Page 174 of Serpent and Shadow

The pain, which seemed to come out of nowhere, snapped him out.

Caelum rubbed his chest, biting his tongue when it worsened. He did everything he could to fight the feeling away, but it lingered, festering there.

It was getting worse.

Amun’s cock, it was getting so much worse.

“Something’s going on out there.” He muttered the words, mostly to himself. He sat against the wall, back straight. He tugged at the cold, burnished collar around his neck, although he knew it would only rub at his skin more. His anxiety rose as the strange noises grew louder in the corridor on the other side of their cell door.

He glanced at Arcturus, who gave a pointed glance at Caelum’s tugging fingers.

He dropped his hand to his lap, and exhaled in frustration.

His hand combed through sweaty hair, and he ignored his stomach growling.

Not being chained to the wall helped.

It helped, he told himself. This could all be worse. They usually didn’t forget to chain him to the wall when he was in here.

He could work out like this, which meant he could sometimes sleep.

He spent over an hour in here already, broken into three different sessions, where he did push-ups, sit-ups, pull-ups on one of the beams, and a number of other exercises. Usually he did those things outside his father’s cage. He’d been expected to accelerate all of his physical training ever since he got dragged back here.

His father had figured out relatively early that Caelum was easier to manage, and to train, when he wasn’t so jacked up on magic and mania and excess energy that he couldn’t focus on a damned thing being said to him, even with repeated curses designed to motivate him.

The habit was ingrained in him now.

He’d needed it less with Leda.

Really, he’d not needed it at all with her, especially not once they’d started having sex. He’d done it anyway for those few weeks they’d been together and his body had been working properly, if only to keep from driving her mad or getting too fucking demanding with her, and making her regret ever letting him touch her.

But the physical thing had been an issue since he’d first gone away to school.

He’d snuck away early in the morning and at night in primary and middle school, usually running in the early mornings and sparring or practicing Skyhunt later in the day. He’d later added various balancing exercises he’d needed more space to accomplish, and started shadow-boxing at night, usually in a part of the campus no one used.

He’d also work on precision hits against statues and suits of armor, which taught him where to stop without breaking his hands.

It was never quite enough.

Right now, it felt like nothing would be enough.

Something was wrong.

He didn’t want to think about it, mostly because he knew it had something to do with Leda. He also knew, even with his few stolen moments with her, he was starting to lose it, being separated from her so much of the time.

It was hard to burn anything off in here, which probably made that part of him that missed her feel worse. He’d woken himself up more than once, sweating, shouting, gasping for breath, and he’d been mortified to find Arcturus sitting nearby, watching him in the dark, which embarrassed him and horrified him in equal proportions, mostly because he had no idea what he might have said aloud before he snapped out of it.

From the look on Arcturus’s face a few of those nights, and the way he avoided Bones’s eyes, he feared he’d shouted things the kid understood all too well.

When he couldn’t exercise in here, he usually spent his time with Arcturus. He ate with him, talked to him, asked him questions about the human world, and about human myth, human music, human dancing, human medicine, human universities, his childhood, Leda before she’d come to Magique. He asked Arcturus detailed questions about television, which Leda had tried to describe to him already. He asked Arcturus what he’d been learning in the Sanctum, and his favorite foods, and where he might’ve wanted to live, if he’d stayed on Earth.

He answered most of Arcturus’s questions, as well.

Anything that distracted either or both of them was good.

Anything that pulled Caelum’s mind off her, off his magic, off the likelihood the two of them would die down here, off the possibility he’d go mad first and kill himself trying to get out of the collar… all of it was good.

The collar definitely had an alarm on it of some kind, too, either an advanced linking charm that connected to his most recent gold tattoo, and thus likely his father’s magic, or else it set off some kind of alarm that got felt upstairs. Either way, he’d activated that one once by accident, too, and three guards came running and entered the cell, all of them large.