Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Sir, begins the letter.

Damen knows, without going any further, that he isn’t going to enjoy what follows. For one, the letter is handwritten. Only a particular kind of constituent still sends in letters by hand. The likes of them are an older, more irritable sort, the kind that deliver their ire in thin, slanted script for the likes of him to read.

He steals a look at his phone – half past nine on Tuesday morning. It’s going to be a long day.

Damen hasn’t slept enough for the last three nights. There are too many hours left to see through before he can go to bed, and his exhausted body runs on an ill-advised cocktail of coffee and bacon sandwiches. Till now, he’s managed—just—but he suspects that all five pages of this letter in his hand might kill him.

He continues reading.

I wish to express my extreme disappointment with the findings of the most recent report of the Justice and Reform Committee, which you chair. It would seem that the Committee, under your chairmanship, has cast aside the aims that —

Damen puts the letter down.

He should be used to it by now. His father had taught him and Kastor to read using constituent letters. It was the only time the brothers were ever allowed into their father’s study, which also served as the family library. It was a weekly pilgrimage into a holy sanctum—into a room full of things that were to be admired, and feared, and longed for one day, but never touched.

Damen, very young, would sit on his father’s knee. On the desk before them would be a pile of correspondence handpicked by their father’s chief of staff, an ancient pencil of a man named Stellan with all the charm of a kidney stone, who made Nikandros seem lax and mellow by comparison.

Theomedes would hold a letter up for Damen. Damen would follow the handwriting with his fingers, stumbling over combinations of letters he had never encountered, reading paragraphs aloud without understanding a single word. On the other side of the desk would be Kastor, his young features furrowed in intense concentration over paper. With one of their father’s ink pens in his hand, too large for his fingers, Kastor would take down notes for their father’s response in his precociously elegant script.

By the age of 13, when Damen’s school friends were being fitted for braces or taking their driving tests, he and Kastor were drafting responses to their father’s mail of their own accord. It was an early education in people’s cares, their concerns, and the myriad ways in which they expressed them, in all their restraint and excess. Because of those lessons—and they were lessons—Damen can gauge a letter by its opening two or three sentences.

And this letter is going to be a stinker. He doesn’t have to read the rest of it to know that it’ll be more anger than sense, and that it’ll blame him for matters over which he has no control, and over which the Justice and Reform Committee has no jurisdiction. That in itself isn’t a problem. He even makes a point of responding to two or three such letters a week, because angry constituents are still constituents.

But he has to be in a particular mood, and this isn’t it.

He casts the letter down on top of the pile that Nikandros has curated for him. There are twelve letters in all, just like every week—some positive, some negative, some serious, some trivial—collected with the admirable aim of measuring the pulse of his district. Damen picks up another one at random and skims over the contents, spies the word abortion, and throws it right back down.

For a change, he picks up the newspaper and flicks through the first five or six pages. A number of articles catch his eye. Wildfires – five people found dead in their cars, by Aristidis Petras. High Court declaration on prisoner voting rights upheld, by Laurent DeVere. Doctor to face prosecution for breach of Euthanasia law, by Crispin Sabbagh.

His mood doesn’t subside.

Damen makes a brief note to look at the Sabbagh and DeVere articles later, when his head has stopped throbbing. Then he gets up, leaves his office, and walks into the office next door.

If Nikandros notices Damen come in, he doesn’t respond. He’s reclined comfortably in his chair, his feet propped up on the corner of his desk and the curtains behind him firmly drawn to the sunshine outside. He’s also in his bollocking uniform. His white shirt-sleeves are rolled up scruffily around his elbows, and the look on his face is as thunderous as a gathering storm. His tie is loosened, but not off, and a jacket lies discarded on the couch.

Damen closes the door, restores the jacket to a hanger, and collapses on the couch. Nikandros finishes barking orders down the phone about vol-au-vents and vegetarian options—he must be on the phone to caterers—and then hangs up. He throws his cellphone to his desk and turns on Damen.

“What?” Nikandros asks, as though daring a challenge.

“Do you normally cross-examine the caterers when you’re mad?”

“Is that too off-brand for you?”

“I might have approached it differently.”

“I’m sure you would have.” Nikandros says, with a dirty look. “But we can’t seduce everyone.”

Damen knows that it’s intended as a chastisement. He also knows that if Nikandros is reaching for slights about his promiscuity, he must be more exhausted than Damen. It seems that neither of them have the energy for anything more than half-hearted rebukes. This, at least, he can do with his eyes closed.

Which he does. He toes off his shoes and lies down, puling a cushion underneath his head and another underneath his feet. He closes his eyes and decants his exhaustion into the giving leather beneath his back. The couch in this office is more comfortable than most people’s beds. Nikandros often works late enough to sleep on it.

“There’s a halfway point between bullying and seduction.” Damen retorts. “And for the record, if I ever needed an answer fucked out of someone, I wouldn’t send you.”

Nikandros rolls his eyes. It’s a laboured gesture. “Of course,” He says drily. “I’m sure you’d happily martyr yourself for the cause. What are you doing in here, anyway? I thought I gave you letters to answer.”

“I don’t feel like concentrating.”

“And I didn’t get a Masters in Political Science to organize the catering for your next fundraiser, but here we both are.”

There is no bite to his words. Nikandros has two secretaries to whom he could have easily delegated the task, but if he’s dealing with it, it means he wants to. Damen nestles down further into the couch and pulls a third cushion from the floor. He’s already comfortable, but he knows it’ll piss off Nikandros.

“I’m sure you’re trying to make a point, but I don’t think I care.” Damen says. “I read your notes on the Beazley Report, by the way. Can you still come to the working group this afternoon?”

“If you checked your calendar like a functioning adult, you’d have seen that the meeting’s been pushed to Friday. The Commerce Committee’s holding an emergency session. Michel and Dalia were called in.” Says Nikandros. “You’d also have seen that I’ve replaced the meeting with lunch at Antipodes.”

Damen shoves the third cushion over his face so he can groan into it. The sound is overly dramatic, and it will annoy Nikandros, but it’s no less than he deserves. If Damen’s lunching at the Antipodes, then he’s going to have to get off this couch. He’ll need to change into something fit to be seen in, and fix his hair, and—gods—wear a tie.

“I hate you.” He says. “Who am I schmoozing, and why?”

“You’re lunching with Berenger. I don’t know what about. He was intentionally coy with me.”

“Berenger? I saw him on Sunday at Kastor’s.”

“Not the father, Damen. The son.”

That’s enough to hook and line Damen’s attention. He shrugs the surplus cushion back onto the floor and props himself up on his elbows. Damen and Senator Berenger floated in the same circles, but Damen hadn’t seen his son in years. At least two.

In the face of Damen’s confusion, Nikandros shrugs. “I don’t know. I was as surprised as you are.”

“Hm.” Damen says. He sits up properly and scrubs a hand through his hair. It gets caught in a nest of tangles and he grimaces, extracting it again. “I’ve never had much to do with him. Did he say why he called?”

Berenger Junior is several years younger than Damen—he can’t be more than twenty-two or twenty-three at most. Damen doesn’t know for sure because the son had always been a quieter sort, far gentler than his awful father and his insufferable grandfather, and every other caustic member of their esteemed political line.

He was as an anomaly amongst the sons and daughters of the Senate—someone who occupied the periphery of conversations by fierce choice. Whereas his peers looked up the same ladders that their parents had climbed, Senator Berenger’s son sought pastures elsewhere.

In the end, he had foregone politics for architecture. That Senator Berenger rarely discussed his son showed how poorly the decision had been received.

Nikandros abandons Damen to his thoughts. His feet are off the desk and he’s working on his laptop, face woven with concentration as he taps out something furious. Damen considers him for a moment. Nikandros typically rules his calendar with the flexibility of a steel rod. There isn’t usually room for impromptu lunches with distant faces.

“Since when,” Damen asks, “did you schedule a lunch in my diary without knowing its purpose?”

Nikandros briefly stops typing. He looks up from his work, expression lost in something thoughtful.

“He seemed fine,” Nikandros says. “But something about his tone unsettled me.”

*~*~*

Antipodes is outside of Ios, half an hour down the coast and at the very edge of a peninsular cliff. The glass building stands alone on the precipice of the land, the very last thing before a steep vertical drop of white rock. Below it, the sea extends out to the horizon and blends into the sky, and from a distance, it glimmers like a mirror reflecting the sun.

Damen walks into the restaurant at one pm sharp. The concierge is a wizened man named Pierre, with an energy and a handlebar moustache that suit someone far younger than his seventy years. He knows Damen by sight—has done since Damen was eight, when his father started bringing him here—and asks about the health of his mother and brother before beckoning an usher with an unthinking flick of his wrist. Master Berenger, says Pierre, is already waiting for him in one of the private dining rooms.

A young man materializes into the foyer. Damen hasn’t seen him before, but he takes notice. The waiter has hair the colour of a sandy beach and eyes that keenly register Damen’s interest. His smile stops just short of inviting, and Damen allows himself the indulgence of one in return. He follows his lead.

The lunch crowd hasn’t arrived in earnest. The idle chatter of the few diners already present is too low to compete with the ambient melody from the grand piano in the corner. The day outside is dazzling, and sunlight streams in so generously that looking out to the horizon hurts Damen’s eyes.

He nods at a table with the Secretary of Education and his under-secretary, and stops at another with a handful of his mother’s friends, just long enough to have his cheeks kissed and pinched dry of blood. His waiter stands peripherally while Damen attends to these pleasantries, perfectly poised and still nursing a quiet smile, as though waiting on Damen’s pleasure is his own.

Damen likes him. Maybe he won’t wait so long between visits, next time.  

The waiter leads him through the centre of the restaurant and out to a concealed corridor. Five private dining rooms emanate from its length, concealed behind dark wood. Damen hasn’t spent a lot of time in these rooms. To be at Antipodes is to be seen, and one cannot be seen from behind walls and a closed door.

But it’s where Berenger’s waiting for him, taking in the view and apparently mid-reverie. The waiter opens the door quietly enough not to disrupt him. Damen has a moment to register his absent gaze and the gentle drumming of his fingers against the tablecloth, before a discreet cough from the waiter restores mind to body.

Then, Berenger’s looking in their direction, rising, extending a hand to greet Damen. The door closes shut behind them, leaving them alone. They’re not close enough to hug, but even so, Damen finds his hands being grasped in a handshake that’s far firmer than the circumstances might call for. He takes a moment to note his pristine grey suit and the surprisingly golden skin beneath it.

“It’s good to see you. You look good. ” Damen says, smiling and meaning it. “Since when did you spend time in the sun?”

His observation draws faint colour across Berenger’s cheeks. “I’ve been keeping busy. Please, have a seat.”

So they do. Damen has questions, but Berenger reaches for the menu and begins to inspect it, which is enough to tell Damen that he’s nervous. There would have been time to read it at least twice over before he arrived, but Berenger nonetheless applies his full attention to studying it. Damen doesn’t need to bother; he’s been here enough times to have sampled everything.

He’s more interested in Berenger, anyway. If Berenger objects to being watched, he keeps his reservations to himself. He flips aimlessly between the pages of the dining menu and then the drinks menu, with all the restless energy of a man whose eyes are looking at words without reading them.

“Is everything alright, Berenger?” Damen asks, gently.

The question has an immediate effect. Berenger’s mouth draws in a thin, pursed line. From somewhere in the distance, the sound of pealing laughter pushes through the silence.

“No.” He answers. When he finally meets Damen’s eye, there’s a lost look about him. He exhales, as though the admission has released the pressure behind a valve. “I’m sorry to drag you away from your work. I know you must be busy.”

“Never too busy for an old friend,” Damen says, in a weak bid to reassure him.

It’s not quite true. They’re connected by history rather than friendship—the work their parents did, the incestuous nature of the political community in Ios, the annual litany of balls and fundraisers and functions.

But even though Damen’s words are intended as kindness, to soothe whatever is unsettling Berenger, they have the opposite effect. Berenger’s gaze drops down to his plate, to his menu again.

“You might not say that,” he answers, “after you hear what I need to tell you.”

Damen’s attention sharpens as keenly as his interest.

But then: a knock, and the door opens. The same sandy-blonde waiter from before enters with a brief bow and asks whether the gentlemen have any questions about the menu, or whether they’re ready to order.

On another day, Damen might have come up with a half dozen questions just to keep him at the table and flirt. Not today. Even though Berenger picks up his menu again with the slapdash attention of a student cramming for an exam, Damen turns to the waiter and rattles off selections for both of them: the porc en trois facons, the ignames, the poitron, and whatever wine matches the sommelier will recommend.

A nod, a bow, and a retreat. The door closes shut again, and Damen turns his attention back across the table.

“I, uh— “ Berenger hesitates. “I don’t normally drink at lunchtime.”

“Seems like you need it.” Says Damen. “Are you alright? Is your family alright?”

“I’m fine. Everyone’s fine,” says Berenger. “—Technically.”

“So—not alright.”

Berenger looks back up at the door again, as though to confirm that it’s properly closed before he speaks. For just a moment, the discomfort burgeoning up Damen’s spine is broken over by a wave of irritation. The only thing he likes less than dancing around a point is being made to wait while someone else does. He forces himself to resist the sour tide, exhales, and waits

“What I mean is that—well, everyone is alright, I guess. I don’t even—“ Berenger says, and stops. He reaches for his glass and takes a hearty gulp of water. Damen watches him reassemble himself and look back up, apologies in his eyes. “I’m sorry, Damen. This isn’t easy for me. I don’t know how to begin telling you what I need to say.”

“Begin anywhere.” Damen responds. He hopes that the effort it takes him to be gentle is well-concealed.

“Alright.” says Berenger. “Well, I’m in a relationship.”

The very beginning of the beginning, then.

Damen nods and manages a smile. This, at least, he means. Berenger had always remained seated at the table while everyone else around him danced. After a while, people stopped trying to coax him out of his seat. Their crowd spared no attention for those who didn’t seek it.

“That’s good. I’m happy for you.”

“His name is Ancel. I met him two years ago.” Berenger says, and the very act of naming his lover fortifies him. His tone suddenly finds its grip. “I think you’d like him. There was never anyone like Ancel when we were younger.”

Before Damen can open his mouth to offer a light defence of how they grew up, there is another knock, and the door opens again. The waiter enters with two glasses of Riesling.

As he deposits them on the table, Damen very intentionally catches his eye. The young man is sharp enough to realize that the room won’t care to hear about the originating vineyard or the tasting notes. Another curt bow and he leaves again, the click of the door shut loud enough to ricochet off the walls.

“Please.” Damen says. “Continue.”

Berenger takes a brief sip of his wine before resuming the story. “I shared a flat with a theatre major. I met Ancel at the wrap party of one of his plays. He caught my eye immediately but we didn’t hit it off. He insulted my dress sense before we were even introduced, but there was just something about him. He’s … an absolutely scathing man.”

There’s a note of deep adoration in his tone. Damen can’t reconcile it what he’s just said. “If he’s arrogant and presumptuous, he sounds like everyone we grew up with.”

“No. He was scathing to my face, not behind my back.” He says, firmer still. “He doesn’t lie about anything. He’s clever and he’s beautiful, and the most honest person I’ve ever met.”

“Then you should hold onto him.”

“I want to. I’ve tried to keep him from everything here – from Ios, from our friends.” He says. He reaches for his glass again and turns the stem between his finger and his thumb. “But mostly, I’ve tried to keep him from my father.”

Damen frowns. Senator Berenger isn’t a mild man, but there are easily more difficult fathers amongst his cohort. Damen would know: he had grown up with one.

“Why would your father be a problem?” He asks.

“Because Ancel paid his way through law school with sex work.”

He finishes there and looks pointedly at Damen, the nerves in his expression clearing for a streak of defiance. He waits, as though he expects Damen to say something unpleasant. Damen wonders whether he’s being dared to do so.

But he doesn’t react. There’s nothing to react to, as far as Damen is concerned. That Berenger thinks he might is the surest sign of how poorly they know each other.

“If you’re waiting for me to be unsettled or displeased,” he says simply, “this lunch will drag on till dinner. But I understand why you’d want to protect him from your father.”

Senator Berenger, after all, is an old sort, and the political community in Ios is even older and more entrenched in its ways.

Theomedes had lectured his sons at great length about the privilege of participating in their community. He observed its rules and etiquette like they were ciphered in his blood, and taught Damen and Kastor to do the same. They were so unwritten and all-encompassing—what to wear and when to wear it; who to be seen with; what to do; how to speak—that his father had drawn more than one comparison to organised religion.

Or a cult, Damen had thought more than once, despite the knowledge that he was one of the game’s more skilled players.

But if their codes of behaviour were rigid, then their attitudes to outsiders were even more hard-set. Any difference was received like flung meat met by wolves, with a destructive enthusiasm. If Berenger wanted to spare this Ancel their community, Damen cannot fault him.

In any case, his unflinching response earns him a slight deflation of Berenger’s shoulders—no more than a fraction—but the defiance doesn’t subside from Berenger’s eyes.

“He’s not ashamed of his choices and I’m not ashamed of him. I love him and I’m proud of him—all of him. But we spoke, him and I, very early on, and he decided that he’s not comfortable with my parents knowing. For two years, we’ve been carrying on just fine. But then—“

He falters. He sits back in his seat and goes quiet. Damen notices then, that the napkin in Berenger’s lap has been twisted out of its shape, and that he’s absently curling it around his fingers

Berenger is still dancing around the point, and far away from why he would bring it to Damen in the first place. The inability to draw a line around why they’re here gathers something unpleasant in Damen’s throat. He reaches for his own glass of wine and tries to swallow down the uncertainty.

“A man came to my father three months ago.” Berenger eventually says. “He knew everything about Ancel. Not just the fact of what he used to do, but every detail about it. He had Ancel’s tax returns, his social security details, even his list of clients. He took everything to my father’s office and told him that I had been in a relationship with this person for two years.”

Damen remains perfectly still, and quietly files away every single presumption about the direction of this conversation.

“And then?”

Berenger opens his mouth, and stops at the sound of another fucking knock.

At least the waiter knows the drill by now. He comes in followed by three others, each one of them bearing a single plate hooded with a cloche. Their food is placed before them and un-cloched with a flourish that seems farcical against the backdrop of the conversation. Damen and Berenger humor them with the thinnest veneer of civility as their glasses of water are refilled and cracked pepper is rained on their meals. Damen remembers to thank them, but he cannot muster the reflex to smile.

No one speaks a word.

Once they’re gone, Berenger’s next breath comes in a tremor. “The man threatened my father. He said that unless my father cooperated fully, he would plaster Ancel’s biography across the front page of every newspaper and magazine from here to Vask.”

“Did you get his name? Have you called the Police?”

“My father won’t let me. He’s afraid that the more people know, the more likely the story will leak. He wants me to end things with Ancel.” Berenger says. He leans back in his chair, his misery so thick it could be cut with a steak knife and served on a plate. “I’ve told him I won’t.”

“Berenger, if you won’t speak to the Police, I don’t know if there’s anything I can do to help.”

“I want you to try.”

“If you need strings pulled, your father has far more power than me. ” Damen says. He doesn’t add that he refuses to pull strings on principle.

Berenger takes a long drag of his drink. His next look at Damen is a blank one, and resolute. He leans forward again, crossing his elbows on the table. The line of his shoulders is thin and laden.

“Damen, the man who came to blackmail my father was sent by your brother.”

Damen stops still, and stares.

“My brother.” He repeats, redundantly. “You think that my brother’s threatening your father.”

“No, we know he is.”

There is a long pause.

Damen looks away from Berenger and out to the ocean, only for a moment, only to collect his thoughts. The day remains as bright as it had been when he arrived, and there isn’t a single ship or cloud on the horizon to break the vivid blue. Damen dwells on all these things because his thoughts are a tangle, and he cannot unpick them.

He exhales, folds his arms, returns to the conversation. He feels sick. He says, “Keep going.”

“We were at my father’s home a few months ago.” Says Berenger. A flickering part of Damen’s mind registers that Berenger doesn’t call it home. “It was the worst dinner we’ve had in a long time, as a family. I don’t think I tasted a single mouthful. And my father—he just sat there and he yelled. He was speaking about tradition, and honour, and how he wanted me to take after him, and how my life was a constant series of disappointments to him.”

“You don’t deserve that.” Damen remembers to say, even though his mind is still pushing away reeds, trying to see where Kastor fits into the frame. “You know you’re a credit to your family.”

Berenger is looking at him but also not. He doesn’t acknowledge Damen’s olive branch, and his eyes are glazed over as though he’s back at the dinner he’s describing.

“And then my father brought Ancel into it,” he continues. His tone changes, edging closer to anger for the first time in their conversation, “He said that I had made us vulnerable, made us exposed. He said that if it wasn’t for me, how I am, Kastor wouldn’t have anything to hang over his head. He seemed certain it was your brother.”

Damen waits for something in his gut to lash out fiercely in response, to tell him no.

He waits, and it doesn’t come.

In its place is a sudden and urgent need to find out more, accompanied by a sinking feeling to which he cannot place a name.

“Damen?” Says Berenger. “Please say something.”

“I’m trying to work out what motive Kastor could possibly have to blackmail your father.”

What he means was, there is no motive.

The Akielos and Berenger households were both old money and old power in Ios, cut from the same ancient cloth. Their families had history. They worked together, served on committees together, their progeny friends and colleagues in every breath. Senator Berenger had been a pall-bearer at Theomedes’ funeral, had borne the same burden that Damen and Kastor had held atop their shoulders. Their mothers still visited each other.

No member of the Akielos family had ever needed anything that only a Berenger could provide. Every line Damen tried to draw missed the dots. And gods—he had been at a charity fundraiser on Sunday afternoon with Kastor and the Senator. The three of them had spoken that day, at length.

Damen hadn’t picked up on a thing.

“You’re certain that your father mentioned Kastor?”

“Yes. He said the man had made it very clear who had sent him, and that he’d be back with instructions.”

“What instructions?”

“He wouldn’t tell me that.” Berenger says. “I’m sorry.”

The apology does little to appease Damen. His stomach begins to turn at the scent of the untouched food between them. The prospect of eating seems so grotesque that Damen pushes his plate to one side. He prods at the matted nest of his thoughts, and settles on the next most immediate query.

“Why come to me, then? We barely know each other. We haven’t spoken in years. If you think my brother’s blackmailing your family, how can you possibly trust me?”

“You’ve never been like your brother, Damen.”

“You can’t possibly know that.” Damen says flatly.

Berenger considers him for a long moment before answering. “You’re right. I don’t. But my father won’t go to the Police and he won’t give me any further information. My lover is beside himself. I have to do something.”

Damen raises his hands, confused. “What are you asking of me?”

“Dig. You’re his brother. See what you can find. Please.”

Damen exhales. He turns his mind to the task and maps out its edges. He draws a blank and then a second, and for a moment, the whole room spins. He touches a hand to the edge of the table to steady himself. He wonders if Berenger can tell.

“Your father doesn’t know you’re meeting with me, does he?”

“No. And I’d prefer to keep it that way.”

*~*~*

Damen passes the rest of the day on the kind of autopilot that only kicks in after 24 hours awake, or after a sizeable shock.

He goes from lunch with Berenger; to a meeting with his chief research staff about a draft bill he’s sponsoring; to the opening of a new wing at a local primary school. Someone hands him an embarrassingly large pair of novelty scissors, and tells him cut a pink ribbon. There are three-dozen six years olds at his feet, each vying loudly for his attention and showing him their missing teeth. Even they aren’t enough to distract him.

After that engagement, he’s free to clear his mind. He leaves Ios and heads out to the coast for a long drive.

He drives far enough outside the city for the traffic to thin. Eventually, he finds himself alone with the high road ahead of him and the endless sea to his left. The brilliance of the afternoon sunshine has weakened to a mellower light by now, and whispers of pink brush across the sky. It’s been unseasonably warm for a mid-winter day, but the chill is returning.

Had Damen been younger, he might have pulled down the top of his car and pushed the gas. He’s always enjoyed driving fast enough to flay his skin on the cold wind. But he knows the headspace he’s in, and knows too that flirting with speed won’t clear his mind. At worst, it would spend enough adrenaline to draw police attention, and if there’s any truth in what Berenger had told him, then one misbehaving brother is enough.

Berenger’s revelation sits like a strange and heavy weight in his hand: he doesn’t yet understand it, but he feels obliged to carry it. It doesn’t lend itself to being received, filed and dealt with at a later stage. It demands his full attention, immediately. Damen has nursed enough worries in one lifetime to recognize one that will settle at his feet and gnaw.

With each winding turn of the road, and with each kilometre he puts between himself and Ios, Damen looks for some shred of moral certitude that Berenger has misunderstood the situation, or that he has made it all up to slander his brother. For the second time that afternoon, Damen turns his focus inwards and looks desperately for a generous reflex towards his brother

Again, he does not find it.

The sky outside begins to dim. He turns the car around and begins the drive back to Ios. On the way, he contemplates his options.

He thinks about confronting his brother. He imagines putting the question to Kastor and watching him deny it, but the script in Damen’s head comes jilted and meaningless. Kastor has always been the more fluent liar of the two of them—has been since childhood—and Damen cannot replicate his skill, even in his head.

Then, he imagines putting the question to Kastor and hearing him admit it. That scene comes easily, but it so tightly knots Damen’s stomach that he dismisses the option out of hand.

Damen then thinks about hiring a private investigator, and bats that thought away as well. This isn’t a problem to delegate away with money, and an investigator’s loyalty extends only so far as the highest bid. Damen is unsure of how many people know about what Berenger has told him, but entrusting the knowledge to someone else, who might reveal it to unfriendly parties for the right price, sits uncomfortably in his gut. It would be a reckless step in situation that demands finesse.

Then, he thinks about a different approach—a different type of investigation—by someone respectable, ethical, who would seek the truth as its own objective. A name crosses his mind, and a face—brilliant eyes, light hair—but no. It’s too soon for that kind of thinking.

By the time Damen reaches the city, it’s completely dark and he finds himself wedged in the early evening gridlock. He’s tired and ravenous, and nursing a murderous headache. Neither he nor Berenger had touched any of their food that afternoon, and his stomach—clearly still concerned with mortal needs, despite the developments—growls angrily against his ribs.

Without thinking, he drives past his apartment. Then, he drives past a takeout restaurant, and a second, and a third. Finally, his mind catches up to what his reflexes are doing, and he crosses the lengthy distance across the city to Nikandros’s house. When he parks outside the modest, gablefront home, the lights are on and muffled music blares into the street.

When Damen steps outside of his car, the scent of cooking hits him so powerfully that his stomach almost turns in on itself. He lets himself into the house and hangs his suit jacket in the hallway closet. After a moment’s thought, he steals one of Nikandros’s jumpers and throws it on over his shirt. The scent of cumin and ginger hangs tantalisingly in the air and he follows it to its source.

The music—some godforsaken opera—is so loud that Nikandros shouldn’t notice him approach, but he does. Damen lingers in the doorway and leans against it, and Nikandros looks up with all the surprise of a man who had diarized the visit.

He wipes his hands off on his apron and turns the volume down. “I should start charging you rent.”

“How about you get me a glass of wine instead?”

“Fine. But make yourself useful and grate the cheese,” Nikandros says. He reaches for the bottle and a second glass, and fills it with an amount that Damen will need to sleep off later on the couch. “While you do that, you can explain to me where you disappeared to after the school opening.”

Damen treks around the kitchen. He collects the cheese, the grater, and a chopping board and joins Nikandros on the opposite side of the kitchen island. He accepts the glass of wine offered to him.

Silently, he offers a grateful prayer to whatever’s listening for not having to spend the night alone.

“That lunch that you scheduled with Berenger.” He begins. A large part of the drive had been spent contemplating how to approach this very subject. “It threw my afternoon off.”

“Really,” comes the answer. Nikandros slits open a chilli and begins scraping out the seeds. “I always found Berenger exceedingly dull.”

“Well, you’re a prick. That’s not his fault.”

Something in Damen’s tone prompts Nikandros to look up. He studies Damen for a long moment and registers that something’s wrong. His expression softens.

“Sorry.” Nikandros says. “Continue.”

Damen takes a sip of wine and begins grating. He tries to think of how to say what he’s learned, and whether he should begin with the lunch or the punch-line it had delivered. The throbbing in his head intensifies.

In the end, more out of frustration with himself than anything else, he puts the cheese down, wipes off his hands, and pushes the palms of his hands into his eyes.

“Damen? What’s wrong?”

“I’m fine.” Says Damen, closing his eyes against the pain. “Do you have any painkillers?”

“Not while you’re drinking.” Says Nikandros. Damen hears water running into a glass and then, the sound of it being placed in front of him.

“Right. Of course.” Says Damen. He accepts the water and drains the whole glass in one go. By the time he replaces it, Nikandros is watching with outright concern.

“What happened at lunch?”

“Berenger said his father’s being blackmailed by Kastor.”

And in response to this bombshell, this news that has turned Damen’s afternoon on its head, Nikandros—

—does not react. At all.

Damen waits for something: a word, a quirk, a quiver of his brow, anything against which he can measure his own reaction, but Nikandros schools his expression into perfect stillness.

“You’re not surprised,” observes Damen, after a long moment. His heart reaches for a conclusion and finds one that it doesn’t like. “Do you know about this?”

There, finally: a flash of irritation. “Christ. Of course I don’t.” Nikandros bites out. “But it’s Kastor.”

“INik. This is blackmail.”

“Yes, Damen. This is also your brother.”

A heavy pause descends on the room. The conversation reaches a stalemate.

For a while, the only sound in the kitchen is a simmering pot.

“I know you don’t like Kastor.” Damen says slowly. “I know a lot of people don’t. I won’t sit here and protest that my brother’s a saint. I’m the first person to know that he isn’t. But this—Nik, this goes way beyond any of that.”

“Did you come here to tell me that you’re certain Berenger’s making it up?” Nikandros asks. His tone is sceptical, just short of patronising.

For the third time that day, the answer presents itself to Damen with ease—and this time, it comes more quickly than the others. It’s one thing to reach the conclusion himself. It’s quite another to have it echoed, without a shred of hesitation, by the most level-headed person he knows.

Quietly, Damen says, “What do I do, then?”

“You don’t do anything.”

“He’s my brother. I have to do something.”

Nikandros puts his knife down.

“Damen? Listen to me. Listen to me closely. I know that head of yours. Whatever’s telling you to get involved, shut it down, now. If the game doesn’t involve you, you stay off the field.”

Optics, his father had called it.

Theomedes had believed that in their line of work, how something looks is far more important than the truth of it. To him, optics was an answer and an explanation and a morality. Theomedes had given his blessing to Nikandros’s appointment as Damen’s chief of staff, precisely because Nikandros understands optics, my boy.

But Damen isn’t a novice.

“What if it’s true and it comes out?” He asks. “What if someone finds out that Berenger told me, and that I did nothing with the information? How do you think that’s going to look for me? For the family name? I don’t have a choice, Nik. I have to do something.”

Nikandros swears an oath. He takes a long drag of his drink. His glass is full when he picks it up, and by the time he puts it back down—a little more forcefully than necessary—there’s less than half of it left.

“You, of all people, always have a choice.” Nikandros says. “And what are you planning to do, anyway? Go up to Kastor and ask him to stop blackmailing people?”

Something bursts, then. Something sour and sharp, and it spills into Damen’s blood.

Nikandros is his oldest friend, and his dearest, and the only person whose thoughts could always challenge his opinion. But, for all their years together, Nikandros still has an awful tendency to serve advice with a generous helping of condescension.

Damen waits before responding, as long as it takes to tame his irritation.

“Even if I wanted to,” he answers eventually, “I don’t have much to work with. Berenger told me everything he knows but it isn’t enough.”

There’s a pause as Nikandros measures out the chilli and throws it on the pan. It hisses and rises with furious steam, and he regards it with a satisfied grimace.

When he looks back to Damen, he asks, “Do we trust Berenger?”

“Now you want to give Kastor the benefit of the doubt?”

“No.” Nikandros says. He begins stirring the pan, without any kind of intention. “Maybe it’s neither this nor that. Maybe Kastor hasn’t done anything, but Berenger’s hand is being swayed. His father, maybe?”

Damen considers it. Senator Berenger had been a contemporary of their father’s, the last sentry of a very old guard. He should have retired a decade ago. Something about the possibility of him constructing such deception doesn’t sit right with Damen. If there’s a scheme beneath a scheme, then it’s a game for younger men.

“I just don’t think he has anything to gain.” Damen admits. “And Berenger didn’t strike me as anything but honest. I don’t know whether he has it in him to be so deceitful.”

“Then let’s assume that in the middle of all this smoke, there’s a kernel of truth. What’s your next step?”

“We need more than a kernel. We need more information.” Damen says. After a thoughtful pause, he adds, “I considered hiring a private investigator, you know? But I can’t trust just anyone with this.”

Nikandros rolls his eyes. “We might yet make a politician of you, one day.”

“What I need—” Damen continues, reasoning aloud as he speaks. An idea returns to him and he chases the ends of it, vying for grip. “What I need is someone discreet, who investigates things for a living, with unimpeachable ethics.”

“In this town?” Nikandros asks. “Tell me if you find them. Give them my card.”

Damen pauses a moment longer, allowing the idea to take shape. “What I need is a journalist.”

Nikandros puts down the spatula and leans against the counter-top, hanging his head in frustration. If the shadow of danger in his expression is anything to go by, Damen is lucky that Nikandros doesn't throw the spatula at his head.

“You’re going to go to the press against your own brother.” Nikandros says sharply. “On a whim?”

“No, I’m going to ask for help.” Says Damen, his surety solidifying. “Think about it for a moment. I need someone with investigative skills who can’t do anything with the information unless it’s absolutely true.”

“I never knew you were such a fan of the fifth estate.”

“I don’t need all of it. I only need one person.” Says Damen. “Where’s your copy of this morning’s paper?”

Nikandros nods towards the dining room table. It’s heavily laden with paperwork and files and god knows what else. Damen, who eats at least three meals a week in this house, isn’t sure that he’s ever seen its surface.

Damen rifles around and rescues today’s edition of the Ios Tribune from underneath a mountain of draft legislation. He flicks through it on the way back to the kitchen and finds what he’s looking for on the sixth page. A half-page article: quiet, lengthy, detailed. He clears his side of the island and puts down the newspaper for Nikandros to peruse.

Nikandros skims over it, and then looks back up at him blankly.

“What am I looking at?”

“Bottom left article.”

“High Court declaration on prisoner voting rights upheld.” Nikandros recites. “What does this have to do with anything?”

“Not the article. The journalist. Laurent De Vere.”

“You say that like I’m supposed to know the name.”

“You would, if you bothered to read the paper closely. He’s very good.”

Even as he says it, he knows it’s an embarrassingly low threshold for a task that will require the utmost delicacy. He knows that he sounds foolish. Still, there’s no resisting the conviction that has settled in his gut.

Nikandros gives him a sceptical look. “He’s at the bottom of page six. How good can he possibly be?”

Laurent spends the morning covering the plenary session of the Economic and Social Committee, and heads back to the office at midday. When he arrives, most of the newsroom is out for the lunch hour. He counts five heads amongst the sea of computers.

It’s still enough for him to immediately sense that something unusual is afoot. When he walks into the room, all five heads snap towards him and look back down just as quickly, as though they’ve been caught doing something. All five heads make a terrible performance of pretending to work.

It makes for an unconvincing show. He surveys the room for a moment longer, cool and unflinching, but no one dares look back up at him. No one offers an explanation.

He goes to find Nicaise. Nicaise is alone in the junior copy editors’ office, eating lunch at his desk, halfway through a turkey on rye. The document on his screen is bleeding so heavily with red edits that the original text is almost gone. He feels a momentary pang of pity for whoever authored it.

Before Laurent says a word, and without so much as looking at him, Nicaise asks: “Since when did you fraternize with senators?”

“I don’t fraternize with anyone.” He says. “I hate people. You know that.”

“And believe me, they hate you. But there’s a senator in your office.”

Laurent freezes.

When his thoughts kick back into gear, he takes a step back out into the newsroom to look in the direction of his office. It’s on the other side of the large, open space, and the distance to it is littered with computers and printers and other office sundry.

But Nicaise is right: even from here, Laurent can make out the large silhouette of a man in his office.

He returns inside and looks back at Nicaise, who still only has eyes for his screen.

“Which senator?” Laurent asks sharply.

“Akielos. The younger one.”

“And who let him in?” Laurent asks, by which he means: who is going to die today.

Nicaise turns slowly away from his computer, and delivers him a withering look.

“Do I look like your secretary?“

“Keep that tone up, and you will be.”

Nicaise puts down his sandwich for the sole purpose of raising two middle fingers in Laurent’s direction. Without so much as blinking, he turns back to his screen, and just in case Laurent doesn’t get the message, he pops in his headphones.

Nicaise is an irrepressible little shit. It’s exactly why they hired him.

But there are more pressing matters at hand.

Laurent begins making his way back to his office. The closer he gets, the more clearly the senator comes into view. He’s deep inside Laurent’s office, standing at the window, admiring the city view from behind my desk, Laurent thinks. The sheer nerve of him.

Laurent is not feeling charitable when he arrives: he has three deadlines to meet by the day’s end. The morning’s plenary session had run overtime by an hour and a half, and he needs every spare moment he can squeeze from the afternoon to write.

He knocks on this own door, and is pleased when the sound shakes the senator out of his reverie. He turns and smiles contritely at Laurent, embarrassed at how easily he’s been startled.

It’s a strangely unfiltered response. Un-senatorial. Especially from a man large enough to cause a solar eclipse.

Senator Akielos walks over to the guest’s side of the desk, and extends his hand to Laurent. Laurent takes it, and watches as his hand disappears in the senator’s warm, gigantic grip.

Laurent says, dryly: “I’ve never been received in my own office before.”

Akielos has enough grace to retain his embarrassed look. It’s still a strange contrast to the sheer power of the rest of him—everything from his height, to the perfect tailoring of his charcoal grey suit, to the obvious muscle that it barely conceals. Laurent imagines that he hulks above most people in most rooms.

“My apologies,” says Akielos, and he sounds he like he means it. “I was led here.”

“So I’ve been told,” says Laurent. “You must tell me the name of the gracious culprit.”

Laurent closes the office door behind him. He takes a quick look out the glass and notes that there are more people in the newsroom. Now there are a dozen heads, and again, they all make a very poor show of pretending not to look.

Laurent winds a hand around the drawstring and curtly shutters the blinds. It’s not much privacy, but it’ll do for now. He waves a hand towards one of the chairs in front of his desk, inviting Senator Akielos to sit, which he does.

“To what do I owe the pleasure, Senator?” He asks, taking his own chair.

