Considering that his brother had at least a hundred years to live with nothing but the remnants of his bond to a dead man, it sounded…painful. Painful and incredibly lonely.
Seyn suddenly wondered how widowed people were supposed to deal with their physical needs. With their bondmate gone, their sexual urges were no longer limited to their deceased bondmate. Did they arrange clandestine meetings with other widowers? With off-world foreigners? Or were they supposed to remain celibates for the rest of their lives?
“It’s against the law,” Jamil reminded him, tearing Seyn away from his increasingly inappropriate thoughts. “Besides, the High Adept said the bond had been in my mind too long and it isn’t safe to remove it. It’s interwoven with everything by now.”
Seyn frowned. Could that be true? Ksar had been able to remove Seyn’s bond without much effort, but Ksar was a fucking telepathic freak, and Jamil was eleven years older than Seyn, his bond older—not to mention that it hadn’t been one-sided.
“And to be honest…” Jamil added quietly, his eyes fixed on his unborn daughter. “I want to keep my bond. I still feel him that way, a little. Like an echo. I don’t want to pretend he never existed. He did.”
Seyn’s hand twitched, the urge to hug his brother almost irresistible. It was such a bizarre feeling. After his bond had broken, he’d been feeling constantly torn between craving and fearing physical contact. But he couldn’t touch his brother, not in the state he was in. Physical contact would be too much for his senses right now. Jamil’s grief would likely overwhelm him and he would give himself away.
It wasn’t that he didn’t trust his brother. But the less people knew about his lack of bond, the safer it was. Technically, not having a bond was against the law. If something went wrong, Seyn didn’t want to drag his family down with him.
“You still didn’t tell me why you were hiding here,” Jamil said suddenly, turning his face to Seyn.
People always said he and Jamil looked alike, except for the hair color, and Seyn had never really liked such comments. He wasn’t exactly insecure about his looks, but he thought comparisons to Jamil weren’t really flattering to him. While they did look alike, Seyn had always thought Jamil was better in every way. His brother’s jaw was firmer, his lips fuller, and his green eyes seemed deeper, maybe thanks to his dark eyelashes. Not to mention that Jamil was taller and more muscular than him. Seyn had always felt like a smaller, paler imitation of his older brother every time people mentioned the resemblance.
But nowadays, with Jamil’s face thinner than it used to be and his shoulder-length hair a bit longer, Seyn had to admit the resemblance really was uncanny.
Seyn put on his best confused expression. “I wasn’t hiding.”
Jamil snorted. “And I suppose you weren’t declining all invitations, either.”
Seyn winced. He had hoped his family had been too busy to notice that.
“Just not feeling it,” he said, avoiding his brother’s gaze.
“You?”
Laughing, Seyn rolled his eyes. “I can get tired of socializing, too.” His mind raced as he considered and discarded possible explanations for his behavior. He could hardly tell his brother the truth: that big gatherings of people were overwhelming to his heightened senses. Granted, it hadn’t been as bad in the last couple of days as it had in the beginning, but his control was still far from perfect.
In fact, Seyn was positive he was going to go crazy if things didn’t get easier. He could handle oversensitive hearing, he could handle a better sense of smell and taste, he could even handle his stronger telepathy, but nothing had prepared him for how horny he would constantly be. It was awful.
Rationally, he knew it made sense. His body was dealing with unfamiliar hormones, basically going through the puberty he would have gone through years ago if the bond hadn’t been suppressing his ability to feel arousal. So it was probably normal to get hard for no reason at all, and in the most awkward of situations, but it was a small comfort when Seyn was attending a ball and surrounded by hundreds of curious eyes as he tried to hide an inappropriate erection. Avoiding all social gatherings was kind of necessary until he figured out how to control his stupid cock.
But it wasn’t exactly something he could tell his recently widowed brother. Due to their significant age difference, they had never been particularly close. Truth be told, Seyn had always felt a little uncomfortable around his happily bonded brother and his bondmate—like an outsider looking in at something that would never be his. And now with Mehmer dead, he felt even more awkward around Jamil, feeling irrationally guilty for all the times he envied his brother’s happiness, as if it was his fault that Mehmer had been killed by the rebels.