WARNING: This chapter contains explicit sex with important information revealed so it cannot be skipped without being lost. If you are not yet 18, you should not be reading this book from the start. If you are, consider yourself warned. 

Nazir woke up with the most painful erection in his life, swearing profusely at the recurring dream and the man who had caused it. The dream––a reminiscence of an event he had so far failed to leave behind––was still following him everywhere, attaching itself to him like the scent of Baaku that still clung to his nose, his skin, like the too familiar silhouette he could always see in the back of his head when he closed his eyes, like the charred, peppery trace of khizrar on Baaku's lips that never left his palette no matter how long ago they'd parted. Baaku liked to smoke right after sex. Khiz was the one thing he couldn't give up no matter how many times Nazir had voiced his aversion to it.

'It isn't that I can't quit,' Baaku had argued one night, taking another pull on the slim, silver pipe and made a perfect circle with the smoke on the release. 'I just haven't found a reason to.'

'It's bad for you.' He'd scowled then, made sure it could be seen. It did nothing––his scowl. None of his reactions had an effect when it came to quitting khiz. 'Everyone knows that.'

Baaku looked up from under the hooded lids, eyes already losing some focus from the herb's influence. 'So is me being here.' The reply came readily, without thinking, without effort. 'So are you. Everyone knows that.' Another pull on the khizrar pipe, a deliberately slow one this time, to make a point. 'I'm not quitting one or the other. You can't make me.'

You will have to quit both now as kha'a, Nazir thought, pulling himself back from the distant memory as he walked over to light his own pipe. He'd never liked the smell of khiz, hadn't smoked it unless out of obligation until a couple of months ago. Now, he craved the scent, the taste of it, the feel of the silver pipe on his lips. It cleared his mind, made it near impossible to focus, chased away some of his visions.

Like Baaku, only the man could do it better, faster.

It all came back to him then, drifting and coiling like the smoke that materialized to shield him from the room at present, taking him back to the past, to the first time Baaku had come into his tent to demand what he did.

'We may die tomorrow for all I know,' Baaku had said, had stood there like a tree, growing roots, claiming grounds and spaces he had no right to. 'I don't want to die not having done this.'

Such careless words, spoken so easily, as if the conclusion had been the most logical thing in the world. Nazir drew a breath and found the air turning thick, like water, like smoke from a new fire trapped under a low ceiling. "You could also die doing this, Baaku.'

He remembered the shrug, the smile, the way his own heart skipped a beat at the reply that followed. 'Can't think of a better reason to die if you ask me.'

He remembered the five steps it took to cross the line, too, five effortless steps that felt too many, too slow. He remembered their first kiss, the sense of danger that came with it, the thrill of diving into that perceived danger, head first and without thinking. He remembered the shortness of his own breath, of Baaku's, when their lips came together, as the taste of khizrar filled his mouth, blending with the aftertaste of wine from his own, altering both, changing all, taking residence where it shouldn't.

Baaku pressed onto him with his bulk, crushing the distance between them with the urgency of a man starved near death being fed for the first time. There was pain everywhere––in his chest, on his ribcage against which his heart hammered, on burning, bruising skin where calloused hands scraped and scorched, between his legs for the pressure Baaku's rock-hard erection brought upon his own.

'Have you done this before?' he asked, somewhere in the clumsy chaos of their lips, their tongue, trembling at the very thought of what could, what might, and what was about happen.

'No,' Baaku replied, fumbling over the sash of Nazir's robe as he did, tugging it free. Grinning against his lips, he said, 'But I know exactly what I want to do with you.'

And pulling now, on the silk of Nazir's robe, peeling it off his chest, his shoulders, Baaku's lips left his. They traveled down to the exposed right side of his throat, hovering there for a moment before clamping down, sucking hard enough to leave a mark. A moan forced its way up out of him, didn't have time to finish before Baaku moved down to his collarbone and further down, to where more pain and pleasure were waiting.

'I know what I want to taste.' A mumbling of words under heaving breaths, between the small sounds his lips made as they moved from one place to another. 'Where I want to touch.' A scraping of rough hands on his skin, pressing, dragging, digging into his flesh to make a point. 'What I want to hear.'

It took him grabbing the back of a chair nearby to not whimper, when the cold, hard edge of Baaku's teeth closed in around his nipple, sending a brand new lightning of aches and pains straight down his groin. The warm, wetness of Baaku's tongue that circled it immediately after crushed the air out of his lungs, drove it up his throat, turning into a groan he hadn't known he could make on the way out. Baaku's muscles grew rock-hard at the sound as he tensed, before his hand traveled down and further down between Nazir's thighs, toward the source of pain that demanded the most immediate attention.