“Please, call me Damen. I’m sorry to bother you. I’m sure you’re busy.” says Akielos. Damen, Laurent corrects himself. “I’m here because I would like to take you to lunch.”

Whatever Laurent had been expecting, it certainly isn’t that.

“Lunch,” he repeats, neutrally, just to be sure.

“Yes, lunch.” Says Damen. “If you’re free. Which I know you are, because I asked the nice lady at the front desk as soon as I arrived.”

Lauren thinks, two people are going to die today.

He leans back in his chair and studies his unexpected guest. The younger of the Akielos brothers is the more natural politician—far less experienced than Kastor, but much better liked. He smiles easily and speaks simply, and does well enough on the late night talk-show circuit to be familiar. The handsomeness doesn’t hurt, either. Nor the dimple. People use a lot of words to describe his face, like charming, or presidential.

But Laurent is wary of pedestals. Likability is a dangerous platform to cultivate, especially for a politician. It screams to be sullied, and Laurent is wary of ever being tarnished with the same brush.

“We don’t know each other well enough to be lunching, Senator.”

“Perhaps we should. Let me take you out.”

Had Laurent been three or four years younger, and equally less-experienced, he might have mistaken the invitation for personal interest. He might even have been inclined to agree. A handsome face is a handsome face, and it never hurts to build an extra bridge in his line of work.

But he’s shrewder now. He registers the dissonance between the Senator’s easy invitation, and the grave expression with which he offers it. There’s something searching in his eyes, and Laurent realizes with a flash that lunch is a subtext for something else, even though he can’t begin to discern what it might be.

“Lunch.” He says deliberately, eyes keen, just to make sure they’re both on the same page.

Damen’s features relax a little, when he sees that Laurent’s understood him. “Yes, exactly.”

So—lunch means a story. Laurent’s pulse begins racing, the way it always does when he finds a new lead.

It races even though he doesn’t know what the scoop might be, or whether it’ll lead anywhere. The thrill of a new tip-off is always sheer and heady. He quietly drums his fingers against the armrests of his chair, and tries to keep the elation off his face.

“Political or personal?” He asks quietly.

“Political.”

“Involving you?”

“Involving Kastor.”

Laurent stills. A less professional man in his place would have emitted a low, long whistle.

Damen looks away from him, to a point beside his head and outside the window. The struggle to rein in whatever he’s feeling is clear. It’s also clear that he doesn’t want to be here, doing this.

The fact that he’s so uncomfortable tells Laurent something promising about the reliability of what’s to come. But they can discuss that later. He steers the conversation down a slightly different avenue.

“Why me?”

Damen looks back to him, the corner of his mouth betraying an ironic quirk. “You didn’t strike me as the self-doubting type.”

“I’m not. I’m only pointing out that if your story’s as big you think it is, you might be expected to take it higher than a mid-level editor.”

“I don’t need someone with profile. I need someone thorough with a low radar, who hasn’t been around long enough to curry loyalties.”

“I’m obviously flattered, but I’d prefer if you told me the whole truth.”

Damen leans back in his chair and fixes Laurent with a pointed look. Now, he’s smiling.

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” he begins lightly.

It’s hardly a promising start. Laurent says, “I’m not sure there’s going to be a right way to take this.”

Damen opens his mouth as though to speak, but pauses and refrains. He looks at a point above Laurent’s head, visibly struggling with how to phrase what he needs to say. It only serves to pique Laurent’s interest. He can’t imagine that he’s going to like what he hears

“Put it this way.” Damen says, after a considerable number of moments. “No one’s going to ask questions if I start spending time with someone like you.”

“A journalist?”

“A blonde and attractive one.” He says. “I’m advised that I have something of a type.”

Laurent feels the colour rising in his cheeks, and he can’t do a damned thing to stop it.

Of course Damen has a type. Of course Laurent knows what it is. He picks up as many gossip rags as the next person. He’s seen the conveyer belt of attractive men and women Damen keeps on his arm.

But he isn’t sure how he feels, about Damen counting him amongst their ilk.

“Your type is—me.” He says, just to confirm.

“Yes. Which means people won’t ask too many questions if I spend time with you. We’d be able to work in peace.”

Laurent clicks, and draws the next few lines by himself. “And you’d like to encourage those misunderstandings, to throw them off your scent … which is why you want to take me to lunch.’

"So you’ll join me?”      

Laurent pauses again.

“Yes. Not today, because I’m busy. But I will later this week. ” He says. “And Senator? We’re going to need to set some ground rules for this performance.”

*~*~*

Here are the ground rules.

If they’re to work together, they have to foster the illusion that they are together. In order to do that effectively, they’ll need to be seen in public, and more often than strictly necessary. However: public displays of affection will be limited to handholding, or maybe a hand folded into an elbow, but nothing more.

Damen raises an eyebrow and asks, with all the indifference of scientific inquiry, And kissing? Laurent can’t be sure whether or not he’s joking. He can’t imagine that this scoop will necessitate that kind of contact. In the present instant, he resolves the question by avoiding it: he says that they’ll decide whether it’s appropriate if and when the issue arises, and on a case-by-case basis.

It seems like a safe answer. Laurent has no template from which to devise these rules and only scant prior experience on which to draw. He's a novice, tasked with designing a cathedral. It might have amused him had it been happening to someone else.

They agree to meet on Thursday, with the details to be worked out later. Then, Damen leaves.

Laurent thinks about accompanying him out, but decides that the two of them have already courted enough attention for one afternoon. He’s not typically in the habit of seeing anyone off, and making an exception for someone like the Senator—Damen, he reminds himself—grates him the wrong way.

It won’t do to cultivate a reputation for exceptionalism.

He also needs to think, and hard. As soon as he’s alone, he pulls his chair to the window. It’s unseasonably bright and warm for a winter’s day. The street below him teems with bodies eager to catch the sunlight before it flees again. He watches them against the backdrop of his still-racing pulse, and counts what he knows.

From one view, Damen has given him nothing. Perhaps even less than that. He knows less about Kastor, and less still of the scoop. It could make his career. It could be a dead end. Schrödinger’s scoop, Halvik would call it; the liminal space between what a story could be and what it eventually becomes.

And yet—of all the grit and the trudge in his work, of all the cyclical mundanity, it’s this exact uncertainty that he likes best, and that he finds himself craving. He’d sooner spill blood than admit it, but it’s the only romantic point, the only time he can entertain silly thoughts of a Pulitzer before the meagre reality of a story disabuses him of the fantasy.

And he’s intrigued, too, that of all the newsdesks in this media-bloated city, Damen has set the challenge down on a plate in front of him.

As to the reasons for that.

Well.

He replays how Damen looked at him, the appreciative sweep of his gaze. Laurent registers the warmth that rises to his skin at the recent memory. Absently, he picks at a cut in the leather arm of his chair and is honest enough to call the warmth by its name: pleasure.

It won’t do. He’d have dismiss it and soon, but just for a moment, he holds the feeling in his hands. He turns it over in his fingers and holds it up to the light.

Laurent knows what he looks like and how other people look at him; and knows, too, that Damen isn’t frugal with his attentions. He’s probably bedded half the city, and made eyes towards the other half. But the warmth persists. Laurent files it away as an occupational hazard of working with someone as handsome as Damen, and hopes that the novelty will wear off.

In the meantime, he’s going to need to speak to Halvik. He gets up and leaves to find his editor, detouring to the kitchen just long enough to brew her a coffee. She generally receives things more favourably with a double-shot.

Halvik’s door is closed, but the timber and glass of it aren’t enough to contain the rising tenor of her voice. Every word comes out clear, perfectly enunciated, enough to elicit winces from the three junior staff at the cubicles nearest to her office. He goes in without knocking and leans back against the door, listening to her flay an advertiser. He knows she won’t mind his presence. She always appreciates an audience for her kills.

Halvik is seated on a corner of her desk. Her mass of dark black curls is tied in a plait that falls heavy and thick down her back. The blazer of her grey work-suit has been discarded on a couch near the door and her white shirt-sleeves are rolled up tightly to the elbows.

He enjoys watching her in action like this. Halvik is youngest editor in the history of this or any newspaper in Ios by two decades, and not without cause. By the end of the call, she’s brought the caller round to her point of view and terminates the line with a satisfied grimace.

To him, she says, “Sit,” and Laurent obeys. There are two large couches in front of her desk. He takes the left, and places her mug in front of the other. She watches him and asks, “Are you here to tell me why there was a Senator in my office?”

“You heard, then. “ He says.

She sits next to him and accepts the hot drink. This is another thing that he likes about Halvik. She’s a boss until she trusts you, and then she very much isn’t.

“No, I saw. He’s very difficult to miss. His grace blocked half the sun when he came in.” She points out. “I wasn’t aware you two were friends, by the way. What else have you been keeping from me?”

“I don’t recall describing him as a friend.”

“He walked out of your office like a man who had made a social call.”

“His job is to seem like he’s friends with everyone.” Laurent points out, and then, “Actually, he was here on business. He thinks he has a scoop.”

He stops, partially to gauge her response, and partially for dramatic effect.

She raises an eyebrow. “Well then. Don’t let me stop you there.”

Laurent shrugs. “I don’t know more than that. He says he has something about his brother, but I don’t know what it is yet. If we’re being exacting, I don’t actually think he fully knows either. But he seems to want to talk to someone about it, so I’ve agreed to hear him out. We’re going to lunch on Thursday.”

Spoken aloud, it sounds even less substantial than before. He feels as though he’s turned up to Halvik’s office and presented her with a beautiful but empty basket. She mulls over what he’s told her and takes a lengthy sip of her coffee.

“Let me get this straight.” She asks, with a tinge of scepticism. “He suspects that his brother’s up to no good, so he goes straight to the press? He can’t hire a therapist like everyone else?”

“I asked him about that.” He says. After a thoughtful pause, he adds, “Would you believe, Halvik—I think he’s trying to be morally responsible.”

She gives him a long and probing look. “Come on, Laurent. Really?”

He grimaces, having counted the various implausibilities himself: an earth-shaking scoop; a politician with a moral compass; a politician who trusts a journalist; a journalist willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

If one of the junior staff had come to Laurent with the same skeletal plan, he would have drafted their resignation letter himself.

“I know.” He says. “I know that this might lead to nothing. But if it is a dead end, I think I want to confirm it for myself.”

“That’s a lot of your time for very little information.” She points out.

“Gut feeling?” He says, and then, more to himself than anything, “But perhaps appearing trustworthy is in his job description.”

“I presume there’s a reason you’re telling me all of this.”

He meets her eye very pointedly. There’s no point playing it off or being bashful about it, especially not to someone like her. “Actually, yes. Given the—shall we say, sensitivity of our subject matter, he and I discussed how we might go about it. We need to spend time together without arousing suspicion. We’ve decided that while I’m investigating his lead, we’re going to—let people think we’re dating."

“Laurent.” She says, with less humour.

He doesn’t react. In Halvik’s company, jumping to defensiveness is only a step above admitting defeat. She preys on it.

“It makes sense,” he reasons. “He wants to keep this secret, but I’m going to need his time. We need an excuse to spend time together without people asking too many questions.”

Halvik gives a single, disbelieving scoff. “You’ll be in the society pages of every disreputable rag in the city.”

“Exactly.” He says. “We’ll be hiding in plain sight.”

She drains the rest of her coffee and places the cup on her desk. Her expression clouds over as she thinks it through.

“I don’t like it,” she eventually answers, “but I’m not going to stop you. That said, you can expect me to intervene if I feel it’s getting out of hand. Do you need me to delegate anyone to help?”

Laurent allows himself to sink into the comfortable leather, and savour the thrill that he’s going to be allowed to pursue this. He begins sketching out the work he needs to do before he next meets Damen: the research into him, into Kastor, into every piece of information he can source about the political dynasty of their family.

“None for now,” he says. “The fewer people involved, the better. But hold off sending Nicaise away for a while.”

Halvik nods, and falls quiet. He waits for her. It’s clear that her mind is occupied somewhere completely different to his.

“You sound excited, for once.” She says.

“I think I am.”

“There’s a lot to be said for gut feeling in this line of work. Chase it, but make sure you interrogate it often.”

He rolls his eyes. “Thank you, dear leader. Any other glaringly obvious gobbets of wisdom?”

“Only one.” She smiles. “Your Senator is handsome. Be careful, there.”

*~*~*

On the Thursday morning before their lunch, Laurent questions his reflection in the mirror for a lot longer than usual

He wears his best suit—a deep navy slim-fit, with a white shirt and a tie the same azure blue as his eyes. He knows he looks good, and certainly good enough to be on the arms of a Senator. Laurent has walked into enough rooms in one lifetime to know that when heads turn, they typically turn for him.

But looks are only part of it. There’s something more to the paramours that he’ll be trying to emulate. There’s a lightness to them, an expectation of attention and an ease with it, like flames reaching for oxygen. Laurent knows that this, too, shouldn’t be much of a problem. It’ll be a performance, but he’s given plenty of those before.  

Laurent is well-dressed for lunch, but overdressed for work, and he draws eyes from the entire newsroom for it. He marks it as a successful dry run and throws himself into editing junior pieces until he has to leave at midday for lunch. Damen has chosen a restaurant quite a way out of Ios. Laurent tells Halvik not to expect him back till late afternoon.

He drives and uses the long distance to calm the nervous static in his blood.

He hasn’t seen Damen or spoken to him since his visit, but Damen had made his presence felt in other ways. A conspicuous bouquet had arrived at the office for Laurent the day before. It was too big to be ignored, a mix of blooms in bohemian colours that stopped just short of being tasteless. His door had been closed and he had headphones in his ears, listening to a replay of that morning’s plenary session, but the flash of colour from reception caught his eye through the glass windows.

Laurent had watched as Martha carried the bouquet into the newsroom. She had clear passage with it; as though she was parting a sea, and everyone watched to see which direction she would take it. Laurent had suspected it would end up at his door and he was right.

She knocked twice before allowing herself in and presenting it to him. She had looked rather thrilled, and said to him with enchanted tones: “Present for you, Laurent. From Senator Akielos.”

He invited her to leave it on the stack of archive boxes to the left of his door. Then, knowing fully that everyone was still looking through his window—and also, that it would be too obvious to draw the blinds—he returned to his work and flatly ignored the bouquet

He only picked it up before he went home at night. There had been a note tucked carefully between the blooms on Damen’s stationery. His handwriting was large and cursive, his letters rounded, and slanted almost comically to the right.

Antipodes. Tomorrow, at 1pm. Spare me two hours.

D. x

The flowers were the first note of colour in Laurent’s office. Laurent’s burning cheeks were the second. If he had devised the ground rules for this arrangement with speed, Damen had inhaled and applied them like a natural pupil.

Now, Laurent drives to the restaurant with the note in his pocket. He’s never been there before, and doesn’t presume that they’d let him in. Antipodes is the kind of institution that made its name precisely because of its ease with turning people away.

Driving along the water calms him till he arrives, and enters the front lobby. It’s dizzying space with white marble floors and glass walls that rise to a high ceiling. It gives him a vertiginous feeling that he’s forced to push back immediately, because the maître d’ is watching him.

If Laurent had paused long enough to consider his expectations, he might have guessed that anyone working here would be young and beautiful, just as likely to be seen dining here as serving. Instead, the man before him is a relic from a different time, with hair the colour of first snow and a handlebar moustache that curls loosely near his cheek.

The sign at the lectern says Pierre Morel. Pierre smiles at Laurent like an old friend and says, “Mr DeVere. Welcome to Antipodes. The Senator is waiting for you at his usual table. If you’ll please follow me.”

Well, then.

Laurent nods and smiles politely, but not too broadly, lest it broadcast his relief. He allows himself to be led into a large open dining area, enclosed in glass and with astonishing views over the water from three sides. The vertiginous feeling returns—the space feels suspended over the water—but he distracts himself by cataloguing the patrons.

Every table is occupied. On the way to wherever Pierre is leading him, Laurent counts four other Senators, two property magnates, a table with three different telecommunications CEOs, and enough socialites for him to stop counting altogether. Conversations ripple around him but not loud enough to untangle.

He wonders how many mortgages worth of dinners one has to spend here, before having a usual table.

Damen is seated at a window table. He looks dressed up enough for a date—which Laurent remembers, quite suddenly, that this is. For a moment, his mind spins in tension between what they are here to discuss and how they will behave to protect it. He and Damen are strangers, but they will have to act like anything but.

Damen is lost in the view. Pierre quietly announces Laurent’s arrival. When Damen pushes his seat back as though to stand, Laurent places a firm hand on his shoulder to say sit. And to steel himself a little, perhaps. Their eyes meet briefly. Laurent gives him a cloaked smile, which Damen returns without thinking.

He takes the seat next to Damen rather than opposite him, and watches him order a bottle of wine for the table. Pierre bows and leaves. When Damen’s satisfied that they’re alone, he turns his attention to Laurent.

“Hello, Laurent.”

“Senator.”

“Please. Damen.” He says. Something behind his eye glimmers and threatens to spill. “Did you like the bouquet?”

“The office did.” Laurent says. He picks up the menu and begins examining it, keenly aware of Damen’s attention still on him. “For future reference, I enjoy dahlias. And a little more subtlety. Have you already chosen what you’ll eat?”

“I’ve had the whole menu.”

“Of course you have. How silly of me.”

It earns him an appreciative sound, quieter than a laugh. Damianos leans forward and when he does, his knee accidentally brushes against Laurent’s under the table. The space between them has now closed to something meaningless. At this distance, the notes of oud and bergamot in Damen’s cologne become pronounced.

Laurent looks up, and notices a scar down the side of Damen’s nose. He’s never seen it before. At last, an imperfection.

He wills the rigid lines across his shoulder, and down his back, to slacken. He wills himself to relax. He notices Damen log each of these shifts as they happen. He’s intuitive, Laurent realizes. That eases him a little further. He leans a little closer, drops his tone, allows his gaze to dance.

“Do you think people will believe we’re on a date?” He asks.

“This close, people might think we’re about to do more than that.” Damen points out.

A thoughtful pause. “Better to lie too well,” Laurent says eventually, “then not well enough.”

Damen’s smile, when offered at this range, is startling. He surveys Laurent the same way he had in his office, like a mystery he’s looking forward to resolving.

You’re at work, Laurent reminds himself.

“You know, I figured you might be good at this game.” Damen says. “I didn’t realize you planned to enjoy it as well.”

Laurent gives him a single look through sweeping lashes. It’s the closest he’s ever come to preening. “Have we generated an audience, do you think?”

Damen tilts his face just enough for a lateral glance of the room. “Yes. They’re not being subtle about it, either.” He says. And then, turning back to Laurent with a fraction of grimness, “Nikandros is going to have my head for this.”

Laurent knows very little of Nikandros, Damen’s chief of staff. He knows that they grew up together, went to school together, and that they had both worked for Theomedes after university. Nikandros only left Theomedes’ service when Damen decided to enter the political fray himself. He was the spectred figure of Damen’s staff, perpetually in the stands, the counterbalance to Damen’s weight.

He’s rarely in the public eye, but Laurent suspects that his fingerprints are on every speech and policy to Damen’s name.

“Nikandros has an opinion about this?” He asks casually.

“Nikandros,” begins Damen, balancing his words on a scale “has multiple opinions about most things.”

“How much does he know?”

“Everything.”

“Did he counsel you to come see me?”

“No. He counselled violently against it. He thinks I shouldn’t get involved in Kastor’s business at all.” He says. His tone is resigned to the conflict, checking off its elements like laundry. “In fact, he said—“

But he doesn’t finish the sentence. The garcon arrives with a bottle of red wine that Damen must have ordered earlier, and he begins to declaim it politely and at length: vineyard, grape, source, and vintage. Then he serves it and asks if he can assist with selecting their dishes.

Damen looks down at the menu, an obtuse text incomprehensible to anyone without a working knowledge of gastronomic French. But—before he’s finished reading through the entrees, Laurent rattles off the orders that he had decided for both of them the night before: for him, the scampi and lovage emulsion, and with the spruce and the daikon; for Damen, the kingfish and pistachio, with the pickled ginger and kohlrabi.

His feigned ease is worth the confounded expression it pulls from Damen, and the smirk that the garcon barely conceals as he bows and returns to the kitchen. Laurent feels a savage rush to have bested Damen in his own territory.

“How did you know I liked kingfish?” Is all he can manage.

“I don’t.” Says Laurent.

A tug at the corner of Damen’s mouth. “I see. And do you normally bankrupt your sources at lunch?”

“Please. You’re rich enough to buy the entire menu, and then the whole restaurant for dessert,” says Laurent. Damen concedes the point with a shrug, and Laurent restores them to their earlier conversation. “As for Nikandros --- perhaps I can understand his point. But I’d still rather Kastor knew we were meeting, with the wrong impression of our purpose. It’s better than him finding out and jumping to the right conclusion.”

“I know. I agree.”

“What does Nikandros make of your brother?”

Immediately, Damen’s expression neutralises into something unreadable. He falls silent and looks at a point in the tablecloth as he considers his answer. It takes an uncomfortably long time.

Laurent resists the urge to reword his question. Sometimes, there were good things on the other end of a long silence.

When Damen eventually answers, his response is slow and careful. “I think Nikandros only tolerates Kastor for my sake. I’ve never been sure why. Kastor’s never crossed his way.”

“What about you? Would you say you’re close to your brother?”

An even longer pause, this time. “I always thought so.” Damen answers. “We grew up in an unusual household. Our father had unusual expectations of us. We have an unusual relationship because of it, but I would say we’re close.”

“Not close enough for you to know about Berenger.”

“No. Apparently not.”

It visibly pains him. Laurent wonders why he doesn’t try to conceal it, like anyone else might instinctively do in his position. He decides that—for better or worse—Damen plays every single card face-up on the table.

“I imagine you’ve thought about why he might keep it from you.”

“I don’t know. A part of me hopes that it’s intentional. That maybe he’s doing it to shield me.”

The first word that comes to Laurent’s mind is naïve. It slips down his tongue and waits at the edge, poised for deployment. He keeps it to himself.

Twice now and in as many sentences, Damen has been artless with him about something deeply personal. Laurent wonders whether he’s like this with everyone, and if so, how he’s survived in politics for as long as he has, and thrived.

He settles for, “Your brother is a politician.”

“He’s my brother.” Damen responds, reflexively and with a trace of iron. It’s barely there, but enough to buttress his words.

“Yes.” Says Laurent. “A politician and your brother. And perhaps in that specific order.”

Damen says, “You don’t understand the household in which we grew up,” and Laurent resigns himself to a sermon on the tragedies of growing up rich and powerful. He reaches for his wine. “My father served two terms as vice-president. It was never enough. It ate at him, and it ate at our family. Eventually, he passed the point where he could run on his own. When that happened, the only thing that stopped it from destroying him was drilling the ambition into both of us.”

“I see.” Says Laurent. He eddies the glass idly in his hands. “And how many people have you blackmailed in the last month?”

Damen ignores the question, but Laurent doesn’t miss the sweep of irritation in his eyes. “Kastor is the eldest. He had to bear the brunt of it. If my father needed to rage, he did it in Kastor’s direction.”

“I’m confused. Are you suggesting that he might be innocent of whatever it is?”

“No, I just—I’m trying to understand why, and I can’t.”

Laurent sees an opportunity to draw the conversation towards more productive waters.

“Alright then. Talk me through everything you do know.”

And so Damen does. It doesn’t take him long to recount the entirety of his conversation with Berenger, and he tells it with no small anguish across his features. It only serves to underline all that he doesn’t know.

Carefully, he asks, “Other than Berenger’s word, what proof do you have?”

“How do you mean?”

“Photos, emails, receipts. Anything?”

“I don’t have anything more substantial than Berenger’s word.” He admits. “That’s partly why I came to you. I need your honest assessment about the way forward.”

Laurent contemplates his answer. Damen has presented him with a single fragment of information, a puzzle piece from a missing box. It isn’t enough for him to extrapolate the shape of the task ahead of them, nor its size, nor to gauge where their piece fits, or what else might fall around it.

“I’m not saying that I don’t believe you.” He begins. “Your word is an excellent start. You’re liked and well-respected, and you have those two qualities in far greater abundance than your brother. If we ever publish, that will help. But right now, what you’ve given me is barely a circumstantial case. We can’t print without corroborated evidence and people willing to go on record. Anything less than that would ruin my name, and yours. You need to give me more. The first step is to see whether Berenger will agree to be interviewed on the record.”

Damen sits back in his chair and nods grimly. He looks resolved.

Laurent spares a thought for the dissonance of their surrounds. The beauty of the view around them is irresistible: the wind carves white ripples into the ocean, which is empty but for the occasional pleasure yacht dotted on its surface.

On a more ordinary afternoon, in a fairer universe, Laurent would have sat here alone and just watched.

“I imagine this isn’t what you hoped to hear,” he continues. He means it. “I’m sorry that I can’t be more enthusiastic. Stakes this big demand a certain degree of precision.”

“No, I needed to hear all of it. It’s why I read your work.”

Laurent raises a sceptical brow and sees another opportunity: this time, to lighten the conversation. “Oh?” He says, seizing it. “I thought you fell victim to the blondness of my hair. Or did it only push me above the other contenders?”

“There were no other contenders. No one writes like you.” Damen says, with disarming honesty. It’s spoken like a solid truth in his palm, physical and certain. He adds, “I would know. I make a point of reading the papers cover to cover over breakfast. It was a habit of my father’s.”

“I’m surprised you have the time.”

“I make the time.” Damen says.

Laurent decides to attribute his warm skin to the sunlight.

*~*~*

Upon reflection, Laurent should not have been surprised when, a week later, a bouquet of dahlias in every pastel shade of orange and pink arrives at the office. It’s swaddled in coloured paper and fernery, and large enough to obstruct the courier’s vision as he delivers it.

Laurent is at reception when it arrives. As soon as the elevator door opens to reveal it—with Martha gasping loud enough to draw the attention of the entire floor, blast her—Laurent knows. The rest of the office reaches the same conclusion that he does. This time, their titters are audible.

It’s hopelessly redundant when the courier deposits the bouquet on Martha’s desk and asks, “Is there a Laurent de Vere around?”

It’s beautiful, and outrageous. It’s a foil to the distance and asceticism that Laurent has so carefully cultivated around himself, slicing through it in a single, pastel-coloured motion. His instinct in that moment is to raze the entire office to the ground, and the bouquet with it, and then to go find Damen and do the same.

Laurent takes the flowers in hand and walks with them back to his office, with too many eyes on him. He makes his way as though this is exactly what he had planned to do, and where he planned to be. He doesn’t blush at all. But closing the office door behind him is a relief. He scowls out his embarrassment, an exhalation.

The march from reception is the closest thing to a walk of shame that he’s ever endured. The tragedy being, of course, that it isn't a walk of shame, and he hasn’t even been well-ploughed to justify the scandal. He sets the bouquet down on his desk—next to the vase containing the other one—and realizes that there’s an envelope attached to the ferns.

Laurent pulls it out and examines it. It’s plain, and under his fingers is the distinctive feel of a small, plastic rectangle. He takes it out and stares till his wits conclude that it’s a key-card to a hotel room.

Then the blush rises.

Laurent places the key-card on his desk and rifles through the envelope. For his efforts, he’s rewarded with another handwritten note:

The Hotel DeBrett. Wednesday. 1pm. Room 1505. Clear the afternoon.

Can’t wait to see you.

D x

Laurent stares at the note like it’s written in a foreign language, and then, like it might explode in his hand.

Before he can stop the thought, his mind baits him with what it would be like to receive that kind of invitation; to pass the middle of the day doing something more exciting than eating a panini over his keyboard; to have the triplicate luxuries of time and money and a lover.

To go to a hotel room with said lover. To be undressed with care. To be pushed backwards onto a bed as soft as cloud. To feel a body over his.

He hasn’t felt a body over his in so long.

The thought lasts only a moment, but it’s a moment too long. Longing ebbs and flows through him like a warm water tide. He’s normally master of himself enough to suppress it, but in the wake of that moment, Laurent is unable to do anything but feel its demand.

It won’t do. You’re working, he reminds himself. You’re going to conduct an interview. He breathes and pulls back the unleashed units of what he’s feeling, string by string. Then he boxes them and seals the edges, and settles back down to work.

Damen reserves the hotel room for the day. He arrives an hour earlier than scheduled, and it’s a mistake. It gives him an hour to pace restlessly around the suite, wondering whether he’s overstepped the mark with the flowers, with booking a hotel room, with everything.

The room is plush. The bed is plush. Damen has passed wonderful, delicious hours in hotel rooms just like this one, doing in fact what he and Laurent would be pretending to do. He has a weakness for mid-afternoon trysts. They break the tedium of days that would otherwise be swallowed by meetings. A fuck in the middle of the afternoon does wonders to disrupt the passage of time.

Of course, this is going to be work.

But other thoughts cross his mind. Hotly. Inevitably.

Damen had been meeting people since he was old enough to shake hands, but the universe hadn’t given him any kind of precedent for dealing with Laurent DeVere. Laurent holds the capacity to be reserved and then forward, polite and then formal, and Damen is no closer to figuring out what precipitates each switch.

It doesn’t help that Laurent seems aware of his own beauty, but indifferent to it. In other hands, beauty like Laurent’s would be wielded as a weapon, and it would be precisely the type to which Damen would fall prey. All the better, he reasons, that Laurent doesn’t use it.

Damen walks around the suite, uses the bathroom, and lingers in the bedroom just long enough to entertain an image of Laurent ravished on the bedspread. It’s enough to send him fleeing to the living area, restricting his imagination to safer surfaces. He flicks the television on to the news channel, figuring that the sight of his colleagues is more practical than a cold shower. He compromises by muting the volume, and occupies himself by responding to emails.

His work is disrupted by a beep, and a click, and the suite door being opened.

Laurent steps into the room. He’s in dark blue chinos, and a white shirt under a navy blue sweater. A brown leather satchel hangs over his shoulders, so weather-beaten that Damen would guess it’s seen five generations of Laurent’s family. He looks pristine, like finely-spun sugar.

Damen’s pulse gives an inconvenient jump.

Laurent acknowledges him with a look and a shadow of a smile, but gives his full attention to the room first. His expression is unreadable as his eyes sweep their surroundings.

“A little excessive, don’t you think?” He finally says.

“Hardly.” Damen says. He makes a nominal effort at resisting a smile and fails. “This is only a junior suite.”

“How quaint. I think it’s bigger than the newsroom.”

“That’s not true, Laurent.”

Damen isn’t rewarded with a concession, but Laurent sits down on the other end of the same couch, which is even better. He casts an idle eye at the television before returning his attention to Damen, his gaze level.

“And how will Berenger come up here?” He asks.

“I sent him my own keycard. I told reception I had lost mine and they issued me a new one,” he responds. But talk of Berenger plays with his stomach, so he changes the subject. “Did you like the dahlias?”

“The point of that bouquet wasn’t to please me, and we both know it.” Laurent says tartly. “I hope you’re happy, by the way. I’ve become gossip.”

Before Damen can counsel him about the joys of notoriety, another beep rings out around the room, and then a click.

Berenger has arrived. They both rise up like a shot to meet him.

Berenger’s apprehension at being here is writ large across his face. Persuading him to come and speak on the record had been one of Damen’s more difficult recent accomplishments. It had taken a lengthy hike and three hours of gentle negotiation in the woods, but he was here.

Damen goes to him and warmly clasps his hand. “Berenger, this is the journalist I was telling you about - Laurent DeVere from the Ios Tribune. Laurent, this is William Berenger the third, the son of Senator Berenger.”

In the fractional moments since Berenger’s appearance, Laurent has shed every trace element of conviviality. In its place is the man Damen had first met: Laurent DeVere, the consummate professional, a study in polite firmness and keen attention. Laurent is the smallest man in the room, but his presence quite suddenly looms the largest. He, too, offers his hand to Berenger.  

Berenger takes it and considers him. Damen hasn’t told him too much about Laurent, nor has he asked what Berenger was expecting, but it’s abundantly clear that Laurent isn’t it.

The two of them don’t waste any time with fripperies. Berenger takes the single armchair closest to Laurent and sits down. From his satchel, Laurent takes out a small recording device. After confirming his permission to record, he presses a button and sets the device down on the coffee table between them.

No one says a word for a little while. Berenger can’t take his eyes off the recording device. He looks physically uncomfortable, every muscle in his expression broadcasting his mounting hesitation. Laurent waits for him and holds fire: he doesn’t begin barraging him with questions, but neither does he tease out his concerns in order to soothe them.

Damen is breathless with nerves. He knows what it’s like to sit before an impersonal third party and their recording device. Berenger’s look is that of a man standing behind a line, who hasn’t contemplated the act of stepping over it long or hard enough.

Feeling spare, Damen says, “I’ll make coffee”. At least it will give him something to do. He withdraws to the kitchenette with one ear on the proceeding.

Laurent doesn’t jump into the deep end. He charts a slow course from shallow waters, beginning with the mundanities of Berenger’s life: his study, his work, his family. They spend a long time on these questions—so long that Damen wonders whether they’ll finish within an hour.

But at some point, he realizes that the tension in Berenger’s shoulders has slackened. He holds himself a little less stiffly, easing back into the copious comforts of his armchair. By the time Damen returns with a sweet, milky brew for each of them, they barely glance at him as he sets the mugs down. He retrieves his own and then settles in to watch Laurent at work.

Laurent, for his part, does not interview formally. He has no pens or paper, or any notes, and only the recorder differentiates this conversation from a normal one. His gaze is tunnelled on Berenger, the unwavering line of it a fixed point to which Berenger’s attention is hooked. Damen had expected Laurent to procure information by grilling, but his mind draws a comparison—perhaps a little stupidly—to hypnosis.

Gently, wave by wave, Laurent steers the conversation to more pointed harbours.

He begins by asking nudging questions about Ancel: how they had met and how long they had been together. He asks about what had drawn them together and how they passed their time, all with the familiarity of an old and sincerely interested friend. Periodically, Damen has to remind himself that he’s watching an interview, but he can tell that Laurent’s amiability serves a purpose: Berenger begins volunteering information more freely.

So much so that he takes them to what happened unprompted.

Damen has already watched Berenger recite the story twice: once to him, and a second time to Nikandros, after curiosity had trumped his warnings. The emotional toll of it doesn’t lessen with repeated narrations. Berenger’s tone still crests with anxiety at the point of his father’s confrontation, and still stutters at the point where he breaks the news to Ancel.

And through the whole story, a sharp thread of despair to understand why him—why, after a lifetime of seeking the quiet corners of high society, Damen’s brother had decided to stalk him there.

But then, at least, he’s done. He looks dazed with the effort of it. Damen watches him reach for the mug and knock back a few gulps of his coffee, which is probably cold by now. His body tremors with a movement that is neither a shudder nor an exhalation. Then he looks back up at Laurent.

“Are we done?” He asks. He sounds tense, hopeful.

Laurent’s eyes are sharp, but he answers with a gentle tone. It’s a mesmeric combination, and disorients Damen even though it’s targeted at someone else.

“Thank you for speaking to me. I know this isn’t easy to discuss.” He says, and then stops. “But if there’s something further that you’re not telling me, now would be the time to do it. I can’t help if you don’t give me all the pieces. ”

Berenger’s guard, which Laurent had so expertly dismantled earlier in the meeting, reconstructs itself in a flash.

“Why do think I’m hiding something?” He asks.

Which makes Damen worry, quite violently, that he is. His knuckles whiten around the mug in his hands, his grip tight enough to burst its ceramic into ash.

“Are you?” Says Laurent. It’s very intentionally a non-answer.

A pause, then. A long one. One that extends well past the point of discomfort for Damen and Berenger, but it doesn’t have a drop of effect on Laurent.

“No.” Says Berenger, too quietly. The word falls unconvincingly into the silence, a poor show of conviction. Laurent doesn’t move, just keeps watching him. And then, under the weight of that crystalline stare, Berenger says—in an even quieter voice—“Yes.”

The room tilts around Damen. Never has he been more grateful for the presence of someone else to carry the conversation in his stead.

“In your own time.” Laurent says.

It takes Berenger a moment to collect himself. This time, he has to do so visibly. He leans forward, elbows on his legs, and scrubs his face in his hands. Damen watches the way his back rises and falls around the laboured pattern of his breathing.

For his own part, Damen cannot react. As much as he needs to, this moment is not about him.

When Berenger eventually looks up, his face is haunted by a look that Damen’s never seen him wear before. It takes him a moment to recognize it for what it is: fear. He realizes, then, that Berenger’s grace has been a far more convincing performance than presumed.

Kastor, what have you done?

From somewhere in the room, a clock ticks away unseen. The journey between second and second seems to last an age.

“Photos,” He says, the word coming out faint even in the quiet. “The man who threatened my father had photos of Ancel and me.”

“Just so we’re clear,” Laurent says evenly, “what kind of photos do you mean?”

Berenger’s answer is a despairing thing. “What else would I mean? Intimate photos.”

The gathering pool of dread in Damen’s belly suddenly and forcefully acidifies. Around him, the room spins again, this time in the opposite direction. He turns to Laurent, who does not pay him fractional attention.

“Are you sure?”

“I’ve seen them.” Says Berenger, hollowed. “He showed them to my father, and then sent copies in the post to him and to me. They came with a note.”

“A threat?” Laurent guesses. Berenger’s silence is confirmation enough.

“It said that if my father didn’t cooperate fully with Kastor, he’d leak the photos.”

“Was your phone hacked, then?”                                                              

Berenger closes his eyes, shakes his head. “No. We didn’t take the photos ourselves. Ancel and I went on holiday to Arles two months ago. They were taken then. Someone must have planted a camera in our hotel room.

Damen puts his mug down and hangs his face in his hands, willing the room to stand still.

When he looks up, he finds Laurent’s unreadable gaze waiting for him. It’s a searching glance, as though Laurent is looking for something. Damen has no idea what it could possibly be. Kastor had done this. His own brother, his blood. He cannot think past the liquid shame in his veins.

Whether or not Laurent finds what he’s looking for, he turns back to Berenger. His expression is softer in turn. “Is there anything else?”

Damen thinks, Please, no. But Berenger nods.

“It’s happened again. My father was approached by someone else.” He says, looking to Damen. “Senator Guion. They’ve done the same thing to Aimeric.”

Damen closes his eyes against it. “No.”

“Thank you.” Says Laurent, sidestepping the revelation like it’s nothing more than a crack in the street. “I only need few more things from you. You say the man came to your father’s address?”

“Yes.”

“I’m going to need the security footage. I need his picture and any vehicle he came in if I’m going to figure out his identity.” Says Laurent. “And forgive me—but I’m going to need to sight the photos and the envelope they came in.”

