that hadn’t been there before.

  Suddenly the talk about “paying for the damage” made sense.

  Rob’s mother replaced the blade in her hair in efficient motions, then sat in the armchair. Luc wondered if he should get up, rather than continue to lounge in her son’s embrace, but as there wasn’t anywhere else he wanted to be, he decided against it. He slid his hand over Rob’s on his hip and interlaced their fingers, still holding Rob’s bracing arm with the other. Behind him, Rob made a happy humming noise and dropped his chin onto Luc’s shoulder, pressing a kiss under his hair.

  “Luc, this is my mother, Marta Lentowicz. Mother, this is Luc Marling,” Rob said.

  Luc waved with their joint hands. “Nice to meet you.” He cleared his throat so as not to make his statement a question.

  “I’m sure it is,” Marta said.

  Rob snorted in Luc’s ear. “She’s a very loving mother,” he whispered. “Just bad with people.”

  “I’m sitting right here.”

  “And I’m sure you remember the thing with the Estonian ambassador as well as I do.”

  To Luc’s surprise, a faint flush rose to Marta’s cheeks. She looked away. “How was I to know she’d had a traumatic jellyfish experience?”

  “How were you—You shouldn’t have started with the story in the first place!” Rob laughed. “Honestly,” he said, lowering his voice for Luc alone. “Don’t let her scare you.”

  “It’s not so much a ‘let’ kind of thing,” Luc muttered.

  Marta shifted, drawing their attention to her. She waved one hand airily as if scrubbing their previous conversation from the room. “It matters not. You have nothing to fear from my family, Luc Marling. I apologize for the… inconvenience our magic caused you. We will… take more care in the future, should you and my son continue your… relationship.”

  That was a lot of ellipses.

  “I have never wanted to be somewhere else as hard as I do right now,” Rob said, but since he didn’t let go of Luc, Luc didn’t take it personally.

  “Robert Lentowicz, you are—”

  The two Lentowiczs started to bicker in the way Luc was familiar with from his own family, and in response, his heart lowered from the moon, and he relaxed more fully into Rob’s embrace. The Lentowiczs weren’t like Harriet fucking Nessom and her lot—although he was beginning to doubt whether even Harriet fucking Nessom was as he first feared, after the thing the other day—but the Lentowiczs were a family, and they didn’t want to hurt him. Marta had even destroyed the tape from them bursting into the hotel room, which presumably had recorded Luc reacting badly to their magic. She hadn’t even waited for him to ask. Just done it. And it didn’t seem to be a show for Luc’s benefit.

  Luc smiled. He twisted around to kiss Rob’s cheek, effectively stopping whatever rant he’d been in the middle of with his mother.

  “Thank you,” Luc said.

  Rob blinked. “You’re welcome?”

  Luc smiled at Marta. “Thank you for getting rid of the video. I’ve never seen magic work on digital before.”

  Expression a little confused, Marta shrugged. “We had to create it for the shows, of course. Too many of the family get excited when a camera points at them, and we have secrets like anyone else. We have things we wish to protect.”

  Luc felt Rob stiffen behind him and thought back to Rob’s confession about his cursebreaking skills, or lack thereof. Evidently there hadn’t been time for a family discussion on that, if his reaction was any indication. Luc leaned more heavily onto Rob in an attempt to comfort him like Rob comforted him in turn.

  Before he could respond to Marta, she clapped her hands on her legs and rose to her feet. “In any case, there are things I must attend to while I’m here. Paperwork, so I’m told, waits for no one. I will speak with my son later.” Raised eyebrows and a pointed expression accompanied this; then she looked at Luc. “It was nice to meet you. I’m sure we will speak again.”

  “I’d like that,” Luc said before he’d had chance to think of a polite lie. If he sounded surprised, the Lentowiczs didn’t comment.

  Marta left the hotel room, closing the door behind her. Luc lingered in Rob’s embrace, intending to move about quarter past never. He felt drained from losing the stress he’d been carrying, a damp doll in Rob’s arms. But sexy. Much sexier than that.

  Distracted by his thoughts, it took Luc a moment to realize Rob traced feathery kisses across the nape of his neck. As soon as Luc noticed, every part of him paid attention. His skin tingled under the brush of Rob’s lips, and his breath caught when Rob worried his skin in playful nips, the sensation going straight to Luc’s dick. He tightened his hand on Rob’s arm around his waist, which he had never moved, and glanced at the door.

  “Should we lock that?”

  Rob growled. The sound made Luc’s dick throb, and he shifted to spread his legs wider.

  “I know two dozen hexes, and my aim isn’t bad,” Rob said, the words damp against Luc’s sensitive skin.