It threw him off balance, took him off guard, made him want to weep––the tightness of Baaku's hand around the hardened, aching, dripping wet length of his sex, the roughness of those fingers scraping on sensitive skin as they worked to wring him dry, and the expertise of a hand he now knew had been missing all his life.

He didn't know how long it took before they were both stripped down to the skin, didn't know what his hands had been doing to Baaku's robe to have torn it to shreds. Standing completely lost and naked in his tent lit by a single hurricane lamp, everything around him became a blur, pushed out further and further into the distance, leaving only the sight of Baaku and the raw, masculine scent of him that mingled with his own, topped with the smell of horses, of leather, of body fluid produced by two people caught in the battle of need pushed to the very height of its limit. It accelerated his pulse, occupied his lungs, gave him a sense that there was no room left to breathe, no time to think, to live beyond what they were doing. When all his patience were spent, and his threshold of pain brought close to breaking, he reached for Baaku's equally hardened sex, seeking the mutual climax they both needed.

'No,' whispered Baaku, snatching his wrist, holding it away. 'There is something I want to do,' A smile played about his lips as he said the words, taking back a step as he did, lowering himself down––

––and kneeling now, in front of him, the son of his father's rival, a man both larger and physically stronger than he was, looking up from down below, asking him the question he never thought would ever be uttered. 'Do you trust me?'

Trust, he said. Was it even possible, given who they were?

'No,' Nazir heard himself say, saw his own hand slide into Baaku's hair as he did, pulling him forward. It didn't matter. Nothing mattered anymore, not their positions or the danger of what they were doing, nor time, nor place, nor any consequence that might follow. Baaku smiled for a moment, before parting his lips to take him in all at once, without warning, without time for preparation, without pause.

It stretched him like a bowstring pulled past its tearing point, bent his back close to breaking––the skin-tight pressure of Baaku's mouth, sliding in and out with its enveloping heat and the slickness of his saliva. He was screaming in his head, groaning in reality, coming in and out of focus between the two as Baaku swallowed him from tip to hilt. The surroundings had disappeared, the outside noise faded, lost somewhere amidst the sound of skin against skin moving fast, and the low animal-like growls from his throat he found he couldn't stop.

Baaku wrapped his hand around his own sex and began to stroke, falling into the same rhythm, the same speed at which his lips were moving. And then he saw it, in the flickering light of the hurricane lamps, as they moved together in and out of consciousness, sharing the moment and the painful pleasure it produced, the bond that began to form and solidify between them.

Here and now, in the loss of time and space and conscience, more than the expertise of it, more than the wrongness, the danger of what they were doing, was the willingness of Baaku to offer him this, and the powerful, inescapable sense of mutual need, of shared pleasure and desire they both felt at the same time, pulling them apart, throwing them back together, repeating over and over again, each time coming on stronger, harder, faster, racing blood, raising pulse, ripping air from their lungs too violently, too fast, too soon––

––and threw them off, both at the same time, both coming together in what seemed to Nazir an explosion of too many things that shattered all at once. It was the bursting escape of an ache long-held and locked up in the dark, the cracking of the wall that shielded him from seeking shelter and warmth from another he'd long needed, the disappearance of that weight in his chest for every life he had failed to save, the forgiveness offered to a boy whose father's shoes he knew he would never fill.

The release of every tear he hadn't allowed himself to shed when his mother didn't come back.

It was the most damaging five-step he had taken in his life, Nazir realized, looking back at their first time together. He had known even then that there would be no way back or forward from that point on for either of them, nowhere to run. The damage was still here now, cold and hard on his lips, clouding his vision with the smoke he now craved on a regular basis. He would have to quit smoking soon to keep his conscience clear, before it escalated into another thing he couldn't quit.

One thing at a time. He pulled on the khizrar pipe, dragging on it to fill his lungs. I'll deal with it, one thing at a time.

A knock on the door brought him back to the present. It's about time, Nazir thought, sighing, as he moved to open the door. It had been three days since he filed a request for a meeting with the ma'adevi. Hopefully whoever called on him this early had a message from the White Tower.

It was, as he thought, a message from the White Tower, but the person delivering it wasn't at all someone he'd expected.

In the bright alabaster hallway, Kaal izr Naveen stood all neat and handsome in a finely pressed zikh bearing the mark of the ma'adevi, looking torn between trying to appear impressively large and apologizing for being large. A habit, Nazir supposed. The man, after all, was an orann, a term Citaran used to call a dead seed––a child born to a bharavi and a trueblood oracle who didn't come out either, and therefore confined to a life in Citara for having been born in it. Oranns, especially those with commonblood features like Kaal, didn't have a good standing in Citara. They survived in the khagans just fine, like his father, but here in the sacred city populated by trueblood oracles, bharavis, and White Warriors, people like Kaal were considered a mistake if not a big disgrace to their lineage, especially without a zikh.