“Is that it? Are we done now?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

Then, with slender fingers, he picks up the tape recorder and presses stop. Damen exhales—there would be no more revelations, at least for today—but it does little to uncoil the ropes that have tightened around his lungs.

“I’m sorry.” He blurts out, surprising himself as much as Berenger or Laurent. But the words have been spoken, and others follow suit. “I don’t know if that means anything coming from me. But I am.”

Berenger regards him wearily, and doesn’t respond.

The goodbyes are a terse, formal thing. Berenger wastes no time in leaving. Now that the interview is finished, he doesn’t need to be here, and it’s abundantly clear that he doesn’t want to be, either. Damen accompanies him the few metres to the door and sees him off.

Closing the door behind him is a small relief.

But the air heavier in his wake. When Damen turns around, Laurent is already standing up with his satchel looped over his shoulder. Damen doesn’t know what to say to him.

Laurent speaks first. “Are you alright?” He asks. It’s posed stiffly. Their jesting an hour earlier seems a world away.

“No.” He responds. “I can’t make sense of it.”

“Berenger and Guion both served with your father. Do you think it has something to do with him?

Damen shakes his head. “My father’s been dead for a decade. If it had anything to do with him, it would have surfaced earlier.” And then, something else that’s been preying on his mind: “How did you know that Berenger was keeping something else?”

“I didn’t.” Laurent says. “I guessed.”

*~*~*

Laurent returns to the office and immediately begins transcribing the interview. He doesn’t let himself think about where this story could go, how cataclysmic it might become, or the fact that he’s now got someone on record about it. He would have liked talked to Halvik, to sit her down and play through the entire interview for her, but she’s in Bazal for a week.

Once he finishes transcribing, Laurent returns to his actual work.

He continues with a profile of the Senate Majority Caucus Chair, a man named Petrides with the charm of stagnant water. Laurent’s disdain for the man has seeped into every single paragraph despite his valiant efforts. He tasks himself with notching it back to a mild dislike. A container of salad lies forgotten and wilting by his side. The cleaners come and go, and so do most of his colleagues.

At around 8, Martha knocks on his door. Her face is creased with discomfort.

“Laurent.” She says. “There’s a man for you at reception.”

Laurent raises an eyebrow. “At this hour?”

“Never seen him before. Flaming redhead.” She shrugs. “I asked if I could take a message, but he said he had something for you. Insisted on delivering it in person.”

Laurent rises from his desk, with a fair idea of who’s waiting for him.

In the reception area is a young man, no older than 23 or 24, with an imperious poise in his spine. He leans casually against the front desk, his deep red hair worn chest-length and falling around him in lush cascades. Laurent’s attention is drawn immediately to his startling green eyes, as well as the manila envelope in his hands.

“Ancel, I presume. ” Laurent says lightly.

Dry, sensible, artless Berenger clearly contained multitudes.

Something in Ancel’s expression sours at the sound of his name—or perhaps, at the sound of Laurent speaking it.

He says, like a man before a putrid heap, “We need to talk. Privately.”

Laurent gestures to one of the interview rooms branching off from the reception area, and follows Ancel inside. With a final quirk of his brow at Martha, he closes the door behind them. No sooner does the latch click shut than Ancel spins around to face him. His expression is militant and the set of his shoulders presages confrontation.

Before Ancel can speak, Laurent interjects. “I presume, since you’re here, that Berenger has told you who I am.”

“I don’t give a flaming fuck who you are,” says Ancel. He practically spits it out.

Laurent is unperturbed. “Perfectly understandable, given the circumstances. ”

The concession does little to endear him. “I don’t know you. I don’t like you. I don’t trust you.,” says Ancel. “And I don’t know why Berenger thinks I should, given the likes of who drudged you up.”

Laurent’s jaw twitches but his mind cuts the wire before he can respond. Some people weren’t there to be won over. Ancel is one of them. Defending Damen—which he realizes, with a startle, is what he had been about to do—wouldn’t make this any easier either.

“Then why are you here?” He asks, flattening his tone.

“Because I trust Berenger more than I dislike you,” he says, and holds the manila envelope out between them like flaming sword. “And he thinks you should have these.”

“And ‘these’ are?” He asks, even though he already knows the answer.

“The CCTV footage, the photos, the information they sourced—everything.”

Laurent reaches for the folder, and feels a moment’s resistance before Ancel finally lets it go. It’s heavy in his hands. He can feel paper and plastic, documents and disks under his fingers.

Yesterday, Damen’s hunch had been nothing more than words, but now, it’s a story. It has a long way to go, for sure, but at least his hands have found grip and his feet a foothold. Now, finally, he can focus on the next step.

“I realize that you might not care to hear it from me,” Laurent says, “but thank you for bringing these documents to me. I appreciate their sensitivity.”

Ancel watches him with a cool, infuriated eye. He looks fit to lash out. A primitive remnant of Laurent’s mind measures the chances of him walking out of this room alive, if Ancel were to snap at him.

His odds are uninspiring.

When Ancel speaks again, his tone is deliberately low. “Let me be very clear,” he says, in a warning tone. “If we were dealing with this my way, Kastor would already be facedown in a ditch, drowning in a shallow pool of his own blood. Unfortunately, Berenger believes in diplomacy, but make no mistake—if you, or that scum Damianos, do anything to jeopardise me or Berenger, I will take matters into my own hands.”

“I don’t make a habit of betraying my sources.” Laurent answers. “It tends to be bad for business.”

“This isn’t business. This is our life.”

“I know. And I’m nailing my journalistic integrity to your welfare.” He says flatly. “I don’t need you to like me, but you’ll need to trust me to do my job.”

“Then do it and destroy Kastor.” Says Ancel, with acid. “And if you have to take his brother down with him, do it. The sooner this city is rid of that family, the better.”

And then, without waiting for a response, he shoulders past Laurent and knocks into him with a force that cannot be accidental. Then he’s gone.

Laurent takes a few moments to recompose himself in the quiet. He looks down at the manila envelope in his hands. He’s never held a loaded gun in his hands before, but he imagines the weight of it might feel something like this: potential and power and destruction, all of it dependent on the direction he chooses and the fidelity of his aim.

When he eventually emerges, Martha’s waiting for him behind the reception desk with a phone in her hands.

“Do I need to call the Police?” She asks.

He considers his words for a moment. “No. I’m just—having a very eventful month.”

He walks back to his office and it’s all he can do not to run there. His hands itch around the envelope, itch to open it, to sprawl out its contents on the nearest available surface and begin sorting. He locks the door and shutters the blinds because it feels appropriate, given what he’s about to look through. Then he piles all the papers for the Petrides piece into a single stack and consigns them to the floor.

Finally, he sits down. His fingertips teem with electricity.

The envelope is made of thick-set paper. The half-ream stack is arranged neatly, not even stapled. He takes it out gingerly and places it on his desk.

The item at the top is a CD. He listens with headphones and hears a recorded call between Senator Berenger—audibly upset—and a gruff sounding man with a voice like aged sandpaper. The Senator speaks very little. The other man is curt in his instructions, advising him that he’ll be back, and that Kastor Akielos looks forward to hearing the good news of the Senator’s cooperation. If the Senator finds himself wavering, says the man, he’s welcome to study the package of information left for him.

Lauren turns his attention to said package.

At the very top are pages with Ancel’s personal details: social security papers, medical records, and bank documents carrying a balance that makes Laurent briefly contemplate a change of career.

Then, his roster of former clients, seized from an address book—a perfectly organized list of names and numbers, with detailed client notes of the kind to destroy reputations and lives. Laurent counts four high-ranking former civil servants amongst the names, and three members of the military, and an editor known personally to him. The list is a dozen different types of dynamite, and in different hands, might have been a story of its own. Not in Laurent’s.

Below those documents are extracts of intercepted text message conversations between him and Berenger—a thick wad of papers spanning the gamut of a relationship’s moments, from its mundane to its most claustrophobically intimate.

And then, at the very bottom—across thirty still shots—are the intimate images.

His expectation of their presence does little to ease the actual shock of seeing them. Having satisfied himself of their veracity, he quickly sheaths them back in the envelope: there won’t be any need to look at them any more. A pang of sympathy volleys in his chest for Ancel as he puts them away. Handing them over was no less than an act of bravery, given that Ancel likely wants to set them on fire and murder everyone who had ever seen them.

Beneath those are still images of the ugliest man Laurent has ever seen, entering and then exiting the offices of Senator Berenger. Security footage never provides a forgiving portrait, but the images are just sharp enough to broadcast the full menace of him. He’s thickly set at every limb and joint, a tree-trunk made flesh, and his face bears the irregularity of multiple broken bones. An unpleasant feeling slithers down Laurent’s back just at the sight of him.

He remains seated for a long while, the immediate course forward falling into place before him. First: find the identity of the ugly stranger. Second: find Senator Guion’s son. Third, investigate anything that might link Kastor to Guion and Berenger.

He locks away most of the papers in his safe, keeping with him half a dozen still images of the stranger. Then he leaves his office, crosses the floor, and goes to find Nicaise.

It’s close to 10pm. The resident enfant terrible is alone in his shared office, and doesn’t hear Laurent knock or come in for the headphones jammed in his ear. Whatever he’s listening to, it’s loud enough for a tinny, watered-down version of the melody to reach the door.

Laurent goes for the nuclear option, yanking them out. Nicaise stops typing and swivels around in his chair with a thundering expression. Laurent withstands it easily and pulls up a chair: Nicaise looks too boyishly puckish to pull off anger well.

“I have a midnight deadline.” Nicaise says.

“I’m sure you do.” Laurent says. “I’m also sure that whatever it is, it doesn’t need a sixteenth round of edits.”

Nicaise narrows his eyes. “Don’t you have a Senator to go plough?”

“Are you accusing me of not working hard enough, Nicaise?”

“I’m sure you’re working very hard,” comes the response, dramatically, “on your back.”

Laurent snorts. He had expected nothing less.

Nicaise is the youngest member of the writing staff. His predecessors had been quiet and keenly observant, deferential even when they had no need to be. Not so Nicaise, who had begun dispensing opinions less than an hour into his first day. It had the dual effect of searing Nicaise into the collective psyche, and creating an expectation that he would continue to cause trouble.

Laurent almost envied him.

“Suit yourself.” He says casually, standing up. “I’ll have to take my scoop to Erasmus.”

“You don’t have a scoop.” Nicaise accuses.

“Then you won’t mind if I give it to him.” Laurent says, over his back. He walks out, wondering how long it will take for Nicaise to call him back.

The answer is three steps out of the office. Then, a resounding “Wait!” comes from behind him.

Laurent turns around, eyeing Nicaise through the open doorway but not making a move to step back inside. It’s a stare-down, and Nicaise breaks first, rolling his eyes and slouching back in his chair.

“Christ on a stick, fine. I’m sorry. Come back inside and tell me about it.”

So he does, and offers the pages in his hands.

While Nicaise studies them, Laurent studies his workspace. The bin is piled high with cartons of takeout. An overnight bag lies under his desk. A small pile of casual clothes languishes on the back of another chair. His in-tray, under the weight of multiple files, sags in a permanent curve.

A part of Laurent feels guilty about giving him more work. Another part won’t dare trust something this sensitive in the hands of anyone else.

“I’ve been given a sliver of interesting information from a not-disreputable source.” He says. “I’m working early leads. I still don’t know how much will stick.”

“Then why waste two staff on it?”

“Because the allegations are serious ones, against powerful people, and I need your eye for detail.” Laurent says.

Nicaise doesn’t immediately respond, which Laurent takes with unbidden hope as a sign of interest in the work. “Give me a précis.”

“A very powerful senator is blackmailing other very powerful senators using highly personal information for reasons we don’t yet know.” He says. “Allegedly.”

There is a long pause. Nicaise frowns, the sapphire of his eyes clouding over. “This has something to do with your boyfriend, doesn’t it?”

“Damen is my source.” Says Laurent. “He was approached by the son of Senator Berenger, The Senator was blackmailed by a goon we believe was sent by Kastor. Junior went to see Damen, and Damen came to me.”

“And you’re fucking him? Laurent, this is—”

“I’m not. We needed to find a way to spend time together without having people ask why. I’m not fucking him, I promise you,” Laurent says drily. “I just need people to think I am.”

Nicaise folds his arms and leans back. As he thinks it over, he swivels a little to either side. Laurent is almost certain that he’s going to say yes, but if it takes a performance of doubt to get there, he’ll have to sit through it.

Finally, after too long, Nicaise says, “What do you need?”

Laurent nods towards the papers in his hands. “What I need,” he says, “is the name of that beauty queen. He’s the one that approached Berenger’s father. I don’t have his name or date of birth, but I need you to find him for me.”

“You want me to find a needle in a haystack the size of the whole country?”

“Are you saying you can’t?”

“Go fuck yourself,” says Nicaise, without venom. He looks back down at the photos. “I’m keeping these for reference.”

Chapter Text

In the three days that follow their meeting at the DeBrett, it takes Damen considerable restraint not to call Laurent daily. He knows that pushing won’t shed more light on the story. He knows, too, that although he’s led Laurent to the story, Laurent isn’t answerable to him for its investigation.

But he’s used to making that kind of demand. He’s used to picking up the phone and expecting answers from the other end of the line. Damen’s restraint is already pulled thin, a rope frayed down to a single delicate string, and every passing day pulls a little more firmly on its ends.

He sits on committees with Senator Berenger and Senator Guion. He has to look them in the eye, greet them, and ask after the health of their families knowing what his brother has done, and that their answers are false. They speak to him about committee reports and supplementary order papers, and share their plans for family holidays. The whole time, a different conversation sits on a loaded spring in Damen’s throat, awaiting volley.

The universe waits eight days to reward his patience.

The eighth day is a frost-bitten Friday afternoon, with Nikandros in his office. The fireplace seeps warmth into the air, the kind that invites a man to lie down, close his eyes, and lose a few hours. Instead, Damen paces left and right across the room with a handful of papers, practising a keynote address he’ll have to give next week for the Artesian Criminal Bar Association’s annual conference.

The couch belongs to Nikandros. He reclines along its length, cushions behind his head at one end, and his ankles crossed down the other. Damen rehearses a paragraph out loud at a time until he or Nikandros calls a halt, either to redo a sentence here, or a turn of phrase there, until the speech sounds right. Damen had thought they had a decent working draft to begin with, but the paper copies in their hands are now rivers of red ink.

A timid knock on the door startles them both.

Damen calls out “Come in!” at the same time that Nikandros calls out “We’re busy”. But it’s Damen’s office, so he opens the door anyway. Nikandros rewards him with a scowl and doesn’t bother to sit up for the interloper.

The newest hire comes in—a shy, wildly clever student named Cyrus, no older than 19 or 20, interning for extra-credit. He carries a large white cake box in his arms and walks in slowly, as though he’s afraid he might drop it. When Damen meets his eye, Cyrus turns the same colour as the curtains. This is an ongoing problem.

Damen offers him a smile, even though smiling hasn’t defused the boy’s embarrassment the last dozen times this has happened. He takes the box off his hands, and praises his excellent talking points memo for the upcoming meeting with the Isthiman Minister for Justice.

It only serves to render the boy puce. He forgets himself enough to bow a little on the way out. Damen bites back his amusement.

He pushes the door closed with his elbow, and turns to the inevitable judgment wafting at him from the couch.

“I was only trying to be kind,” He protests.

“That’s making it worse.”

“You say that like being a prick would somehow help.”

“He might stop blushing around you long enough to string a sentence together.” Nikandros points out.

“Motion denied.” Damen says. He places the cake box on his desk and studies it. It’s unmarked, bearing no postmarks or identifying features.

“Anyway,” Nikandros says, with the pointed emphasis of a man reeling in a fishing line and an unusually difficult beast. “Enough distraction. You were up to the fifth paragraph. Start from The evidence is, overwhelmingly, that lengthier periods of incarceration increase recidivism—”

“No,” says Damen, with finality. They’ve been working on the speech for three solid hours. It’ll keep till next week. His head feels fit to burst. “I’m declaring a cake break.”

“Gods. You’re not actually planning to eat what’s in there, are you?”

Damen fires him a level glance. “I certainly don’t intend to throw it in the bin.”

“We don’t consume unmarked food delivered by post, Damen.” Nikandros says, ever the exasperated parent.

“We? Who said anything about offering you a slice?”

Damen puts the papers down in his in-tray, a death sentence for all work that needs more attention than he’s willing to presently give it. Before Nikandros can protest further, Damen opens the cake box.

It conceals a huge rectangular morsel of a thing, lashed generously with white icing, and with a clustered line of candied citrus fruits along the top. Taped to the inside roof of the box is a note on Ios Tribune letterhead. With a jolt, Damen recognises Laurent’s narrow, angular script. With a second, he notes an unfurling warmth over his lungs that he abruptly blames on the fireplace, in lieu of further examination.

My mother’s recipe. Tell me what you think tomorrow, 8am, by the fountain at Grand Square.

Clear your day. I’m taking you somewhere.

Laurent x

The note is held in place with four perfect, identically sized and symmetrically placed cuts of sellotape. Of course it is. Damen carefully liberates it and registers with considerable interest how powerfully it carries Laurent’s scent. He feels Laurent’s proximity as suddenly and as physically as he had when they were inches apart at the Antipodes.

The scent is too strong to have caught on the paper by mere chance. So strong, in fact, that he has to wonder whether Laurent is playful enough to have spritzed it with his perfume.

Before his mind sprints off in that direction, Nikandros calls him back to earth.

“Are you—sniffing the paper?” He demands, rising off the couch.

Damen briskly folds the note and hides it in his back pocket. Nikandros sees him do it. A grave instant lingers, in which both of them wait for Nikandros to decide whether he’ll address it.

He doesn’t. He sighs heavily, and arrives at the desk.

The knife Damen had used for his morning muffin is still languishing on its plate of crumbs. Damen reaches for it and cuts himself an overly generous silence, a middle finger to the morning’s tedium. And since only Nikandros is in the room, he dispenses with all niceties and etiquette and bites it into it like a biscuit.

Flavour explodes across his palate. Laurent has sent him banana bread, dense but moist. It’s countered with a sweet lemon icing that sits lightly on his tongue, remaining for only a moment before dissolving. He polishes off the slice with a few bites, licks his fingers clean, and promptly goes for a second.

Nikandros leans against the desk, hip to its corner, and watches him. His arms are folded. Damen braces himself for a chiding.

“Is this from your toyboy?” He asks.

“He’s a grown man. And a professional.” Says Damen, between mouthfuls. “And a damn good baker, apparently.”

“You’ve sent him two bouquets. He’s sent you cake, and now you’re storing notes from him in your back pocket.”

“You seem to think you have a point, in all that.” Damen says. He can’t even muster the energy to be annoyed. The cake is that good.

“I only wonder,” NIkandros says flatly, “whether you’re keeping this professional.”

“If you can think of a better cover for us to spend tome together, tell me.”

A brief silence, in which Damen finishes his second slice. Nikandros—presumably having satisfied himself that Damen remains un-poisoned—pulls the box towards him, and accepts the knife when Damen offers it.

“I’m not saying that it’s the worst means to your end,” he explains, cutting himself a slice the size of two. “But you went to DeVere for a purpose.”

Damen reaches for the box of tissues, and dabs the sticky icing off his fingers. His skin is scented with lemon, and he doesn’t resist licking a last morsel of taste off the pad of his thumb.

“I haven’t lost sight of it.” Damen counters. “He’s interviewed Berenger on the record. I think he’s going to try for Aimeric tomorrow.”

Nikandros’s slice freezes halfway to his mouth. He stares at Damen over it, incredulous. “Aimeric Guion?”

“Apparently. Unfortunately.”

The revelation is enough to momentarily distract Nikandros from his appetite. He reaches for a tissue and wraps it around his half-finished slice. Wiping off his hands, he says, "I haven’t heard his name in—gods. I can’t even remember the last time. Did he approach you too?”

Damen shakes his head. A restless anxiety kicks open the door into his gut, the first bout in a few hours. It’s easier to keep at bay when he’s busy with other tasks or conversations, but nigh impossible when the discussion is on the very point he’s been trying to avoid.

He leans back against his desk. For a moment, he forces himself to focus exclusively on how solid it feels beneath him.

“No. Berenger dropped his name. He said the same thing had happened to Aimeric.”

Nikandros frowns. His face darkens. “Aimeric and Berenger aren’t friends, are they?”

“No, they’re not. It didn’t come through Aimeric. It came through his father. Senator Guion approached Senator Berenger.” Damen says grimly. “A second threat’s been made, apparently like the first.”

“What the hell is your brother playing at?”

Damen exhales, deeply. It doesn’t undo the matted knot beneath his ribs. He’s asked himself the very question hourly, like a sour prayer, and every thread of answer he’s followed has led him, unconvinced and frustrated, back to the start.

“I don’t know.” He says. “I don’t know. Berenger didn’t have any more information than that.”

“Then ask him to get it. Make him go back to his father.”

Damen looks to him, sharply. “I don’t think the Senator even intended to mention Guion. Berenger seems to think he let it slip in a moment’s heat.”

“You won’t know until you ask him. Why would Guion even—”

“No.” Damen interrupts. The line is non-negotiable. So is his refusal to cross it, or let anyone else do so. “Berenger doesn’t have a good relationship with his father. He’s been through enough already. He’s already gone on record for Laurent and I refuse to be responsible for putting him through anything more.”

Even as he says it, he knows it isn’t much. He knows, too, that he isn’t responsible for Berenger, and that assuming any such responsibility won’t serve him or Berenger or the story. But it’s something, at least. It’s the smallest token of amends he can offer in light of what Kastor appears to have done.

Nikandros reads the warning in the air and changes the subject, marginally.

“Aimeric, then.” He says, an intentionally wide opening gambit.

“Aimeric, then.” Damen repeats. “Aimeric isn’t where he’s supposed to be.”

Before they left the suite at the DeBrett, Damen had given Laurent the last bit of news he recalled hearing about Aimeric—that he had chosen to study far away in Skarva, and that he’d grown fond of Vask and remained there. When pressed, Damen couldn’t offer any certainty as to when he had come by that information, or who had given it to him. It was simply the last known thing about Aimeric in their set, the final sentence in a closed book that no one was much interested in reopening.

Only: Laurent had made inquiries. He had relayed his findings to Damen in a brief call two nights ago. There was no record of Aimeric’s enrolment at the Univerity of Vask, or of his residence in any of Skarva’s municipal registries, or any other trace him of in Vask at all.

Laurent said he would keep digging, and that Damen would hear from him when he had news. Silence, since then. Until today. Damen tells Nikandros all that he’s unlearned.

Nikandros takes everything in wordlessly. His eyes are focussed in deep concentration. Damen’s never asked, but he imagines—and has always imagined—that Nikandros’s mind is like a battle-map laid flat, with pieces and players and strategies that sit atop it as physical things to be shifted and rearranged with every bit of new information.

“Be careful, Damen.”

A flare of irritation. “You think I don’t know that?”

“More careful than you’ve been. Especially around this Laurent. Don’t—become distracted.”

Damen gives him a level look. “Do you think I’m in any way capable of forgetting what my brother might be implicated in?”

“No.” Nikandros says. “But you need to consider the cost of growing fond of the man that’s about to destroy him.”

The following morning, Laurent goes to meet Damen at Grand Square with a background thrill in his belly. It warms him against his will, even though he doesn’t want to feel it, and despite the wind striking at his face like a whip.

In front of the mirror this morning, Laurent opted for looks over leisure knowing that he’d likely be seen in public with Damen again. He chose the camel hair coat Auguste had bought him for Christmas two years ago, and beneath it, his only black turtleneck. He looks good, and he’s honest enough with himself to recognize the outfit for what it is: Armour.

But not against the chill of the morning. The black knitted scarf around his neck is porous, offering more holes for the cold to nip through than protection. He’s also completely forgotten his gloves at home. Chill numbs all the sensation out of his fingers, but the warmth in his belly rages on.

Sources are a necessary part of Laurent’s work, but they rarely light up the bloodsport in him. Most of them give him nothing, or else something that he already knows, or else they’re so possessed with their rage that they hinder rather than assist his work. Few come to him with anything meaningful.

Damen is proving unprecedented in more ways than one. He pushes the thought to one side.

It’s still early on Saturday morning. The sun is low and Grand Square is at its quietest. The four tree-lined promenades emanating from its compass points show only a dusting of early-morning joggers and senior citizens, and there are more birds in the rows of beech trees than there are people in Laurent’s line of vision.

There’s also a spring in his step, because he has something to take to Damen. He’s found Aimeric. The fruit of his labyrinthine investigations has been hard-won, and it’s left him feeling rather pleased with himself.

Laurent spies Damen waiting for him, seated at the edge of the fountain. He takes the chance to observe him observing the world. Damen wears a more heavily knitted expression than the one he wears day-to-day, and he watches a smattering of birds in front of him with the unfocussed gaze of a man who isn’t seeing much of anything. In his lap is a heavy book, but it’s shut. A takeaway cup of coffee is balanced on it.

But soon enough, the sound of Laurent’s approaching footsteps disrupts the birds, and with them Damen’s reverie. He looks up in his direction, focuses, and stands up, beaming. It’s too early in the morning for anyone to look that pleased to see anything. Laurent manages to keep walking in a straight line, but the beat in his chest trips twice.

Damen slides the book under his arm and offers the takeaway coffee to Laurent.

He stares down at it like it might explode. “What is this?”

“A triple half-sweet non-fat caramel macchiato. With two marshmallows, both pink.” Damen says.

The recitation of Laurent’s coffee order from their single lunch at Antipodes draws an eyebrow. Damen had rattled it off easily, and has the gall to look rather pleased with himself afterwards.

As a rule, Laurent prefers tea. He had made the convoluted order only to be a brat, the single middle finger to the extravagant establishment that he could allow himself in the circumstances. He hadn’t contemplated an outcome where Damen commits the order to memory, and offers it back to him with sincerity.

It’s disarmingly sweet. Laurent accepts the drink. The heat of the cup is a shock against his frosted skin.

“You’ve only seen me order it once.” Laurent observes. It’s the most neutral thing he can think offer in return: a statement of fact.

Damen’s lips twitch. “Don’t think it’s for nothing. I want your mother’s recipe.”

Laurent brings the cup to his lips, takes a sip of the sugared confection. “We haven’t been pretend-dating long enough for you to earn it.”

“Suit yourself. I’ll ask your mother.”

“My mother’s dead,” Laurent says, even-handedly. It’s been true for so long now that he can recite it as a fact, as something that simply is, rather than a grievance he has with the universe.

His answer startles Damen, but Damen doesn’t look away. Something unreadable happens behind his eyes, and then, his face softens.

“My mother’s dead too.” Damen says.

“I know,” Laurent responds.

It’s a strange bridge, constructed at a strange hour of the morning.

The scandal surrounding Damen’s birth had long since died out, already relegated to a footnote in history. But back when the story broke, it was the single blot on the otherwise distinguished career of Senator Theomedes Akielos. He would later overcome the scandal, and go on to two vice-presidential terms, but it came at a cost.

The Senator had been a vanguard of family values. He had married his childhood sweetheart, Hypermenestra, at a very young age. The young family, and their son Kastor, presented an idyllic vision of Artesian society on which Theomedes was shrewd enough to capitalize.

It unravelled soon enough, with a hairline crack that eventually shattered the entire glass edifice. First, Artes learned Theomedes had been unfaithful with a beautiful, brilliant lobbyist named Egeria Marinos. Second, they learned that she had fallen with child to him. Third, in the midst of the press flurry, she went into labour and died giving birth. The child survived. He was christened Damianos.

The affair and fallout chastened Theomedes. He wasn’t pushed to resign from the Senate, but he was stripped of every office and rank he held in his party. He shelved his ambitions for a while and turned his attention to his family. Hypermenestra withdrew from public life briefly, but stood by him. The broken family took in the infant Damianos, and he was raised an Akielos.

There were still circles that argued that Theomedes had never recovered, and that his actions had precluded what would otherwise have been an inevitable presidency. Those same circles argued that Damen’s illegitimacy would, or should, stand in the way of his career.

“Where are you taking me?” Damen asks.

His voice is a hot knife across Laurent’s mounding thoughts, and Laurent reorients himself: Grand Square, Saturday morning, working.

“Pellydos.” Laurent answers. Damen’s brows rise, and he adds, “I’ll explain in the car.”

“Right. Shall we?” Damen asks.

He accompanies the question by offering his arm to Laurent. Laurent pauses a beat, taken aback by the fluidity with which Damen can perform a relationship, and irritated by the stiffness of his own responses. Gingerly, he slips his hand into the crook of Damen’s elbow and grips.

“You’re enjoying this too much.” He points out.

“There’s worse work than having a beautiful man on my arm. Where’s your car?”

It’s less than five minutes away. They fall into step together at a meandering pace and Damen runs warm. With one hand around his coffee and another nestled in Damen’s elbow, the morning chill now bypasses Laurent altogether. They walk in companionable silence for a few moments, and Lauren counts at least three people taking surreptitious photos of them with varying degrees of subtlety.

It doesn’t feel wrong, exactly, but it doesn’t feel comfortable either. A walk in the park is a far more public and visible display than lunch at an expensive restaurant, or an afternoon in a hotel room. He wonders how they must look together, and how his slighter frame fares next to Damen’s hulking form. Authority and power radiate off Damen like heat, even if he opts to wield them gently.

They don’t speak till they get into his car, a nondescript grey sedan that he inherited from Auguste. It’s impeccably clean and it’s served him well, but Laurent is acutely aware that it’s probably worth less than the dust in Damen’s ashtray.

If Damen has any thoughts on the modesty of their chariot, he keeps them to himself. He buckles in and says, with resoluteness,, “Alright. Talk to me.”

Laurent heads to the coastal highway, to a rural hamlet called Pellydos three hours outside of Ios. As he drives, he speaks.

Laurent’s research had confirmed a number of things: Aimeric doesn’t study in Vask, and never has. In fact, he had only entered the country twice, both times as a child and accompanied by his family on holidays. The last visit occurred when he was eight years old. There are no records of him attending any kind of tertiary institution in Artes, either—or residing anywhere, or being admitted to any hospital, or voting in any election in the country.

Aimeric Guion had, in quite a literal sense, disappeared.

It had taken a material degree of negotiation—and a favour pulled with the Births, Deaths and Marriages registry—to uncover that in a legal sense, Aimeric had disappeared. He had changed his name by deed poll to Etienne Fournier, and buried Aimeric Guion in the ground. Laurent managed to source copies of the statutory declaration effecting the change, as well as a copy of Etienne’s birth certificate.

Laurent tells Damen to open the satchel at his feet and pull out the certificate, sheathed in a white envelope.

Damen examines it for a few seconds. “It lists his parentage as unknown.”

“Exactly. When I learned that he’d changed his name, I called my contact at the Police.”

Damen’s eyes widen, but he doesn’t comment.

Laurent asked his police contact to run a full criminal history check on both of the names. Etienne Fournier’s record came back pure as the driven snow, without so much as a single speeding ticket to his name. Aimeric Guion’s record, on the other hand, appeared to return a more florid history. However, all of it was suppressed by one of the most infuriatingly expansive judicial gag orders that Laurent had ever encountered.

A third favour at the Courts had run him into a dead-end. All his judicial contact could disclose was that Aimeric had been discharged without conviction on a serious charge in the Appeals Court jurisdiction. The Judges that discharged him had ordered the entire file be sealed for thirty years. Laurent tried for close to an hour, on three separate calls, to swindle information about the nature of the charge or the reasons for the suppression. He was unsuccessful.

“The interesting thing,” Laurent says, tying the threads together, “is that Aimeric became Etienne a week after the judicial gag order. Which makes me think that at the conclusion of his court case, he changed his name and fled Ios. Etienne is easily traceable. What isn’t is the fact that he was someone else for a long time.”

Damen’s bewilderment is a palpable thing. He stares out at the road ahead and shifts uncomfortably in his seat.

“These criminal charges he faced—how serious can they have been?” Damen asks. He sounds like a man trying to reason himself to a conclusion he can live with. “He was discharged without any kind of conviction in the end. They don’t often hand out that remedy.”

Laurent allows himself a moment to think on Damen’s point. “But the charges being serious would explain why the file was sealed. If the Court hands out a discharge in a serious case, suppressing the whole file is the easiest way to prevent the case from becoming precedent.” Laurent says. After a pause, he adds, “But I don’t know for certain. Do you think his father might have pulled a few strings?”

Damen gives a humourless scoff. “Guion? No. He wouldn’t do that for Aimeric.”

Laurent briefly turns his head from the road to snatch a glance at Damen. His expression has darkened a little.

“How well did you know Aimeric?”

“Less well than Berenger. Aimeric is younger than me. I had more to do with his older brothers. But,” he says, and pauses, and seems to push back a barrier of distaste, “You didn’t need to spend long with the family to realize that the Senator paid Aimeric the least amount of attention. I think Aimeric always resented his father for expecting him to live up to his brothers.”

“So—what? He just disappears for years, and no one thinks to ask where he’s gone?”

Damen shrugs. “Appearances are currency, in our set. People tend to jump in and out of view because of it. Disappearing is easier than facing the cost of what you’ve done.”

He goes quiet, then. Laurent wonders whether he’s thinking about his father.

They’re on a long, straight stretch of coast. Laurent can see at least two kilometres of clear road ahead of him. He speeds up to overtake the three vehicles ahead of theirs even though, strictly speaking, he doesn’t need to. They’re in no rush to reach Pellydos.

It has nothing to do with making good time, and everything to do with spending the kindling rage winding up and around his throat. He doesn’t know a thing about this Aimeric, but Laurent can’t wrap his head around a community so easily given to collective amnesia—particularly when the same community tends, almost reflexively, to a suffocating degree of gossip and slander.

He pushes down on the gas, hard. The little sedan hurtles forward. Laurent senses Damen tensing in the passenger seat next to him. A quick lateral glance reveals that his knuckles are gripping the edge of his seat, and white.

“We don’t need to get there yesterday.” Damen says.

“Don’t be dramatic,” Laurent answers, well aware that speeding to spend rage is hardly restrained. “The car has airbags.”

Damen looks from his knees, which are bunched up in front of him, to Laurent. Without a hint of irony, he says, “There won’t be enough room for them to inflate.”

“Your internal organs are cased in more than enough muscle. You’ll live.”

A pause.

And then, from the corner of his eyes, he spies a brief smile.

He hears it in Damen’s response, when it comes. “Is that a compliment?”

“No.”

“I think it’s a compliment, Laurent.”

“You’re conditioned to assume most things are.”

Damen laughs quietly, under his breath. Laurent berates his fumbling mouth. They lapse into silence after that. Pellydos is still some distance away.

Eventually, Damen falls asleep. Laurent notes the tell-tale regularity of his breathing, and then, his head slumping against the window. It doesn’t wake him. Nor does his snoring. He sleeps so deeply that he doesn’t even stir when Laurent switches on the radio to drown him out, nor when he raises the volume, because his snoring is just that loud.

They reach Pellydos near midday. It’s an inland hamlet, sparsely populated, more a collection of dwellings than a village. Laurent parks the car outside the property. A dense forest separates the house from civilisation, and it isn’t visible at all from the road. There are no other cars nearby, no pedestrians, and no other signs of life. The nearest house is more than three kilometres away.

Laurent turns his attention to waking Damen.

It’s been a while since Laurent has seen anyone asleep. Damen’s not a particularly graceful sleeper either; his head is wedged in the gap between the headrest and the door, and his mouth is slightly ajar. Still, Laurent feels like he’s witnessing something that he shouldn’t be seeing. It feels too personal, too intimate to see Damen like this—even if there’s nothing remotely suggestive about his snoring, or the awkward arrangement of his body in the confined space.

You’re working, Laurent reminds himself.

Pulling the car to a stop doesn’t wake Damen up. Neither does a chaste prod to his forearm, or a sturdy shake of it. Laurent’s other favoured alarms—using water or shaving cream, perfected by years of experimentation on Auguste—aren’t handy in the circumstances.

He presses the car horn instead. Damen jerks awake so violently that the side of his head collides with the headrest. It’s a wonder that the force of his movement doesn’t tip the car on its side.

Laurent wills his lips not to react. “Good morning, Damen.”

Damen emits a low, guttural sound, a marriage of annoyance and exhaustion. He unclips his seatbelt and leans forward, rubbing the heels of his palms into his eyes.

“Gods. What’s the time?”

“Midday. You’ve been asleep for a few hours.” Laurent says, nodding at his clearly uncomfortable seating arrangement. “In defiance of all laws of ergonomics.”

Damen sighs. He sounds devoid of perk. It’s a novelty. “I barely slept last night, Laurent.”

Laurent wants to ask, what were you doing. Then he wonders whether it would be more appropriate to ask, who were you doing. He examines himself briefly and finds that in case of the latter, he’d rather not know.

Happily, Damen offers an explanation without prompting. “They’re trying to push through a criminal justice reform bill by ambush. I received the draft at quarter to midnight and I spent most of the night reading it,” He says. “It’s the size of a brick. You could throw it at a man and kill him.”

“I didn’t think you’d be the type to stay up reading legislation.”

“It’s my job. What else would I be doing?”

“I don’t know. Ploughing some young debutante?”

“I will have you know,” Damen says, wryly, “that I’m extremely faithful to our fake relationship.”

Laurent feels himself blanche, but Damen spares him the task of responding. Gingerly, Damen prods one of his calves. He winces like a shot; his legs have fallen asleep.

Leaving him to it, Laurent restarts the car and turns into Aimeric’s driveway. He summons an inordinate amount of energy, and deploys it all towards resisting the charm of Damen battling pins and needles.

From the outside, everything about the property is disinviting. There’s no mailbox outside, and the lengthy driveway leading inside is poorly sealed and barely maintained. It’s sheltered on both sides by a dense canopy of trees, which lets through such minimal light that it seems to change the very hour of the day.

Behind all this evasiveness: a small home, of the exact opposite persuasion.

The property is a study in peaceful isolation. It’s a single-storeyed wooden cottage, made in dark amber that strikes a sharp contrast against the forestry around it. The small porch houses a two-person swing and a kennel, as well as a sizeable pile of chopped wood. Next to the house is a dusty pick-up truck. Above it, a plume of chimney smoke curls up into the sky. The property isn’t new, but it’s visibly and lovingly cared for.

From the moment they step out of the car, Damen and Laurent hear a dog barking. They exchange a glance before Damen leads the way up the three steps of the wooden deck to the front door. They don’t hear any human voices, but the rich scent of cooking meat seeps outside, as well as the distinctive sound of a knife falling rhythmically against a chopping board.

