Sidney strides back towards us, a haughty, well-dressed silhouette with the large windows behind him framing him in pale winter light.
“Does Mr. Guest want the items in these cases appraised as well?” Sidney asks.
His voice is so sharp and precise that I could use it to fold shirts. I could use it to cut myself.
I sigh. Longingly, quietly.
No one seems to notice.
“Just the paintings,” Cremer replies.
“He should have all of this appraised,” Sidney says, turning back to face the room. This close, I can see the faint lines around his eyes, and the barest shadow of stubble beginning to darken his jaw. I resist the urge to shiver again; my hunger for older men is insatiable. “Your client should bring someone in to see to this library before it rots away in neglect.”
I expect Mr. Cremer to protest, but he only gives a defeated exhale. “Yes, I’ll tell him.”
Sidney doesn’t acknowledge this—he doesn’t seem like the type of man to acknowledge when people have agreed with him, as if he expects that as his due.
I also have a bit of a kink for that too, if I’m honest.
Cremer’s phone rings, and excusing himself, he leaves to take it in the hallway, which means it’s only me and Sidney left inside this moldering cathedral of books.
I take a step forward, peering into the deep recesses made by the shelves, and consider my task. I’m very good at what I do—or at least, I was very good at what I did, before my employer and king died and I didn’t care about being good at anything anymore. Finding a book in a library should be no more difficult than getting a suit dry-cleaned with only an hour’s notice or briefing the President on a day’s packed schedule while we both jog across the tarmac to catch the car.
It doesn’t take me long to assess the layout of the library, and not much longer than that to go through a flow-chart of options in my head about the best way to approach the search. A job well done is accomplished in the planning as much as in the execution, and even if I’m not technically being paid, even if this job doesn’t affect anyone but Merlin and Nimue, it matters to me to do it well.
There’s a prickle of something at the back of my neck, hot and light all at once, and I look back at the doors just in time to see Sidney Blount looking away from me.
3
Years of sleeping only when the President slept—and often less—mean that I’m fairly energized after a two-hour nap, even with the jet lag. I shave and shower, change into a pair of chinos and a leaf-green sweater that sets off my olive complexion, and then I spend an embarrassing amount of time fussing with my hair.
Before, in my life working for Ash, there was no time for vanity and there was no bandwidth for fashion. I had my roster of tweedy clothes, my trusty glasses, and I’m blessed with a thick flop of black hair that looks good no matter what I do. But thinking about sitting down at the table with the meticulous Sidney Blount, a man who scoffs at rare books and glares at Roman artifacts inside glass cases, has me worried that I’ll look immature or foppish or vain.
But there’s no helping it. The hair must flop, and I don’t have the right tools to manage it. I arrange it as tamely as I can—not very—and head downstairs to dinner, where I’m greeted by Mr. Cremer and a handsome young man in his early twenties.
“You must be Ryan Belvedere,” the young man says, extending his hand with a grin. He’s got a flop of hair to rival mine and hazel eyes like windows to summer in the midst of all this cold and damp. And his smile has an uneven hitch on one side of his upper lip, roguish and innocent all at the same time, the grin of a young man just on the verge, just at the threshold. In another year, maybe in another handful of months, he won’t be a comely youth but a man in the first flush of his power.
And that’s not at all my type, given my penchant for older, crueler men, but my heart speeds up all the same as our hands touch.
“Mr. Belvedere,” Cremer says, “this is Auden Guest, your host.”
This is Auden Guest? I try to hide my shock as I shake his hand in return and then nod my agreement to his gesture at the open wine bottle nearby. I really thought I was staying at the house of a splotchy, book-hating, father-blaming miser, but nope. Just a gorgeous boy with hazel eyes and an open, crooked smile.
“Thank you so much for allowing me to stay here,” I say as I accept the glass of wine. Our fingertips brush, and while it’s not sheer electricity between us, I still feel my cheeks warm. It’s been over a year since I’ve touched another person with more than the most perfunctory of courtesies, and even the punishments I’d come to crave at my local kink club were too hard to seek out between the hectic pace of Ash’s re-election campaign and then my grief after his assassination. I’m starved for caresses and slaps both, and tonight is the first time I’ve really felt it, felt the hunger and the lack.
Maybe Thornchapel is stirring me awake again. Urging me back to life.
I look up to see Sidney Blount in the doorway of the dining room, staring at me and Auden Guest. His expression is hard and cold, his eyes are like ice under a flat sky, and suddenly I know that if he snapped his fingers right now, I’d drop to my knees. Right here in the dining room, here in front of everyone. I wouldn’t even set down my wine first, I wouldn’t even mind dropping it in my haste to obey
him, in the hopes that he’d make me lick every spilled drop off the rug. That he’d punish me for the insult to my host.
Then Sidney glances away, stepping in with his hands in his pockets and a line between his eyebrows as he no doubt catalogs the antique furniture in the room.
There’s a difference between cruel and just plain not interested, Ryan, I remind myself. The former is one of my favorite things in the world, and the latter is something I won’t hurt myself with ever again. I’ve already spent the last four years quietly aching for the two most powerful men in my country as I watched them ache after each other—there’s no sense in starting an even more hopeless attachment to someone I barely know.
But I still can’t stop my eyes from drifting to him as we sit and a rosy-cheeked woman named Abby bustles in with our dinner. I can’t stop watching him as he lifts his wineglass—by the stem, no unsightly smudges on Sidney Blount’s glass, no sir—and as he tilts his head to listen to Cremer or Auden say this or that. As he eats with a precision that’s as joyless as it is elegant.
“So Mr. Cremer tells me that you worked for the former President?” Auden asks after we’ve finished with our meal, and moved on to the little apple tarts Abby’s brought in. “I’m so sorry about what happened, by the way.”
