“Your expression worries me. May I see it?”
She handed it over, feeling dizzy. “He’s done this out of guilt.”
Jinadh stared at the balance, face blank. “And perhaps it made him feel better. I really do not care. This money will send Stephen to school. It will make us … hm.”
“Solvent?”
“At the least.”
“Well, I suppose he is a sort of uncle to Stephen now. Though Queen save us if he decides to act … avuncular, in any way.” Her hands were shaking.
Jinadh took them in his own. «Moon-eyes, I’m not sure we’ll be hearing from either of them very soon.»
If ever, she thought, and began to cry.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-TWO
Cyril dropped the Adam Wallis persona with gratitude once the door to his boardinghouse room closed behind him, though he couldn’t shed the exhaustion so easily. Or the chill. He couldn’t remember ever being so cold, for so long. His bones felt brittle, and every muscle ached. He was starving, too; there’d been very little food or sleep over the last three days to blunt the stress and hardship.
His window looked down on a sooty, salt-crusted street, the gutter filled with butts and garbage. Beyond that the sea wall, and beyond that, fishing boats at their moorings in the oily water.
So this was the harbor Memmediv had betrayed him for. The sound of mournful bells came through the glass. Long blue evening shadows made the vista grim. Still, he supposed people had held stranger things dear.
Someone knocked on his door. “Coming,” he said, and pushed back from the sill.
Aristide stood in the doorway, posture stiff and face drawn into a frown. Cyril wondered if this was Erikh Prosser’s worry, which would fall away when he crossed the threshold, or if he was truly as nervous as he looked. In one fist, he held a greasy paper sack. Cyril smelled fry oil, pork fat, and cabbage.
“Come in,” he said, already reaching for the food.
Ari left Prosser in the corridor, yes, but the frown came along. Once he was in the room he seemed not to know what to do with himself. The windowsills weren’t deep enough to sit in, and the room had only a bed and a washstand, no chair. He hesitated in the middle of the floor, boots shifting on the bare boards. At least he looked less drawn, less bloodless. Maybe he’d already eaten. Maybe he’d just gotten drunk.
Springs squealed as Cyril sat on the edge of the bed. The open sack revealed potato dumplings, burnt at the edges and speckled with brown where they’d touched the grill. He bit into one: ground pork, cooked to gray paste with cabbage and onions. A thread of grease slid down his chin. “Your luggage came in all right?”
That settled Ari. He didn’t relax, but his weight at least stopped shifting. “Delivered from one ship to the next, as promised. It will be in the cabin when we board.”
“Only one cabin?”
He’d hit a tender spot, and saw Ari flinch. “There’s room enough for a cot, and if you’re uncomfortable with that, I’m sure we can arrange … it only seemed less suspicious to…” He trailed off, and began to shift his feet again, eyes searching for something to fix on that wasn’t Cyril.
Unfortunately for him, they strayed across the surface of the washstand mirror, where Cyril snared his gaze and held it. “I don’t remember that you were ever this stuck for a line, before.”
To see Aristide so unsure of himself was more frightening than mortars or freezing or border control. It was more painful to see him like this than it had been to see him in full glamour, rouged and vicious, imperiously putting the prison guards into their place. His lips moved, abortive, and then he abruptly looked away. “I don’t know what my cue’s supposed to be.”
At which point Cyril realized he had never needed one before. Aristide had always been assured of Cyril’s desire. Of everyone’s desire. He had wanted his lovers desperate, begging, at his mercy, and Cyril had obliged him on all counts.
Perhaps he didn’t know how to ask, when something hadn’t been offered already. Perhaps his pride made him afraid to. But any less prideful and he wouldn’t be Ari.
If Cyril wanted this, then he would have to make the first move. Which meant he was faced with a decision: Did he want this? Now?
It wasn’t as though he’d kept it down, in Liso. Put people in mortal peril and what else did they do but rut? That was different, though; mechanical.
Which made him think of Lillian’s first embrace, the instinct he’d quashed that said to block a strike and flip her on her back. The surge of adrenaline when anything moved at the edge of his line of sight. All his reactions were compromised by the memory of violence.