Damen gives three short raps on the door, and the chopping stops. Then, they hear steps. Then, the door opens a fraction, only as far as the chain latch goes.

A man looks through the gap. Damen can’t place his age. He can’t be past his early 30s, but the shaggy beard framing his chin hides it well. He’s tall, and dressed in an old-looking sweater and grey jeans that may have been black once upon a time.

They’ve also clearly interrupted him cooking: his sleeves are bunched up to his elbows, and a faded tartan apron is wrapped loosely around his waist. At his feet is a large border collie, nosing out curiously from between the gap. His hand is on its collar, pulling it back.

A blank moment passes, in which he notices Damen and then recognises him for who he is. With that recognition comes a sudden and unmistakable hardening of every line in his face.

“Senator,” says the man. The word comes out like a curse.

Damen has a particular smile. He uses it when he first meets people. He also has enough experience to sense that deploying it now would earn him a slammed door in the face. He sets his expression.

“I’m sorry to disrupt your afternoon. Do you have a moment?”

“Not for you.”

“I was hoping to speak to Aimeric.”

A sharp intake of breath. “No one by that name lives here.”

Next to Damen, Laurent watches the volley of words like a sports match, his eyes darting to follow each serve and return.

“Etienne, then.” Damen continues, calmly. “Is he in?”

The man doesn’t react. In the brief gap between the door and its frame, his body is a rigid and impermeable line. He holds himself like a second barrier to entry. A latent energy rests behind his eyes and he casts it at Damen like a gathering storm.

“Senator.” He says quietly. “I suggest you leave. He doesn’t want to see you. Gods know, I don’t.”

“If that’s the case,” Says Damen, as politely as he can, “I’d prefer to hear it from him.”

The man moves to close the door. Without thinking, Damen’s hand flies up and stops it in place with his palm. The realisation comes as an afterthought and he worries that it might be the wrong move. Too late now, with his hand splayed open against a glass pane.

Around them, the wind whips clamorously. Laurent maintains his quiet. Damen and the other man stare each other down, and Damen has the distinct sense that he is being appraised for a fight. He knows that in a contest of pure physicality, he would win. He knows too that the man behind the door is no stranger to a fight: he has a weathered look in his eyes, a quiet voltage that can probably match strength and overcome it.

“You shouldn’t have been able to find us,” Says the man, with a quiet fury. “We don’t want anything to do with you, or anyone from your cursed family.”

At a very young age, Damen had grown accustomed to hearing his family name spat out rather than pronounced. His father was respected but not loved, and Damen was familiar—if not entirely comfortable—with seeing him attacked in scathing editorials and heated speeches.

But it’s always harder to endure as intimate dialogue, given face-to-face, laid right at his feet. It stings, even though this particular fault-line has been carved by Kastor.

“My brother doesn’t know I’m here.” He says plainly. “I know Aimeric’s been threatened, and he isn’t the only one. I’m on his side and I’m here to help how I can—but I can only do that if I speak to him.”

“Are you, now? What a lofty promise.” Says the man. “Your family is won’t worth the air they breathe in. He’s been hurt enough”

Laurent interjects, “If I may—stopping Kastor will protect Aimeric far better than isolating him.”

His sudden participation startles both Damen and the other man. The stranger regards Laurent with a confused disdain; Damen, with an ill-concealed gratitude that threatens to overwhelm him.

Damen turns back towards the man. “If Aimeric sends me away, I won’t take up a minute more of his time, or yours. But I’ll hear it from him. Not you.”

A pause, and the door closes in their faces.

But then, the sound of a chain being unlatched, and it opens—not wide, not invitingly, but just enough to let them through. It seems they’ve earned their entrance, but it’s given begrudgingly.

Damen quickly catches Laurent’s eye before crossing the threshold. The dog starts barking its excitement and runs around them in small circles, as if to herd them into the house like sheep. His master says nothing to quieten or stop him.

Every interior surface is made of wood—dark, polished, so rich in colour that it almost burns red in the firelight. The house is tidy but brims with ornaments: photographs on the walls, hand-knotted rugs on the carpet, a mounted deer head above the fireplace. Warmth spills generously into the air.

The man leads them to an open space that houses both the sitting room and a dining area. Damen sees no television, but enough books stacked on the floor for a man to stay occupied for years. It’s cosy and homely, and Damen cannot begrudge Aimeric for finding his solace here.

The man hovers at the entrance of a hallway. “I’ll go find him.” He says ominously. “But if he doesn’t want to see you, you’re to leave immediately.”

A single nod from each of them, and he disappears into a corridor, firmly closing the door behind him. They hover awkwardly in the space. He hasn’t invited them to make themselves uncomfortable.

“Do you think we can sit down?” Asks Laurent. He doesn’t sound particularly perturbed, but his eyes scan the room like he’s cataloguing it.

“We probably shouldn’t take liberties.”

“Hm. You’re probably right,” Laurent murmurs, more to himself than anything. He picks up a carved wooden sparrow, slides his thumb over the grain. “This is well made.”

Damen is too tightly coiled to exchange fripperies about the décor. “You and Nicaise didn’t pull up anything about a flatmate?”

Laurent replaces the bird and picks up a rounded trinket dish, with a rose motif on the lid. “No, we didn’t look,” he says, distracted. “But our host seems a little over-involved for a flatmate, don’t you think?”

From outside in the corridor, footsteps sound. They’re muffled, and Damen can’t quite tell if it’s more than one set. When the door reopens, the grumpy man remerges. He goes near the fireplace, arms folded, fury unmitigated. The dog comes to his feet, and lies there.

Aimeric is nowhere to be seen. The man doesn’t indicate whether he’s coming.

Laurent says, “Forgive me, I haven’t introduced myself. My name is Laurent DeVere.” Damen notes that he omits to explain who he is. Given how easily spooked the man already seems to be, it’s a sensible tactic

“I’m Jord,” comes the gruff response. “How did you find him, anyway? His name, his identity, his address, all of it supposed to be—“

“Unlisted. I know,” Damen says. “I have my resources. I want to use them to help Aimeric, if he’ll let me.”

“You don’t know the first thing about Aimeric.”

“I know, and I’m not here to pretend that I do.” Damen says. “I haven’t seen him a long time.”

“Four years,” says a new voice from the hallway, startling Damen and Laurent. The dog pounces up and goes to him, nuzzling against his leg. He leans down to scratch her behind the ear. “The last time we met was at my father’s sixty-fifth.”

Eventually, he rises and looks towards Damen.

He looks well.

Damen racks his brain. Aimeric can’t be more than 22, and it’s immediately clear that country living becomes him. Damen’s memory offers images of a listless youth with a permanent, melancholy bend in his spine. The young man before him is a contrasting sight: he’s well-built and lightly-muscled beneath his heavy-knit jumper. His mussed curls would be a little too long for Ios—but in this cabin, in the middle of such densely overgrown forest, they suit him very well.

Aimeric doesn’t look particularly pleased to see them, but he stops well short of Jord’s palpable scorn. Instead, his eyes fall and linger on Laurent, who gives him a brief nod of acknowledgement.

Aimeric goes to stand nearer to Jord, and Damen catches the brief look that passes between them. It’s rich and fleeting, a world communicated in a second. Aimeric’s presence is clearly a balm to Jord, as much as Jord’s presence steels Aimeric. It’s an intimate thing to behold.

“Hello Damen.” Aimeric says.

“You look well, Aimeric.” Damen says.

“He was better before your brother and his goon darkened our doorstep.” Jord says bleakly.

A wave of guilt. Damen finds himself looking to Laurent. He’s coming to learn that his companion cages his feelings in a steel net. It’s a quiet comfort, and he turns back to Aimeric.

“You have every reason not to trust me,” Damen concedes. “God knows I wouldn’t trust me, walking in here after four years, on the heels of what my brother’s done.”

Aimeric folds his arms, leans back against the wall. He watches Damen closely. “You’d work against your brother?” He asks. The scepticism in his tone is a neon light. “You adore him, Damen. You always have.”

Damen doesn’t have to accept the point for the uncomfortable truth of it to lie suspended between them.

“Perhaps I can assist.” Says Laurent. His tone is relaxed, a grating contrast with the air in the room. 

Aimeric and Jord jolt at his interruption. “How?” Aimeric says.

“My name is Laurent DeVere. I’m a journalist with the Ios Tribune.”

“Is that supposed to put me at ease?” Aimeric says.

Jord grunts. “A fine day, when aid comes through an Akielos and the press.”

Laurent doesn’t acknowledge the slight, doesn’t bend to the disdain. A leaf of hope turns over in Damen’s chest at his steel, unbidden. He presses his thumb down hard to suppress it.

“I don’t know who you are.” Says Aimeric. It’s an indictment rather than a statement of fact. “I’ve never seen any of your work.”

“Exactly.” Says Laurent. “I’m no one. I owe nobody anything.”

“They could set you up nicely, that lot.” Jord accuses. “They could make your fortune. Perhaps they already have.”

“I have no need for money.” Says Laurent. “If my personal gain concerns you, then I’m writing this story to make my name. I can’t achieve that without bringing down Kastor.”

It’s Damen’s turn to jolt, at his blunt words more than anything else. Laurent doesn’t look at him and Damen turns over the words in his mind. Of course doing the right thing would come with a side of personal glory for Laurent. More fool him, he thinks, for allowing himself to forget.

He takes a deep breath. It won’t happen again.

“You haven’t given me a reason to believe you.” Aimeric says. “You came here with the brother of the man blackmailing my father.”

“Damen is my source,” says Laurent. “He led me to this story, but it doesn’t depend on him or his input, and it won’t require his blessing. If he continues to help me, as he has, then you can be safe in trusting him. If he gets in my way, I promise you,” he says, and pauses, and drops his tone to a needlepoint, “I will make a story out of him.”

And then, to run highlighter through the point, Laurent turns to meet Damen’s waiting gaze. Damen is expecting ruthlessness, but in its place he finds a clinical neutrality. It’s as if Laurent is saying to him, without words, what else were you expecting?

But it has the intended effect on Aimeric and Jord, whose sharp attention is now squarely on Laurent, and tempered through and through with curiosity. Damen, in the midst of a room and a story in which he is intimately involved—indeed which he triggered—suddenly finds himself feeling quite alone.

Aimeric leans down again and begins scratching behind the dog’s ears. He looks pensive. After a moment, he says, “I’m not agreeing to help you. I need—some time. I need to think.”

Damen thinks, at least it’s not a no.

He says, because it’s the only other helpful thing he can think of, “Call Berenger. He’s been—Kastor threatened his father too. Your father approached his father. Berenger then came to me. He can confirm what we’re doing.”

“And I’ll leave you my card,” says Laurent. “If you’re ready to speak, call me. Damen doesn’t have to be here for it.”

He takes a business card out of his back pocket and offers it to Aimeric. Aimeric studies it, and after a moment, places it on a small wooden tray on one of the shelves. Damen knows he should focus on being grateful Aimeric didn’t toss the card into the fire behind him. Instead he grapples—for the first time, and probably far too late—with the realization that he might occasionally be a liability to this story.

Jord certainly seems to think so. He watches Damen like a leashed dog.

Their business concluded, Damen and Laurent take their leave. Jord disappears into the rest of the house but Aimeric and the dog see them out. The two stand on the porch, watching Laurent’s car disappear into the nettle of trees.

Damen watches Aimeric grow smaller and smaller in the rear-view mirror. When the car eventually emerges from the driveway onto the main road, he exhales. It’s a loud, exhausted sound. “That was disastrous.”

To his surprise, Laurent smiles. “That? No. You’ve clearly never had to work a source before.”

Damen stares at him incredulously. “Jord looked ready to dig two shallow graves. What’s bad, if that’s good?”

“Bad,” Laurent says wistfully, turning left onto the road “Is the time a source pulled a gun on me during a meeting at his home. It took me an hour to talk him down from it. Your Aimeric? He’s cake. He’ll call within a week. Watch.”

Damen falls quiet. He’s hopeful, but hardly optimistic. Laurent doesn’t try to pull him out of his mood and it’s a mercy. Instead, he switches on the radio and flicks it over to a quiet, easy listening station. He keeps the volume down.

It’s still early in the afternoon. Around them, the sky is a mess of soft, brushed clouds. Damen only begins to unwind when they hit the ocean road—and only when he unwinds, does he realize how tightly coiled he must have been in Pellydos. But although his muscles ease, and despite the way he sinks into the leather seat, his mind hurtles faster than the car on the route home.

He tries to think around a particular question, and finds that he can’t.

“Do you really think I’d ever get in your way?” He asks abruptly.

The question takes Laurent by surprise. He flicks over a quick glance. “What do you mean?”

“What you said to Aimeric and Jord, about what you’d do if I betrayed the story. You know I wouldn’t.” He says, and then decides to ask it. “Don’t you? Is there a part of you that doubts that, at all?”

Saying it aloud doesn’t make it smaller. Nor does the almost minute of silence that follows as Laurent contemplates his answer. Damen knows that a touch of hurt crept into his question, the first stripe of fear that his brother’s brush has tarred him as well. In the silence, it seems to echo in the small space around them.

“I don’t think you would.” Laurent answers. He says it with weight, like a man who’s arranged all the possible answers in a row, measured them against each other, and then made his selection.

“Then why say it?”

“To remind them that the only side I’m on is the story’s. They needed to hear it.” Laurent says. “It didn’t hurt to remind you as well."

The following morning is a Sunday. Laurent had set his alarm for six, but finds himself awake and staring at the dark ceiling at half past five. He makes the mistake of contemplating his day, and as he compiles a roll of tasks that grows from length to length, he feels sleep slip further out of his grasp.

Inevitably, his thoughts return to the day before. Because of the strange hour of the morning, he dwells on particular details over others.

He thinks of Jord and Aimeric, and the warmth of their home. Even though he and Damen had not been welcomed inside, the space had teemed with the fingerprints of a life lived well, lived closely, shared. It was clear that the couple didn’t entertain much. Everything about their home was arranged for the pleasure and comfort of its two occupants.

It was even clearer that they were a couple, although neither of them had confirmed his hunch outright. He dwelled on the look they had exchanged when Aimeric entered the room. It spoke of another form of warmth—one generated in carving out a home in retreat, and in each other.

A phantom ache echoes in Laurent’s chest. Maddeningly, it conjures for him the look that Damen had given him, when he noticed Laurent’s arrival at Grand Square. It summons the hot press of the coffee into his hand, the arm that had been offered to him, the heat of his body that radiated through both their coats and into Laurent’s skin.

This was a new kind of trouble. Laurent closes his eyes, as if that might resist it.

Even before Damen arrived in his office, Laurent had been familiar with the man, the Senator. In the course of his work, he had attended speeches that Damen had given, and sat in on committees that Damen had chaired. Damen’s family was old money in Ios, old power, and even though he had known of Damen’s existence—and registered the pleasing symmetry of his face—the memory of him didn’t stick. He was an impermanent face, a raindrop in a perpetual storm of people.

Not so, now. The image of Damen, once summoned, proves difficult to banish—and more so now that Laurent has a measure of the man himself. Laurent returns to the look on Damen’s face when Aimeric raised his devotion to Kastor. The accusation of double-means had distressed Damen; an artless response. If Laurent had any lingering doubts about the sincerity of Damen’s intentions, they died in that room.

He had known that Damen was honest, but had learned yesterday that he was also good. That exuded its own, separate force.

It doesn’t help that Damen is infuriatingly handsome, either. Laurent thinks again of being on his arm. A quiet voltage surges through his entire body, unbidden, unwanted, irresistible.

Drugged by the pull of his imagination, Laurent wonders what it would be like to be kissed by someone like Damen. He imagines them alone in his office—no, scratch that, the hotel room—and Damen coming up to him, tilting his face up.

Damen would be a good kisser, he thinks. A possessive and needy one, probably, and Laurent feels himself stir at the conclusion. He imagines his lower lip between Damen’s teeth, the taste of him, his hand at the back of Laurent’s neck, keeping him close, and—

—his alarm rings, a violent disruption, dropkicking him back down to reality. Laurent opens his eyes and realizes with a shock that his hands are at the waistband of his trousers. About a source. About his work.

He leaps out of bed before he can think himself out of it. He throws on his trainers, takes his work swipe-card, and flees: he leaves the house and runs to work.

He doesn’t allow himself the luxury of pace. He pounds his footsteps across the pavement, feeling the pushback of concrete against the soles of his feet. He wills the force of his exhaustion and his gasping breaths to drown away the look that Damen had given him yesterday, and all the others.

He runs till he finds himself in the centre of Ios. It’s barely half past seven and the business district is still asleep—its avenues empty of cars, footpaths devoid of life, an eerie silence that makes him feel like the only person in the city. His bloodstream thrums with adrenaline. He feels awake and alert, and restless.

More importantly, he has come to his senses. Each time he wants to turn his mind back to an hour ago, to his bed, to what his hand would have done if he had given it free reign, he wants to balk. Instead, he reaches work and heads for the staff showers, and changes into one of the spare sets of clothes he keeps in his office. He settles at his desk and begins sifting through the editing in his in-tray.

An hour or so later, from somewhere in the office, a door slams shut.

Laurent is startled but unconcerned. He doesn’t look up from his work. There’s only one person with enough liberty in the office to slam doors, and Halvik slams them shut by force of character and habit, rather than because of mood. The only unusual detail is that she’s in earlier than normal for a Sunday.

He looks up, though, when he hears her footsteps getting closer. He’s waiting for her by the time she appears in his doorway, impeccably attired for brunch in jeans and a white blazer. In her hand is a newspaper, and on her face: amusement.

She approaches his desk and throws a morning paper down in front of him. Laurent looks down at the front page. It’s The Daily Metro, a tabloid he wouldn’t use to wipe his shoe.

And on it, two pictures.

The headline screams, in red capital letters: THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER! Beneath it are two photographs of him and Damen, in delirious colour—one of them at lunch, and the other of them at the fountain, his hand in the crook of Damen’s elbow. Both images would be completely innocuous in content, were it not for two things: the way that Damen looks at him in each one, gentle and affectionate; and the way that Laurent returns his gaze, seemingly basking in it.

He says, “Slow news day.”

She says, “I have to ask. Call it editorial due diligence. Are you fucking him?”

He looks up from the paper, and regards her like she’s brought a dead mouse to his feet.

“Halvik.” He says. “Come on.”

“I figured you might become news.” She says. “I didn’t expect you to do it so enthusiastically.”

“I warned you.” He points out. “The day he came to me. I walked straight into your office right after he left, and I warned you of what we would do.”

She takes one of the seats in front of his desk—the same one that Damen had taken, a few short weeks beforehand.

She says, “I planned to discuss contingency plans with you this week, but we might as well have them now. We’re going to need them.”

Laurent decides to pre-empt her. “I think I should step off the politics desk.” He says. “For a while, anyway. Till after the story breaks and I can explain what I was doing.”

He’s been expecting it. This assignment, for all its promise, plays a dangerous game with a cardinal ethic of journalism: that the perception of conflict is just as bad as having one in fact. Laurent knows that so long as he remains on Damen’s arm—or appears to be there, anyway—every political story under his name will be understood through the prism of the relationship. In the meantime, it’s safer to turn his pen to subjects that steer clear of Damen.

But his conscience is clear. He has his editor’s blessing, even though he suspects that most other editors might have withheld it.

And besides. If Laurent is completely honest with himself, every journalist worth the ink in their pen has a story about pushing their boundaries. It’s the mythology of his craft, and he’s sat around tables at dinners and functions and Friday-night drinks, listening in thrall to journalists who’ve risked their lives for a lead; of others who’ve sucked, screwed and jerked their stories out of a source; of jobs lost and then restored with glory; of risks taken—sometimes calculated, most often not—that have paid glorious dividends.

A part of him that he won’t admit to having, not even with a gun to his temple, has always rather liked the idea of a tale like that for himself.

“The science desk?” Halvik suggests. “I’d put you on sports, but I don’t think you can tell a football from a basketball.”

Laurent grimaces. He can’t tell a lab from a dungeon either, but he’s in no position make demands. “Fine. Science desk it is. Effective when?

“Effective a week ago.” She says. Then, she nods down at the front page. “Your lunch at Antipodes looked cosy.”

He gives her a withering look. “He and I spent the whole lunch talking about his brother and this story. But you know how this works. They take a hundred photos and choose the single shot that frames the story they want to sell. You make the exact same editorial decisions, every day.”

“Yes, but the subjects of the image aren’t normally quite this obliging.”

He raises his hands in frustration. It’s barely 9am. It’s far too early for any conversation, let alone one as loaded as this one.

“What are you fishing for?” He asks.

Halvik watches him closely. Her perfectly manicured right hand drums out a lethal beat against the wooden armrest. No matter which side of the desk she’s on, she moves the conversation with exasperating authority.

“I’m just saying. He flaunts you at the most expensive restaurant this side of the Ellosean Sea. You look at him like he hung the moon. I trust you, Laurent, but I don’t want you to give me cause to regret it.”

“Have I ever let you down?”

“No.” She concedes, standing up. “But then again, I’ve never seen you look at anyone that way before.”

There’s no point protesting an irrefutable truth. He shrugs off her point. She reminds him that the science desk meets fortnightly on Mondays, and that tomorrow’s Monday is a meeting day. Then she sweeps out of the office, and the door slams shut in her wake.

She leaves the paper behind.

Laurent picks it up for a closer look. Irritated though he is, he can see what she means. Heck, with that front page, the whole country is likely to see what she means by Sunday brunch. He and Damen arch into each other, look like they can’t turn their attention elsewhere. They’ve excelled at their game, perhaps a little too well.

Laurent had contemplated this outcome, and he cycles through its elements again to remind himself that this is all planned. This is what’s supposed to happen. The consequences are easier to swallow when he reminds himself that he’s authored them.

His name will be known now, the effort of toiling for years to achieve any kind of profile superseded by two dates. He also knows that he’ll be considered arm candy first and a journalist second, if at all. Even after the story breaks and reality resumes, some residue of this peculiar arrangement will likely always stick to him, summoned when his name is mentioned amongst strangers.

It’s a particularly drastic shift, from ascetism to the pits of tabloid fodder. He’s chosen it, and he knows it isn’t a fall, exactly, but it somehow still feels like one.

Although pauper was an unnecessary flourish.

Really.

He thinks about calling Damen, but doesn’t. Most of his relationships probably begin this way, broadcast to the country at large. Laurent imagines that this kind of attention is all part of a Sunday for him. The last thing he wants is for Damen to try and hold his hand through it.

He throws the paper into the bin. Then, without pausing to think about why, he recovers it and shoves it at the bottom of the lowest drawer of his desk. He’ll think of what to do with it later.

Laurent works a long day, until the sun begins to set. When he finishes, he heads to his brother’s for dinner, as he does every Sunday. He’s honest enough with himself to admit that today, he’s been putting it off.

When he walks into their family home, shortly after seven in the evening, a dread-lined rope hangs down from the back of Laurent’s throat to the pit of his gut. He’s never dreaded coming home before, but the day seems intent on being a panoply of firsts. He knows that Auguste reads at least two papers from cover to cover every single day, and that he scans the front pages of all the rest. He would have heard by now, and although he’s used to finding Laurent’s name in the press—it’s never quite like this.

And yet—when Laurent walks into the kitchen, Auguste looks up at him from over the sink in the kitchen island. He smiles like nothing’s happened. The air is warm and beckoning with the promise of hearty food, and enough dirty kitchenware is stacked by the sink to presage lots of it.

Despite himself, Laurent feels his shoulders loosen. He drops his satchel by the dining table and pulls up a stool nearby.

“You look exhausted.” Says Auguste, draining a pot of pasta into the sink. He disappears briefly behind a cloud of steam.

“It’s been a week,” says Laurent. “But you go first.”

Auguste plys him with a feast: roasted broccoli and blue cheese soup; pappardelle with harissa and capers; split wheat and beetroot salad. As they eat, Laurent pushes the conversation away from himself at every turn, asking about Auguste’s clinic and his patients and exhaustively about his staff. Anything at all, just to avoid the inevitable topic for a little while longer.

He runs out of interview material around dessert. Auguste still hasn’t said a word.

He pushes a generous slab of chocolate cake in Laurent’s direction, crowned with raspberries and a fat dollop of ice-cream. Laurent ignores it in favour of scrutinising his brother’s face, which remains supremely unperturbed.

He can’t very well leave without discussing it, but it seems that Auguste won’t raise it first.

“Well?” Laurent asks. “Are you really not going to say anything?”

Auguste is occupied heaping toppings on his dessert: currently, shaking the last of the fudge sauce out of the bottle. His expression betrays nothing.

“Well, you hadn’t told me about it,” Auguste says. He picks up his spoon and carves out a single scoop, piling on one of everything on his plate. “I was only following your lead.”

He says it without a hint of malice or accusation, a neutral fact. His tone suggests that he doesn’t know why Laurent might keep this from him, but that he’s prepared to be understanding.

Laurent suspects that he ought to be grateful for Auguste’s empathy, but it only serves to make him feel worse.

“It was an unexpected development.” He says.

“You don’t have to tell me that.” Auguste counters. “One moment, I’m scrubbing up for theatre, about to go in and perform an appendectomy. The next moment, my junior registrar is putting a newspaper with your face on it against the window of the surgical suite.”

Laurent blanches, and weighs the cost of telling Auguste the truth.

Laurent trusts him more than life itself, and he doesn’t like lying to his brother, whether actively or by omission. It’s as a comfortable as slipping on a wet shirt: it sticks to his skin, and he cannot distract himself from the feeling of it.

But then Auguste speaks, and takes the decision right out of Laurent’s hands. He looks up from his plate and offers the first whisper of emotion about the matter: a genuine smile, a golden thing.

“Listen, I don’t know if I approve of this new boyfriend of yours, but I’m not mad. You two look happy.” He says. “It’s just—good to see you dating something other than your deadlines, for once.”

One issue now resolved for Laurent, another promptly occupies the vacant space. Auguste has always sniffed out his lies like a bloodhound. If Laurent’s going to get away with lying to him about this relationship, he’ll have to commit to the edifice.

An endeavour, for sure, given that Laurent has technically never been in a serious relationship before.

“When can I meet him?” Asks Auguste.

“You can meet him,” Laurent replies, “when I’ve been with him long enough to be serious about him.”

“If he’s wining and dining you at the most expensive restaurant in the country, you’re serious enough to bring him home,” says Auguste, brooking no dissent. “I want him here for dinner soon. In the meantime, you can make it up to me by telling me about him.”

At least, Laurent thinks, this bit doesn’t have to be a lie.

He recites the order of proceedings like he’s reading a telephone book. “He likes my work. He came to speak to me in the office one day. We talked politics for a while, and then we talked about other things. He invited me to lunch and I said yes.”

“A fan of your work, huh?”

Auguste says it with a sly emphasis on work, in a knowing tone that plainly suggests he’s talking about something else. Uncomfortable colour blooms across Laurent’s neck. It seems that even his brother is familiar with the interchangeability of the beautiful people on Damen’s arm.

“I’m well aware of his thing for blondes, believe me.” Laurent says tartly.

“What about you, then? Does he please you?”

Laurent nods. That, too, is truthful. Over the last few weeks, he’s developed a vivid recall of the dimensions that make up Damen’s face: the light scar on the side of his nose, the infuriating dimple in his left cheek, the ease with which his smile is lit.

Perhaps Laurent might survive this conversation, if its direction allows him to continue jumping from one fragment of truth to another.

“He’s hardly difficult to look at,” is all he allows himself to say.

“We all know that.” Auguste says wryly. “That’s not what I meant. Is he a good man? Is he good to you?”

“He’s—“ Laurent pauses, and gathers his thoughts.

He thinks: Damen is more clever than people give him credit for. He thinks: Damen cares about things with a sincerity that doesn’t typically accompany his station. He thinks: Damen has an irrepressible need to do the right thing, and it borders on the pathological.

He’s confident, but it doesn’t sit ugly and loud on his skin. His sincerity would drive a dishonest man to despair. He’s an outrageous flirt.

Auguste’s question is an axe to a dam. Laurent’s thoughts rush past him, far faster than he can keep them at bay.

“Yes.” Laurent answers, and feels himself colour. “He’s a good man.”

Damen allows himself the luxury of sleeping in on Sunday.

It’s the only indulgence he permits in his schedule, and he observes it diligently. When he goes to bed on Saturday night—or early Sunday morning, depending on the weekend—he sets every single device that could beep or holler him awake into flight mode. Then he shuts the curtains and crawls into bed, and trusts that his body will wake him before his first Sunday obligation.

When he comes to this morning, he does so slowly, drowsily. He falls in and out of sleep for an age before, reluctantly, he forces his eyes open a fraction more than they otherwise would. He can feel the weight of every single muscle and bone in his body, dragging him down into the mattress with an irresistible gravity. He rubs his eyes, stretches out, and realizes that he’s hard.

Without thinking, he takes himself in hand and begins to stroke. It doesn’t take long for the first leash of pleasure to coil around him and pull him on, or for his hips to jut their first push into his hands.

It also doesn’t take long for his mind to turn to Laurent.

He hasn’t been able to resist this particular line of thought for a few days. He doesn’t intend to start resisting now, nor to drag it out. He knows himself—and knows, too, that to try and suppress it would only throw gasoline on its embers.

He’s cultivated a quiet, quick little fantasy of what they could have done with ten minutes in the hotel room. It involves the bed, Laurent pushed back against the sheets, his shirt undone and slipping off his shoulders, trousers at his ankles. Damen over him, sliding into him urgently and with his full length.

He would kiss Laurent’s neck till the skin is sure to bruise, and for the further pleasure of having Laurent’s lips near his ear. Laurent wouldn’t be a loud, showy lover. Damen would be hellbent on catching every involuntary sound he makes as it emerges. Damen would finish first, too, and then come down to his knees and take Laurent in his mouth.

The image that pushes Damen over is always Laurent coming—Laurent, propped up on his elbows to watch, his lips parted and his flushed skin stricken red. All that elegance and all that grace, undone.

Damen comes at the thought, and hard. Before the ebbing tide of his pleasure is replaced with guilt, he flees to the shower to get ready for the day. He knows he shouldn’t indulge that line of thinking, but it’s done now.

He gets dressed, makes his coffee. After throwing two pieces of bread in the toaster, he reaches for the stack of newspapers left on the counter by the housekeeper.

The third paper in the stack is The Daily Metro. Its headline stops him dead.

THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER

Spotted in public! Less than six months after his messy public split from gold-medal gymnast Celine Anastas, Senator Damianos Akielos (D-Ios) (30), younger son of deceased Vice-President Theomedes Akielos, has been spied with a new beau on his arm. The Daily Metro can exclusively reveal that the mystery blonde is Laurent DeVere (25), a journalist with the Ios Tribune.

The couple were first spied together at a cozy, romantic lunch at the exclusive Antipodes establishment. An eyewitness confirmed that the happy couple could barely keep their hands off each other throughout the meal. 

And that’s as much as Damen can stomach for now.

The toast springs finished, and the coffee machine beeps for his attention. Damen ignores both of them, his eyes fixed to the images as though glued, to his smile, to Laurent’s smile, to the warmth of the gaze between them. Of course he had known they would be seen.

What he had miscalculated—he knows now, with paper in hand—is the visible overspill of his emotions.

He forces himself to eat the toast dry, and doesn’t taste a drop of the coffee. He contemplates the storm that awaits him on his phone, and how much of it will come from Nikandros. And Kastor—Kastor will know that they’re spending time together, now.

He dawdles with another cup of coffee before switching his phone back on to the network. It immediately begins vibrating in his hand and doesn’t stop. The number of notifications is enough to drive any man to despair: missed calls from Nikandros; emails from reporters; more missed calls from Nikandros; messages from other friends; further missed calls from Nikandros; and voice messages from Nikandros; and text messages rom Nikandros.

But nothing from Laurent, even though Damen isn’t sure of what he’s hoping to hear. He swipes everything away.

He hits the treadmill and doesn’t think. He cleans his bedroom and doesn’t think. He even settles on the couch voluntarily with a draft appropriations bill—a document the size of a metastatic tumour, and about as user-friendly—and he reads every footnote of every clause, anything to avoid having to think.

Damen kills enough hours until he has to prepare for the family luncheon. As he shaves, he reflects without humour that of all the Sundays in the month, of course the story just has to break on this Sunday: the last of the month, when the remnants of the Akielos clan congregate together.

Sunday lunch had been one of his father’s most hallowed traditions—perhaps the most hallowed. The family gathered around a meal irrespective of which committee was meeting, which bill needed editing, whichever donor needed to be wined and dined and entertained. Theomedes and Hypermenestra flanked the ends of the table, bracketing their sons, and the meal was conducted with the precision of a military exercise under their parents’ oversight.

Each member of the family would deconstruct their week for the others over pot-roast brisket and whatever roasted and dressed vegetable masterpieces the family chef had decided on that week. Their parents didn’t shield the boys from anything during those conversations, and inculcated them into every nuance and double-play of political life.

His father’s been dead for years, but the tradition had continued—although less frequently since their mother’s health had taken a turn for the worse. Luncheons now occurred once a month, on the final Sunday of the month, and both sons re-arranged their schedules to make them work.

Before he leaves his house, Damen makes the mistake of picking up The Daily Metro one more time. He wonders how Laurent is coping with the attention. Damen is used to it now, of course, but he can still remember the first time he had made the front page. It had pleased and disoriented him for a week afterwards. He wonders how different it must be for someone like Laurent, who’s used to reporting the news rather than being it.

Similar thoughts distract him as he gets into his car, and on the drive to their family estate. He only snaps back to earth at the front door of his parents’ home. It opens for him even though he doesn’t remember knocking.

Behind the door is a butler, who bows.

“Hello, Alfred.” He says, trying for lightness.

“Master Damen,” says the old man. He sounds every one of his sixty-five years. “The family is already gathered at the luncheon table. Please follow me.”

Alfred insists on leading the way through the house, even though Damen could probably navigate it in a sensory deprivation suit. It’s a beautiful day, though cold, and the French doors have been flung open to circulate the air in the house. Gauzy curtains billow out and fall back against the windows. Damen pulls his jacket a little closer around him.

As they walk, Damen casts his mind back to the last time he had seen Kastor. He realizes with a startle that it was a week before he had first spoken to Berenger.

The family is seated around the table in the conservatory. Their mother sits at the head of it, bundled in blankets and with a standing heater nearby. She looks tired and frail, like a swaddled infant, but she holds herself with as much grace as her body will allow. She’s still beautiful, hair twisted in an elegant knot, and she smiles when she sees him.

Damen goes to her first, hand on her shoulder so she doesn’t get up. He leans down to press a kiss to each cheek. “Mother. Lovely as ever.”

It doesn’t matter that she isn’t his mother. It doesn’t matter that he’s the result of one of his father’s affairs, that his very presence in the household is a breathing reminder of her husband’s indiscretions. It has never mattered to her. When his mother had died in childbirth, Hypermenestra had taken him in with a grace that Theomedes did not deserve, and raised him as her own. Nothing else had had ever mattered to Damen.

“And you’re late, as ever.” She says with a smile. “Sit down. You’ve starved us.”

He sits to her left. Kastor is already sitting to her right, with Jokaste on the other side of him. They both watch him with slightly different twists on the same amusement—Jokaste, dry; Kastor, light-hearted. He catches Kastor’s eye and his brother smiles at him so sincerely that for a moment, Damen forgets everything else.

At the beginning of every meal, their father used to serve each of them. After his death, Kastor assumed that mantle. He takes his mother’s plate and serves her first, and then reaches for Damen’s. Damen watches as a small feast of roast and potatoes mounts on his plate, and feels guilt settle in the base of his lungs like ashen sediment.

He distracts himself by reaching for the wine, and pouring generous glasses for everyone at the table.

Kastor begins carving his food, his tone humorous and casual. “So. Damen. You came alone.”

“Early days.” He replies, over his glass. “Since when did you pay attention to who I dated?”

Jokaste reaches for the gravy, lashes it over her plate. There’s a glimmer of a smile at the edge of her mouth. “Well. Since me, technically.”

Damen gives her a sidelong glance, which he next turns to his brother. “Are you planning to steal Laurent from under my feet as well?”

“Boys.” Hypermenestra interrupts, scandalised. “Really. We’re eating.”

“Sorry, mother.” They reply in unison, like a schoolboy chorus, the intonation as rote to them as blood.

Kastor and Damen catch each other’s eyes and exchange a smile. They police their language and humour more loosely in the absence of their father. It’s become something of a tradition to gently offend their mother’s conservative sensibilities, at least once or twice a meal.

Conversation turns to work, as it invariably does. An hour passes, and then a second. Alfred had long-ago perfected the alchemy of pacing new dishes from the kitchen to the flow of conversation. Talk meanders from the recent judicial appointments to the Court of Appeals, to the celeriac boulangère, to the upcoming valedictory sittings, and the balsamic shallots with goat’s cheese.

Damen eats well. He drinks well. No one brings up Laurent or the newspaper article again. With his phone on silent and lying ignored in the depths of his jacket pocket, he is warmed and sated enough to forget the worst of what troubles him. And by the time dessert is brought out—an indulgent lemon tart, his mother’s favourite—he sits low in his seat, his bones weighed down with the delicious lethargy of a good meal eaten in slow time.

He’s tempted to let his head fall back, and to give himself over to sleep.

After half of her dessert, his mother beats him to it. She moves to rise and Kastor instinctively reaches for her hand, standing up and moving closer so that she can lean her weight on him as she rises. Damen watches as she closes her eyes, the effort of even standing enough to show itself across her features. She announces that she’s tried, and excuses herself to retire for the afternoon.

Kastor pulls up one of the lighter wraps from her chair, a mink in crushed purple, and he wraps it around her shoulders. Damen and Jokaste rise to kiss her goodbye, and they watch Kastor lead her away. In this moment, in the absence of everything else, Kastor is the model of a dutiful son. The accusations levelled against him re-emerge and settle like a bezoar in the pit of Damen’s belly.

A clattering of spoons against saucers draws his attention, and he notices that Jokaste has left the conservatory. She’s outside in the cold, at the edge of the brick terracing. She stands with her back to the house, the family’s illustrious gardens spread down beneath her like a country before a queen. It’s late enough in the day that the sun has begun to descend, and Damen’s mind falters a little at the sight of her, limned in the pastel light of the late afternoon.

He rises and joins her, leaning his hip against the banister at the edge of the balcony. On either side of them, steps wind down into the garden below, a mirror of the grand foyer inside their home. A fanfare of scents rise to meet them, lily and jasmine the boldest. Damen wills the tension in his shoulders to loosen. It doesn’t.

Jokaste acknowledges him with no more than a slight turn of her head, and her enigmatic smile. Her fingers drum idly on the banister.

