Page 34 of Nemesis Mine
When Cyrus stepped back into his living quarters with a drink for himself and one for Maximillian (Balthazar could lick the dew off the walls for all he cared), he stopped and stared. Maximillian was hogging the couch with his arm out like that, so Balthazar had pulled up a chair to sit across from him. Cyrus’s brooding chair. He opened his mouth to object—the harmony of his home, disrupted!—before he caught Maximillian watching him. There was a hint of amusement in his expression, like he knew what Cyrus was thinking.
Cyrus wrestled the objection down, offering the goblet wordlessly and fighting the urge to withdraw at the coolbrush of fingers against his. Then he sat down on the couch next to the champion, harder than was necessary. Maximillian would just have to move over.
He didn’t. Cyrus let a large sip of Champion’s Bane roll over his tongue, honey with a bite of heat, commiseration for how close Maximillian’s knee was to his own.
“So, the fight in Cepha.” Maximillian looked perfectly at home in Cyrus’s lair, his lounge casual and comfortable. “We should debrief, I think, before we plan the next one. I wanted to do it straight after, but—” He glanced at Balthazar, mingled impatience and tolerance in his expression. “Bal pointed out that it was better to go straight to Heliarth following the fight.”
“Make sure your people were sufficiently awed?” Cyrus drawled.
Balthazar frowned. Or perhaps his constant frown simply deepened; his expression permanently looked like he’d smelled something pissy. “You told him everything?”
“I wasn’t about to agree to a champion’s suggestion without knowingwhyhe was suggesting it, was I?” Cyrus muttered. “I’m not a fool.”
The glint in Balthazar’s eye suggested he was more than ready to argue against that, but Maximillian interrupted before he could. “We’re here to talk about Cepha, remember? First off—that leap onto the stage. That wasimpressive. I mean, yes, for a moment I did think you were going to break your ankle and ruin the whole thing. But you pulled it off. And some of those moves—never thought I’d be complimenting a wrongdoer, but you’re lethal with those daggers.”
Cyrus found himself smiling again as he soaked up the champion’s praise. Maximillian was right, Cyrus had been great. He was glad it had been noticed.
He let Maximillian keep going, rambling on about the fearful letter the governor of Cepha had already sent, begging him to step in should Cyrus ever return; the way he had heard from two new brand ambassadors following the fight (a footwear company keen to have Maximillian model their latest range of leather boots, using the tagline “Kick wrongdoers out of your life”; and a Cepha-based bakery looking to ice Maximillian’s face onto their goat milk cookies). Maximillian couldn’t keep the self-satisfied grin off his face, hands as animated as his face as he gesticulated. His goblet tipped precariously with every movement.
“And listen—they didn’t like you at all,” he confided. “The brand ambassadors, I mean. Found you really sinister—in fact, they were a bit worried about that, weren’t they, Bal? The bakery considered icing your face onto cookies too, so they could have wrongdoers versus champions and make a whole thing of it, but they were too afraid you’d come after them if they did.”
Cyrus would have shoved the cookies up the baker’s nose. Before he could say as such, Maximillian’s smirk morphed; became, possibly, a little more genuine.
“Perfectly done, really. We should be proud.”
Cyrus was proud; exceedingly so. He’d secured himself attention in the news and he’d frightened a lot of people. Who cared if it had been Maximillian’s idea to start with? Cyrus recognised a good deal when he had it. He nodded his agreement.
A beat passed, then another. Maximillian looked expectantly at him. Cyrus looked back, still smiling. Maximillian’s eyebrow performed a delicate arch.
“I thought I was pretty good too,” Maximillian hinted.
“He doesn’t know how to be nice to people,” said Balthazar.
Maximillian’s head turned, frown already in place. “Bal,” he admonished, “don’t say—”
“It’s true,” Balthazar said. His beady little eyes burrowed into Cyrus. “Isn’t it?”
The knowing look on Balthazar’s face rankled. If he was anyone else—or at least, if he was under anyone else’s protection—Cyrus would peel that expression off him. Literally.
“Wrongdoers don’t say nice things,” he hedged.
Maximillian laughed. “You must have said a nice thing atsomepoint in your life. Go on, say something nice about me.”
“I don’t get paid enough for this,” Balthazar muttered.
“Um,” said Cyrus, through a flood of panic that he was working very hard to keep off his face. This was way out of his comfort zone. And there was something in Maximillian’s question that doubled his discomfort, made him want to drop his goblet on the ground just so he could leap up under the pretext of needing a new one. He could, perhaps, think of one or two nice things to say about Maximillian. Maybe. About his—the way he moved. In a fighting context, of course. The way he looked. Sometimes, only sometimes. When the light was particularly flattering. But he didn’t want tothinkthem, let alone voice them.
The panic must have been visible on his face despite his efforts, because Maximillian took pity on him and clarified, “About the ceremony. Our little performance. There must have been something you thought I did well?”
Cyrus stared at him in silence for a few long moments. Then he cleared his throat, too aware of both sets of eyes tracking his every breath.
“I thought it was good when you...” Cyrus groped about for a way to finish that sentence, mouth opening and closing several times as he landed upon an option, examined it for potential humiliation, and discarded it just as quick. “When you...”
“I don’t think you impressed him enough, boss,” said Balthazar. He sounded like he was enjoying Cyrus’s discomfort.
Cyrus made the mistake of looking up. Maximillian’s eyes were very blue and very intense. They made it difficult to hold on to the thoughts he was trying to marshal into order. It was the alcohol, it had to be the alcohol, but surely there was something that he could—
Balthazar laughed under his breath. It buried Cyrus’s discomfort under a sudden cold flood of annoyance.