But he remembered, too—and vividly—the scratch of wool against his wrists, bound with his own necktie, one end a leash in Ari’s fist. The ease there was in letting him lead, and the power there as well: He did not do as he was told because he had to, but because he chose to. A welcome change, in those days. And enough now, maybe, to keep him from remembering the jungle, and everything that he had done there. That had been done to him.
He raised his hand to the top button of his shirt, feeling the thickness of the looped thread, the raised edges of the horn.
“It can’t be how it was,” he said. “Not … not now, anyway. You can’t hit me.”
Aristide nodded, once, worried lines crimping the corners of his eyes.
The button slid stiffly out of its hole, and Cyril felt cool air on his throat. “I’m not the man I used to be, Aristide.”
“Darling, you never were. Neither was I.” Ari came to sit on the bed. The tortured springs objected. With a weighted elegance that spoke less of caution than of reverence, he lifted his hands to Cyril’s second button. “Here. May I?”
And Cyril, breathless, let him.
* * *
It was nothing like it had been. It was … not better, or worse. It moved slowly, like a puzzle, or a game of chess.
Aristide undressed Cyril as he had the first night they saw so much of each other’s skin: patiently, savoring. The wrapping had been more beautiful then—platinum shirt studs through starched white piqué, rather than plain horn and cotton. More layers, loops, hooks, and catches. But he took longer now, lingering, unsure of what he was allowed.
First he uncovered the familiar scar: the shining line that bisected Cyril’s stomach. The one he had never asked about. He traced it with a finger, and wondered if he would dare, someday.
“You do that for all of them, we won’t sail with our ship.”
“Hush,” said Aristide. The first command he’d ventured. He laid it down lightly, almost teasing. Cyril rewarded him with a small smile and silence.
Aristide peeled him like an apple from which he meant to carve one single, spiral ribbon. Steady, delicate, slow: teasing himself as much as anything. Cyril should have been keening by the end of it, sweat at his temples. He would have been, then. Now he had his eyes shut tight, brows furrowed, his lower lip pinned between his teeth. Half-hard, yes, but only that. And his expression belied his arousal.
Aristide paused, fingertips just touching the bare skin of Cyril’s thigh. “We don’t have to—”
“No,” he said, curling his fingers into Aristide’s waistband and pulling at the button fly. “I want you to make me forget.”
So entreated, Aristide vowed to put the whores of the Prince and Temple to shame.
All those perfunctory afternoons with Daoud, all that time he had spent wishing for someone who would plead, someone who would play the power games that pleased the capricious, predatory part of him … it fell away and he lost himself in the taste of Cyril’s skin, the smell of him, the flex of his calves as he put his heels to the mattress. Need twisted into a knot at the base of Aristide’s spine, making his whole body clench and ache.
But Cyril turned his face into the pillow and said, eyes shut again, “I’m sorry. I can’t … I just—”
“Your hands then,” said Aristide, strangling on the words. “Queen’s cunt, please.”
Shame vanished from Cyril’s expression, swept away by shock at hearing Aristide beg. He’d surprised himself as much, and wasn’t ready when Cyril sat up fast, throwing him off-balance so he fell back in turn.
Aristide had forgotten how, when Cyril’s pupils widened with desire, they left only a fine ring of frosted blue like creeping ice at the edge of a black pond. Or, as they hung above him now, with the reflection of the bedside lamp bright in their center: like the white ring around the moon on a cold night before snow.
One of Cyril’s hands pressed into the center of his chest, weight pinning him to the complaining mattress. He wet two fingers of the other with his mouth and then—
Aristide made a sound he might have been embarrassed of, under any other circumstance. After that, it was all over rather quickly. And that, too, might have embarrassed him. But not tonight.
Sated now, but remembering the sudden bloom of lust in those bright blue eyes, Aristide reached between Cyril’s legs. Nothing, still.
Rolling over, Cyril put his arm across his face, looking as ashamed as Aristide should feel. “I’m sorry,” he said again, less desperately this time.
