Chapter 53: A Rather Messy Situation

Lioren vaulted over the table with the sort of urgency usually reserved for house fires, assassination attempts, and discovering that the kitchen had run out of food.

"Prince Xavion! Gods above, are you... are you breathing?!" Lioren blurted out frantically, the words tumbling out of his mouth in a panicked, high-pitched jumble before his brain could even filter them. "Are you alright?! What just happened?!"

The moment the questions left his mouth, Lioren realized how stupid they sounded. Xavion had just collapsed onto the rug, clutching his eye like someone had shoved a red-hot poker into his skull. Obviously, he wasn’t bloody alright. What sort of answer had Lioren expected?!

"Guards! Someone get in here!" he shouted at the closed study door. "Fetch the house physician! And bring anyone else who knows how to treat a man who’s suddenly fallen over!"

For one brief, miserable second, Lioren’s panicking brain decided that the best possible solution was to remember his old world. Back there, he could have pulled out his phone, punched in three numbers, and had an ambulance on its way before he could finish losing his mind. He would even have settled for a stranger yelling, "Help is on the way!" through a tiny speaker.

Where the hell was a phone when you needed one? Why couldn’t this world have invented 911?!

But no. Of course not. He had to live in a fantasy kingdom where the fastest way to get medical attention was apparently to scream at a door and hope someone happened to be passing by. No ambulances, no emergency dispatchers, not even a convenient little box he could shout into.

Lioren crouched over Xavion, his hands hovering uselessly above the man’s shoulder. He wanted to do something

He didn’t know where to put his hands. Should he grab Xavion’s shoulders and haul him upright? Should he leave him flat on the floor? Should he touch his face? Should he avoid touching him altogether in case he somehow made Xavion’s condition worse?

For a man who could calmly hold a hot candle over a captive spy’s thigh down in a damp dungeon without blinking an eye, Lioren was proving spectacularly, embarrassingly useless when faced with a fiancé who had fallen over.

"Don’t move," Lioren pleaded. "Just stay still. I’m going to go tear the front gates open and drag the physician here myself..."

Before Lioren could scramble to his feet, a hand emerged from the mess of scattered papers and caught him firmly by the wrist.

The grip was steady. Strong enough to stop him in his tracks.

"Your Grace," Xavion called. He squeezed Lioren’s wrist once, anchoring the panicked Grand Duke in place. "Stop. Please. Do not call for anyone."

Lioren froze, staring down at him with wide eyes. "Prince Xavion, you just fell!"

"It’s already passed," Xavion assured him, taking a slow breath as he pushed himself into a sitting position. He leaned against the side of the desk, straightening his back as though nothing had happened. "The pain around my eye flares up from time to time. It’s an old problem, nothing more. There’s no need to summon a physician over something so minor."

Naturally, this rational, soldierly explanation did absolutely nothing to soothe the frantic storm raging in Lioren’s chest. In fact, it made it ten times worse.

Occasionally?!

What in the blazes did occasionally mean?! Did "occasionally" mean once a year? Once a month? Once a week? Every single night when nobody was looking?! Has Xavion been walking around this vast, drafty estate experiencing agonizing, skull-cleaving pain behind his eyepatch without telling a single soul?!

And how on earth could he sit there on the floorb with a completely straight face and call it nothing when he had looked, merely three seconds ago, as though his soul were being ripped straight out of his chest?!

Lioren stared down at him, his mouth hanging half-open, his chest heaving as he tried to swallow down a lump of pure outrage.

"I don’t think it’s nothing," Lioren said, his voice turning fierce. "You were in terrible pain, Prince Xavion. I saw your face. I saw you clutching your eye. How can you just sit there and dismiss it as if you’d merely stubbed your toe on a table leg?!"

Xavion looked at him, his violet eye softening slightly as he noticed how pale Lioren had gone with worry. "I am sorry for alarming you, Your Grace. Truly. But the pain has passed. See?"

To demonstrate his complete recovery, Xavion reached out toward the scattered mess on the rug, picking up fallen papers and neatly stacking them against his knee.

"We’ve made quite a mess of the candidates’ papers," Xavion added quietly, glancing over the scattered sheets. "Oh, look at all this..."

Lioren’s head nearly exploded.

The papers.

The man had just collapsed from pain, and now that he was sitting on the floor, his first concern was the scattered papers?!

Before Xavion could reach for anohter sheet, Lioren’s hand shot out, his fingers wrapping tight around Xavion’s wrist, pinning his arm in place above the rug.

"Stop it, please!" Lioren snapped, his eyes flashing with a sudden, passionate intensity that made Xavion pause in surprise. "Forget the bloody papers, Prince Xavion! To hell with it! We can burn the whole pile and start over tomorrow, or spend another week reviewing every candidate from scratch, for all I care! I am not going to sit here on the floor and pretend that didn’t just happen because you’d prefer to sweep it under a rug!"

Xavion blinked, clearly taken aback by the sheer, unbridled vehemence in the Grand Duke’s voice. He looked down at Lioren’s hand gripping his wrist, then up into Lioren’s flushed, emotional face.

"Your Grace," Xavion said gently, his deep voice carrying a patient, quiet authority. "I know my own body. I’ve been living with this pain for quite some time. The pain is an old acquaintance. I know its rhythm, and I know when it is dangerous versus when it is merely... unpleasant. It has passed."

"I know you know your body," Lioren replied, though his voice cracked slightly with a touch of vulnerability he couldn’t hide. "I know I can’t possibly understand what you’re feeling better than you do, and I’m not trying to treat you like a fragile piece of glass. But that doesn’t mean I can just... just turn my brain off and stop worrying about you."

Lioren looked down at Xavion’s face, his gaze settling on the thick leather patch strapped tightly over his right eye socket.

Before he could stop himself, Lioren lifted his left hand, driven by an overwhelming impulse he couldn’t quite control. His fingers hovered just a fraction of an inch away from the edge of the black leather strap near Xavion’s temple.

He desperately wanted to touch the skin there, to check if it was still burning hot, to feel if the skin was feverish, but he hesitated. He held his breath, hovering in the agonizing space between them, not daring to make physical contact without permission.

For once, Lioren, who was usually loud, chaotic, and supremely confident, found himself at a loss. He wanted to make sure Xavion was all right, but he didn’t want to overstep his boundaries or make the prince uncomfortable.

After a long, hesitant moment, Lioren finally let out a quiet breath and lowered his hand back to his knee. He forced himself to hold back, even though every part of him wanted to check whether Xavion was truly fine. The worry still lingered on his face, impossible to hide no matter how hard he tried.

And right at that exact, painfully awkward moment...

CREAK

The study door swung open.

Evelia stood in the doorway, dressed in a fitted red dress, a pair of leather gloves dangling from her right hand. She took one step inside before stopping abruptly, blinking at the scene before her.

Her gaze moved from her brother, kneeling on the floor, to Xavion, who sat on the rug with his back against the desk and papers resting on his lap.

She looked at the catastrophic avalanche of papers scattered across every single square inch of the carpet like a paper blizzard.

For three long, agonizing seconds, total silence reigned in the study.

Evelia slowly tilted her head to the side. She adjusted her gloves, looking between the two men with an expression of pure, unadulterated, utter sincerity.

"Did the furniture finally lose its patience with you, Lioren?" Evelia asked. "Or have you simply decided that chairs are far beneath your royal dignity?"

Lioren could only sit on the floor and stare at his sister, his mouth slightly open, completely devoid of any reply.