"Liam," he said.

"No, Your Majesty, let me save everyone time," Liam replied. "I am not soft. I’m not socially elegant unless threatened into it. I don’t play court very well, and if someone expects me to smile through stupidity for the sake of harmony, they should probably buy a different omega."

The silence that followed was sharp enough to draw blood.

Arik did not speak and only looked at Liam.

Interested. Focused. A little darker than that, perhaps, but Liam declined to examine the possibility while standing in a sunlit room with a king who had been trying to market him for the last twenty minutes.

George recovered first, of course.

"The Crown Prince understands that people often undersell themselves when nervous—"

"I am not nervous," Liam said.

"That is not helping your case."

"I am not building a case."

"No," Arik said softly. "You are dismantling one."

Liam looked at him.

Arik’s mouth curved, his golden eyes openly amused now in a way Liam found both offensive and, somehow, worse than if the man had looked angry.

"Very efficiently," Arik said. "I might even admire the effort if there were not one small complication."

Liam’s brow lifted. "A tragic one, I assume."

"A persistent one." Arik took one unhurried step closer, still perfectly prince-like, still dressed in white and gold as if sunlight had signed a treaty with his tailor. "The request was specific."

George straightened at once, eager to reclaim ground that had not belonged to him for several minutes. "Yes, precisely, that is what I have been explain—"

Arik did not even look at him.

"From me," he said.

Silence.

The room held it.

Noah stopped pretending to study the floor. Mezos became so still Liam suspected the man had simply abandoned his body out of self-preservation.

Liam stared at Arik.

That should not have landed the way it did. It should have been infuriating, absurd, politically grotesque, and filed immediately under imperial nonsense to be dismantled later in private with better vocabulary.

Instead, his mind caught on one deeply inconvenient section of the sentence.

Specific.

Arik, the bastard, continued before Liam could decide whether to be furious or only mortified.

"I am the one interested in you, Lord Liam."

George blinked.

Once.

Then again, slower this time, like a man discovering the meeting he thought he orchestrated had not only escaped his control but had possibly never belonged to him in the first place.

Liam felt his entire body go very still.

He became aware of everything at once: the heat pressing through the glass walls of the Sun Room, the weight of his own hand against the arm of the chair, Noah’s silent delight, Mezos’s professional suffering, George’s gathering outrage, and Arik standing there looking entirely too composed for a man who had just decided to say that in front of a king.

Liam’s mouth opened.

Closed.

Then, because dignity had never once in his life arrived before instinct, he said, "That sounds like a terrible lapse in judgment."

Arik let out a low, charming laugh.

"Oh, no," he said. "You are the best candidate."

George lit up.

The change was so immediate that Liam briefly considered whether someone had adjusted the room’s ether lighting to flatter greed.

"Your Highness," George said, delighted now, green eyes twinkling in the warm light, "I am very pleased to hear that."

Liam could practically hear the treaty clauses rearranging themselves behind the man’s eyes. He clenched his hands over his knees but kept silent before he would be executed for hitting the king in the face.

Arik did not look at him.

That, more than anything, should have warned George to shut up, but the man was a lost cause.

"I had suspected," the king continued, moving quickly to claim the moment before it escaped him, "that once the matter was presented properly, Your Highness would see Lord Liam’s value."

Liam turned his head slowly toward him, his red eyes burning with contained violence.

’If you say value again, I will redecorate this room with your teeth.’

George, idiot, mistook the silence for lack of objection.

"With privacy, perhaps," he said smoothly, "the two of you may speak more freely."

That made Liam suspicious at once and Arik smile again.

George took that as permission because men like him never waited for actual authority when imagined authority would do.

"Yes," he said. "That would be best."

He turned toward the door. "Chief Mezos. Lord Noah. Wait outside."

Noah’s brows rose.

Mezos’s expression did not change, which on Mezos was the equivalent of open disbelief.

Then George looked at Liam with the pleased air of a man gifting him his own abduction. "Lord Liam, I believe candor is easier without an audience." 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝓮𝒘𝙚𝙗𝒏𝙤𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝒐𝙢

’And stupidity is easier with one,’ Liam thought.

Arik finally looked at George with the calm of someone who had already decided that this arrangement worked for him.

"That is acceptable," Arik said, his low voice filling the room in a way Liam started to assess as danger.

George smiled as if he had personally engineered the sentence.

"Excellent."

Noah glanced once at Liam, then at Arik, and the look on his face was so blatantly entertained that Liam resented him on principle.

Mezos’s gaze rested on Liam for one brief second longer. There was nothing mocking in it. Only a dry, silent: survive this.

Then both men moved toward the door.

George followed them, pausing only long enough to say, "I trust this will be productive."

Liam looked at his back. "I trust very little in this palace."

George laughed as though that were charming rather than accurate, then stepped out into the corridor with all the satisfaction of a man who thought he had just arranged destiny.

The door shut behind him.

And then there were only two of them in the Sun Room.

Liam remained exactly where he was, his face still calm, but his eyes were filled with the need to murder someone. Preferably the human waste called George of Wrohan.