  Luc arched his neck to give Rob
better access. “I thought you didn’t do cursebreaking so well?”

  “Nah, but I’m not bad at the other stuff.”

  “Really?”

  “I’ll tell you later, if you want. For now…. For now I want to see you come.”

  Luc gestured toward where his dick tented his jeans. “By all means, have at it.”

  “Let me—one sec.”

  Rob moved them both to his satisfaction, with Luc happy to be putty in his hands. They ended with Luc’s back against the headboard and Rob on his knees before him. They would’ve been quicker about it, but Rob kept pausing for kisses, and then Luc had to get rid of his jeans and insisted Rob get rid of his sweatpants in turn. And that seemed silly if they had T-shirts on, so finally they were completely naked apart from their respective blushes. Luc felt strung out like spun sugar, fragile and ready to break.

  “Are you just going to look?” he asked Rob. Luc wrapped his hand around his dick, but Rob knocked it away. The touch made Luc’s nerves zing.

  “I told you,” Rob said. He licked the palm of his hand, grinning at the way Luc groaned, and paused above Luc’s dick. “I’m going to watch you come. Can I touch you?”

  “I wish you fucking would—Rob!” Luc swore as Rob took firm hold of his dick and started jacking him to full hardness. “Keep going. Fuck, that’s good.”

  Carefully Rob moved to straddle Luc’s leg. His weight grounded Luc from floating into the stratosphere, which was needed as Rob put his not-inconsiderable efforts toward making Luc lose his mind. He claimed a kiss from Luc’s willing lips, and Luc gasped into Rob’s mouth, mumbling something even he didn’t understand, the words becoming vibrations as Rob sucked on Luc’s tongue. In response Rob jerked Luc faster, and Luc clutched desperately at his biceps.

  “I’ve been thinking about this for days,” Rob said, his voice confessional.

  Luc opened his eyes, unsure when he’d closed them. Rob was looking down at his hand on Luc’s dick. Following his eyeline, Luc’s hips jerked at the sight of bruised knuckles holding one of his most vulnerable parts, and a groan spilled from him before he could stop it. Rob stroked him thoughtfully, testing but not teasing, and rubbed the liquid back into the tip of Luc’s cock.

  “You’re killing me here, Rob.” Heat prickled in Luc’s hairline like the curse about to break over him, but if it was a curse, he’d happily give himself to it. “Let me come. Please.”

  Rob licked his lips and dragged his heavy gaze to Luc’s face. “I want you to come in my mouth.”

  “Then you better hurry up, or you’ll miss the show,” Luc managed to say. His balls were already drawn tight, and the weight of Rob’s attention didn’t help matters. No one had ever looked at Luc the way Rob did, like they saw all of him and didn’t mind. Like they could keep looking forever.

  “You’re so fucking beautiful,” Rob muttered as he slid down the bed. “Do you have any idea what you look like?”

  “Sweaty?”

  Rather than dignify Luc with an answer, Rob braced himself with his hands on Luc’s hips, pressing his thumbs against Luc’s hipbones, and leaned in to lick up the side of Luc’s dick. When Luc jerked instinctively, Rob went with it, loosening his grip so Luc had freedom to move, and watching him hungrily until Luc settled. Luc wanted Rob’s mouth back on him. He smoothed his hand back through Rob’s hair.

  “Go on, then,” he said.

  Rob laughed. “Such a brat.”

  “Shut up. I’m adorable. Get to work.”

  Rob grinned like Luc had passed a test, and went to work, tracing the vein on the underside of Luc’s dick and pressing the flat of his tongue under the head, then laying in to suck in earnest. Luc let his head loll back but kept watching his dick disappear beyond the stretched line of Rob’s luscious lips.

  The world faded beneath Rob’s touch, and Luc moaned and whined embarrassingly as he bucked into Rob’s clever mouth. Luc fisted the sheets as heat pooled in his center and shot through his muscles.

  “I’m gonna come,” he bit out. “I’m—Rob, Rob, that’s so good!”

  Rob backed off, stroking Luc through an orgasm that felt like someone had clubbed him with a two-by-four, until he became too sensitive and flapped ineffectually at Rob’s hands. Taking the hint, Rob climbed up the bed to sprawl over Luc’s legs. They panted into the sex-stale air, sweat cooling on their skin.

  “You want me to get you?” Luc asked, words blurry. He stroked lightly through Rob’s hair, his hand moving with no input from his brain.

  “That’s fine.”

  Luc frowned and twisted his neck to meet Rob’s eyes. “What?”