“Shh.” Aristide stretched out beside him, luxuriating in his own nakedness against someone else’s skin. Against, miraculously, this skin. With as much wonder as he now traced the ridge of Cyril’s hipbone, he said, “There will be other times. Plenty of them.”
Cyril glared from the crook of his elbow. “If you don’t drop dead first, old man.”
“I’m not even sixty,” he protested.
“With the lives we’ve led, that’s quite an age.”
“Well then,” said Aristide, and leaned in to kiss him. Deeply, as he had not kissed anyone for years. “We’d best rick our hay before the rains.”
* * *
The wind picked up, past midnight. Something in Cyril’s deep memory of the place said rain, though still a long way off. Nights like this in late winter and early spring, he remembered the smell of damp sweeping across the plains from the sea. But despite the draft, tucked beneath the blankets Cyril finally felt warm.
They laid in silence for a time, listening to the loose panes of glass rattle in their frame. Aristide, beside the wall, lifted one hand to scratch at a chip in the paint.
“Small lies,” he said. “Do you promise?”
Cyril tucked his chin. “Mm-hm.” Even without a segue, it didn’t catch him off guard. The hour was right for confessions, skin pressed on skin in the dark.
There was a pause in which it seemed Ari had chosen not to speak. Then, after too long, he said, “You got the letter. Why didn’t you come?”
“I tried to. But … I was afraid of Lourdes. I thought he would lead them to you.”
“So you killed him.” Aristide said it so reasonably, made it sound as simple as it had been in that moment: a hard decision made in haste, the only possible outcome. “I read it in the paper. I … stopped reading papers, shortly thereafter.”
“It wasn’t my first choice,” said Cyril. “I didn’t go there to shoot him.”
“Then why did you?”
His own stupidity was so much harder to bear in retrospect. He imagined it would grow harder every year, until it or he passed some critical point that made the whole thing seem humorous. A critical point he would never have reached, if not for the man whose elbow was currently pressed into his ribs.
“I was going to send him after you,” said Cyril. “I even took a bottle of peroxide for his hair, so he would match the papers.”
“What went wrong?”
“Me.”
Aristide waited for him to go on, fingers making a cage over the hem of the blanket.
“I—I had seen the name on the visa and I didn’t trust myself to keep my teeth shut.”
“Cordelia used to say it just like that.”
Her name conjured a warmth in Cyril’s chest that had lain dormant too long. But like blood returning to a senseless limb, it was agony. “Can you imagine? I told her she ought to pitch in with the Ospies. Said she’d make a good fox.”
“She would have.” Ari laughed, or almost. “Rather say, she did. You propped up the Ospies, in your way. But she tripped them and they stumbled down.”
“You said you saw her. After you left. Before she died.”
“Long story,” said Aristide, and when Cyril began to protest he put one hand up and said, “which I’ll be happy to tell, sometime. But the last I saw of you, you were waving a snubby around her dressing room and looking like someone had peeled you off their shoe. How in perdition did you get from there to an Orriba slum?”
“Who told you it was Orriba?”
“Asiyah. Said the hounds brought you in on a drunk and disorderly, and you gave them a false name. Paul—”
“Darling,” said Cyril. “A stupid work name. Sentimental. That’s the kind of thing that gets you caught.”
“I know.” He stared into dead space. “I couldn’t help it.”
“You could have,” said Cyril. “You just like being clever. It’ll get you into trouble.”
“Orriba, Cyril. How—?”
“A friend of yours, actually.” Not that he had known it at the time. Not like she knew him. How she’d recognized him, busted like an overripe fruit, and only from the description on a set of false papers … “Same friend who let you put that stupid name on my visa.”
“Zelda Peronides? How—?”
“I stowed away,” said Cyril. It wasn’t the whole truth. He’d hauled himself onto the first boat with a ladder in the bay and let the world go black around him. He’d woken hours later in the grip of a thug, to the sound of a motor and water breaking on the hull. But he was allowed small lies. “She was turning tail. Got out of the city with the skin on her bones and not a lot besides. Had some bruiser named Marto with her. After the swelling went down, she clocked me. Said I was a roto print of some actor named Solomon Flyte, if he’d taken a few good slugs to the face.”