“Your new beau is handsome.” She says. “But you’ve always had excellent taste.”

He gives her a look. “It doesn’t count as a compliment if you make it about you.”

“A journalist, though,” she continues, as though he hadn’t responded. “I never took you for that type.”

Damen feels an aggrieved twinge. Dating Laurent—or appearing to do so, anyway—has been a grim education in what people expect of his tastes.

But he’s too full and drowsy to argue it, least of all with someone as skilled with sharp rejoinders as her. “I don’t know what to tell you. I ran out of socialites.”

“And how long before you tire of him, do you think?”

“That depends,” he teases her, “on how quickly he develops an interest in my brother.”

He says it because it’s easy bait, and because he knows she can take it: and she does. Jokaste laughs—a loud, piercing sound that carries out into the garden, a sincere world away from her evasive smile. They fall into a companionable silence afterwards.

When she eventually speaks again, her tone is more laboured than before. “Be careful there, Damen.”

The warning comes without warning. Her face doesn’t offer a clue as to what prompted it. A sensible part of his brain tells him that she’s talking about him and Laurent, about being careful there, but a secretive mind inherently becomes a suspicious one. He wonders, quite suddenly, whether she knows something.

“Are you afraid he’ll break my heart?” He says, a ploy at glibness.

“No. I suspect you’re more likely to break his.” She answers, eyes forward. “But we both know that’s not what I mean.”

“Do we?”

“Be serious, Damen.” Jokaste says. She turns to him, expression like porcelain but her eyes like bright glass. Her mask still holds, but Damen wonders whether he’s imagining the tumult behind it. She repeats her warning: “Be careful with him. Please.”

Then, from behind them, footsteps.

They exchange one final, lingering look before turning in time to see Kastor emerge from the conservatory. Damen takes a moment to study his brother. For all intents and purposes, he looks like a man with an unburdened conscience. Doubt flickers underneath Damen’s skin again.

Kastor approaches them both and claps Damen on the shoulder, gripping it with firm affection.

“It’s good to see you.” Kastor smiles. “You haven’t come by my office in a while.”

“I know, I’m sorry. I’ve been—busy.”

A shadow of a smile. “I’ll bet you have. I trust he won’t keep you away next weekend?”

Damen’s memory stumbles for a moment before he remembers, with a pained jolt, that the coming weekend is blocked up with Kastor’s 40^th birthday celebrations. Lavish invitations portending an extravagant affair had been sent over six month ago—so far in advance that Damen, clearly, had time to forget all about it.  

“I wouldn’t miss it for anything. Need anything from me?”

“No. Everything’s taken care of. And for everything that isn’t—” he smiles, and reaches for Jokaste. She goes to his arms and he pulls her body against his, placing a chaste kiss at her temple, “—I have this war machine of a woman.”

It had burned, once, when she had gone to Kastor. It still does, sometimes—not because he wants her, but because there are some things that are felt so deeply, for so long, that the reflex never quite dulls away. But at least for now, Damen can smile at them and mean it.

Still, his interrupted conversation with Jokaste dwells with him, and he doesn’t think that he’s imagining the leftover apprehension in her eyes.

“Everything’s taken care of,” she says serenely, and Damen doesn’t doubt it. Jokaste plans events with the precision of a military strategist. He’s always thought that she’s wasted on political fundraisers, but she runs them to a drill.

“I hope,” says Kastor lightly, “that you’ll be bringing Mr DeVere?”

The temperature of Damen’s blood drops to the vicinity of the air around them.

“I didn’t want to presume,” he says casually. “We haven’t been seeing each other for that long. He might be busy, but I’ll ask him.”

“Good,” Kastor smiles. “Journalist, huh? I’m sure he’s a fascinating man. I’d love to hear what he’s working on.”

Laurent waits to hear from Damen on Sunday, and doesn’t. Once or twice, he picks up his phone and begins tapping out a message before giving up. There’s no precedent for what to say in such an unusual arrangement, no protocol for him to deduce, no person he can turn to for advice. In the end, he lets it lie. There’s only so much backspacing a person can do before it starts dissolving their soul.

The radio silence continues, unabated, until Tuesday. Laurent leaves the mid-week all-staff meeting with his attention numbed. His temporary secondment to the science desk has drastically reduced his office workload, and with it, his enthusiasm for coming in to the office, and with that, his tolerance for sitting through any meeting above thirty minutes.

Besides which: Aimeric had called yesterday morning. Laurent had driven to Pellydos alone, at Aimeric’s request. He has an interview to transcribe.

But then he returns to his office, and sees fresh flowers, and his heart almost punches out of his chest. They’re Damen’s most austere offering so far—a modest bouquet of white hyacinths in full, magnificent bloom. They had already bathed the walls in the sweetness of their scent.  

Laurent sits at his desk and picks up the other arrival: an envelope, embossed with the Akielos family crest, and the seal of Senator Damianos Akielos. From its weight in his hands, he can sense another hotel key card. He finds himself hoping for a note too, and finds one.

I miss you. Tomorrow. 1pm. Same room. DeBrett’s.

Laurent re-reads the eight words. He and Damen had already convinced the world that something was going on between them. Damen was clearly so committed to the act that he was performing it privately as well, for an audience of the two of them.

Still, Laurent’s chest registers an alarming imbalance between the little said in the note and the effect it has on him. I miss you, it says. It dwells in him. Without interrogating why, he folds the note back in its envelope and locks it away in the safe, above the folder that Ancel had delivered him. A wave of something moves over his lungs like a rabble of escaped birds.

24 hours later, he walks into DeBrett’s. This time, hungry eyes follow him across the pink marble of the foyer floor, his presence now a beacon that attracts curiosity in every degree of its spectrum. The attention sticks to his skin like dried glue. This isn’t his world, and an hour’s stay in this hotel is probably worth a week of Halvik’s salary. It tells him a few things about the size of Damen’s fortune, and the ease with which he disposes of it.

He walks through the circus as though none of it interests him, but he wants to set a separate fire at every inch—from the grand staircase; to the garish chandeliers; to the feature wall draped in its lush ivy; to every desk and chair and rug and occupant.

When he reaches the suite on the sixteenth floor, he realizes that he’s arrived first.

Laurent lays down his satchel by the door. For lack of anything else to do, he pulls a small bottle of wine from the minibar and pours himself a glass to soothe his vibrating nerves. He isn’t in the habit of daytime drinking, but neither is he in the habit of mid-afternoon sojourns in swish hotels. His eyes skim over the price list as he takes a sip, and the three digit figure of his drink burns a hole through his tongue.

Halfway through the glass, the door opens and Damen steps inside. He’s impeccably dressed, light grey suit and white shirt and pink tie. Laurent thinks, he could do with a haircut, and still feels like a schoolchild by comparison, in his sweater and slacks.

“Laurent,” says Damen.

“Hello,” says Laurent.

“No quips about the cost of the room today?”

“I’m growing used to the opulence.”

An awkward moment comes, and stays a little, and passes.

“I wouldn’t mind a drink, if you’re offering one,” says Damen.

“You’re the one footing the bill, aren’t you?”

Damen gives him a dark smile. He walks over and accepts the glass that Laurent pours, settling into the nearest chair. Despite the tense set of his shoulders, he seems determined to meet Laurent squarely in the eye.

“You’ve seen the paper,” says Damen.

“I’ve seen little else since Sunday.”

Damen leans forward, regret lining his expression. “I pulled you into this. I owe you an apology.”

“I thought that was what the hyacinths were for,” says Laurent. “How much money does your florist make from your apologies?”

He means it as a joke—but immediately, it’s clear that Laurent has said the wrong. Damen looks up, whip-snap, and the hurt in his eyes is visible for a second too long before he papers over it. It’s there just long enough for Laurent to notice.

“I’m sorry. That was uncalled for.” Laurent says abruptly, looking down at his drink.

Damen takes a sip of his wine. “Never mind,” he remarks. “How have you coped?”

Laurent shrugs. The gesture is intentionally noncommittal. Auguste and Halvik aside, he has few opinions to care about. With everyone else, he’s cultivated a sufficiently intimidating air for no one to dare raise it in his presence

“Nothing more or less than I expected.” He says. “I imagine it’s been more incessant for you. Then again, I'm sure you've had plenty more practice."

Swirling his glass, Damen says, “Remember when I first came to you, and mentioned that no one would blink an eye if I had a blonde, attractive person on my arm?”

“I do.”

“Well, I was wrong. They blinked.”

“Am I not up to scratch?”

“No, you’re above scratch. It’s confusing people. Apparently, I’ve cultivated a reputation for being anti-intellectual.”

Laurent isn’t sure how he’s supposed to respond to that, so he doesn’t.

He changes the subject instead. “I spoke to Aimeric.”

Damen’s attention snaps into focus like a sprung trap. “You did what?”

“He left me a message yesterday morning. I drove out to see him in the afternoon. I would have called, but his participation was conditional on your absence,” says Laurent. After a pause, he adds, “Don’t take it personally.”

“It’s a little difficult not to.”

“This isn’t about you.”

A long pause. “No, of course it isn’t. You’re right,” Damen admits. “Am I allowed to know what he said, at least?”

“Yes. He wanted to be alone for the interview—not even Jord was there—but he said you could listen to the tape. Give me a second.”

Laurent goes to get the recording device from his bag. By the time he returns to a seat opposite Damen, Damen has shed his jacket and tie, and is undoing the top two buttons of his shirt. His eyes are closed, like he’s shedding a burden instead of sundry clothing.

Laurent spies the hollow of his throat, an exposed V of chest, the suggestion of hair at its base. He doesn’t mean to look, but it happens, and then he’s too slow to look away. When he eventually does—far too late—Damen’s waiting for him.

Laurent doesn’t acknowledge the moment. He casts it away along with its brethren, other moments between them where a look has lingered too long or a touch has remained past propriety.

He places the recording device on the arm of his chair.

“How was he?” Damen asks.

“Calmer. Resolute. You’ll hear it in his voice.”

And he presses play.

Laurent begins every interview the same way—he asks the subject neutral questions to introduce themselves: the date, their full name, their location, and whether anyone else is in the room. Then, he asks the subject to explain the purpose of the interview, and begins asking them about something that has little to do with it, in order to set them at ease. Laurent had planned to ask Aimeric about Jord. Aimeric responded with all the give of a bird of prey about its young.

Instead, Laurent asked him to describe a few of the hand-carved wooden ornaments in the room. The question had perplexed Aimeric, who answered it with a guard that showed he was trying to divine what Laurent was getting it. But the subject matter relaxed him; his tongue loosened in describing the differences between chip and relief carving, his tools, how long it had taken him to make something he felt comfortable putting on display. Laurent asked him how he had learned the craft, and Aimeric had fallen quiet before sharing that it was how he had met Jord.

Slowly, Laurent steered him towards his departure from Ios years ago. Aimeric refused to specify the charge that had brought him before the Artesian Courts, and only offered—quite ominously—that a very bad man had received no more than he had deserved. He was more open about the mechanics; there had been a three week Judge-alone trial, at the end of which he was found guilty and convicted. He was imprisoned in a juvenile facility for a month, and then remarkably, he was discharged without conviction following an appeal court decision. It cited “the exceptional circumstances of the case”, wiped the verdict, and ordered the file sealed.

A dream outcome for a nightmare scenario, but it didn’t appease his father. He disinherited Aimeric, about which Aimeric cared very little, but also disowned him, which gutted the remaining scraps of him. Aimeric left Ios with the clothes on his back and hitchhiked to Cyrina, the smallest large town in the Iosian province.

No one recognized him, but someone eventually took mercy on him. Aimeric was offered a job waiting tables in a diner and also found a room to stay in, for dirt-cheap rent. He began drawing out the borders of a quiet life, and then he had met Jord. All Aimeric would tell Laurent was that Jord used to come in to the diner sometimes. He would occupy the corner booth and down mug after mug of the diner’s acrid coffee, passing a couple of hours in one go by whittling small farm animals or trucks. Aimeric served him, and when the diner was quiet sometimes, he would sit across from Jord and watch. One day, Jord arrived with a second pocketknife and a block of pine for him to have a go.

[Laurent glances over at Damen as he listens. He’s staring at a spot of carpet, grazing circles around the palm of one hand with the thumb of the other. His face is set like cement. Laurent can’t read a word from it.]

Aimeric shut himself off from Ios. He didn’t hear from his father for a long time, until a manila envelope arrived by post one morning. It contained photographs and a note.

Aimeric’s voice falls sterile as he describes the images, intimate shots of him and Jord taken on holiday out of the region six months beforehand. Someone, he said, must have followed them and planted the camera in their suite, and then taken the photographs. The accompanying note from his father offered cruelty rather than explanation, stating only that Senator Guion was now beggared to Kastor Akielos because of these photographs, because of him.

The note laid blame at his feet for every choice: in destination, in lifestyle, in lover, in deciding to leave Ios. Aimeric resigned himself to the fact that his father had only remembered him long enough to tell him he was a disgrace, and that he was—as the note concluded—a liability, not a son.

The tape runs for three quarters of an hour. The recording stops at the end of the interview. When it clicks off, Damen remains still, gaze focused on the same meaningless patch of carpet. Had guilt been a tangible thing, Laurent imagines that he might have seen it climb up Damen’s back and settle around his shoulders.

Laurent racks his mind for something to say.

Someone knocks on the door first.

Three heavy raps, cast-iron knocker against heavy wood.

Adrenaline floods into Laurent in a rush, and so suddenly that he has to grip the arm of his chair. They look towards the door and neither of them moves or speaks. Three further knocks chime into the expectant silence.

“Who is it?” Damen calls out. His words boom, a demand rather than a hesitant question. It’s a tone fit to dislodge birds from trees. He hasn’t used it around Laurent before.

The voice that answers from the other side of the door is a timid whisper; a young man no older than 18 or 19.

“Room service.”

Damen stands up, walks to the door, but does not open it. “We didn’t order anything,” he says, without quietening or softening his tone.

“It’s a—it’s a gift, sir. To be delivered. I’m—uh—sorry to interrupt.”

Damen looks to Laurent. Laurent calls out, “Just a minute.”

He beckons Damen back to him, close enough to speak in a whisper.

Damen asks, “What do we do?”

Laurent’s mind hurtles through the circumstances. They’re in the room for a clandestine purpose, but the fact of their presence inside it is no secret: it’s a matter easily confirmed by booking references, security camera footage, and the deduction of anyone who had seen Damen walk through the DeBrett’s foyer ten minutes after Laurent had.

It could be a press trap, wanting to catch them in flagrante delicto. Or—and Laurent has no proof of this—it could be attention from Kastor, a warning.

Either way, there’s an immediate problem if they’re to maintain their guise.

“We don’t look like a happy couple,” Laurent says.

Damen stares at him like he’s spoken in tongues. “What?”

“We’re supposed to be in here for a quick afternoon fuck. Neither of us looks the part.”

Damen colours, and quickly. Laurent registers his response with a twinge of exasperation. After all, booking an opulent suite in the middle of the day, twice now, had been his idea, and for the benefit of this exact ruse.

“I—suppose so?” Damen says.

The young bellboy outside knocks on the door again, and calls out with either genuine terror or a frightfully good homage to it. “Mr—uh—Akielos?”

Damen ignores him. His eyes are on Laurent. “What are you suggesting?”

It’s obvious, surely.

“You need to look the part. Strip.”

“What? Laurent ---“

“Take off everything but your underwear. I’m going to fetch you a bathrobe.” And then, to the bellboy, Laurent calls out: “One moment!”

Before Damen can protest, Laurent turns on his heel and makes a beeline for the wardrobe in the bedroom. He finds a bathrobe, and it sits so softly in his hands that he worries it’ll dissolve before he can get it to Damen.

By the time he re-emerges into the living area of the suite, Damen has stripped as instructed. He looks exactly as Laurent had imagined he would, a body in its prime, nurtured and worked to its peak.

Laurent also registers that Damen is a boxers man.

He forbids his gaze any lower than Damen’s neck, and walks up to him with the robe in his arms like a ball-gown.

“This’ll do.” He says, neutrally. “Don’t tie it too tightly around the waist. Let some skin show.”

Damen obliges, not without bewilderment. “Have you done this before?” He asks, shrugging the robe onto his shoulders.

Then he stands back for inspection. Laurent shakes his head. It isn’t quite good enough. Damen looks the part now, but he still doesn’t quite seem it.

“You,” says Laurent, “don’t look like you’ve been ravished.”

And then—without warning, and only to achieve the necessary effect—Laurent steps forward, cups Damen’s face in his hands, and kisses him so deeply that Damen’s body stills with shock. Laurent kisses him till he feels Damen draw breath, ready to return it—and then he pulls away, three paces back.

He appraises Damen again. He looks as though he’s been slapped across the face.

In a good way. Perfect.

“Now you look ravished. Go answer the door.”

He hands Damen five dollars from his pocket to tip the bellboy, and retreats to the bedroom where he won’t be seen. When Damen opens the suite door, the sight of him is so freshly-fucked that the young man almost stutters himself hoarse with apology.

Laurent bites back a smile at a job well done.

Damen collects the gift, shoves the tip in his hands, and in haste to end the encounter slams the door in his face. Laurent re-emerges. When Damen turns around, he’s holding a bottle of expensive-looking something in his hands.

“Champagne.” He says, like he’s run a half-marathon. “It’s just a bottle of champagne.”

Damen offers the bottle for Laurent’s inspection and moves to the couch, collapsing down onto it and rubbing his face. Laurent turns the bottle over in his hand. The warm lighting above him strikes a brilliant gold from its foil, and crimson ribbon hangs around its neck in a dramatic bow. Looped through the ribbon is a small card, no bigger than the span of Laurent’s palm.

“For the happy couple,” Laurent reads out. “Typed and no signature. Did you tell anyone you’re here?”

“Only Nikandros. He wouldn’t send this.” Damen says, and after a pause. “The champagne is one of Kastor’s favourites.”

“How rare is it?”

“Not particularly, in our set.”

“Then we can’t be sure it’s him,” says Laurent. “But even if it is, it doesn’t matter. I have two people on record about what he’s done now. The story’s almost publishable.”

“It’s almost probable cause for arrest,” Damen says, blankly.

Laurent nods. Criminal charges had always been somewhere in this story’s horizon, but they’re closer now, their silhouettes visible against the sun. He’s relieved that Damen raises the possibility first.

He sits down next to Damen and places the bottle on the coffee table in front of them. The adrenaline surge from the visit isn’t yet done with his body. It strikes Laurent as morbidly unfair that he’s in a beautiful room with a beautiful man, and expensive alcohol, and that he isn’t at liberty to enjoy it.

Damen looks caught in the middle of something. Whatever it is, it resolves itself to a point. He looks apprehensive as he turns to Laurent, even though the rest of him seems rather snug in the robe.

“There isn’t going to be a good time to bring this up, so please forgive me.” He says. “What are you doing this weekend?”

“Why?”

“We had a family luncheon on Sunday. You’ve been cordially invited to my brother’s 40^th birthday party.”

Laurent wonders whether anyone’s referred to any meal as a luncheon this side of the century. “How intimate will it be?”

“Three hundred of Kastor’s nearest and dearest, and you. It’s a house party at his estate near Imbria, over the long weekend. Food and drink and golf and hunting. The usual. We start on Saturday night.”

Laurent also wonders whether anyone’s had a house party this side of the century, or explained to Damen the meaning of the word usual.

But then his thoughts trip over the concept of the long weekend, and stutter to a halt. “If it’s a house party, am I—expected to stay the night?”

At least Damen has the grace to look genuinely apologetic about it. “Yes. I know. I’m sorry.”

Laurent steals a longing sideways glance at the champagne, “I guess it might look strange if I don’t.”

For the rest of the day and all the rest of that week, and every waking moment until Kastor’s party, Damen can only think about the kiss.

He knows he shouldn’t. It isn’t the best kiss he’s ever experienced, or the most skilful, or even his best performance. He hadn’t even come to his wits in enough time to properly return it, but it had come from Laurent, against all the backdrop of his restraint. He doesn’t need to be told that few people have likely ever seen Laurent in that state.

He wonders whether Laurent is thinking about it too. Whether Laurent is going from one editorial meeting to another thinking about his lips, editing the same sentence three times because he can’t concentrate; drafting scripts of what might, in another universe, have happened if they had the time, the space, none of the obligations, and the rest of the afternoon to pass between those plush sheets. Laurent had been curt in the aftermath, the flirtation burgeoning between them shuttered away behind the wry formality of their first meeting. Damen reads less from that than he should.

All of it is easier to focus on, anyway, that what his brother is almost certainly up to.

Early on the Saturday morning, Damen leaves Ios for Imbria, four hours down the coastal highway. Kastor’s estate is on a cliff-side and flung open over the sea. Damen arrives before Kastor and Jokaste and finds himself alone in the large house, with a small army of staff for company. He retreats to the guest room that he always uses when he stays here, and at around midday, settles down to work on the spacious bed.

Damen makes the mistake of lying down for a minute. He wakes up to a dark room hours later, and to the sound of distant chatter and activity from outside. The bed is too inviting to leave but he forces his body, limb by insolent limb, off the sheets and upright. Then he cajoles it to the window. He pushes aside the curtain and peeks down, and sees a party in the first throes of a full swing.

The garden is bathed in the soft glow of fairy lights, from which no tree or surface has been spared. Beneath and around them are already seventy people on a casual glance, tuxedos and evening gowns, all out for a society event masquerading as a birthday party. To the left of the party, a dais. Directly ahead, the open sea at night.

Resentfully, Damen throws on the lights and lays out his suit, showers, begins getting dressed.

When he’s about to do his tie, someone knocks on the door. “Damen?”

“Come in.” He says.

Kastor enters the bedroom, fully dressed in a pristine black suit. Only his bowtie remains undone, its lapels falling down over his chest. His hair is slicked back with a grace characteristic of Jokaste’s hands.

“There he is.” Kastor smiles. “We thought you’d died.”

Damen nods towards the bed, and to the small mass of papers now disrupted over the covers. Several hours in their company haven’t drilled a single word of them into his head. “I wish I had, after all that reading. I’m exhausted.”

“Then let me do your tie,” says Kastor. He selects a block blue number from the dressing table and approaches Damen. The tie loops around his neck, and his hands fly. “Gods. When was the last time I did this for you?”

“Dad’s funeral?” Says Damen.

Kastor’s hands still for a moment, but his features lose none of their grace. “You’re right.”

“I used to be jealous, you know,” says Damen. “That he would let you fix his ties. He never trusted me to do it.”

It evokes a hollow smile. In the soft light of the room, Damen sees that his brother looks worn in a new way. Kastor’s older than him, the signs of it marked across his brows and around his eyes, but there’s a new darkness underneath them as well. It’s pronounced, like the bold strike of his mouth, and Damen is struck by how much of their father is in his face.

“He trusted me, but he doted on you.” Kastor says. He tucks the end of the tie into a balthus knot and smooths his handiwork even. His mouth curves in a wistful smile. “We can call it even. Are you coming downstairs?”

“I will,” he says. “Soon.”

A moment arrives, and brings with it a need to lay everything before Kastor.

It crashes into Damen like a wave of boiling water, an uncomfortably physical thing, with a shape and a mass and a burden that takes too much energy to carry and even more to push back.

Something must show on his face. Kastor studies him closely, as if he might read something directly from Damen’s eyes. “What’s going on, up there?”

Damen measures his exhale. The two of them had learned at an early age—in the kitchens, pilfering sweets; in their father’s office, snooping through his papers; everywhere else, amongst broken ornaments and holes in the wall—that Damen is the inferior liar.

He shakes his head and closes his eyes, hoping that Kastor will take it for exhaustion rather than guilt. “I’m just tired.”

Kastor cups Damen’s cheek with one hand and gives it two gentle slaps, as if to rouse him from sleep. “You need to stop finding things to worry about, alright? I’ll see you downstairs. Don’t take too long.”

And then he leaves. Damen watches the door close behind him, and gives it another twenty minutes before heading downstairs. He’s dawdling, but he doesn’t have the energy to fight it.

Kastor’s house is modelled closely on their family home: a grand entrance of cream stone, with a sweeping staircase that rises and bisects up to the first level. Portraits of Artesian stateswomen and men watch from proud golden frames around the walls, and servants mill in and out of the foyer. They carry coats, and trays of canapés, and champagne flutes. They move with an urgent silence.

Damen makes his way through one of the drawing rooms, dark so as to not interfere with the light of the party. At its furthest end is a door that opens to a quieter part of the garden. It’ll provide an inconspicuous entry. Fingers on the handle, Damen draws breath and composes himself for company that he would rather not entertain.

When he eventually emerges at the edge of the party, a quick sweep of the tuxedos and gowns tells him that Laurent hasn’t arrived.

Damen doesn’t want to be here, but he knows how to do it. He and Kastor had crawled and toddled through events like this one since before they could speak, let alone understand their significance. Neither of them had taken much pleasure in the activity. They had endured regular soirees where they could do nothing more than allow every last blood-vessel to be pinched broken in their cheeks. Afterwards, their father would quiz them on whom they had spoken to, what they had heard, what they had seen.

Damen switches into the same autopilot now. He smiles and shakes liver-spotted hands, kisses rouged cheeks, endures conversations that span from the trifling to the stale.

An hour passes. Laurent is still nowhere to be seen.

But Damen can see everyone else. The brass band plays a gentle version of a vaguely familiar song, only just quiet enough to be ignored. Near them, Kastor is at the centre of a group of four men, laughing heartily at something Damen can’t hear. Jokaste is close to him, on the arm of Senator Agen, a vision in a simple gown of dark blue flecked with gold. A little further away, their mother is seated at one of the tables nearer to the water, a heavy shawl around her shoulders, holding court. Damen steals a gin and tonic off a passing tray and goes to say hello.

Then he mills about. There’s no shortage of conversations vying for his attention, and he jumps from one to the next like a spring dance. He speaks tax; and then electoral finance reform; and then he hears all about a new molecular gastronomy restaurant that you absolutely must try, darling; followed by a conversation about fishing with five people including both Senators Berenger and Guion, who are both more reserved than usual.

Damen moves away from that conversation. He doesn’t quite trust himself to keep quiet, and certainly not with his third drink in hand.

Nor can he understand why they’re here. They were colleagues, and had been friends of his father—but neither he nor Kastor had established much of a friendship with them.

When his head begins to pound again, he settles in the company of Sir and Lady Vidal. They had been at university with his father, and possess the remarkable gift of generating the conversation of five people between the two of them. It usually grates Damen the wrong way but tonight, it’s exactly the level of detachment he needs. He asks them about their recent holiday to Isthima, and enjoys a brief reprieve from having to open his mouth.

As Lady Vidal leads him on a play-by-play of one of their tours, Damen feels a sly hand sneaking around his elbow. He turns his head, and stops.

Before Damen’s senses catch up to the fact of Laurent’s appearance, his skin registers the soft, lingering press of Laurent’s kiss. It lands at the corner of his mouth, immodestly intimate for the company they’re in. His scent is the first lungful of sea breeze on a dewy morning, sunny and light. Laurent gives him a look that bottles the breath in Damen’s ribcage.

Lady Vidal laughs, a joyful screech of a sound that draws the lazy interest of the people around them.

“Oh, Harold!” She says, hand reaching for her husband’s arm. “When was the last time you looked at me like that?”

Harold chortles. The echoes of it rumble through his voluminous jowls. “Darling, I’m not sure I ever have.”

Laurent has never been in this company before, but the grace in his spine and his indifference to everyone’s attention but Damen’s makes him seem born to it. And people look, men and women both, their interest in him either poorly concealed or not concealed at all. Damen knows that at least for tonight, their attention has nothing to do with Laurent being on his arm. He might as well not be here.

But Laurent only has eyes for him. It’s sincere enough that Damen has to remind himself that it isn’t. He wonders what it would take for Laurent to look at someone that way, with that same open-paged desire, and mean it.

Lingering a little longer on Damen’s face—and in a stroke of masterful play, with a dropped glance to Damen’s lips—Laurent turns to their company with a smile ripped straight from the society pages.

“My Lord. My Lady. It’s an honour to meet you. My name is Laurent DeVere.” He says, shaking his hand and kissing hers. “Will you mind terribly if I steal Damen away?”

“Well, Mr DeVere,” says Lady Vidal, with a shimmer of mischief. “Do you promise to behave with him?”

“No,” he says, the coquette, without missing a beat. ”But would you, in my place?”

They leave the Vidals to their laughter. Laurent’s hand sinks more comfortably around his elbow, and Damen feels himself being pulled away. He allows himself to be led and Laurent takes them to the edges of the revelry, nearer to the private corners of the garden. They turn heads as they go—and briefly, Damen wonders where his brother is, or Jokaste—but he cannot see them.

They stop where they won’t be overheard. Laurent holds a glass of champagne in one hand, and he offers it to Damen’s drink in a quiet clink before taking a sip. Damen knows that he’s staring. He knows that he shouldn’t. He knows, also, that he probably cannot stop.

“One would think,” Damen says, and he cannot keep the fondness from his voice, “that you owned the place.”

“And one might be forgiven for forgetting that you do.” Laurent retorts. “I’ve never seen you this silent before.”

“You look beautiful, Laurent.”

“Don’t change the subject.”

“I’m offering an explanation,” Damen replies plainly, and why not? If the fault is Laurent’s, Damen has every right to lay it at his feet.

Laurent’s composure shifts, just so. He lets slip a shadow of an expression, like a brief ripple in the still waters of a lake. It smooths over as quickly as it emerges. He glances around again, perhaps to satisfy himself that the nearest people are several metres away.

Damen decides to steer the conversation to calmer straits. “Was everything alright when you arrived?”

“Yes. The rich are disgustingly hospitable.” Laurent says. “Did you notice Guion and Berenger?”

“Yes. I don’t know why they’re here.”

“Perhaps your brother wants to breathe down their necks. “

The headache gives a single, warning pulse in Damen’s temple. He closes his eyes against it. “I don’t know, Laurent.”

“Well, never mind that for now.” Laurent says casually. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say that the Lady Jokaste is heading over in our direction.”

“Now? Gods.”

“Look sharp, Damen.”

Damen opens his eyes, follows the direction of Laurent’s gaze. Jokaste’s midnight blue gown isn’t fully visible through the horde, but emerging gaps in the crowd forewarn her approach. People part for her, here. Kastor isn’t at her side, but Damen feels his shoulders square at the sight of her anyway.

She arrives. Before Damen can introduce them, Laurent takes her hand as though to kiss it. Instead of allowing him to do so, she approaches and kisses each of his cheeks instead. Then she stands back, and appraises him flagrantly.

Damen has watched Jokaste level people with that look. He has seen her transmute confidence into sand and then force conversation onto her victim, clear-eyed and cool as they try to speak and recover at the same time. He has seen, too, how those interactions are impossible to banish for those who have endured them, and how their spectre always lies suspended in the air of Jokaste’s wake.

Laurent meets her like an equal.

“Well, well, Mr DeVere. At long last.” She says. Her smile is feline. “We’re so pleased that Damen finally coaxed you out to meet us.”

Laurent matches her smile, inch by canny inch. “It’s impossible to resist Damen for very long. But I imagine we both know something about that.”

Damen—midway through a sip of his drink—splutters on it. A second of silence arrives, in which the night is made and unmade and tilted wholly off its axis. It is fractured by the sound of Jokaste’s piercing laugh, high and clear in the air like a stem of crystal.

She turns to Damen and her eyes are dancing.

“I like this one already.” She says, and then, to Laurent. “You and I must compare notes, sometime.”

Damen blanches at the nerve of her. “Jokaste.”

With the level tone of a man asking about the price of fish, Laurent asks, “Has he always been this prudish?”

Damen opens his mouth before he’s thought of the rebuke to fill it. It momentarily distracts them from each other, and they turn to him expectantly. It makes things that much worse, their combined attention setting fire to his wit. He shuts his mouth again.

Jokaste turns back to Laurent, with the same amused conspiracy. “Yes. He’s always been this prudish, but it’s the least of your problems with him. I wonder—have you cracked the secret to him yet?”

“If you mean that he’s pleased most when he’s pleased frequently, then yes. I have.”

This time, Jokaste cackles, an unequivocal assent.

Damen mutters an oath under his breath and drains his glass. He wonders, tiredly, whether he’s spent enough time in this particular circle of hell to justify leaving. There isn’t enough alcohol in the whole party, in the world.

A member of Kastor’s security detail appears. He approaches Jokaste from behind and leans down to whisper something in her ear. She nods, and whatever she hears mutes the sparkle in her expression for just a moment. But she recovers quickly, and offers them a final, dazzling smile.

“Gentlemen, it’s been a pleasure. I’ve been called elsewhere. Will you excuse me?”

They nod, and with a final glance at Damen—and a brief, conspiratorial smile at Laurent—she allows herself to be whisked away.

They watch in silence as she goes, past the point when she’s out of earshot.

When she’s gone, Damen says, “That was unnecessary.”

Laurent shrugs, but a corner of his mouth betrays his amusement. “Did I do well?”

“You did too well.”

“I guessed correctly, then.”

“Please.” Damen huffs. Laurent arches a single, perfect brow in response. “That could be true of anyone.”

“Then it must be true of you,” says Laurent. He considers his conclusion. “By that metric, this must be the most unsatisfactory relationship you’ve ever had.”

“You might think so. You’d be wrong.”

Laurent answers him with a look for which Damen has no word, a peculiar warring of surprise and caution that he is coming to recognize routinely on Laurent’s face.

He doesn’t have long to dwell on it. Laurent steps closer and takes his hand, and Damen feels his muscles respond, feels himself instinctively accommodate the twining of Laurent’s fingers around his own. Their palms come together and nothing, nothing at all, feels staged about this locked touch.

But Laurent’s eyes are in the distance, towards the main dais.

“Something’s happening.” He says. “Come on.”

The something is the winding down of the music. The band’s volume had risen progressively throughout the night, loud enough that its sudden diminishment draws attention. The crowd falls quiet in gradations.

From this distance, Damen sees Kastor step up to the dais. He is joined onstage by three other men: Senator Guion, Senator Berenger, Senator Herode.

Damen’s stomach drops immediately. He swaps a glance with Laurent and sees, behind a thin layer of indifference, a mirror of the concern he feels.

He easily manoeuvres them to a spot near the foot of the dais. People make way for him. His mother is seated nearby with an attendant by her side. He places a hand on her shoulder and she places her own over it, her frail skin somehow colder than the night breeze around them.

Finally, the band comes to a complete halt. For a brief moment, despite a crowd comprised of people who enjoy their own voices above anything else, the loudest noise in the air is the crashing of the waves against the bottom of the cliffs below. It is punctuated by the clicks of camera shutters. Only then does Damen notice the small retinue of photographers nearby.

Laurent seems to have noticed them as well. He brings his mouth close to Damen’s ear.

“Does your brother always invite the press to his birthday parties?”

“Yes.”

Kastor, for his part, looks out over the crowd and his face is a study in deep, rich satisfaction at who, and what, surrounds him. His eyes dwell on Jokaste for just a moment and she gives him a thin smile. Near him, the three Senators stand as if to a purpose, their expressions schooled in smiles that are only a shade above neutrality.

It is their presence, more than anything else, that upturns Damen’s stomach. He tightens his grip on Laurent’s hand without thinking. Laurent offers a single reassuring squeeze in return.

“Friends,” Kastor begins. He does not need a microphone to reach the farthest ends of their company, nor to hold its attention.

Their father never did, either.

He smiles like a man surveying his kingdom, and continues:

“My nearest and dearest, all here. All in my home. A man couldn’t ask for more on his birthday. Thank you for coming,” he says, to polite applause and a smattering of cheers. He then looks very deliberately at the handful of reporters, and serves them his best indulgent smile. “Your lot excepted, of course.”

An appreciative chortle from the rest of the crowd.

“I know that everyone here today, by station or occupation, has to either give or endure speeches for a living. You have my word that I’ll keep this one brief,” he says, “but a man doesn’t turn 40 every day.”

Kastor pauses. He looks out at a point in a distance, somewhere over the attentive heads of the crowd before him, overcome with thought.

Damen knows that he’s anything but. He’s watched Kastor prepare for big public engagements before. He’s seen him rehearse and rewrite speeches till he could recite them with the sincerity of scripture; heard him recite the same sentence in four different cadences; watched him test a pause at three different points in a paragraph, all to discern where it has the greatest effect.

But this crowd doesn’t know any of that. Damen looks out and finds a sea of mesmerised faces.

“I know,” Kastor says, with every hallmark of sincerity, “that I’m a very lucky man. I was raised by a mother and a father who loved me fiercely, and who placed every opportunity within my reach but not in my hands, because they valued accomplishment over entitlement. Mother, every person in this room would have gone further in life for being raised by you.”

He gestures to her and the audience claps loudly, fiercely. Damen glances down but her attention is on Kastor, matching his adoration with her pride, measure for measure.

Then, Kastor looks up towards Damen and meets his eye. The smile he offers is a variant of one he hasn’t used in a long time, summoned for small and secret victories to be shared between them. It’s a smile for figuring out the new hiding place where Cook had moved the biscuits, for negotiating a later bed time during a dinner party, for a secret learned that shouldn’t have been overheard—and now, apparently, for whatever this is going to be.

“I was also lucky enough to be raised with a brother who has risen to every heavy expectation placed on his young shoulders. If our father was alive, Damen, he would have been proud of you. I know I am. No could ask for a better brother,” he says, “or a better partner in crime.”

The applause comes for Damen this time. From behind and around him, disembodied hands grip his shoulder and punch him playfully.

Laurent raises a brow, but doesn’t comment.

“And,” Kastor continues, this time above the noise rather than waiting for it to subside, “I have the love of the most beautiful woman on the coast, who could run the Senate herself and put us all out of a job if she chose to. But she’s somehow still at my side: my love, my fiercest ally, my Jokaste.”

Kastor looks to her with enough intensity to strike aflame the air between them. Jokaste, for her part, remains indifferent to the appreciative clamour that combusts around her.

When Kastor returns his attention to the crowd, the determination of his gaze stands in deep contrast to the casual tones with which he had begun speaking.

“But on days like today, even in the midst of all that I love, I find myself dwelling on the absence of my father. The older I get, the more I find myself reflecting on the memory of him, his legacy, and on the lessons he imparted to us. Damen and I used to tease him that he would turn anything into a lecture. He could take any trivial action or careless word and distil a lesson from it. Everything he taught us was to a purpose. He wanted us to push to our greatest heights.”

For this pause, there is no applause, no undertow of murmurs. It has become clear that Kastor is leading the audience towards a point. The camera shutters echo in the air as they wait. Damen tries to unpack something, anything, from Guion and Berenger’s expressions. He can’t.