  Red splashed across Rob’s face, and he buried his face into the sheets. “Give me a bit. You can get me then.”

  It took Luc’s postorgasm brain a moment to understand, slowing his hand in stroking Rob’s hair until Rob bumped pointedly into his palm. When Luc understood Rob’s meaning, the resulting smirk could’ve rivaled magelights for illumination.

  “You came from sucking my cock? Really?” Luc didn’t know the last time that’d happened. He curled his toes into the sheets.

  “Shut up,” Rob replied, muffled by the sheets.

  “I kind of want a cigarette.”

  Rob lifted his head to glare, his hair sticking up in tufts and a blush staining his cheeks. “Shut up, Luc. If you weren’t the size of my first car, I’d fight you for my honor.”

  “But you’d lose,” Luc said, pleased. He grinned when Rob rolled his eyes and lay back down.

  “You have about a thousand years to stop doing that, by the way,” Rob said, nudging into Luc’s hand again.

  Luc obeyed and got to work, a grin stealing onto his lips as he did. Rob was seriously kind of perfect.

  DAYS were shorter without the cuffs. After returning the favor with Rob—Luc believed in paying debts, especially pleasurable ones—Luc returned to the chalet. He kept his eyes open for anyone following. An itchy feeling settled between his shoulder blades like a pulled muscle and made him tense as he walked through the village. Marta Lentowicz had helped settle some of Luc’s worries, but he’d spent a lifetime with them, and it would take more than one meeting to assuage his concerns.

  But the meeting had helped, as did Rob seeing Luc’s other form. It had been over a decade since anyone had seen Luc change; he was a leggy fawn back then, according to family legend, and he never given any thought to what the intervening years might do to his other form. He’d spent so long trying to detach himself from the idea of having a second shape that he managed to force the physicality of it almost entirely from his consciousness. He remembered only its shadows, like his nails and scars.

  In a brief fit of bad decision-making, he went online. Official metaschemata websites held limited information about cursebearers, and in desperation, Luc turned to Wikipedia, only to promptly exit from the pages with equal desperation. He’d never experienced a rut and didn’t want to examine whether he felt cheated about it or not.

  After all his research, Luc wondered at the things he didn’t know or had taken for granted and never reexamined. The incident with collectors—hunters, whichever—as a kid was formative, but had he outgrown the need to fear? Not subconsciously, perhaps, but logically. Should he let the fear control his life when, according to Rob, Luc had antlers any mother would be proud of? And the will to use them?

  Luc imagined a line of stags in combat paint as he walked, and he snickered under his breath until the familiar itchiness thrummed beneath his skin and his teeth began to ache as he drew nearer to the chalet. When he turned the corner, he frowned to see floating magelights around the high windows. Someone had decorated the chalet with craft.

  As he continued to frown at the chalet, the front door opened, and Eloise stepped outside. “I can explain. The guests are craft. They didn’t mention it when they booked, which is a violation of our terms, but with it being Solstice week, we didn’t want empty rooms. It’s a total nightmare and Amandine is fuming, but—”

  �
��Eloise—hey, Eloise, it’s okay,” Luc broke in when Eloise paused for breath. He wrapped his sister in a hug.

  Eloise hugged him back. “You’re sure?”

  Luc broke their embrace and shoved his hands in his pockets. One of the magelights flickered—bad connection—and his eye twitched at the sensation, but he shoved it back and waggled his eyebrows at his sister.

  “You charged them extra, right?”

  Eloise glanced over her shoulder, then back to him. She lowered her voice. “Of course we did.”

  “That’s why you’re my favorite sister.”

  “I’m your only…. Why do I bother, honestly.”

  Luc grinned. He walked inches taller than when he left the chalet that morning, bowed under worry about Rob and the curse and his future. The sight of the tapestry back in place made him pause before he headed to wave to the guests and accept a peck on the cheek from Amandine, wondering how he could’ve changed so much in mere hours. Something must have seemed different to others too since he caught Eloise watching him as he moved through the chalets toward a well-deserved shower.

  Had the cuffs really changed him so much for their absence to be felt so keenly?

  Or was it something else? Something more Rob-shaped?

  As sunset seeped in through his bedroom window, where he and Eloise had hastily shoved their furniture to the outside walls, Luc decided he didn’t care to discover the reason behind his change.

  Luc had spent his life trying to avoid his fate. He’d left schools, towns, jobs, and his country trying to avoid what life chose for him. And yet halfway up a mountain, where he barely got phone reception, where he shared a Better Homes rustic-edition bedroom with his sister, and where he’d literally crashed into the man of his dreams, fate found him anyway.