Page 67 of Nemesis Mine
Max looked pleased with himself. “Happy to be the first.”
“Not really how it happened, you mostly just invited yourself over—”
Max was the one to lean forward this time, hushing the grumble with a kiss. He licked his way into Cyrus’s mouth, sucked gently on his lip.
“You’re too perceptive,” mumbled Cyrus, as soon as he had the breath to speak. “It’s disgusting.”
Max huffed out a soft laugh, but his small smile was genuine when he pulled back. He lifted a hand to push Cyrus’s hair back off his forehead. Somehow that gesture felt nearly as intimate as the touch of his mouth.
“Thanks for telling me,” Max said.
“Again, not how it happened, you sort of forced it out of me—”
Max kissed him again, a quick little thing. “Well. Thanks anyway.”
Cyrus fidgeted. He wasn’t about to tell Max about the light feeling in his chest; he was more relieved than he could ever have expected to have that truth prised free and met with acceptance. He’d spoken more truth and emotion this evening than he had in his lifetime, but he didn’t have the words for that.
“Yeah. Well,” he said, with feigned indifference he knew Max could see through. “Probably for the best that you know. No more secrets between us now.”
Max was quiet. He moved to sit beside Cyrus, elbow to elbow, and tilted his head back against the headboard. Cyrus looked at him out of the corner of his eye, mapping the familiar profile. Max’s expression gave nothing away, but Cyrus knew him well enough to pick out the tension about his brow.
“What’s wrong?”
The furrow at Max’s brow deepened, just a little. “Thought you said I was the perceptive one.”
“Maybe it’s a talent we share,” Cyrus retorted. He jostled Max with his elbow. “Go on.”
Max didn’t smile. He sighed instead, his shoulders wilting. “I was just thinking that I... I have my own secrets. And I don’t really have a right to keep them from you, given what you’ve just shared with me.”
Cyrus raised his eyebrows. Max had lived his life on a public stage, and he’d been on that stage for so long. What secrets could he possibly bear that nobody had dug up yet?
Max seemed to read his silence as expectation. He swallowed, sitting upright again. He pulled his legs closer too, almost hugging them to his chest. It made him seem smaller, younger. Cyrus knew without needing to ask that whatever Max was about to say, he hadn’t told anyone before.
“I grew up near Arclee,” Max said quietly. “Not in the village itself, in another hamlet nearby—smaller than Arclee, not as much going on.” Cyrus held his tongue, pushing back the immediate thought that popped to the forefront of his mind: that Arclee was a dull little backwater in itself.
“My family used to go to the market there. We didn’t have much. A group of kids always used to steal things from my parents’ stall, and it frustrated me. A lot. But I couldn’t do anything about it. My dad told me not to, that if we ignored them, they’d go away.”
But Max wasn’t good with frustration, and children like that didn’t just go away—well, until they joined the Wrongdoers’ Guild. Cyrus said nothing.
“It all came to a head one day when I was about fourteen. They pushed the stall over, just for fun. My parents lost so much stock, and I was so angry...” Max trailed off. He stared straight ahead, avoiding Cyrus’s gaze. Cyrus tried to imagine what he might have done in Max’s position. He’d have plotted revenge, no doubt. He’d have wanted to hurt them.
In the dim light of Cyrus’s lair, Max closed his eyes. His voice came out a hoarse whisper. “I followed them home. I saw where they lived, and I—I set it alight.” A tight swallow. “With them inside. All of them, the entirefamily. I could hear them screaming. And my—my first thought was that they deserved it.”
Cyrus released a surprised breath without meaning to. It sounded too loud in the quiet between them. Max seemed to cringe away from it, as though the exhale carried condemnation.
It was wrong. Far worse than anything Cyrus had done at that age. At fourteen, he could be found stalking lines of ants in his parents’ garden with a shard of glass and a knowing eye towards the rising sun. Cyrus could picture it, the flushed, satisfied face of the teenager crouched a safe distance from the flames. The way he’d watch as the flames rose, the pungent scent of burning carrying for miles. The cries of alarm and fear from all around. Those who had wronged him, screaming for help.
In another life, it would have been Max’s first step on the path of wrongdoing. He would have been the worst of them.
But Cyrus had heard this story before, with a different slant. Maximillian, the people’s champion. The heroic boy who saved an entire family from their burning home.
“You changed your mind,” Cyrus murmured. “You dragged them out of the fire.”
Max’s mouth twisted bitterly. “And I was praised for it. The brave youth, destined for the Federation. Born with a champion’s soul, because I saved people from the fire I lit myself.” The bitterness became disgust, threading into his tone, before it softened into regret. “My family never said as much, but I—I think they suspected. Probably why they’ve stayed away from me. I lifted them out of povertywhen I became a champion, and they made the most of that, but then...”
Max turned his head away from Cyrus, like he couldn’t bear to see the judgement on his face.
The nonexistent judgement. Cyrus hadn’t expected this, no. There was definitely an element of surprise.