“What is this?” Laurent says.

Damen doesn’t answer. His tongue is dry and leaden in his mouth.

“My father died five years ago.” Kastor says, sombre but driven. “I had an hour alone with him at his bedside, on the day before he died. I asked for his blessing in an aspiration. At the time, it was little more than a distant hope, but he gave me his blessing. Today, I honour it. ”

He holds his silence, this time, till the atmosphere is dense enough to bring the sky down from the heavens. He holds it till it’s uncomfortable for everyone else except him, till every shred of attention lies attentively at his feet.

“You may be wondering why Senator Guion, Senator Berenger, and Senator Herode are on the dais with me today. They need no introduction—you know each man as a luminary of the Senate. Each man has served Artes for over 30 years. Between them, they have almost a century of experience. I’m honoured that they stand with me tonight, for what I’m about to announce.”

He turns to acknowledge them, and raises his hands in their direction in a gesture of applause. The crowd, who are eager to reach the conclusion of this chase, mimic his actions quickly.

And then, when the applause finally peters out, Kastor smiles. He’s in the home mile.

“My friends, my loved ones, my colleagues, I’m honoured to announce—to all of you here today, before the world knows—that I’ll be running for President of Artes in the upcoming elections, with the full endorsement of the three pillars of the Senate behind me. I hope I can count on all of your support.”

The crowd explodes.

A wall of noise, a fired cannon of joy, surges up from the revellers and rises into the night air. The press move in frenzy, writing or snapping photographs as their respective roles require. All around them, the crowd roars its approval by way of shouts and laughter and applause. Damen can hear champagne flutes being brought together in toast, drained, refilled.

But he holds himself still. He looks to his mother, whose bewildered expression matches his own. She mustn’t have known. But Jokaste did. One look at her, and all her impenetrable blasted insouciance, is all Damen needs to confirm it.

The three Senators on stage smile for the crowd, for the cameras, for the world. They clap with an enthusiasm they cannot mean.

“There it is.” Says Laurent, just softly enough for Damen to hear.

This, then. This is why he’s done it all. Every single Senator in their party will fall into line with those three endorsements.

Damen readjusts his world to accommodate the reality that his brother has stolen the nomination.

Kastor raises his hands to hush the audience, and they obey. A few pockets of noise remain here and there, but he carries on over them. His smile is a thousand watts, bright and satisfied.

“I appreciate,” he continues loudly, “I appreciate that this is something of a surprise to all but a very small handful of you. My preparations were deliberately small. My dear mother and brother are just as surprised as the rest of you, if their faces are anything to go by.” He throws a pointed look in their direction, with an apologetic smile, and the crowd laughs right along with him. “But I’m happy to finally share my news. And I’m grateful that you could all be here to share in it with me. I’ll make a number of announcements in the coming days and weeks, but for now—please, as you were!”

The band strikes up as if on cue, and with it, summons the loud ambient noise of a party in full swing. Laughter rings out, the crowd visibly pleased with the spectacle it has received.

And even in his state, Damen is still himself enough to recognize that they would be.

These are Kastor’s friends, his donors, his patrons, people who had nailed a portion of their prestige to his name and ascension. They would boast about being here tonight. He knows their sort. If Kastor makes it all the way—if Damen becomes brother to a President—that lot would retell tonight until even those who weren’t here could recite what happened.

Damen’s first sensible thought is that the crowd cannot have known the cost at which their celebrations have been bought. His second is that perhaps, some of them might not care.

He feels a hand squeeze tightly around his. Laurent.

“Damen?” He asks. “Are you alright?”

Damen comes to himself, pastes on a smile. He needs to, because at least two of the nearby cameras are on him. He steps closer, so that only Laurent can hear him talk. “I need to go speak to Kastor.”

“That’s not a good idea.”

“It’ll look worse if I don’t. I won’t be long.”

He raises their clasped hands and kisses Laurent’s knuckles. It buys him the chance to meet his eye and assure him, I’ll be fine, without so many words.

Letting go, he makes his way to Kastor. His brother is at the foot of the dais and surrounded by a crowd of people that’s four-deep on every side. Damen knows that he could probably barge through, that people will step aside for him, but he decides to hover in wait. He also needs time, because he doesn’t have a clue of what he’ll say.

But Kastor spies him waiting at the periphery. He holds up a finger as if to say, give me a minute, and goes first to their mother. He leans down, kisses her forehead and both of her cheeks, and they exchange quiet words. She smiles at him, but the sadness at its edges is unmistakable. She’s already suffered presidential ambitions at the hands of a loved one before. She probably thought she was done with them.

A low bitterness bursts at the back of Damen’s throat, coating his tongue.

Kastor sets eyes on him next and comes over. They both reach for each other in embrace, and hold on tightly. The cameras around them descend into a frenzy of activity. For a moment, the world is so bright with bursting shutters that Damen has to close his eyes.

He thumps Kastor’s back and says, directly into his ear, “Congratulations, asshole. You should have told me.”

Kastor pulls back and gives him a pointed look, a knowing smile. “You would have worked it out, eventually.”

Damen smiles back, even as his heart lurches. A rational, distant part of him says, He probably doesn’t mean anything by it. An irrational, more urgent part of him says, He knows.

“I didn’t realize how good you were at keeping secrets,” says Damen, and regrets the choice of words immediately. Never mind. “You’ve won over your first campaign crowd.”

“This crowd doesn’t count.”

“This crowd will fund your campaign.” Damen scolds him. “Go. You have wallets to charm open.”

“Are you happy for me?”

The question is posed earnestly, almost hopefully. Damen searches Kastor’s tone for grafts of double-meaning, but comes up with nothing. Something in him reaches for the hope in it, seeking out reassurance that underneath all these layers of politicking, his brother is still there somewhere.

“You know that I’ve only ever wanted your happiness, Kastor.”

It’s a non-answer. But at least it’s true.

Kastor smiles. He gives Damen one final clap on his shoulder, and they hug once more, tightly. It’s a claustrophobic embrace, less for the severity of Kastor’s grip than for the struggle of caging what he knows in his chest. When they part, Kastor wades into the crowd. It swarms around him and cocoons him out of view.

A waiter passes by. Damen swipes a glass of white wine off his tray. He downs a few unrespectable mouthfuls, and brushes his lips dry with his thumb. This could be a long night.

The cameras follow Kastor, and the noise, and the light. The brass band plays on, switching to a milder number intended as background. It is still too loud for Damen’s liking. He yearns for silence, now more than ever, fully aware that there will be less of it for at least another year, as the public eye returns to bear down on his family.

Into the chasm left in his brother’s wake, Laurent reappears.

“That was an admirably cryptic parting remark.”

“I think I botched it.”

“You didn’t.” Laurent says. He holds out a napkin with a small sandwich in it, and an unnaturally generous helping of cake. “Eat these.”

The thought of forcing down anything more solid than wine isn’t worth bearing, let alone doing. Damen stares down at the food incredulously, and then regards Laurent the same way.

“I’m not hungry.”

“You seem to think we’re negotiating.” Says Laurent. “We’re not. You’ve had a shock, and your blood is more alcohol than plasma. Eat.”

He surrenders his glass of wine to Laurent in exchange for the the food. He downs it without tasting a morsel. Laurent next presses a glass of water in his hand and watches hawkishly until Damen has drained it. The empty glass is replaced onto another passing tray.

“Anything else?”

“We have our story, now.” Says Laurent. His eyes are somewhere over Damen’s shoulder, behind him. “All we needed was his motive, and now we have it. I didn’t expect him to close the circle for us.”

Damen turns and sees his brother halfway down the party, speaking into someone’s dictaphone, answering questions in one breath and returning a greeting in the next. The attention rests on his skin like cotton, comfortable and light. He feeds on it. His focus is a tunnel, and Damen’s never seen him happier.

The hive of activity follows him. It’s quieter near the dais, now.

“Are you alright?” Asks Laurent.

Before Damen can speak, someone else answers for him. “He has to be. He doesn’t have a choice."

Jokaste had heard Laurent’s question. She stops between the two of them, close enough to speak but not enough to be overheard. Her expression is unreadable at first, but Damen lingers on it long enough to unpick the veiled dismay in her eyes, and the way it quietly jars against the smile she had readied for the cameras.

“Congratulations.” Damen says, and leans in to kiss her cheeks because it’s what he ought to do. “You must be proud.”

She barely moves in response, accepting his gesture with the warmth of a marble statue. “Do you really think so, Damen? Knowing all that we know?”

A line of ice water trails down Damen’s back, and the night air plummets.

He wants to look at Laurent, to gauge his reaction in order to calibrate his own. Instead, he focuses on her and holds his will.

“What do I know, Jokaste?” He asks.

It earns him a thinning of her lips. It’s as close as she gets to a public display of genuine emotion. Damen’s heart pounds hard, ready to break through his ribcage. The conversation demands an artful approach but all he wants to do is take to it with a sledgehammer. It strikes him as obscene, that the festivities can rage on against its backdrop.

Damen wants to pull Jokaste indoors so they can speak in peace. He wants to ask her a litany of questions about what she knows, and what Kastor knows, and what Kastor has on Senator Herode, and more importantly—why. Why all of this. Why any of this. Whether any of it can ever be worth the cost.

She says, “You don’t have time to play coy anymore. That bell chimed when Kastor made his announcement. I’m not trying to trick you. Believe me.”

Laurent watches her with renewed interest. He answers for them both. “You’re his partner.”

“Not in this,” she says, as firm as Damen’s ever heard her utter anything.

“Then prove it.” Laurent says, unrelenting. “Prove yourself useful.”

“Fine. Give me a way to do it.”

Laurent steps closer to her. No one’s listening. His words fall into a small gap between the three of them.

“Kastor’s thug. Tell me his name.”

“Govart Borel. I’m not surprised you’re still looking for him. He isn’t an easy man to trace. That’s why Kastor hired him.”

Damen watches the exchange between them, back and forth, back and forth, like a tennis match in hell. His head threatens to split with the combined weight of it all—so many things learned and unlearned, all in the last fraction of an hour, each sinking a separate hook into the problem and twisting it into a new shape.

He closes his eyes for a moment and whites out his thoughts.

“Wait.” He says, turning to Jokaste. The conversation has moved too fast for him. He reaches forward desperately in order to rein it back. “How do you know that we know? And if you do know—and if you’re on our side—why have you waited this late to do something?”

She gives him a cold, withering look.

“Next time you see Berenger,” she says quietly, “Why don’t you ask who sent him your way?”

Chapter Text

Laurent holds himself together for the rest of the party.

But only just.

This is what he wants to do: he wants to go back to Ios; to lock himself in his office; and to pull the kind of all-nighter that this story deserves. His body thrums with unspent energy and unleashed ideas. Words surface in his mind and threaten to brim over its edge like bubbling wine, and the evening becomes an exercise in holding them in, keeping them secure, holding onto them till it’s safe to spill them on a page.

This is what he gets: three hours at Damen’s side. The evening belongs to Kastor, but the dust unsettled by the launch of his campaign has risen high and landed on his brother. Damen manoeuvres them both, from friend to colleague to distant acquaintance, names and titles slipping like water through Laurent’s open hands. No sooner does a conversation start than someone else interrupts it, wishing Damen well for his brother. Laurent smiles at people whose company he’d rather not keep. He shakes hands, presses lips chastely to others, or else kisses the air beside cheeks.

He feigns comfort despite every crawling inch of his skin.

The night goes on, and on, and on.

The reporters and photographers had been banished an hour after the announcement. The party starts in earnest in their wake, the music coming louder and the alcohol flowing more freely. People mix and dance and drink with a particular type of abandon that makes Laurent want to run for the shadows. If he were another kind of reporter, he could have gathered enough material to busy his pen till the end of the year.

If Damen feels overwhelmed—and Laurent is fairly certain that he does—he hides it impeccably. He dazzles, his charm an unsheddable skin, but after a while his exhaustion seeps through. His face begins to wear the ache of holding his smile in place, and his rote phrases of gratitude and pleasantry have been cycled through so frequently that they lose all meaning to Laurent.

Kastor dazzles too, a moving focal point for the party’s energy. He’s surrounded by three concentric layers of people at every point, at the very least. Laurent had expected to meet him tonight. Now, there doesn’t seem to be a chance of getting through, and asking Damen to take him there seems an act of cruelty in light of whatever he’s feeling. Besides: Laurent has his story now.

Three hours, and then finally, they escape.

Damen steals the first gap between conversations and leads Laurent to the private edges of the garden, around to the side of the house. They enter through a set of double doors into a dark room, a parlour of some description. The moon comes in just brightly enough to reveal the shapes of the furniture, and Damen—with his hand still clasped tightly around Laurent’s—leads him around the maze of couches and tables, and out of the room.

He takes them across a large, dimly lit foyer where servants bustle in and out of the myriad doors. They walk up the grand staircase at the entrance of the house and proceed into the first floor of the left wing. They seem to walk for an hour down a darkened corridor until finally, Damen stops them in front of a set of palatial double-doors.

It would seem this is his bedroom. Damen lets them inside.

Finally, peace.

Damen closes the door behind them. He sheds his jacket and tie before the latch closes shut, and relegates them both to the first surface that can hold them—this time, an ornately carved fauteuil beside the door. Reflexively, he heads straight for the bed. Laurent half-expects him to collapse facedown on the mattress—gods know he’s earned the right, and more—but he doesn’t Instead, Damen sits down at the edge of the mattress. His shoulders are set with the exhaustion of a man who has lived a lifetime in a night, and he rubs the heels of his palms into his eyes as if he can wipe clean whatever thoughts lurk behind them.

He looks in desperate need of sleep.

Laurent feels a stab of pity watching him, but says nothing. He’s acutely aware that in a few short weeks, Damen’s shoulders will bear the additional burden of his story. He also knows that tonight, before he’s even submitted a single word for publication, that pending truth guts the value out of every kind word he can offer, no matter how sincerely he might feel it.

He remains by the door and takes in his surroundings instead.

It’s a suite that hints, very obviously, at the cadre of servants required to maintain it. Everything speaks of money and extravagance, from the four-poster bed, to the ornately carved fireplace banister, to the golden accents that gild the edges of the tables. Artwork adorns the walls in an orderly line, and even that speaks to the family’s status: lined drawings of notable Artesian architecture, or sumptuous oil paintings of landscapes and scenery.

No wonder Damen had barely blinked at the hotel suites. He operates in this kind of luxury by default.

The room has also visibly been readied for a second occupant. A servant has brought Laurent’s overnight bag and deposited it next to Damen’s. On a chaise longue underneath a window, overlooking the gardens, a second full set of towels awaits him. Laurent counts them—seven in all, in varying sizes. He doubts he has seven towels at home to his name. Other elements of the room have also been made divisible by two: two bottles of wine (one red, one white), four wine glasses, two bathrobes, and two sets of slippers.

It should be enough to distract Laurent. In the circumstances, it isn’t.

Abruptly, Damen asks, “Are you going to start drafting tonight?”

Before Laurent left for Imbria earlier in the evening, he contemplated bringing his laptop. He toyed with the idea for all of three seconds before shooting it out of the sky. Drafting a man’s destruction in his own house would have been undeniably poetic, but also supremely foolish.

"No. I want Nicaise look into Jokaste’s lead first,” Laurent says. “But even if that goes nowhere, I think we’re almost ready to publish.”

“We?” Damen says. His expression is flat.

It’s clumsy wording on Laurent’s part but when he holds it up to the light, he realizes that it’s come from an honest place. The story might ultimately carry his byline but Damen’s presence will loom large in the white space between every single word.

“I’m sorry,” Laurent says.

“For what? I brought you the story.”

“For being here. For how involved you've become. People in your position are normally distant enough to hate what I do in peace. This,” Laurent says, to the breadth of space between the door and the bed, “This isn’t ordinary.”

“He’s written the story for you.”

“I guess he has.”

“Obliging man, my brother.” Damen says.

It does not sound like a compliment.

For the ache in Damen’s voice alone, Laurent wants to go to him. He knows that it won’t help, and also that he shouldn’t. The paces separating them are few, but crossing them would come at the cost of his independence, and his journalistic integrity.

Or the meagre dregs of it, at this point. Laurent recognizes an edifice held together by string when he sees one.

“How much did you know?’ He asks instead. “About much he wanted it, I mean.”

The question is a back door to others that will be inevitably asked once the story is published: whether Damen should have known; whether he had missed any signs; whether, when the story is exposed to daylight, anyone will really believe that Damen had been kept in the dark.

Damen is innocent of all these things, but Kastor may very well have tarred a brush wide enough to sully his brother. The thought turns Laurent’s stomach.

“I knew he wanted it,” Damen says bitterly. “But well all did. He hardly kept it to himself.”

“How vocal was he?”

“He’s wanted nothing else since he was a child, but he’s not the only one. Can you understand that? Most of us want it. Most of us were raised by the likes of the people that you met tonight, and around each other. Can you see the effect it might have on someone? How it might distort their worldview?”

Laurent doesn’t have to say yes for Damen to know his answer. He’s heard enough stories about their childhood to piece together the rest by now. The brothers had haunted their father’s shadow while he lived. His death hadn’t cut that chain; only inverted its direction.

“But you’re still surprised.” Laurent says.

“I am. I just—“ Damen says, and stops. It’s the first stumble of the night, the first time that he can’t summon words through the sheer force of his indomitable will. A heavy breath escapes him. He continues. “I knew he’d go for it one day, but not like this. Not this quickly. Or at this cost.”

Having stumbled once, Damen doesn’t do it again. His voice doesn’t waiver as he speaks, and his words don’t trip over each other.

But there, in the heavy layers of his voice, is a single layer that stands out boldly against the rest: an artless, defeated melancholy. It strikes a resonant tone in Laurent’s chest, a mallet to a gong. It vibrates through him and turns his thoughts into static.

He goes to the bed, and sits at the edge of the mattress to Damen’s left.

He hasn’t thought about what he’s going to say or do now that he’s here. Laurent admits to himself that he hasn’t thought about much of anything, beyond the observation that Damen is distressed, and that standing wooden by the door might not be helping him.

Damen’s left hand is between them on the bedspread. Laurent thinks, we’ve already held hands tonight. It doesn’t feel like crossing a line because they’ve done it before, even though he understands that multiple crossings don’t move a line further away. Without letting himself think too hard about it, he places his hand on Damen’s.

What he doesn’t bank on is how the simple quality of being alone changes the very meaning of the act. Nor does he bank on the audible catch in Damen’s breath at his touch. Laurent regrets it the moment it’s done. It’s too familiar. It’s too much, too soon.

But it’s done now—and Damen receives it with the same intention in which it’s offered. The hand beneath Laurent’s turns and twines their fingers together, enveloping skin in skin. Damen’s grip is firm, and in it, Laurent’s hand feels miniscule and strangely secure, even though he’s supposed to be the one offering comfort.

The touch also surges something wonderful and terrifying out of Laurent’s blood, a dial turned up too quickly. He looks up and meets Damen’s gaze. It waits for him, still and powerful, like a sword in a rock.

“You were wrong.” Damen says.

“About what?”

“About what you said earlier. About it being hard to have you here,” Damen says. “It isn’t. I’m glad you were with me tonight.”

“I. ” Laurent begins, and stops. “I’m glad you didn’t have to hear it alone.”

It would have been a terrible burden, to stand isolated in the middle of that crowd with all the dark pieces of the puzzle in hand. A terrible burden, and a terribly lonely one too, to perform joy in the midst of all that effervescence. Laurent had felt the loneliness of it even with Damen at his side.

Damen says, “There’s a second story in all of this.”

“About?”

“About me coming to you. Everything that’s happening between us.”

Laurent’s heartbeat is the loudest thing in the silent room. Louder even than the muffled pulse of the music from the festivities outside.

“As a rule,” he says, carefully, “I don’t begin stories before I know how they end.”

He should have said, there is nothing happening between us. The fact that he doesn’t causes a shift, invisible and nameless, in the slit of space between them. Laurent is suddenly aware of just how little of it remains, and how easily the sparks in his blood could jump ship through it and fall into Damen’s skin.

Laurent also realizes that honesty acts differently on each of them. It freezes his feet in ice, holds him still, stops his breath like prey in a trap—but it urges Damen on. It lends a surety to his steps, imbuing each one with more conviction than the one preceding it. Damen’s eyes search him as though he’s a book left open on his lap, there to be read and discovered.

Damen says, “You have a say in how the matter ends.”

“Professionally, I shouldn’t.”

“This,” Damen says plainly, gesturing between them with his free hand, “hasn’t been professional in some time.”

Laurent doesn’t have a response lying in wait for him. Some points can only be conceded. This is one of them.

For the second time that night, Damen raises their clasped hands to his lips. Laurent watches him do it with pressure in his lungs. Damen presses a kiss to Laurent’s knuckles and lingers, before pressing down another. As a declaration of intent, it’s hopelessly tender. His lips are warm, and full, and soft, and they press against Laurent’s skin with a reverence that he isn’t sure he deserves.

Laurent’s kissed those lips more than once, now: modestly in public, frantically behind hotel doors. What cleaves Laurent in two is the force with which he wants to see how Damen kisses when he’s alone. For himself, with a lover.

Just once.

Damen reads it off him. Knowledge spills into his expression.

“You want this.” He says, with a halting wonder.

Laurent’s control is a finely balanced point resting at the tip of his finger, waiting for the slightest shift to keel it over. “What I want doesn’t matter.”

“It’s the only thing that matters, Laurent.”

“Your brother is running for President, Damen, and I’m going to write the story that ruins him.”

“I don’t want to think about my brother right now.”

A cannier person in Laurent’s position would have drawn the line exactly there. Before Damen walked into his office, Laurent would have drawn the line exactly there. But Laurent is no longer that rendition of himself. Only he sits here, imperfect and flesh and on the other end of a brief, combustible distance to Damen, an angle away from being kissed.

None of the thoughts that come to him are sensible or principled. They stain his blood with a strange, restless energy.

“What would you rather think about?” Laurent asks. It’s just neutral enough to be safe, just coy enough to preserve the delicate momentum.

“I can tell you.” Damen says, letting go of his hand, shifting a little closer. “Or I can show you.”

Laurent feels himself yield. He knows that it’s obvious across his face—he registers the way Damen studies him, the palpable spike in his anticipation—but Damen doesn’t read it as permission to take new ground. Laurent realizes with a jolt, and after a very long moment, that Damen is waiting for him to say yes.

With more confidence than he feels, and against every fiber of his judgment, Laurent says, “Then show me.”

Damen comes closer, and his presence looms near Laurent’s side. He reaches for Laurent’s neck and cups his skin like it’s porcelain, something to be handled with care, his palms warm enough to sear prints that will still be visible tomorrow. An aching moment passes before at last, Damen presses a closed, lingering kiss to the farthest corner of Laurent’s mouth.

Laurent can’t help but smile for it. It’s payback for his performance in front of the Vidals, measure for measure.

But his lips sting as they wait for attention. Damen ignores them. Instead, he drops kisses along the margin of Laurent’s jaw like munitions, each one falling with only a moment for him to feel it before the next one lands. It’s disorienting.

To the extent that Laurent had allowed himself to imagine this before, he had presumed that Damen would be bolder, more urgent. He imagined that Damen would use his size, and that he would give pleasure with the full strength of his body, and take it the same way.

With a glorious thrill, Laurent concedes that he’s misjudged.

Damen tilts Laurent’s face away just enough to offer up more of his sensitive neck. He seems to have no discernable purpose other than to draw as much blood as possible to the surface of Laurent’s skin. His mouth takes a lawless route to that aim. Damen’s kisses become open, wet, and the first brush of his tongue against Laurent’s skin—unexpected, languorous—sends a shiver running through him that both of them feel.

Lips to Laurent’s ear, Damen says, “Tell me what you want.”

He gives Laurent a moment to ride it out. It’s more than Laurent needs. His whole body yearns in single, powerful answer.

“I want this,” he admits. It comes readily, as most truths tend to do.

If he had ever asked for something like this before, he couldn’t remember it. If he had ever wanted it this much, he couldn’t remember it. Laurent had always been frugal with his desire, sparing with an enthusiasm that other people applied to their reckless hedonism. His trickle of experience had long since dried out into something which he could box away, and from which he could maintain a distance.

But Damen’s mouth is a sledgehammer to his restraint. Laurent pulls away, just far enough for Damen to sit back up and look at him with searching eyes. Then, Laurent takes what he wants, and leans in to kiss his lips: once, and then again.

Permission given, chasteness sheds from Damen’s attentions like silk sliding off a surface. His mouth becomes an urgent, seeking thing against Laurent’s, sealing and breaking kisses before Laurent can answer them. They come together with an irresistible momentum, and Laurent gives himself over to the hungry, delicious inevitability of it all.

Still—as though from a distance, something quiet whispers in his ear to stop.

It’s immediately muted by Damen’s hands delving into his hair, fingers curling around it and tugging. Laurent brings his arms around Damen’s neck, brings him closer, brings him in till he’s arched over Laurent and ready to topple them backwards over the bedspread.

Gravity wins quickly enough.

Laurent lands with his back to the mattress and finds himself being kissed deeply into it. Damen leans over him. His weight hovers a space above his body, knee balanced in the gap between his parted legs. Laurent wonders for a wild, blind moment how the full bulk of him would feel.

Will feel. He can tell that Damen is reaching the outer extremities of his control. His breathing roughens and new, artless sounds emerge with it, the grammar of Damen’s desire. They draw warmth from Laurent like water poured over hot stone.

Laurent tangles his hands roughly into Damen’s curls, pulls him down closer. As much as he wants to see what comes next, he could pass hours just being kissed like this, with just the pressure and play of Damen’s lips and his tongue. He’s unnervingly good, and Laurent’s mouth will likely be a bruise tomorrow. He’ll have to avoid company to hide it. He’ll have to coax Damen to arrange another meeting in a hotel, because he’s not going to last more than a week without a second round of this.

Damen’s mouth veers wildly off course, a route of open-mouthed kisses until it finds a plot of skin it likes just above his pulse. He nips the skin gently, and then sucks a wet mark into the ache. The dual sensation—the sharp sting and immediate relief—snuffs every thought dead in Laurent’s mind. A sweeping shudder rises from a deep corridor in his bones and radiates through him. Every nerve ending in his body sings to the slit of muscle near his jaw.

This is the most reckless thing he’s ever done. It’s the best thing he’s ever done. He wants to stop before they can’t anymore. He wants to see what Damen can do, given a whole evening.

Damen undoes the first three buttons of Laurent’s shirt. He kisses him, and kisses him, and kisses him, snaking a hand between shirt and skin, flattening his palm against Laurent’s thumping heart.

Laurent’s restraint tannoys its alarm once more, a dying call.

This time, he forces himself to listen.

“Damen.” He says abruptly. “Stop.”

And in a blink, he’s untouched.

Damen sits up. His lips are flushed red, and his hair bears testament to the havoc trail of Laurent’s fingers. And yet, amongst all the visible marks of his desire, his eyes are watchful and searching. He’s worried, Laurent realizes. Glass splinters in his chest.

“I don’t want to stop.” Laurent says. His voice is rough with it, eyes closing to the ceiling. “But we have to stop.”

Damen is gentleman enough not to bait his equivocation. He says, ‘Then we stop.”

Damen offers him a hand. Laurent takes it, allowing Damen to bear his weight as he pulls himself up upright. For a long few moments, they sit knee to knee, recomposing themselves. They’re both fully dressed, though not quite fit for company.

Laurent holds himself still against how close they had come. At how far he had allowed them to get. Upright and with the benefit of distance, the weight of his irresponsibility clatters down over him with violence. It threatens to pin him to the earth.

Damen comes back to himself first.

“You’re right.” He says quietly. “Of course you’re right.”

“I wish I wasn’t.” Laurent says. He risks a glance.

A shadow of a smile flickers across Damen’s mouth, humourless but there.

He says, “I thought you’d enjoy being right.”

“I do, normally.”

It’s a jest, an intentional stab at lightness, but his heart isn’t it. It’s still racing, and Laurent fears that it won’t stop until he and Damen are in different rooms. Damen is still arrestingly close, and their interrupted dalliance has skimmed off enough of Laurent’s self-control to worry him. If Damen were to reach out for him again—and he wouldn’t, but if he did—Laurent’s professionalism might not survive the night.

He needs to find a neutral task.

He stands up abruptly and heads for his overnight bag. Laurent can’t see Damen, but the hot weight of his gaze is a tangible force on Laurent’s back. He ignores it and applies himself to playing at normalcy, lifting out the items he’ll need for the night: his pyjamas; a bag of toiletries; a fresh towel. He hasn’t brought any of the articles that he normally uses at home. While packing that morning, something had seemed indecent to him about bringing them here. All of the items he retrieves now are new, and black, and unremarkable.

When he turns back around, he’s schooled a familiar insouciance back into each knob of his spine.

“Where’s your bathroom?” He asks.

Damen’s eyes are still warm and dark, but he’s recovered enough of himself to muster an arch look. “This suite has two.”

“Of course it does.” Laurent says tartly. “I expect they’re both gilded in 24 karat gold?”

“No. Only one.” Damen smiles. “But that one’s mine. Commoners use the porcelain suite.”

Their jesting doesn’t completely dispel the lingering electricity in the room. But—at least—it reins it in. Just enough to ease the anxiety at the base of Laurent’s throat.

Damen gestures towards one of the doors to the right of the room. Their eyes hover on each other for just a little longer, until Damen stands up and goes to his own overnight bag. Laurent retreats to the bathroom.

He closes the door behind him and takes his first proper breath of the night. Then he looks around.

This bathroom is bigger than his bedroom.

Laurent allows himself to stare. The luxury of the room reveals itself gradually to him, with every successive detail that comes to his attention. There isn’t a visible hint of porcelain. The floor and walls are lined with black marble, streaked with white stria, and the vanities and basins are offset by golden fittings. It’s enough luxury to dizzy him.

He undresses, changes, brushes his teeth, washes his face. Ordinarily, the tasks would have taken him no longer than five minutes, but he dallies intentionally. His reflection unsettles him, unspent energy lying in wait like a banked fire. Laurent resolves not to re-enter the bedroom until he has grasped it, boxed it, and returned it to the dusty shelf where it belongs.

So, he sits at the edge of the bathtub and dwells on where he is: at Kastor’s house, at Kastor’s pleasure, to be audience for his news.

The announcement had been brief, but its brevity—like everything else about it—reeked of calculation: the use of his family to bookend the announcement; the homage to his father’s legacy; the curated guest list, guaranteeing a jubilant reception; the dramatic setting of his personal mansion against the wide, open ocean.

It was all presented with feigned humility but the message was clear: Kastor Akielos was born to this power, and he’s claiming his birthright.

Laurent spares a thought for Berenger and Ancel, Aimeric and Jord. They would have heard the news by now. The thought of them learning the reason for their suffering—of knowing that their intimacies have been breached to secure this, an exercise in vanity—nauseates him. In the end, all Kastor had required was the silence of three men. A fleeting task, purchased at an exorbitant and intimate cost.

Laurent had been unable to put himself in Aimeric’s or Berenger’s place. He had denied himself intimacy for so long that his disgust with Kastor was principled rather than viscerally felt. He had forgotten the deep-seated vulnerability of it all. Forgotten, that is, until Damen had gently pushed him back into the mattress and kissed him. The thought of someone bearing witness to it, and whatever else might have followed if they had continued, shudders through him.

Then, he stops, and ice water slides down his back.

Laurent wonders, with sudden and terrible force, whether a camera is waiting for them in the bedroom.

He holds on to the edges of the bathtub and remains seated until he controls his breathing. They had been clothed. Nothing had happened. Still—there’s no helping the terrified beat of his heart. It threatens to box through his ribs.

Eventually, he forces himself to re-emerge. He comes out to an empty bedroom, and hears the sound of running water coming from the other ensuite. If there’s a camera in here, then he can’t risk looking up and trying to find it. He appeases the rising panic by switching off all the lights, which plunges the room into the dim glow from the waning festivities outside.

Laurent climbs into the right side of the bed, and hugs the edges in the dark. He closes his eyes. He wills himself to fall asleep before Damen reappears and for once, something goes his way.

*~*~*

The following morning, he wakes up with Damen’s hand on his shoulder, shaking him alert.

Laurent reflexively sinks deeper into the bed, bringing the cover further over his head to keep the morning light at bay. It’s a delicious cocoon, soft and light as cotton between his fingers. His first lucid thought of the morning is to marvel at how anyone rich enough to afford such bedding ever coaxes themselves out of it.

He feels a dip in the mattress, in the small gap between his body and the edge of the bed. He registers with annoyance that this can only mean that Damen has sat down to wake him up.

The hand returns to his shoulder, and inflicts another spirited shake.

“Laurent? Are you up?”

“Am now.” He mumbles.

Damen peels the cover off his face, and the morning light hits his skin. Laurent ventures open half an eye, takes one dozy look up at Damen, and then shoots upright.

“You’re fully-dressed,” Laurent says, suddenly and painfully alert. “What time is it?”

Damen tugs up the sleeve of his navy blue sweater. It fits snugly over his form, the collar of a white shirt visible beneath the neckline. Laurent fights a reflex to shyness that doesn’t often strike him—but then, it’s been years since anyone’s seen him fresh out of sleep.

“It’s ten o’clock. Are you hungry?”

“Why didn’t you wake me up earlier?”

“You looked like you needed the rest. Or the shape of you did, anyway. I couldn’t see much of you, under the covers.”

“Yes. Well.” Laurent flushes. “We’re not all used to sleeping on eight hundred-count sheets.”

The corner of Damen’s mouth quirks. “Thousand count, actually.”

Laurent glowers. He pushes the rest of the covers off him and rubs his face.

The pieces of last night slowly fall back into place in his head. By way of accompaniment, they summon a dull ache at the base of his temples. He exhales. The urge to sink beneath the covers once more, to keep the day a little longer at bay, hovers over him like a king wave threatening to break.

He has a four-hour drive back to Ios ahead of him. He has a story to begin drafting when he gets there.

“Actually,” he says slowly, “I think I might head home before breakfast. I’m not hungry.”

The suggestion is met with a lengthy pause, and unless Laurent is still half asleep and misreading him, a flicker of disappointment.

“Are you sure? Breakfast is relaxed. Quite a few people stayed over. You wouldn’t have to talk much.” He says. “Though you excelled there, last night.”

“I have work to do, Damen.”

Damen’s expression flattens. He gives a single, resigned nod.

A new thought comes to Laurent. He wonders whether writing the story will chill the warmth of this strange and nameless thing between them. It stirs a reflexive dread in him that he fights to push back. After all, Damen brought him this story. Even before they had the particulars they now possess, Damen understood the cost involved. When it goes to press, that cost will bear down on Damen as heavily as anyone else. Perhaps more so.

Laurent owes him the grace of his best work, even if only to justify the toll taken so far.

“You need to let me introduce you Kastor, at least.” Damen says. He clearly doesn’t relish the prospect. “It’ll look strange if you leave before meeting him.’

“I suppose you’re right.”

“Take your time getting ready. I can work while I wait.”

“I won’t take that long,” Laurent says.

Damen gives him in arch look. Laurent matches it in return. Then, to prove how efficiently he can function on spite alone—he rises and showers, dries, changes and packs in ten solid minutes. It’s barely enough time for Damen to sort through his papers in order to select one to read. He doesn’t seem displeased in any case. Laurent catches him watching at least twice as he mills about.

Laurent finishes, zips up his overnight bag, and picks it up.

“Well?” He asks. He’s careful to infuse in a touch of haughtiness, just enough to make Damen feel like he’s been the one holding them up. “Shall we go?”

Damen is more interested in the bag in Laurent’s hands. He absently discards his briefing papers onto the coffee table in front of him, stands up, and and comes over to Laurent. He nods down at the bag. “What do you think you’re doing with that?”

“Taking it downstairs.” Laurent says. “To my car. Obviously.”

“You mean—yourself?”

Laurent pauses. It takes him a moment to catch on that Damen means: servants. Someone else will take care of it. This is a house where only some people do things, and where others only have things done for them. It takes him another moment to decide that insisting on doing it himself will likely cause more trouble than the argument is worth.

And then, a third moment, to resist the arsonist streak that this tier of society brings out in him.

Laurent deposits his bag by the door, and makes sure to drip displeasure from every muscle.

Drily, he asks, “Will we be walking downstairs, or carried down by litter?”

Damen smiles, completely unperturbed, and leads him out without comment.

They step out into a lengthy, tiled corridor. Laurent walked through it last night, but it’s designed for daylight admiration. Recurring double doors in red oak, spaced generously apart, mark out the rooms on the left. On the right is a wall of windows and the searing morning sun, which bounces off the large chequered tiles and sets the space ablaze with light.

They walk in silence down the corridor, down the grand staircase, down to the main living floor of the house. Laurent contemplates what he will say to Kastor, and how brief he can keep things without seeming rude.

And good thing that he does. Kastor emerges from the left wing of the ground floor just as they reach the foot of the stairs. Unlike Damen, he is attired for a day on a golf course, his slacks and his sweater in an unremitting white. From the rooms behind him, indistinct sounds of chatter and laughter ring out and peal around the foyer. Laurent can hear drinks being poured, the scrape of fine cutlery against finer plates.

At the sight of them, Kastor switches on his smile. Laurent watches it happen because he sees Kastor a moment before Kastor notices them. His smile is a well-rehearsed thing, immediately arranging itself into form like a stage of performers. At the sight of him, Laurent’s fingers begin to itch for a keyboard. He has angry words, but they’ll keep for later.

“There you are.” Says Kastor, loud and jovial, as though he’s speaking to a studio audience. They’re the only three people in the foyer. “We’re about to have breakfast. I was going to come get you two.”

“Thank you.” Says Laurent, descending the final few stairs, a few steps behind Damen. “I wish I could, really.”

Kastor watches him for a long moment, the announcement slowing his step. “You’re not staying?”

Laurent gives his best apologetic smile. “I’m sorry. I have to return to the office. We’re down two editors at the moment, and we can’t afford a third taking time off.”

Kastor offers his hand, and his grip is as firm as Damen’s. Laurent hopes that at least one of his lies has been swallowed, and he uses the brief reprieve to gauge whether it has. Despite his efforts, the machinations behind Kastor’s smile remain unreadable.

“Really? Well. That’s a shame.” Kastor says, and gods, he sounds like he actually means it. He underlines it with a genuine smile. Laurent’s mind stutters at the dissonance between the shadowy man he’s been investigating, and the one now holding onto his hand in full view of the morning light. “I was looking forward to spending time with you.” Kastor continues. “It seems you’ve completely bewitched my brother.”