Ari looked like he was trying not to be sick, but Cyril pressed on. “We were halfway to Agrakoti by then. And I was in no shape to hunt after you. By the time we made landfall and I caught up on the news, I … I didn’t really want to.”
“I wish you had.”
“No you don’t. I was a midden heap walking.”
“You still are.”
“Stroll off.”
When Aristide’s arms tightened around him his first instinct was panic—he was trapped and strangling, snared—but then Aristide spoke into his ear.
“Never again.”
The sound of that familiar purr, crackling now with smoke and age, told him he was safe, and brought him home.
* * *
Aristide woke up in the early morning to the grumble of thunder. It was not the first time he had woken—Cyril had never been an easy bedfellow, and was less so now. Still, every time a cry or jerk tore Aristide from sleep, he remembered where he was and with whom and felt amazed all over again. And so he didn’t mind.
This time, it was not one of Cyril’s nightmares that woke him. Dawn had crept, indistinct, into the sky. An early spring storm battered the window with sheets of rain. Cyril was gone from beside him and sitting half naked on the foot of the bed, twisting the tuning dial on the radio.
Quietly, without moving, Aristide watched his reflection in the sideboard mirror: his concentration and economy of movement. The shift of small muscles beneath scarred skin. He did not fidget, didn’t pause when he came across a station playing an old song by Marcel Langhorn. He looked grave and focused, brows drawn down over his newly crooked nose. Everything about him had changed, it seemed, except that livid scar across his stomach.
Then a piece of shaggy hair fell across his forehead and he jerked his chin, tossing it out of his eyes.
No knife had ever plunged so deep.
“What are you looking for?” asked Aristide, and saw him jump but clamp down on the reflex. A shudder of skin like a horse scaring flies.
&
nbsp; “The news,” he said, voice so even that his tic might have been a figment of Aristide’s imagination. “From Gedda.”
“Good luck finding a signal.” Aristide sat up, dragging the blankets with him. Despite himself, he was interested. They were nearly out of any kind of danger now, but it might be good to know what kind of silt they had kicked up behind them.
“You can usually get it,” said Cyril, “or at least, you used to be able to. And transmitters are better now. Though the weather—ah, wait. That was it.”
Silence as he moved the dial by millimeters. The static and the rain became one sound. Then, out of the white noise, a garbled, shushing voice. It grew stronger as Cyril fine-tuned the dial.
“—claims are still unsubstantiated. But Qassan’s close association with the company adds credence to his story. Here he is speaking to FWAC’s Laurie Kostos on last night’s After Dinner Hour.”
“Well,” said Cyril. “It’s not what I was—”
“Hush.” Aristide sat forward, bare feet on the cold floor.
“You’re saying Makricosta tried to blackmail Emmeline Frye to save DePaul from the tribunals she’d proposed?” Laurie Kostos might not think he had a radio voice, but it was certainly unmistakable, even with a weak signal. “And this is why she blew her own warehouse and blamed it on the Catwalk.”
Cyril, face still close to the radio, slid his eyes in Aristide’s direction. Aristide feigned intense concentration on the broadcast.
“I am.” In contrast to Kostos, Aristide almost didn’t recognize Daoud. If they hadn’t introduced him by his surname, if the story wasn’t so familiar … his voice sounded deeper, and Aristide wasn’t sure if it was the airwaves or an affectation. Resignation no longer colored his words, nor spite. He sounded sure of himself, unburdened by misgivings. “In addition to acting as Mr. Makricosta’s secretary, we were engaged in a … personal relationship, and so I was privy to information beyond the scope of Cross-Costa’s business. That warehouse exploded shortly after Aristide approached Frye, and it held large quantities of Lisoan poppy tar that Cross-Costa had entrusted to WCRC, our primary Geddan shipping partner. That was not a terrorist attack. That was retribution.”
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