He's fixed that last bit at least, Nazir thought, looking up and down the young man who had grown a full head over him. The last time they met two years ago they were the same height and roughly the same weight.

"Nazir khuma––no," he stuttered, adjusted the perfectly in place robe and corrected himself. "It's kha'a now, forgive me. I meant ... My condolences, for your father."

That nervous, eagerness to please hadn't changed, however, not around him at least. "I see you've gotten yourself a zikh." Nazir smiled. "Congratulations. I should call you izr Naveen now, shouldn't I?"

Kaal, with all that new bulk added and a zikh to boot, sucked in a breath at the mention of his name, letting his jaw drop for a full minute before tucking it back up in a hurry. "You remember."

"How could I forget?" Nobody forgot their biggest secret admirer, especially when those inappropriate dark eyes that always lingered upon him longer than necessary were hardly a secret from the start. Kaal had been a Tower guard at the time, one of the few Nazir had helped rise in rank by putting in a few good words. The White Tower, like any court, required one to grow one's network of support and gather strings to pull to survive intact. Finding allies and tying them to your cause with small favors long before you require one back was normal practice in politics. "You serve the ma'adevi now?"

"I'm Captain of the ma'adevi's personal guards now, yes." Another shuffling of weight and misplacing of hands that didn't quite know where to go. "Thanks to you."

She'll take back a limb from me for that, I'm sure. "I see." Nazir leaned against the doorframe as he mumbled the response, thinking. Saw the young man's eyes moved down to his chest where his robe parted and decided not to fix it. They stared, to his surprise, quite unapologetically, those eyes. "Well, what can I do for you this morning?"

Kaal izr Naveen cleared his throat and adjusted himself, then took something out of his pocket. "I'm here to deliver your letter of appointment. She will see you tomorrow."

Nazir took the rolled-up parchment, held it loosely in his hand without opening as he weighed something in his mind. "And?"

"...And? Nazir kha'a?"

"It's not your job to deliver letters now is it?" He paused, congratulated himself for being right when the man swallowed, hard. "You're here for something else, or there is something more you want to tell me."

There was something else in his eyes now that surprised Nazir. A stillness that suggested a small trace of anger or its close relative. After a short, deliberating silence, Kaal pressed his lips together, pulled himself up straight, and replied, catching his eyes, "Baaku kha'a arrived this morning."

Nazir swore in his mind. Of all the time to be in Citara, Baaku had to pick the same week to be here. "Did he now?"

"He has asked for you."

"Has he?" You inconsiderate bastard. "Did you tell him where I'm housed?"

Kaal's dark eyes studied him harder now, searching desperately for something he might let slip. "I told him I cannot release that information without your consent."

A relief, that. Jealousy had its uses, after all.

But how much use exactly?

"Good. That's everything I need to know?" He grabbed on to the edge of the door, trying to decide if he should swing it shut at this moment or leave it open a while longer. Something did need to be dealt with regarding his reputation with Baaku, and he hadn't prepared to see the new kha'a here after everything that happened.

Kaal, to his surprise, took a step forward, made a motion with his hand that suggested he would keep the door open if it came to that. "Would you like to give your consent, Nazir kha'a?"

An attack of sorts, that. An overstep of boundaries judging from the tone and the look that suddenly turned harder, more hostile.

This, too, would have to be dealt with, he supposed.

"The real question, Captain," he said. "I don't have the time or patience to dance around this crap, not right now."

The deliberate use of rank caught him off guard, caused another shift of weight in response, though not quite out of nervousness this time. "Is it true? Between you and Baaku kha'a?"

The shy young man had grown a spine, apparently. A spine with direct access to the ma'adevi.

The decision, after all, wasn't as hard as it seemed, especially when he also needed something––or someone––at this very moment.

"Do you sleep with men, Captain?"

It was a common enough question in the White Desert and most parts of the peninsula, and yet it hit the man like a punch in the gut, sent him sucking in a breath too obvious to not notice. Kaal adjusted himself quickly and straightened to his full height as he rose to the occasion, as expected. "I do," he said, placing a step toward the opened door, accepting the invitation. "I have, many times."

"Good." Peeling himself off the frame, Nazir flung the door open all the way. It banged against the wall with a sound that startled the man on the other side quite visibly. "Why don't you come in, Captain? And then we'll talk, after we're done with what you're really here for."

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A/N: This is me not holding back and writing what I want. But I would love to hear back from my readers whether to keep this or edit out the explicit content? I will probably save this for the director's cut in any case. But if you all hate it, I don't have to share the explicit version XD. Let me know. All kinds of feedbacks are appreciated and I don't bite my readers, not even trolls, I promise.