Laurent doesn’t have to fake the colour that rises to his cheeks. He says, “I think you’ll find that your brother’s doing all the bewitching.”

His gamble at intimacy is validated, immediately, by the honest speed of Damen’s surprise, followed by his visible pleasure at the comment.

Kastor catches the look, and raises a brow. It seems to amuse him. He directs as sly smile at his brother.

“Well then,” he says. He claps his hands together, a closing flag to the conversation. ”Far be it from me to interfere in the goodbyes of lovers. I’ll leave you two to it. But Laurent,” he says, turning to him with a sincerity that would look at home on Damen, “I look forward to getting to know you. Make sure this rascal of ours brings you to the next family luncheon, alright?”

Laurent nods, and sees him off with a parting smile. Kastor exchanges one final look with Damen—the kind shared between brothers, wily and layered, a history in a moment—and then he’s gone, disappearing back into the wing from whence he came

Laurent holds still for several moments after he leaves, just to make sure that he’s really gone. Then he says, in a tone barely loud enough for Damen to hear, “I’m sorry, but I cannot wait to be out of here.”

Damen responds with a nettled sound. It seems he doesn’t have a scrap of sympathy to spare. With the same undertone, he replies, “At you least you get to leave.”

He takes Laurent’s hand. It’s a reflex by now, and Laurent doesn’t see anything to be gained by protesting it. Nor does he want to. Damen leads them outside to a brisk and brilliant morning.

It’s colder, this close to the sea. The wind cuts sharp lines against their skin, and a shiver runs down the column of Laurent’s spine as it hits him and his paltry jacket. His breath rises in the air in front of him as he surveys the grand entrance to the house, and the sweeping, stately gardens at the front of the property. The area had teemed with life and cars and servants less than twelve hours beforehand. Now, nothing.

Laurent’s aging chariot awaits him at the base of the grand steps. It looks almost comically out of place, well-seasoned and dull amidst the manicured landscaping. He lets go of Damen hand, and they turn to each other.

“My bag—“ Laurent begins, reaching for the safest string of conversation.

“Already in the boot.” Damen says, even though they had been in his bedroom less than five minutes ago. Laurent hasn’t seen a single servant go up or down the stairs past them. It spurs a flicker of distaste in him. He files it away with all the others like it, each summoned by a different symptom of wealth that had disagreed with him that weekend.

They regard each other for a long moment.

Before the look can go anywhere, something disrupts Laurent’s peripheral vision. He spies a rustling in one of the near windows from the right wing of the mansion, an unmistakable movement behind curtains. Surely enough, the curtains part just a fraction, and Laurent would swear on his undug grave that he spies a Kastor-shaped figure through the narrow slit.

“Damen.” He says.

“Yes?”

“Your brother is watching us.”

“Let him. What am I supposed to do about it?”

Laurent considers all the options. Really, there’s only one. “Look amorous.”

Damen laughs. Laughs. It’s an honest-to-the-gods sound that cracks out against the silence of the morning air, a three-note chord of disbelief and joy and despair.

“Amorous,” Damen repeats.

Laurent gives him a moment to recover himself, but no more. “I’m serious. He’s still looking. Kiss me.”

“Any other directions? Should I take you into my arms and dip you?”

“Damen.”

“Perhaps I can make love to you on the bonnet of your car.”

“Do whatever you want. Just stop talking. We still have a relationship to fake.”

“I’m not faking anything,” says Damen, and moves to make his point. He reaches for Laurent and kisses him like it’s midnight again, like they’re on his bed, like they’re both standing with one foot already across the line.

It’s an honest, tender kiss, and it shoots warmth through Laurent like a lit match to drywood, like evening fire. Damen holds onto him closely, and with a force that Laurent would have found indecent had Damen left him with enough faculty to think. It’s a far more effective performance than it needs to be. The kiss also goes on for far too long, but in the instant, Laurent would sooner hand Kastor the presidency than bring himself to end it.

When Damen finally lets go of him, he stands back and looks at Laurent with a split-open sincerity. It drives the wind from his chest. There’s nothing left to say in the wake of it. With difficulty, he forces himself to look away, to go to his car, to leave. Laurent drives away with electric current in his lips. Damen stands at the base of the steps and watches him go, and stays there till he’s little more than a speck in Laurent’s rear-view mirror.

But—as mixed-up as it is to leave him behind—Laurent isn’t sorry to bid the house goodbye. His last few moments on the property are spent waiting for a gate to open, the mechanised iron moving with all the haste of chilled treacle. Laurent’s foot hovers above the accelerator and itches to press down until, finally, the highway is open to him. He’s free.

Maybe he drives home a little faster than he should. Every kilometre he puts between himself and Imbria is another stone removed from his lungs. There had been little to enjoy there besides Damen’s company. All that wealth and all those careless displays of it had prickled at his skin.

He heads straight to work, makes a beeline for Halvik’s office—and finds it empty. The office is calm in her absence, the weekend staff quietly populating the next morning’s issue. Laurent would have expected her to be here after last night’s theatrics. He goes to his office and gives her a call. She picks up immediately.

“Are you back in Ios?” She asks, without greeting him.

“Yes. Why?”

“You should probably come over.”

Laurent’s blood dries at her tone. It’s perfunctory, and to a purpose. “What happened?”

“I’ll tell you when you get here.”

She hangs up without elaborating, and for the second time that morning, Laurent finds himself racing to get somewhere.

Halvik lives three blocks from the office, on the ninth floor of a plush apartment complex. Laurent visits frequently enough that the doorman doesn’t turf him out on sight, but he makes Laurent wait until Halvik rings down. Then, the elevator takes too long to arrive. Laurent isn’t in a patient state; he takes the steps up three at a time until he reaches the ninth floor.

He stands outside her door till he recovers his breath. When he raises a hand to knock, the door opens first, revealing—

“—Nicaise?”

Nicaise gives him a dour look by way of welcome, and steps aside to let him in. Laurent sweeps him over with a gaze and registers his denim and sweater, both with a day’s worth of creases in them. He’s strangely quiet, and there’s less fight in his eyes than Laurent is used to seeing. Behind him, on one of the couches, Laurent spies an overnight bag.

Laurent looks from the bag, to Nicaise, to Halvik in the kitchen. She’s brewing tea.

“What happened?” He asks slowly.

“There’s been,” Nicaise says, “an incident.”

“Someone broke into Nicaise’s apartment,” adds Halvik, with the casual air of someone announcing the day of the week. “We think we know who.”

Laurent’s mind whites out for a whole moment.

When it reassembles itself, it comes together stitched with a guilt that almost forces him down into a chair. He holds it together, just. His mind races to the only available conclusion, even before he has all the pieces: a hand has been played at Kastor’s behest. His blood drops at the thought of how it fits around Nicaise, whatever it is.

“Are you safe?” He asks.

“He’s fine.” Says Halvik. She pours tea into each of three mugs, and then adds generous spoons of sugar to each. She doesn’t stop to ask what anyone wants. “Someone trashed his place completely, but they didn’t take a single thing.”

Nicaise plonks himself down on one of the leather settees. As a performance of indifference, it’s almost convincing, but there’s a rigid line that runs from one side of his shoulders to the other, one that isn’t normally there. Laurent doesn’t call him out on it. He knows enough about Nicaise to appreciate that badgering will only push him further away.

Laurent asks, “What do you mean, someone?”

Halvik and Nicaise exchange a pointed look. Halvik puts down the kettle and wipes her hands dry with a tea-towel,

“Nicaise arrived home and found his place upside down. He called me, and then the Police. They came quickly enough, but there aren’t any prints, and none of the neighbours heard or saw anything. Nicaise is going to stay with me for a little while, until this tides over.”

“In the meantime,” says Nicaise, reaching for his laptop “There’s something that you should probably see.”

Laurent collapses onto the seat next to him. Halvik comes over with the tray, rests it on the coffee table in front of them, and sits on his other side.

Nicaise pulls up a video. From the grainy resolution and lack of an audio track. Laurent guesses that it’s CCTV footage. He’s never been to Nicaise’s flat before, but at the right of the frame is a front door flung open. He doesn’t need to ask whose it is. They watch the door for a long time.

“What are we waiting for?” He asks, after almost a minute of nothing.

“Just wait.” Says Nicaise. “Just—here.”

Suddenly, movement. A figure emerges from the open door. Laurent’s heart sinks to the ground floor when he recognizes the hulking frame, the cruel face, its sneering expression. A face to which he finally has a name.

Govart.

And then, worst of all: Govart looks up in the exact direction of the camera like he knows it’s there, watching him. He steps closer, so that his face is completely and clearly in view, and he smiles. It’s an ugly thing, a misshapen line that looks closer to a threat than an expression of joy.

“Ugly git.” Says Nicaise, with sincerity and venom.

Something terror-stricken rises up in Laurent, the first taste of real danger that this story has dropped on his tongue. He distracts himself by rearranging what he knows to make sense of it.

He reaches three conclusions, each one an iron-hot poker that burns a separate mark into his skin. If Kastor has sent his thug to Nicaise’s home, then Kastor knows about them. If he knows about them, and if he’s acting on that knowledge—and so brazenly—then he’s feeling bold. And worst of all, if he’s feeling this bold, then there’s nothing stopping him from striking again.

“We’ll get him,” responds Laurent, more calmly and confidently than he feels.

Nicaise’s eyes are still on the frozen frame splashed across his screen. He hears Laurent but doesn’t look at him. He seems supremely doubtful.

Halvik answers for both of them, countering Laurent’s comfort with a question. “How? We haven’t been able to track down a thing about this man.”

Laurent peels his eyes from the screen, away from all of its unpleasant magnetic drag. “How would you like his name?

*~*~*

Laurent stays with Halvik and Nicaise for another hour, reciting to them everything that had happened at the party. When he finally leaves, his mind is a hive of thoughts. He walks to his car and starts driving without a destination in mind.

Something in him wants to tell Damen what happened, but something louder and more urgent tells him to refrain. Laurent has watched for weeks as Damen’s estimation of his brother dwindled and shrunk; last night, it finally collapsed flat. With a certainty that he cannot justify or explain, Laurent simply knows that the threat to Nicaise would be a step too far for Damen.

There would be a confrontation. Laurent can even imagine it, now that he’s been to Kastor’s estate. Damen would excuse himself from the company to take Laurent’s call, retreating to a separate room, his voice heavy with the memory of how they had parted that morning. He can also imagine how quickly it would all dissipate with the news. He can see the darkening of Damen’s features, the beginnings of thunder behind his eyes.

Damen would end the call and go to find his brother, wielding his anger in hand like a weapon. Hopefully, Damen would remain calm enough to ask Kastor to accompany him to a private room. But maybe he wouldn’t wait.

Unknowns abound. The only certainty is this: whatever Kastor knows—and it’s clear now, that he knows something—Laurent can’t risk a confrontation between the brothers. Laurent doesn’t know what Damen’s like in his anger. He doesn’t know how Kastor fares when backed into a corner. Most importantly: Laurent can’t be sure exactly what Kastor knows, how much or how little, or even if it’s just a well-informed suspicion.

With this many unknowns, the only stable arrangement is the one that presently is. The story has to break first, before Damen’s control.

Laurent drives past his home and out of the city, out towards one of the peripheral suburbs. He parks on a quiet, beautiful street half an hour later, one of the oldest in Ios. It’s a narrow road, with beech trees on either side of the pavement. They meet over the avenue, plunging the road into shadow despite the brilliant sunlight directly overhead. Historic houses line the road, although they’ve all been used commercially for half a century.

It’s the street of Damen’s constituency office. Laurent remains in his car a while and thinks.

Being here is a collection of wagers. The first is that Damen is still at his brother’s estate, golfing or drinking or whatever else the criminally rich do on Sunday afternoons. The second is that the person he’s looking for is inside. The third is that this person will want to speak to Laurent at all.

Only one way to find out, he thinks

He leaves his car and walks to the front door. It’s a flight of whimsy, this. He raps the brass knocker against the door three times, a noise so loud that it might as well have rapped against every other door down the street. For a moment, nothing. Then, a single pair of footsteps. Then, the door opens, and in its wake: the exact person he wants to see.

“Hello, Nikandros.”

Nikandros is taller than Laurent would have thought, this close up. He’s almost as tall as Damen, almost as broad-shouldered, and almost as handsome. But where Damen looks out onto the world with ease by default, Nikandros favours thorns. He directs the full might of his pointed ire in Laurent’s direction.

“Is Damen with you?”

It’s a question issued like a demand, as if he thinks that Laurent might have taken Damen hostage. If Laurent didn’t have more pressing matters to worry about, he might have been offended.

“Damen’s still up the coast.” He responds. “In fact, I’m hoping that’s the case. I want to speak to you alone. May I come in?”

“Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t call him and tell him that you’re here alone.”

Laurent dispenses with all pleasantries, and gives Nikandros the point. “If I were to tell Damen that someone’s in trouble, as a direct result of our inquiries, do you think he could be talked out of confronting his brother?”

“No.” Nikandros says. He offers it without thinking, and the validation of Laurent’s instinct is his first and only victory of the day. “By the time you finished your sentence, Damen would already be on Kastor’s threshold, fist in his face.”

It’s not helpful, exactly, but better to have it confirmed than not. Laurent sighs. “I thought as much.”

Nikandros watches him curiously. “Are we speaking in hypotheticals, DeVere?”

“I don’t know yet. Can I come in?”

A pause arrives, and lingers. Nikandros doesn’t do a thing to dispel it. Eventually, whatever ledger he’s working on balances in favour of letting Laurent in. He steps aside, allows him inside, and closes the door behind him.

He waves Laurent into the first door on the right. It’s a large meeting room, with a mahogany table that can seat at least sixteen people. The walls are papered in red and gold stripes. It’s a garish style that hasn’t been popular for 30 years—but these offices once belonged to Theomedes. The wallpaper is interrupted with framed photos of him with other presidents, with foreign dignitaries, giving speeches, the works.

“I can arrange a tour, later,” Nikandros says. It’s clear that he’d rather not have to.

Laurent ignores his tone and takes the seat at the right hand of the table’s head—where he imagines Nikandros might sit when Damen’s holding court. It’s a petty move, and Nikandros recognizes it for such. He takes Damen’s seat in answer.

“How much do you know about what Damen and I are embroiled in?” Laurent asks.

“Enough to trouble my sleep.”

“And you’re sure that if Damen decides to confront Kastor, nothing can stop him?”

“Yes.”

“How sure?”

Nikandros raises his hands, a frustrated gesture. “What do you think I do all day as his chief of his staff? I spend most of my day trying to talk him down from things. Mostly, it doesn’t work. Damen won’t like confronting his brother, but he’ll feel he has to. It’ll happen eventually.”

“Alright.” Says Laurent. He drums his fingers on the lacquered wood of the table. “Can we both agree that a confrontation between Damen and Kastor is worth avoiding?”

“Yes,” says Nikandros, but with the equivocation of a man sensing a follow-up question. He clearly neither likes nor trusts Laurent, but he’s listening. Laurent is resentfully impressed by his caution. “Why?”

“I need—” he begins, and rearranges the words into a more honest formation. “I need your help. If this confrontation has to happen, fine. But perhaps we can turn it to Damen’s advantage.”

The few days after Kastor’s announcement are a flurry. Damen is more sought after then ever, a position in which he manifestly doesn’t want to be. The delicate line he has to toe is sharper than a knife-edge and does not lend itself easily to balance: remark without endorsing; smile but don’t seem too enthused; be seen without stealing the limelight.

And under all of it, beating through his veins with every pump of blood, is guilt. Guilt at going behind his brother’s back, and guilt at holding onto his knowledge despite the announcement. Guilt for not realizing sooner, and guilt for not doing enough. Guilt for what it will do to their family name, and guilt for even considering reputation in the cold light of what Kastor has done.

Damen is no stranger to the feeling of a weight on his chest, but this is different—this is a secret, a pressure that sits uncomfortably at the hollow of his gut, that expands and threatens to either burst out of him or burst within.

Worse still, he hasn’t heard a word from Laurent since they kissed goodbye at Kastor’s. The act of picking up his phone, looking at Laurent’s number, maybe drafting half a message, becomes a frequent rosary. Something different stops him from going through with it each time: Nikandros interrupting with the next thing on his schedule. Another phone call. A sobering thought that Laurent is probably mid-draft.

On the Friday, Damen arrives at his office on three hours of sleep and a triple-shot espresso. He makes the morning pilgrimage to Nikandros and finds him at his desk, with one of the morning papers splayed open atop a stack of the rest. To his left is half an egg bagel on a small plate, forgotten but for the way it scents the room.

Damen’s stomach turns. He waits until it subsides before calling Nikandros’s attention.

“I’ll be here for a couple of hours till the select committee meeting.” He says. “Do you need anything?”

Nikandros looks up in his direction, over his glasses and with a scolding air. Damen has no idea what he’s done to prompt the reception. They’ve barely exchanged words this morning, but whatever it is, Nikandros seems to feel that it’s his fault.

“I’m told we have a visitor.” Nikandros says, darkly. “We’re getting all sorts of visitors round here, these days.”

Damen gives him a quizzical look. He had looked over his schedule at least twice that morning. There had been nothing about a meeting today—and indeed, no notable visitors for the last week. “Are we?”

“Yes,” says a third voice, crystalline and light. “You are.”

Damen turns and sees Jokaste in the doorway. She comes in just enough to lean against the frame, easy as all the world, taking enough liberties that one might be forgiven for thinking this was her office. In her hands is a mug of piping coffee, black stoneware that she gifted to Damen when they had been dating.

It means nothing that Damen has kept it, and nothing that Jokaste now uses it. But there are at least three-dozen cups in the kitchen, and she’s selected this one intentionally—knowing her, likely for no other reason than because Damen would notice.

The back of Damen’s skull gives an urgent pulse of pain.

Nikandros draws their attention with a cough. “I’m told that your company is needed, Damen. Do you have an hour to spare for Lady Macbeth, here?”

“Nikandros.” Damen says.

Despite his affront on her behalf, Jokaste smiles at Damen. “I won’t need that long. I only came to say hello.” Then, she turns to Nikandros like she’s patronising a small child. “Including to you. Hello, Nikandros.”

“Hello, Jokaste. Bathed in any virgin blood this morning?”

“Sadly, no. Are you offering yours?”

Nikandros opens his mouth, and Damen recognizes the static electricity of coming words that cannot be undone. He ushers Jokaste out of the office before they’re said, and back to his own. He locks the door behind them. She takes a seat without being offered one, and rather than going to the other side of his desk, Damen pulls up a chair next to her.

Jokaste balances her mug on the arm of the leather chair. She’s dressed to be photographed, and she probably has been since the weekend. He’s certainly seen her and Kastor in every newspaper, every editorial in every magazine, the lead story in each bulletin. Today, she’s in a light grey suit which hugs her figure, one button done up on the jacket, the ruffled collar of a white linen shirt sweeping down her chest.

“You look stunning,” Damen can’t help but say. “Notwithstanding everything.”

“Do I? Well.” She smiles, and it’s almost sincere. “Don’t let your new boyfriend overhear you flirting.”

“My relationship,” he says, ignoring the twist in his stomach at the lie, “doesn’t mean that I can’t have eyes.”

“And my, how you used them when selecting him.”

The fact that she and Laurent share fairness and colouring, and hair that strikes bright gold from sunlight, does not need to be acknowledged.

“You make it sound like I picked him from a catalogue.”

“You might as well as have. He’s exactly what you like, isn’t he? Except for the journalist part. That took me by surprise. Your last dozen conquests have been a little more—interchangeable.”

Damen doesn’t have an immediate answer, mostly because he doesn’t think he needs one. He’s heard variations of the same comment from his brother, his mother, Nikandros, the press, and every society page in the country.

He pointedly changes the subject. “Does Kastor know you’re here?”

She shakes her head gently. “No. Kastor thinks that I’m in the middle of an hour and half long meeting across town.”

“How well do you trust your driver, then?”

“I gave him the week off. I came here myself.”

That she feels the need to hide from Kastor doesn’t ease his mind. In a sense, she has more to lose than him. She’s Kastor’s lover and right hand. She works in his office. She has no distance with which to shield herself.

“How much,” he begins slowly, “does Kastor know about what we know?”

“What Kastor knows or doesn’t know at any given moment is a mystery to me.” She responds, with a ghost of bitterness at the edge of her tone. “I also need you to understand that I didn’t encourage what he’s done. I didn’t suggest it. I haven’t orchestrated or condoned it.”

Damen leans forward in his chair, urgently. “Then go on record with that, Jokaste. Speak to Laurent. This will destroy Kastor. You need to think about protecting yourself.”

“I sent Berenger in your direction, and gave Laurent a name. Maybe Kastor knows what I’ve done, but I have no way of being sure. Every further thing I do makes my position more dangerous. I can’t just—go on record.”

“I’m going to.” He points. “And I’m his brother.”

She gives him a complex look, long, and piercing. It’s not an easy thing, to breathe under the weight of its withering grace. “Good for you. I can’t afford that kind of gesture. I sleep in his bed, Damen.”

An unthinkable thought crosses his mind.

The ease with which it comes is unsettling.

“Has he threatened you, Jokaste?”

Her waits for her to answer. When she doesn’t, something shatters in Damen’s chest.

“This is more complicated than you think it’s going to be.” She says. Her tone is neutered.

“Please don’t be coy with me—not now,” he says. Or perhaps he pleads. Either way, he places his heart is in his words with the same force that she uses to keep the two separate. “Has he threatened you?”

A long pause follows. It’s remarkable, he thinks, the power she exudes with an unbroken gaze. Anyone else in her position could have justifiably come to his office and crumbled in their chair. Not so, her. She remains perfectly composed and contemplates her next move, a master behind a chessboard.

Outside, the sounds of a living office continue to churn. Someone walks past his door, shoes squeaking on the polished wooden floor. From somewhere else, a photocopier spits out something long that he’ll probably have to read later. Damen waits.

Finally, Jokaste says, “Kastor’s blackmail dossier is wider than two people.”

It’s Damen’s turn to hold perfectly still.

Two victims had been enough. Ancel and Berenger had been a terrible means to a terrible end, but the thought of more victims—of blackmail not as a weapon of single use, but as a strategy—doesn’t bear thinking about.

And then, another unthinkable thought. Somehow this one is worse than the first.

“Jokaste. Does he have—photos of you?” He asks.

She nods, once.

Something snaps in the moment, the final string tethering down any affection he has for his brother, any benefit of the doubt. Damen is suddenly and overwhelmingly aware of his physical form, his strength, which screams for full use. He’s ready to break something. He’s ready to take an unstoppable force against an immovable object, to find a physical outlet for his heartbreak.

If Jokaste notices the change in him, she ignores it.

“I might be able to help you another way,’ she says. Her voice is a hard line carved in rock. “I need to think on it, but I absolutely won’t go on record.”

“No. No. I won’t ask anything more of you. I’m sorry, I—“

“I don’t need you to apologize.” She interrupts. “I need you to understand, and I need you and Laurent to be careful in what you do, going forward. Promise me. Can you do that?”

--

Jokaste doesn’t stay for very long after that. Damen shuts himself in his office, in no mood to either hear Nikandros’s jibes about her or answer his questions about what she had said. In fact, he locks the door, heads straight for his leather couch and lies down. It’s not a step he takes often at ten in the morning, but if these don’t count as desperate times, none will.

Lying there with his eyes closed, and a cushion over his face for good measure, he can do nothing but feel the full, nauseous weight of what he’s learned. He turns the knowledge over in his hands and with every shift, finds some new, sharp corner on which to cut his skin. Damen has never felt more distant from his brother or more alienated by the greedy architecture of their work.

Damen wants to set the room on fire. He wants to punch his brother in the face. He wants to go to him, upturn every thing in whatever room he’s in, everything dear to him, and ask why. Damen also finds himself missing their father with an intensity that he hasn’t felt in years, that almost punches the breath from his chest. Kastor would never have deigned to do this while their father still breathed. The loss of him shakes newly through Damen, twinned now with a bitterness that his own presence hadn’t even given Kastor a moment’s pause.

He wants to talk to Laurent.

He’s wanted to for a while. Admitting it seems easy now. Laurent is the only other person who might understand, and the silence between them—the inexplicable swing between proximity and distance, with no blueprint for which comes next—feels suddenly like a surmountable hurdle.

Before he can talk himself out of it, Damen pulls his phone out and dials. Laurent picks up after two rings. It doesn’t mean anything, but Damen’s heart leaps as though it does.

“I’ve been wondering when you’d call,” says Laurent. “Or have I been replaced?”

His tone is light. It manages to pull Damen a little way out of his chasm.

“Not yet.” Damen replies. He smiles despite himself. The sound of Laurent’s voice is a warm compress to an ache. “You have about three weeks left.”

“Such clarity. How comforting. Do I get a goodbye letter at the end of it all?”

“You do. And a signed print of my face in six months time, thanking you for your service.”

Damen waits for the inevitable retort, for a laugh, for anything, but it doesn’t come. In fact, Laurent remains quiet for an unusually long time on the other end of the line.

“Are you alright, Damen?” He asks.

“I am.” Damen says, and then: “No, actually. I’m not. Can I see you?”

Another lengthy pause.

“Well, since you asked—my brother wants to meet you,” Laurent says. He sounds hesitant, though Damen can’t imagine why. At this rate, Auguste could hardly be a step down from Kastor. “Technically,” Laurent continues, “it’s an invitation, but he’s made it very clear that you’re not allowed to refuse.”

Damen manages an almost-smile, though no one’s around to see it. “Should I expect lengthy cross-examination?”

Laurent gives a single ha, a haughty sound. Damen imagines that his mind is probably still at last weekend, and the spectacle he had endured at Kastor’s pleasure. He’s probably bloodthirsty for parity.

“If Auguste cross-examines you,” Laurent begins tartly, “then you take it, and say thank you, and ask for seconds. Are we clear?”

“Perfectly. Pick me up at half-five. Do you know where my offices are?”

“No,” Laurent replies. “But I can look them up.”

*~*~*

Damen doesn’t do a minute’s worth of work that day. He sends his apologies to the select committee. He doesn’t answer a single call, or log into his computer, or open any of the constituent letters in the fresh box next to his desk. Nikandros is considerate enough to respect his closed door, and likely advises the rest of the staff to do the same.

It’s the first solitary window Damen’s had in weeks, and he uses it to sleep. He wakes at four in the afternoon, his back spasming in revolt at being made to rest on a surface designed for other things. Damen changes and moves to the window seat, looking outside and trying for a blank mind.

Laurent pulls up outside his offices ten minutes early. The brief morning sunshine has long fled by the time he arrives, and rolling black clouds sit heavily in its place. Each passing hour pelts down a little more of the heavens, and shaves a few more degrees off the temperature.

When Damen goes out to meet Laurent, it’s been dark for at least an hour. He’s in grey cable-knit sweater and a pair of blue jeans so faded they could pass for white. It’s not his best combination, and it’s barely enough to keep out the cold, and his best jacket is at home, but he doesn’t care. It’ll have to do.

Standing on the threshold of the building, he waves for Laurent to come inside. After a moment, the car switches off. The driver door opens, and an umbrella pokes out and opens to the rain. Laurent emerges underneath it and comes to the front door, a bay of brightness in a miserable day. Damen stands aside to let him through. He’s shivering and damp, despite the best efforts of his umbrella.

If anyone else was around to watch—if they had to perform, in this moment— Damen would have pulled him in and held him close to warm him. He would have gone for a towel and messed his hair dry, rubbed the warmth back into his shoulders, pulled him towards a fire. He would have kissed him till he was flushed. Reaching out for him seems as easy as breathing.

But most of his staff leave at three every Friday, so there’s no need to perform and Damen holds back. The effort of restraint is like holding his breath. Damen watches Laurent tidy his hair down with his fingers, completely absorbed in the act, and wonders whether he’s keeping something similar at bay.

“Come.” Says Damen. “There’s someone I want you to meet.”

Laurent looks at him with a peculiar expression but walks where he’s led. Damen takes him through the stately home to the rooms at the back, near the garden, to the closed door of Nik’s office. He knocks once and lets them both in without waiting for permission.

Nik is completely at ease in his chair, feet atop the same stack of newspapers from that morning. His glasses are low on his nose, his face in grimacing appraisal at a document in one hand. In the other, he holds a red pen. He looks up when the door opens, and then startles and stands when he realizes that Damen isn’t alone.

“I should have introduced you two a while ago,” says Damen. “Laurent, this is Nikandros. Nikandros this is Laurent.”

And then he waits.

He hasn’t thought far enough to consider how they’d react to each other. Now, forced to contemplate the prospect, he finds himself uneasy at the thought that they might not get along. He knows that it shouldn’t matter. He knows that they have no need to meet, let alone to get along, let alone for his sake.

Still, he waits.

Laurent speaks first. “Damen speaks of you all the time. It’s nice to finally meet you, Nikandros.”

Nikandros stares back at Laurent like Damen’s brought him to visit from the moon. He raises an eyebrow, and then his face settles into the mild disapproval that functions as his neutral expression.

“Yes, well.” He says. “You’ve been keeping him busy.”

“I’ll have him home by nine.” Laurent answers, and there’s a smile in his eyes that doesn’t quite reach his mouth.

“Keep him, by all means. I’m actually getting more work done without him around.”

Damen’s goodwill sours. “Thank you, Nikandros.”

“He has a point.” Says Laurent. “I’ve barely attended to my own work, since you showed up.”

Nikandros almost smiles at that. “Oh, good. Then you see that he’s a nuisance.”

“We’ll be going,” says Damen tartly, “if you two have finished defaming me.”

Nikandros fixes him with a look that butchers innocence on the altar of irony. “I thought you’d be pleased that we had something in common.”

Laurent gives a short, sharp laugh. Damen mutters an oath and ushers him back out to his car, with a final sullen look at Nikandros.

Inside Laurent’s car, and safe from the rain, Laurent raises the heating to its maximum. A single shiver runs through his whole body, from his crown down to his ankles. Something helpless bursts in Damen at the sight of it. Laurent recovers. Oblivious to the effect of his involuntary responses on Damen, he starts driving.

Damen has no idea how far they’re travelling. He doesn’t ask, and Laurent doesn’t volunteer the information. The silence is a small comfort.

But it doesn’t resolve the knot at the front of his mind. There are too many thoughts, in too many threads, and they loop through and around each other in an unmanageable tangle. To focus on any one of them is to be led, inevitably, towards the next, and then a third. Damen closes his eyes and tries to focus on the drumming of the rain against the roof.

“I don’t know if you’re the type to talk,” says Laurent, “but you can talk to me, if you like.”

Damen keeps his eyes closed. “I thought we were trying to maintain professional boundaries.”

“You’ve been everywhere, this past week.” Says Laurent, sidestepping the point entirely.

“I know. You’d think that I had announced my own bid.”

“You’ve handled it graciously. By my count, you have grounds for at least three complaints to the Press Council. If you feel like proceeding with them.”

“Honestly?” He says. “I can’t think past dinner.”

They lapse back into silence.

They drive that way for another 45 minutes, the weather around them worsening with each passing moment. The rain falls down in sheets, like buckets being doused from the clouds. Laurent has to slow right down: they can barely see ahead to the car in front of them. Between one wipe of the windscreen and the next, Damen can barely make out what the roads look like.

The vehicle isn’t big enough to withstand the weather, and the wind takes it for a plaything. Damen begins to feel nauseous and is grateful, again, that Laurent’s too busy concentrating on the road to talk.

By the time they arrive, it’s dead dark. Laurent switches off the car and turns to survey him. There’s no light in the car, and what little of it comes from outside is thinned by the rain. His face is little more than a blend of shadows, of dark edges and bright eyes.

“Ready?”

“I don’t know. How perceptive is your brother?”

“Preternaturally.”

“I didn’t think we’d have to take the act this far, when we started.”

“Neither did I,” Laurent responds, after a thoughtful pause. “But we’re getting quite good at it, don’t you think?”

The distance between the driveway and the entrance is less then five metres. It’s still enough to completely drench them. They crowd together in the small nook outside the front door as Laurent tries to open it, but the rain falls full-pelt, and it slips the keys from his wet fingers. The jumble of metal falls to the concrete ground, but its landing is almost completely muted by the rain.

Then, the door opens from inside, and they practically fall into the house. The immediate light and the enveloping warmth of the hallway hit Damen’s body like a physical weight.

A towel is thrust in each of their directions. Damen accepts the one offered to him gratefully and wipes off his face and his hair. He blots it down on his sweater to absorb what moisture will come out, but very little does. It feels heavy and damp on his skin.

He must look a right mess. This won’t do, for a first impression. He looks up at Auguste anyway.

Laurent is still drying the water from his hair with an impressive violence. Auguste, on the other hand, is already watching him closely, his expression studious above all else. He’s taller than his brother, almost as tall as Damen.

A fleeting glance wouldn’t immediately reveal them as brothers. Where Laurent’s hair is honeyed gold, Auguste’s is coppered. Where the edges of Laurent’s jaw are clean-shaven and narrow-boned, Auguste’s is more squarely and thickly set, and mantled with a fulsome beard. But he has Laurent’s eyes, in all the severity of their blue, and Damen has to force his breath not to hitch.

Auguste offers a firm hand and Damen takes it, shakes it.

“It’s nice to finally meet you. Damianos.” Says Auguste. He shoots a sidelong glance at his brother. “I’ve had the distinct impression that you were being kept from me.”

“It’s nice to meet you too. Laurent has barely mentioned you.”

Laurent gives each of them a separate look like a fresh razor. Damen reasons that it’s the least he deserves, after that heart-to-heart with Nikandros.

“I figured you two would be insufferable together.” Laurent says drily. “I’d hoped to delay the inevitable. Is dinner ready?”

Auguste nods and gestures them down the corridor. “We can continue annoying my brother at the dining table.”

And Damen, a mere mortal, cannot hide his smile at that. He says, “Laurent, I like him”, loud enough for Auguste to overhear. It earns him a theatrical eye-roll from his not-quite-lover.

He follows them both to the dining room and uses the brief walk to catalogue his surroundings. The house is impeccably neat, and immediately attractive, but every furnishing and fitting speaks of a taste that had settled twenty years ago and grown comfortable.

Damen tries to find the right word and settles on busy. From the hallway to the dining room, and presumably throughout the rest of the house, the wallpaper is a teal so cold that it verges on stone. It’s overlaid with a trellis pattern of fading gold, but it’s barely visible for all the photographs and prints that adorn it.

Something is everywhere. Nothing is coordinated. Everything is lit, stirring a gleam from the wooden floors, and bathing the home in a warm glow.

It’s a lot to take in. It’s not to Damen’s tastes, exactly—or at all, really—but his curiosity about Laurent’s roots trumps his aesthetic preferences. Damen steals a glance at him, but if Laurent’s nervous about what Damen thinks, he hides it well.

He forgives every reservation, though, when he walks into the dining room and sees a fireplace down the far end.

“Sit,” says Auguste. “Make yourselves comfortable. I’ll be back in a minute with the roast.”

They sit opposite each other, at either side of Auguste’s presumable seat at the head of the table. A small feast of platters is already laid out before them. Here, couscous with golden raisins and almonds and lemon. There, a potato and mushroom gratin. Around them, hummus and some kind of salsa. Next to those, focaccia and sourdough. Three bottles of different kinds of wine, and what Damen can only presume is the household’s better dining set.

“Is he trying to impress me?” Damen asks.

Laurent scoffs, a single humourless sound. “No. This is Friday dinner. I hope you don’t think he’s going to make this easy for us.”

“He’s not exactly making it difficult.”

He leans back in his seat and gives himself over to the comfort of the room, the low-burning scent of the firewood, the pop and crackle of its warmth. Everything in the room is inviting him to soften his bones. If Auguste takes any longer, Damen can easily see himself drifting off at the table.

But Auguste returns with oven-mitted hands, bearing a roasting dish with a leg of lamb and roasted vegetables. Hunger burns up Damen’s throat as he sets it down, already carved. Auguste takes off the mittens and wipes clean his hands on the tea-towel off his shoulder.

“Laurent. You haven’t even poured our guest a drink.”

“Outrageous,” says Laurent. “Who raised me?”

Auguste flicks the side of his brother’s head. He fetches a bottle of pinot noir from the drinks tray on the large wooden buffet behind him, and pours a glass each for Damen, Laurent, and then himself. Finally, he sits down with his apron still on, and gestures to them to begin eating.

“So, Damen. Tell me.” Auguste begins, serving a generous portion of meat onto Damen’s plate. “Why my brother?”

“I’m sorry?”

“What drew you to Laurent?” Says Auguste. “Did you go through all the models?”

“Laurent could be a model.” He points out.

Auguste dismisses his weak attempt to deflect the question. “Yes, but he isn’t. Why him?”

Damen takes a sip of his wine and uses the moment to gauge Laurent’s reaction. He’s watching with pointed indifference, as though the conversation has nothing to do with him.

When Damen answers, he makes sure to focus on Auguste. “I’m a great admirer of your brother’s work. I have been for a while.”

“I see,” says Auguste. He spoons a generous helping of mint sauce onto his plate. “And does everyone you professionally admire end up in your bed?”

“Auguste.” Laurent cuts in, sharply. His indifference has taken its leave.

“No, it’s alright.” Says Damen. He judges between all the ways he can answer the question, and settles on honesty. “I don’t admire most people like I do your brother. He’s principled to a fault and infuriatingly shrewd. He makes me laugh. He makes me think. He’s also more kind-hearted than I think he likes to admit. I didn’t bank on falling for him, but I’m beginning to think that it was inevitable I would.”

The words, when summoned, come easily.

It’s easier to focus on Auguste, in the aftermath of words like those. When Damen turns to Laurent, a strange expression is waiting for him. Damen takes it in, measures it, waits to see which other expression it will become. It doesn’t change. Instead, it remains frozen and watchful, guarded behind a wall that wasn’t there at the start of the meal

“Alright.” Says Auguste lightly. His glass of wine is in hand. He swirls it absently in gentle rounds. “I won’t argue with that. What I still don’t understand is how you convinced Laurent into it. My brother’s never brought anyone home, you see.”

Wary of raising Laurent’s guard any further, Damen opts for a slyer approach.

“In my experience, he doesn’t take much convincing.”

Auguste raises an amused brow. “That would be a first.”

“Perhaps my confidence and charm won him over.”

The noise Laurent makes is neither a laugh nor a breath. It’s a single, haughty sound, and a firm declaration of intent to redirect the conversation.

“I’m attracted,” he begins tartly, “to your credentials. Being on your arm grants me access to more people and places than my press card.”

Despite his words, and the cool regard with which he watches Damen, his cheeks are the deepest red in the room. If they were alone, Damen would have reached out and grazed the warmth off them with the backs of his fingers. But Auguste is in the room, and he looks between them with elevated interest.

