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He had found that the trick, when everyone thought you were always watching them, was to not watch them at all.
And so the Emperor slept.
“My Lord.”
Solus did not open his eyes or lift the arm thrown over his face as he sighed. “You need not whisper, boy.”
Gaius huffed a low noise, not far from a laugh. He held amusement like that, in little chuffing noises, like the wolf his rivals called him when they thought he wasn’t listening. The door whispered closed behind him and his footsteps moved inside, into the now-empty dining room, the couches vacated hours ago by the guests Solus had ignored from the moment of their arrival.
“Now, Your Radiance, oughtn’t we to keep the façade?”
“Façade?” Solus snorted. “If any one of them truly thought I slept, they deserve their guts for garters.” Gaius’s steady footsteps crossed the room, his uniform boots clicking against the marble floors. Even with his eyes closed, Solus could visualize the way he moved. He had grown again of late, taller now than Solus himself was, his shoulders at last matching the barrel width of his chest; as his weight had balanced out, economy of motion had led to his already long stride elongating further.
Like a wolf.
The footsteps went down the stairs into the lowered space for the fountain at the center of the room, then climbed back up until Gaius bent over his emperor where he lay, struck down by his own better graces. He had no need to get up. The petty plots that had filled the air tonight were, by and large, meaningless. They would all come to nothing, and that was without his having to nudge any pawns.
The cushions flattened beneath Gaius’s weight, one knee pressed hard against Solus’s thigh. He bent, one hand curled around the back of the couch; the other, almost proprietary, at his Emperor’s hip. “My Lord,” he said again, and this time, the timbre of his voice was securely in the vicinity of desire.
Solus sighed with mock distaste. “Oh, very well.” He gestured vaguely with the fingers of one hand, neither beckoning his Tribunus closer nor sending him away. “If you must.”
Midway through, speared comfortably open on the girth of his Tribunus’s cock, Solus frowned. Above him, Gaius stilled, chest rising and falling with the force of his exertion. “My Lord?” He was breathless; almost sweetly so. “Is there—discomfort?”
“Discomfort?” It took a moment for the question to process, and then Solus could only smile. “No. Continue, Tribunus.”
Gaius returned to his deep, even thrusting. For not the first time, Solus congratulated himself on a job very well done in selecting this man for greatness. He struck sparks whichever way he turned, as well suited for the bedroom as he was for the battlefield. He would certainly make the future interesting, no matter which way he turned his blade.
Solus waited until Gaius had begun to gasp with exertion before he spoke. “I wonder, Tribunus, if you might indulge me?” The response was a grunt which, quite concisely, determined that indulgence was already happening, but that the question would be honored in the spirit it was intended.
He would have continued anyway. With this tacit approval from his hard-working Tribunus, it would not disrupt their coitus.
“Do you ever wonder if perhaps you have made yourself too easy?”
For a single heartbeat, Gaius stilled, his cock hard and throbbing faintly where he was hilted, the muscles of his powerful forearms shaking. He took a few short breaths. “Easy, Radiance?”
Solus waved a hand. “No need to stop on my behalf. Finish your work, there’s a lad.” Only once Gaius had returned to fucking him did he continue. “Easy.” He didn’t open his eyes while he enjoyed the physical show of aborted force as his wolf refused to allow himself to tug at the lead. “As in, not difficult. As in, simple. As in, clear to the outside observer.”
Another two short breaths. “No, Radiance.” He was straining now, struggling against the base need for friction and the much greater and more powerful need to not anger the Emperor of Garlemald. “I would—never say you are anything like easy. You are a singularly difficult man.”
Solus tutted. “Now, Tribunus. That sounds dangerously close to insubordination.”
The laugh this got was closer to a bark. Close as their bodies were, it was a physical thing, tangling deep in Gaius’s diaphragm before it burst out of him, a pressure valve released. “Never, Radiance. I only meant that—“ There was a brief pause as Gaius, halfway breathless, reasserted the pace between them. He was trembling. He was close. “You understand the... inherent complexities. Of the dynamic systems of the world.”
“‘Inherent complexities,’” Solus repeated, at last cracking one eye. Gaius was crouched above him, in uniform but without his helmet, looking terribly undone. His pupils were blown out so wide that his eyes seemed, in the low light, to be only whites, irises so pale they were invisible. His mouth was open to gasp, a faint flush visible across his cheeks only up close. Sweat beaded at his hairline, catching in the short strands. “If you can still manage words like that, I am clearly doing something wrong.” To emphasize his point, he clenched up tight, and watched the wince as it wrung its way through Gaius, landing at the tightest point of his shoulders.
“N-Never wrong.” Gaius’s teeth were grit. Just to test his composure, Solus shifted his hips, bringing them closer together, and sighed at the way the motion reminded him of just how full he was. “I must hold myself to a—higher standard.”
“You must,” Solus agreed. Gaius’s hips hitched forward, the thrust dragging a low moan out of Solus’s chest.
Clearly, he had picked the right dog to train, because rather than question the open-ended nature of his order, Gaius continued to speak as well.
“I meant, Radiance, that you are difficult to anticipate.” His last word was halfway to a grunt of effort, his pace steady but deep, every thrust strong enough to make the breath catch in Solus’s throat. “You keep everyone on their toes. You are unpredictable.”
“Does that unpredictability itself not make me easy to predict?” Solus was breathless too, now. It was, quite frankly, difficult to be fucked so thoroughly by a man as endowed as his Tribunus Angusticlavius and not become out of breath. “I played pretense at sleep over dinner and yet all my guests continued about their business of plotting my downfall, knowing I was listening.”
“I think, Your Radiance, that you give greater credit than is due.” Gaius adjusted his position to get his hand beneath Solus’s robe, finding his cock and stroking at him in time, his balance nearly wavering. His teeth were bared. He was a wolf, and Solus, too, was a wolf, was he not? Or at least some predator. He was certainly not prey. “Most men see weakness, not the masking of strength.”
Staring into those pale eyes above him, Solus bared his teeth in a tight grin, his orgasm perilously near. He would not give this boy the satisfaction. “And what, pray tell, do you see, Tribunus?”
“My Lord and Master,” Gaius replied, and then, expression twisting into a rictus, came.
After, when Solus had gone soft and the mess had been disposed of, when Gaius rose from the bench, he tapped his nails on the wood to make the man stop. He did so instantly, his spine so straight it almost certainly was uncomfortable beneath the weight of his morals.
“Would you live forever?” Solus asked, for not the first time.
“No,” Gaius replied, for not the first time.
Their ritual complete, his Tribunus withdrew, and Solus was left alone, a few drops of spend and sweat drying between his thighs, to look over the wreckage of his wretched dinner party. There was food overturned onto the marble floors. Blood spilled, where one of his nephews had attacked a cousin. The body had already been removed. The revelry had never even stopped.
“Clean this up,” he ordered, and the servants came in, and he wished, also not for the first time, that he had the luxury of his wolf’s choice.