“Just my credentials?” Damen says, and he cannot keep the fondness from his voice.

“Your left cheek also dimples when you smile.” Laurent counters tartly. “But that’s absolutely all.”

Damen knows a lie when it’s staring him in the face. He can also recognize the kind of detail that only accompanies truth.

Auguste clears his throat. He still don’t seem wholly convinced by Damen, but the edge of his mouth rests at an angle that suggests he might get there, and that he’s content with what he’s seen for now.

“Well,” he says. “I’m glad we clarified all that.”

Laurent turns his attention to his brother. “Isn’t this the point where you threaten to break his bones if he hurts me?”

“I’m sure,” Damen says, “You’re perfectly capable of your own violence.”

“Damen,” says Auguste. He speaks it like he’s about to share a secret. “There’s a few things you should know about my brother.”

They remain at the table for another hour.

For the first ten minutes, Laurent does his level best to halt his brother’s laundry list of stories. Auguste bests him by ignoring him completely, till Laurent settles back and contributes only by way of details and corrections. Between Auguste’s masterful storytelling, and the growing collection of vignettes about a younger, more rebellious Laurent, Damen is a rapt audience.

Laurent, aged three, disappearing for five hours until their parents called the Police, only to emerge from a nap in the kennel of the neighbour’s dog. Laurent, aged six, thieving their father’s lighter and discovering for himself the flammable properties of papers in the family study. Laurent, aged nine, taking encyclopaedia volumes to bed and falling asleep mid-read. Laurent, aged 12, gathering the entire family in the sitting room three times a week, so he could read aloud to them from whatever book had captured his imagination.

Auguste can’t be much older than Damen. Still, he speaks of Laurent with the pride and adoration of a loving, if exasperated, parent.

Then, from outside: an ear-splitting roar of thunder.

It’s loud enough to cleave the house in two. All three of them jump in their seats. Damen drops his fork at the sound, and Laurent almost sloshes wine down his shirt.

Then: the lights flicker and die. But for the carmine glow of the fireplace, the room would have plunged into a pitch black.

“Shit,” declares Laurent. “That hasn’t happened in a while.”

Auguste stands up and carefully looks out the window. He satisfies himself that the entire neighbourhood has lost power and then, from the buffet behind him, finds a candelabra. He fills it with long, teal candles and arranges them between the roast and the potato salad.

“Dessert in the dark, then. Never mind about the dishes for now. You two wait here.”

When he leaves them, Damen looks to Laurent. His eyes are still the brightest thing in the room.

“We should probably head back after this.”

“Is driving in this weather a good idea?” Laurent asks.

“I can drive if you like. I’ve easily driven in worse.”

“Good luck convincing Auguste of that.”

“We don’t need his permission,” Damen says. And then, with a little less confidence, adds, “Do we?”

Laurent doesn’t respond, and merely raises his glass of wine in Damen’s direction. It’s his third. He’s quieter, less acerbic, strangely sweet at moments. Laurent’s far from drunk, but if he normally walks around with knots in his spine—well, Damen knows how to loosen them, now.

Auguste returns balancing three small plates of raspberry chocolate torte in his arms. Damen piles the dirty dinner plates on top of each other and relegates them to the other end of the table. He also takes the natural break in the meal to finally ask about Auguste—a topic that Auguste has completely averted in discussing his brother at length. Whether advertently or not, Damen can’t say.

He’s a doctor, Damen learns. A paediatric surgeon, like their mother had been, and a keen sailor, like their father had been. As Auguste regales them with stories about his patients and practice, Damen registers with interest the unfettered adoration with which Laurent observes his brother. It’s the most honest expression Damen has ever seen on his face.

After they clear their plates, and after Auguste forces both of them into second helpings, and after those are finished, Damen pulls his napkin off his lap and places it on the table, a clear signal that he and Laurent should think about leaving.

“You’ll be staying the night, of course,” Auguste says, remarkably certain about a subject he’s only just introduced.

Laurent flashes a particular look in Damen’s direction. “Did I tell you?”

“We couldn’t possibly impose,” Damen begins. “And besides—“

“Besides nothing.” Auguste interrupts. “Unless you’re suggesting that Laurent would be imposing in his own home.”

“Well, no, but—“

Laurent leans forward, elbows on the table. His voice is tainted honey. “Anyone would think you didn’t want to spend the night with me, Damen.”

“It’s not—I haven’t got any of my clothes, Laurent.”

“We’re the same size,” declares Auguste. He stands up again, fingertips resting on the table. “That settles it, then. I’ll put new sheets in Laurent’s room and fetch fresh clothes for Damen. Can you two be trusted to clear the table? Yes? Good.”

And then, in another blink, he’s gone.

“Does he always do that?” Damen asks, watching the empty doorway. “Issue directives and then just—disappear?”

“You’re welcome to chase after him and argue. Generally, I find it’s quicker to do what he says.”

Laurent has had a little more to drink than planned.

He might regret it tomorrow morning, but he doesn’t regret it now. Happiness is a loud whisper in his blood, amplified since the dinner table. He hadn’t ever planned to have Damen and Auguste in the same room—indeed, he’s been rather studiously avoiding it—but Auguste’s pestering had reached a critical mass.

Notwithstanding the hurdles that Auguste gave Damen at the beginning of the meal, the two of them had gotten along famously. Laurent isn’t surprised by it. There’s a strange commonality in their charms, something that gravitates a first impression to positive conclusions.

After Auguste leaves them to the dishes, Laurent fixes Damen a cup of tea and orders him to stay out of his way. Auguste runs his kitchen with particularity—everything has its own strange order. Its etiquette cannot be learned over the space of an evening. Damen and Auguste might never meet again, but Laurent won’t allow Damen to undo all his good work by placing the wrong leftovers in the wrong kind of container, and storing them on the wrong shelf of the fridge.

Damen, rather blissfully, remains at the stool on the kitchen island like he’s told. In the light of the three candles that Auguste has lit, he watches Laurent shamelessly. Laurent potters about the kitchen and resigns himself to the inevitability of Damen’s attention, and the tide of pleasure that rises in his stomach at how he monopolizes it.

The companionable silence remains for twenty minutes. Perhaps half an hour, but no more. Auguste returns when Laurent has turned his attention from the dishes to the pots. In Auguste’s hands is a respectable stack of towels and clothes, all for Damen. He sends Damen packing for the shower, and Damen has learned his lesson by now—he goes without a fight.

Once they’re alone, Auguste picks up a tea-towel and begins attacking the small mountain of dishes drip-drying on the rack. They work without speaking until Laurent feels fit to burst with curiosity.

“Well?” Laurent asks. “Am I to be honoured with your thoughts?”

“He isn’t what I was expecting.”

Laurent shuts off the tap and turns to look at him, hip against the edge of the sink. “Can we dispense with the ambiguity? Just this once?”

“I think,” Auguste says carefully, twisting his tea-towel around the surface of a mug, “that he likes you far more than you realize.”

Laurent’s heart gives a frightful leap in his chest. When it settles, the warmth of its movement continues to radiate through him. “Is that so.”

“I can’t remember the last time I saw anyone look at another person that way,” Auguste says. He describes it plainly, either oblivious or wilfully blind to the effect of his observations on his brother. “Come to think of it, I can’t remember the last time I saw you blush. He managed it twice in one sitting.”

“That’s not a good thing.”

“I’m sure you don’t think it is.”

“He’s not what I was expecting either,” Laurent offers, by way of small explanation.

Auguste gives him a look that demands further particulars. Laurent ignores it pointedly and turns back to the sink instead, runs the water, picks up the scouring brush.

They remain in near silence for another fifteen minutes while they restore the kitchen to its original state. August slaps him deftly on the back, takes all the used tea towels onto his shoulder, and disappears in the direction of the laundry.

Laurent kills more time instead of going to his bedroom. He wipes down all the surfaces again, and the dining room table, and rearranges the contents of the fridge. Then he goes to the bathroom and washes his face and brushes his teeth. It’s still warm and humid from Damen’s shower, and it strikes Laurent as being fundamentally obscene that Damen has bathed in his home.

But he can only stall for so long. He goes to his bedroom and stands outside the door with his fingers on the handle, trying to gather his nerves into a bundle small enough to conceal in a closed hand.

Then he knocks, and allows himself in very quietly.

He finds Damen lost in his shelves, reaching for books and the small items that occupy the few spaces between them. He’s in plain black boxers and one of Auguste’s old t-shirts, faded to a pallid grey. It’s just a little bit too small, and Laurent registers with annoyance that Damen has the kind of physique where that looks good.

Damen also looks unusual in his room—but then again, anyone would. Laurent has never had anything close to a lover in this bedroom before. And now, someone like Damen is waiting for him here: someone who looks like Damen, who says sweet things about him at dinner like Damen, who looks at Laurent in a way that he likes and wants more of, and should not encourage but does.

It’s reckless, having him in here.

Laurent closes the door behind him, the click of the latch loud enough to draw Damen’s attention. He turns around with a large tome in his hands. It’s one of the oldest items on Laurent’s shelf—a faded volume of fairy-tales, purchased by his parents for an infant Auguste. The spine is cracked and the pages have come loose, and the colours on the front of the book have faded after decades in sunlight. It looks even more tattered than Laurent remembers in Damen’s hands, but Damen holds it like the precious thing it is.

Laurent is suddenly a stranger in his own room—unsure of where to go, where to stand, how to hold himself. He leans back against the door, arms folded behind his back. It’s an adolescent posture, but it saves him from having to think of what to do.

If Damen’s aware of the effect he’s having on Laurent, he’s polite enough to ignore it.

“I was admiring your library.”

“I’m sure yours is more impressive.”

A glint of a smile. “Oh, it absolutely is.”

“Let me guess.” Laurent begins slowly, injecting a familiar sarcasm into his voice because he knows it, and it’s safe. “The library in your house is its own room. Floor to ceiling bookshelves, and a grand old desk in the middle of the room. A collection curated by your father and his father, and his father before that. Am I on the right track?”

The smile deepens enough to dimple Damen’s cheek. “You forgot the shelf of first editions. There’s a volume or two that might be worth more than this house. Are you jealous?”

Laurent purses his lips, but a corner quivers and there’s no helping it. “You’re damn right, I am.”

Damen looks down wistfully at the tome in his hands, and restores it back to its home on the shelf. “You have every right to be.” He says, fingertips grazing along the spines of the books next to it. “But it doubled as my father’s study. We weren’t allowed in there when he was alive, and it’s painful to enter now that he’s dead.” A thoughtful pause, and then he turns back. “Once a museum, always a museum I guess.”

“Do you miss him?” Laurent says. “I can’t work out whether you do.”

Damen folds his arms, leans back against the edges of the bookshelf. He’s almost as tall as the highest shelf. Wildly, Laurent wonders whether Damen’s going to even fit in his bed.

“My father,” Damen begins, carefully, “was caring and dutiful, but he was demanding. He expected a lot from us. Being a child in our family meant always being on display—if we weren’t performing for the media, we were performing for him.”

“One of you turned out alright.”

Laurent doesn’t know whether he means it as an observation, a compliment, or a joke. It doesn’t matter in the end, because Damen barely seems to hear it. Instead, he studies Laurent with a care that has begun to feel familiar and so heavy that it exudes warmth.

“Are we going to talk about this?” Damen asks.

“Is there something to talk about?”

“You tell me. We have to share a bed again,” Damen says, nodding towards it, “and yours is much smaller than mine was.”

Laurent looks towards his double bed. It’s a humble wooden thing, an embarrassment of plainness with a rectangular head-board and scratches in the wood aplenty. His parents purchased it when he was 13, and there hadn’t been any good reason to change it.

And it’s fine—for one person, or perhaps two people of Laurent’s size. But Damen is a different kind of specimen, and there wouldn’t be room to spare even if they both sleep in straitjackets and remain completely still. At some point, skin will inevitably meet skin.

Laurent says, with calculated casualness, “Feel free to get in first.”

“Maybe you should.” Damen says. After a pause and with a gamble, he adds, “But you’re not used to making the first move, are you?”

“I don’t know. Are we still talking about getting into bed?’

“Yes.” Damen says. “And no. I’m trying to understand why there’s so much barbed wire around someone like you.”

If Laurent were a man prone to showing emotion, he might have laughed desperately. His guard around Damen is damp cardboard, a dusty cobweb that wouldn’t withstand that the lightest touch. Damen is in his bedroom, shortly to enter his bed, and he has the gall to speak to Laurent about barbed wire.

He asks, “Someone like me?”

“I already praised you enough at dinner. Are you after more?”

Laurent smiles. “If you’re offering.”

All he gets is a pointed look. Damen takes the few steps towards the bed and turns down the linen, and gets between the sheets. He’s a mismatched vision, a figure cut from one image and pasted hastily into another, but he looks comfortable notwithstanding Laurent’s reservations.

“I want to know,” Damen repeats, “why someone as frightfully clever and beautiful as you keeps alone.”

Laurent’s hands are still folded behind him, pressed back against the door. He pinches the skin of one hand with the other, as though he might pierce through the moment with it.

“As a rule,” Laurent says, “it’s not best practice to fuck your sources.”

“I never said anything about fucking.”

“We’re well past the point where it needs to be said.”

“And yet, you’re still on the other side of the room.”

Laurent has to close his eyes against their momentum.

For once, he doesn’t give a damn that Damen will see, or what he might make of it. His hands clasp together tightly behind him, so tightly that the muscles probably turn white as the blood flees.

“We can’t.” He says, with his eyes firmly closed. “We’re working together. This can’t happen. We shouldn’t even talk about it.”

“We won’t do a thing, if that’s what you want. We don’t have to talk about it, either.” Damen says. “But that doesn’t mean it goes away.”

“I’m going to destroy your brother, Damen.”

“Then can you blame me,” he says quietly, a plea, “for looking to something good?”

“You’re a senator. I’m a journalist. My job is to keep you accountable. I don’t know how well I can do that if I keep ending up in bed with you.” Laurent says. “And if nothing can happen between us, what either of us wants is academic.”

He’s reciting the reasons to himself. Damen is polite enough to let it pass without acknowledging it.

“Whatever you want.” Damen says. “But we still have to sleep tonight. And there’s still the very small matter of your very small bed.”

Laurent opens his eyes reluctantly. Damen’s still sitting up under the covers, which fall loosely over the bottom of his torso. Laurent allows himself a final moment to drink in the sight of his body, propped up like an invitation against his pillows; a single moment to feel his dizzying, sickening desire for Damen in all its force before he raises his hand to the tide and pushes back.

“Close your eyes while I get changed,” he says, in a voice wiped clean of everything he’s feeling.

Damen obliges and sinks till he’s lying down, fidgeting till he’s comfortable and making the bedsprings whine under the weight of him. Laurent watches to make sure that his eyes are fully closed. Then he moves around the room nimbly, pulling out old tatted pyjamas from his dresser and changing into them at lightning speed. He casts furtive looks in Damen’s direction throughout.

Then he goes to the bed. Damen must hear his approach, because he asks, “Am I allowed to open my eyes now?”

“Yes.”

Damen turns so that he’s on his side, head resting on his forearm. Laurent has chosen the first pair of pyjamas that his hands fell on in the drawer—a set of striped white and blue flannel, so old and so faded that there’s barely a difference between the two colours.

Notwithstanding their state, Damen looks—interested.

“Really?” Laurent asks, getting in and pulling the covers tight over him. “Even in these old things?”

He waits for a quip back and doesn’t receive one. All he gets from Damen is a single word, and an almost-smile: “Really.”

It’s a tight fit between the covers.

Damen’s body is the warmest thing ever welcomed into this bed. He smells like the five-dollar bodywash in their bathroom, over-done citrus and mint and all. The sides of their bodies are pressed together in the middle—arm to arm, hip to hip, thigh to thigh. If Laurent pulls away, he’d fall off to the floor.

It’s more difficult to concentrate this close up. Damen’s physicality is immediate and imposing, dangled in front of Laurent to reach for like a string toy. Instead, Laurent reaches for the light-switch next to his side of the bed and flicks it off. Then he closes his eyes and holds himself very still.

But that doesn’t help either. Eyes closed, all he sees is Damen turning on his side towards him, leaning over, kissing him. Once summoned, the fantasy runs its own course. He sees Damen, placing a hand at the top of his chest before navigating downwards, the heat of his palm searing a line down to Laurent’s belly. Laurent knows—as much as it’s possible to know something without experiencing it—that Damen would be very, very good with his hands.

And Laurent, freshly taut with desire, knows that he would snap under those ministrations like a brittle twig. Grateful for the dark, he cannot stop the blush that rises as he imagines Damen sliding a leg between his thighs, parting them to make way for his weight.

He catches himself before it gets too far, and cuts every string off the fantasy. He exhales deeply.

“Penny for your thoughts?” Damen asks, with the tone of a man who knows the answer he’s chasing.

“No.” Bites back Laurent. “Go to sleep.”

*~*~*

The following morning, Laurent comes to slowly.

Disorientation piles upon disorientation. He’s in bed. Not his bed, but a familiar one. His other bed. He cracks open an eye and spies the heavy blue curtains of his bedroom. They’re rimmed boldly with sunlight, and the birds chirping outside tell him that last night’s storm has had its way and moved on.

He’s warm too, but that has more to do with the body wrapped around him.

Damen is hard, and pressed flush and unmistakable against the back of Laurent’s thigh. His back fits against Damen’s frame like a puzzle piece made for this exact arrangement and no other. Damen’s arm is over and across him, holding tightly, and the press of his warmth is impossible to ignore. For the second time in however long they’ve known each other, Laurent is acutely aware of how much more of Damen than there is of him.

He can also tell that Damen is awake.

Laurent closes his eyes against it.

It’s a mistake, collapsing all his senses into touch. His attention becomes a storm with two points—Damen, hard and vital behind him, and the heavy weight between his own legs.

Damen stirs slightly and brings his mouth to Laurent’s ear.

“I know you’re awake,” he whispers. His morning voice is smoke and gravel.

It would be easy, Laurent thinks. It would be the easiest, most maddening thing in the world. His worries from the night before are still there but they seem less urgent at this nearness. All Laurent would have to do is shift a little, say yes, and fall into the deep chasm over which he already has one foot dangling.

‘Yes,” he responds. He knows what he sounds like. He feels Damen stir in response.

Damen shifts, and brings his hand to the triangle of skin exposed between the bottom of Laurent’s shirt and the elastic of his waistband. He lets it rest there, neither heavy nor presumptive. It’s a touch that seeks permission for more.

Laurent suddenly wants to laugh at the irony of it, wildly—if Damen simply turned him over, moved on him, kissed him, Laurent would have given himself over and with pleasure.

Before Laurent can reason himself out of it, he repeats, “Yes,” and hopes that Damen will read the intention from it.

The consequences can wait for later.

Damen’s breath hitches with something like a laugh, like he doesn’t quite believe he’s being allowed this. His mouth falls on the nearest part of Laurent’s neck and kisses it as deeply and urgently as if it were his mouth.

Damen’s hand settles firmly onto Laurent’s skin under his shirt, and begins stroking slow, warm lines up and down his chest. His palm reaches all the way up to Laurent’s neck and grips it, tilting his face to Damen so he can plant a kiss to the corner of his lips. Laurent hears the sound he makes at the touch, and his skin burns red with it.

The sliver of common-sense still remaining notes—with an almost humiliated desperation—that it shouldn’t be so easy for Damen to make him feel this way. Laurent’s body is an instrument in Damen’s hands, strung in tune, the quiet combinations of his touch drawing pleasure out of Laurent’s body in chords. It’s slow. It’s torture.

But then Damen’s hands move down again. They find Laurent’s nipples, hard and waiting for him. At first they brush over, gentle in their exploration, but then they grip and roll roughly between thumb and finger, pressing, till Laurent has to swallow down a whole new raft of sounds.

Laurent realizes, wildly, that it still isn’t enough. Damen’s hands on him aren’t enough. Damen’s lips on his skin aren’t enough. Having sampled the feeling of Damen’s touch, Laurent wants to find its deepest end and lunge in, head first.

“Damen,” He says urgently. He doesn’t know what he’s asking for, but his body does. Reflexively, he leans back into the weight between Damen’s legs, and grinds.

It unravels them both. Damen snaps.

With a thrill, Laurent finds himself pushed to his stomach, Damen’s weight over him, a hand pinning down each of his wrists. The reflex takes both of them by surprise. Damen lines up his length exactly where Laurent wants to feel it and grinds down, honest with need. He rubs back and forth against Laurent, a blind, pleasure-seeking rhythm, and it drags Laurent over to the same edge. His hips rise up of the mattress to feel it in all its force.

Damen says, from behind and hotly into his hear, “You’re impossible.”

Laurent chokes back something like a frustrated laugh. He remains untouched, with only the flimsy pressure of the sheet beneath him. And yet, he’s the impossible one, apparently.

Another shift. Damen turns Laurent onto his back and falls into him as before.

The last time they had done something like this—the only time, Laurent’s first time in a long, long time—Damen had been gentle with him. That quiet reverence is long gone this morning, replaced instead with a hunger that manifests in every little thing: the way that Damen holds Laurent’s face in place for him to kiss, and kiss, and kiss again; the way his hands drag along Laurent’s skin as he pulls up his shirt, as though he cannot stop touching him long enough to undress him; the way he can’t decide where to turn his attention, his lips dropping kisses on Laurent’s mouth and his cheek and his jaw and his neck and even the tip of his bloody nose.

And then, quite suddenly, Damen pulls back.

He straddles Laurent’s thighs, bracketing them between his own powerful legs. He’s careful not to lower the full force of his weight down. Damen’s boxer shorts are tented a breath away from Laurent’s pyjama bottoms. The slightest tilt upwards of Laurent’s hips would push them together. Laurent wants to. He leashes himself back.

Poised above Laurent, Damen is a study in desire with the brakes on. His pupils are wide in the dim morning light, his irises long gone, the muscles in his leg trembling with the effort of holding still. Something molten pools behind Laurent’s ribs at the sight of him like this, at the knowledge that he’s responsible for delivering Damen into this state. It settles into a solid urge as warm and heavy as stone in his chest. He wants to take Damen’s lips and bite the blood out of them. He want to make a wreck of his hair. He wants to sear his palm-print on every inch of Damen’s skin available to touch.

Damen speaks first, as he’s prone to do, with words he could have stolen from Laurent’s tongue.

“You don’t know,” Damen says, “how much I’ve wanted you.”

His voice is a pierced shell, seeping honesty.

The same warning voice in the back of Laurent’s head speaks again, now with a mounting insistence:

Stop.

Before you can’t anymore.

Except—there’s no pulling away from how Damen looks at him. Laurent’s never struggled with attracting attention, but it never leaves him feeling quite this seen, as though his every barricade is transparent and made of gauze. As though Damen can reach out and simply push them all out of view.

There are no cameras in here, nobody else for whom they have to perform. In their solitude, the truth lies suspended in the air between them and it’s simple: Damen wants him. Not the fairness of his hair or the colour of his eyes but him, and all of his sharp corners.

And Laurent wants him just as much.

He wants this, selfishly.

He answers, “Show me.”

Laurent reaches for Damen’s hands and pulls him back down. The rest is as natural as gravity.

When they kiss this time, need rises between them like popped champagne. Damen’s hands run all over him. Laurent presses up into his palms like a flame seeking oxygen, desperate for more heat.

They rut against each other, all momentum and friction and no grace. Damen angles his hips down and grinds so that they’re cock to cock, the two thin layers of fabric a maddening barrier keeping skin from skin. Laurent moans against Damen’s mouth and pushes up, as if they could fray away the fabric with the heat of their motion. They move against each other like schoolboys, driven by a need that outstrips their finesse.

Laurent realizes with a white burst that he could come like this, just from this simple back and forth.

Damen’s lips move to Laurent’s neck. They spill incomplete words against his skin, want and need and you, each interspersed between open-mouthed kisses.

Then Damen swears something foul and rises up again. Before Laurent can protest the distance, Damen pushes the covers off them to the floor. He hitches his thumbs inside Laurent’s waistband a moment before Laurent realizes what he’s about to do. Damen pulls down, pulling the tatty pyjama bottoms down his thighs and ankles. Laurent tilts his body up to help him, hissing as the elastic brushes against the tip of his cock.

Once they’re off, Damen casts them aside like he might throw them to the other end of the city if he could, if only the wall wasn’t in the way. It leaves Laurent completely exposed beneath him. It’s unthinkable. It’s thrilling.

Laurent moves to take himself in hand while Damen gets rid of his boxers, but Damen catches his wrist, burns in his eyes. “No. Wait for me.”

Laurent can’t think past the ring of his skin in Damen’s steel grip.

And then—

—three loud knocks on the door.

Damen and Laurent freeze.

Auguste’s voice rings into the room. He says, “Good morning! Are you two up?”

They stare at each other wildly. Damen looks at the door like he’s afraid it might turn to liquid and flow away. “Yes—I—we’re awake.”

“Excellent. Breakfast should be ready in ten. See you both at the table.”

And then, because they’re listening now, they hear his footsteps moving further away in the direction of the kitchen. Gods only know how they could have missed his approach.

The effect of Auguste’s interruption is immediate, and irreversible. They both deflate. Laurent reaches for a pillow to cover himself, and moves the other pillow over his face. From the movements in the mattress, he senses Damen sit down onto the bed.

“I’m going to kill him.” Laurent declares, into a mouthful of pillowcase. “Myself. Violently.”

“Laurent?” Damen asks, like they’re having a different conversation.

Reluctantly, Laurent bares his face again and leans up on his elbows. They meet eyes. The air is still heavy with the residue of what they had been about to do. Both of them are still visibly and achingly hard.

This is all Laurent’s fault. If he had only restrained, if he had woken up and just disentangled himself from Damen’s limbs and left the room, if he had only—

“Stop thinking,” Damen says. He leans forward and reaches for Laurent’s face with one hand, cupping it and pressing his thumb to the bow of Laurent’s lips. He imagines that they’ll bruise, in the aftermath of Damen’s enthusiastic attentions.

He doesn’t dislike the thought.  

“You go the bathroom first,” says Laurent. “I’ll—take care of it in here.”

Damen leans down and presses a single, chaste kiss to where his thumb had been.

“Let me watch, next time,’ he says. Then, he leaves for the bathroom, with a towel and last night’s clothes bunched suspiciously in front of him.

Laurent is left alone with the scent of Damen in his sheets. He takes himself in hand and begins rubbing roughly, furiously, urgently, summoning image after image of what they had done, what they had been about to do.  

The recent taste of Damen on his mouth makes it difficult to set or keep a pace. He knows now, where Damen’s hand-span sits across his waist. He’s felt the friction of Damen’s morning stubble across his neck. Laurent’s mind fills in the remaining blanks and runs amok. Damen over him. Damen in him. Ten bruising points of pressure on his hips, holding him in place for a rhythm that hurtles him towards his peak.

Laurent comes quickly and hard, a throb of pleasure pulsing through him with enough force to blind his every thought. He bites down on his lips down to hold back the sound.

His hips fall back onto the bed. His breath restores itself to balance, very slowly. His thoughts are melting ice on sea-water, weak and disparate, barely there. He knows he should be grateful for the interruption, that maybe it saved them from themselves.

But equally, perhaps the damage has already been done.

*~*~*

Laurent waits until Damen’s done with the shower, then goes in and cleans himself off. His body feels ragged under the heavy water, even though he had otherwise slept well for most of the night.

By the time he enters the kitchen, freshly changed into old sweatpants and a hoodie, Auguste and Damen are already seated at the breakfast table. As with the night before, his brother has laid out a small feast—this time of breads, cheeses and eggs. If he knows what he interrupted, he conceals it masterfully.

Laurent is in no mood to eat, but he musters a smile for his brother and forces himself to catch Damen’s eye. They exchange a brief and laden look before Damen resumes buttering his toast. Laurent pours cereal into a bowl. He reaches for the newspaper and eats while the other two spiritedly discuss some result from the sports section.

He couldn’t care less for the actual content of their conversation, but it’s a charming picture of domesticity. Of how things could be.

But—things are not how they could be. They are as they are. The scene in front of him is an edifice. The longer he dwells on that fact, the more his mood spoils, like milk left in the sun too long.

After Damen’s wiped clean the third helping of eggs piled on his plate by Auguste—and after skilfully refusing a fourth—Damen’s phone buzzes violently against the table. He picks it up, reads something, and ceremoniously pushes back his chair. Old wood screeches against older wood and Laurent winces at the sound.

“Shall I drop you off at home?” He asks.

“No. I don’t want to cut short your morning with your brother. Nikandros is waiting for me outside.” Damen says. Then, tartly, he adds, “You really don’t spend enough time with your brother, you know.”

Auguste almost beams. Beams. He says, “I like this one, Laurent. I think I’ll let you keep him.”

Laurent turns to his brother, betrayed, before delivering his most scathing look back to Damen. Damen meets it with a grin, and rises off his chair.

“Walk me to the door?” He asks. Laurent nods. He lets Damen say goodbye and leads him out.

Outside, the morning is a counterpoint to the night before, sweet and absolutely silent. The lawn is iced frozen with frost, and a chill seeps through the thin fabric of Laurent’s clothes. It settles sharply into his bones. He shivers more violently than he’d like to, in front of Damen.

Nikandros is on the other side of the street in his car. Through the window, Laurent can see him looking down at his phone. Something about his hunched posture makes Laurent think that he’s very purposely not looking over at them.

“Your brother’s a good man.” Damen says. His eyes are the warmest thing this side of the front door.

“I’m glad one of us is feeling charitable towards him.” Laurent says.

“When will I see you again?”

“Probably when I have a draft of the story to show you.”

Damen’s expression clouds over. “Oh. Of course.”

“Perhaps it’s for the best, then” Laurent says. “That nothing happened this morning, I mean.”

“I don’t believe that.” Damen says simply. “And neither do you.”

Before Laurent can protest, Damen presses a kiss to his temple. It’s tender and gentle and it disarms Laurent’s response mechanisms completely. He doesn’t know how to counteract this kind of sweetness. He’s never had to, before. The same warning noise from earlier in the morning sounds again in his head, this time an urgent klaxon.

With a final look, Damen leaves and heads to the car. Laurent raises a hand to greet Nikandros, who responds in like. He stays outside till they’re around the corner and gone.

Back inside, Auguste is still grazing at the breakfast table. Laurent isn’t in any mood to answer questions or tolerate a post-mortem of the evening. Nor is he energetic enough to humour his brother and pretend that everything’s fine. Auguste would see right through him anyway. He begins clearing the table, and his brother picks up enough from the prickles in his spine to stay quiet.

Laurent changes back to his clothes from the night before and promises to return for dinner within a week. Then he flees home to the newsroom, to work, to the prospect of doing anything that will push Damen to the periphery of his thoughts.

The office is teeming with people for this time on a Saturday mid-morning. No one pays him any mind. Halvik’s voice is a muted roar from behind the closed door in her office. The other bodies in the open space are largely ensconced in their cubicles and tasks. He gets to the kitchen with only a few hi’s and hellos and makes himself a cup of coffee.

For five minutes, he gets to pretend that everything is normal. The illusion is disrupted not long after that. He unlocks his office and finds Nicaise already in his chair, using his computer.

Laurent closes the door behind him and waits for Nicaise to look up. The kid doesn’t. His hand is on the mouse and navigating furiously, typing occasionally, and altogether intensely focused on whatever he’s looking at

“To what do I owe the pleasure?” Laurent says sharply. He’s more territorial about his office than his bedroom.  

“You’re going to want to sit down for this,’ Nicaise says.

“Are you offering me a seat in my own office?”

Nicaise’s fingertips pause momentarily over the keyboard. He spares a single moment to deliver a withering look at Laurent. “Or you could stand. I couldn’t care less.”

Laurent might have pulled rank any another day, but his curiosity outweighs his pride on this one. He hangs his messenger bag on the coat-stand and plonks himself down on one of the seats in front of the desk.

“This better be good.” He warns.

Nicaise reaches for something on the desk. lifts up a large, plain envelope. Laurent can’t see a single marking on it—no note, no handwriting, no postage stamp, nothing to demarcate its source.

“This came for you this morning.” Nicaise says. “It contained a hard-drive. I’ve helped myself to its contents.”

“And?”

“And,” Nicaise says, with a well-timed pause, “The hard-drive is a complete clone of Kastor’s private computer."

Laurent stares.

For a while, there is only silence.

He tries to register what’s been said. Nicaise waits for him to catch up.

Finally, Laurent manages a faint, “What?”

“A hard-drive,” Nicaise repeats more slowly, just to be patronising. “With a clone of the computer. Of the man. You’re taking down.”

Laurent shakes his head. It’s too good to be true. Therefore, it cannot be true.

He turns his mind to better explanations, and several materialize with worrying speed.

“Perhaps it’s a trap.” He says. “If Kastor knows what we’re doing, he could have sent it himself to throw us off his scent. Maybe he wants more time.”

“And what? Constructed an entire fake hard-drive in order to do it? It looks legit, Laurent. I scrolled through the image galleries and the text messages. A lot of it is too mundane and detailed to be fake. There’s too much of it.”

Laurent leans forward in his chair. He rests his elbows on his legs and begins to click the fingers of one hand with the other as he thinks.

“Maybe,” he says slowly. “It’s a different type of trap. You’ve plugged a foreign device into my work computer. Thanks for that, by the way. Maybe he’s infected it with something that gives him access.”

“Fine.” Nicaise says. “But he could have done that without giving you the keys to his life in the process. Look, just come over here and browse through it for ten minutes. You’ll see what I mean.”

“Then get out of my chair.”

Nicaise throws his hands up in defeat. He stands up and offers the seat to Laurent but remains behind the desk, leaning against the windowsill to observe.

Laurent takes his seat and begins clicking away through the documents. Here, emails. There, photographs. Elsewhere, a calendar packed so tightly with commitments—with details of meetings, lunches, interviews—that Laurent immediately begins to wonder whether Nicaise might be right.

“You said this thing has a sync of his text messages.” Laurent says. “Pull them up for me.”

Nicaise reclaims the keyboard for a few moments and pulls up a program for him. Laurent scrolls through the first few conversations. The two most active ones are between Kastor—if it really is him—and his private secretary and press-secretary. He reads conversations about delegating sponsorship of a private member’s bill to a junior senator; about a clash between two pending interview requests; about edits to a campaign letter.

Laurent leans back in his chair and grips tightly onto its arms. Around him, the office threatens to spin, and his mind verges on whirling along with it. He wonders how far back this archive goes, and exactly what else he might find to add to his story.

“Did your boyfriend send you this?” Nicaise asks.

“No. This is too underhanded for him,” Laurent responds, without missing a beat and with absolute certainty. He doesn’t bother to respond to the boyfriend quip. “But he might be useful in another way.”

Laurent picks up his phone and calls Damen.

Damen answers between the second and third ring. From his tone, it’s immediately apparent that he’s both surprised and pleased by the call.

“Laurent.” He says fondly. “I wasn’t expecting to hear from you for a few days.”

Laurent flicks a glance over to Nicaise, who watches him and listens with fluorescent interest. Laurent’s thumb finds the volume button on the side of his phone and decreases the sound, low, as low as it can go.

“Can you do me a favour?”

“Anything.”

Laurent searches through Kastor’s messages and pulls up his text conversation with Damen.

“Can you confirm whether the last text you sent to your brother was three days ago? About organising your mother’s birthday party?”

There’s a long silence down the other end of the line.

“Laurent? What is this?”

“Is that the last text you sent Kastor or not?”

Another pause, this one presumably to check the request. “Yes. Why?”

Well, then.

Laurent exhales and wishes, rather dearly, that his mug had something much stronger for him than coffee. He catches Nicaise’s eye and nods once. Nicaise smiles like a bloodhound on a fresh scent.

“Someone,” he says to Damen, “kindly thought to copy your brother’s personal computer and provide me with a copy.”

“I—oh.” Damen says. Over the line, Laurent hears a creaking chair. Damen has likely sat down, for which he can’t be blamed. “Alright. Have you found anything?”

“I needed to confirm its legitimacy before I started digging. You just did that. Thank you.”

“It’s not me you need to thank.” Damen says. “But I think I know who you do. I’ll make sure to pass on your regards, the next time I see her.”

*~*~*

Laurent lives in his office for the next three days. Nicaise practically moves in as well, and Halvik instructs the rest of the office that the two of them are not to be disturbed. They’re left to their devices, alone and with the blinds down all day.

The first thing they do is clone their clone, so they can each have a copy to work with. Then, they begin reading. It’s a mammoth undertaking, Kastor’s personal and work lives laid out in front of them without anything to map the way ahead. They become fluent in the building blocks of his time. They pore over names and companies and become literate in their roles, and how they fit around Kastor, in order to exonerate or indict them

It takes a while, but Laurent eventually begins to see the faint outlines of a shape.

They find a number of things but in the wrong order. Only later, after all the constituent pieces have been compiled, can they rearrange and then make sense of them.

It begins with a private, written contract between Kastor and a firm named Epsilon. Laurent finds the document in a deep grave amongst Kastor’s files. Epsilon specialises in corporate intelligence resourcing, which Laurent learns is reputation management by another name. Although the firm has legitimate arms, it also seems to a ply a cloak-and-daggers variation of its trade.

In other unmarked grave—and after hours of searching, which lead him to a secured partition that Nicaise takes three hours to crack—Laurent finds the correspondence between Kastor and Govart Borel. Govart had been a private security agent in a former lifetime, the kind of role that Nicaise describes as a heavy. Now, Govart is employed by Epsilon, and exclusively contracted out for Kastor’s use.

He reads scores of emails between them and pieces together the lengthy timeline of Govart’s assignments: first, his surveillance of Senator Berenger and every member of his family; then his discovery of Ancel; and then, the successful spoils of a discreet burglary into Ancel and Berenger’s home, which bore the fruit of Ancel’s little black book. From there, capturing their intimacies had been a late suggestion of Kastor’s, almost an afterthought, security in case the initial threat to his father didn’t reap the intended outcome.

A similar timeline reveals itself with Senator Guion and poor Aimeric, and Senator Herode, too—images of him with a much younger woman, who cannot be his wife, the release of which would humiliate all three persons.

Worse still: Laurent learns that Berenger, Guion and Herode are only the victims he had known about. Others have been surveilled. Laurent begins making a list of names, of Senators and Civil Servants, and even likely opponents from the other party that Govart has followed and entrapped and captured. Laurent finds photoraphs and videos, message logs and screenshots, all of them with the power to destroy, or at the very least, to humiliate immeasurably.

More than once in the emails, Kastor refers to the information as insurance. He instructs Govart with detachment, a man focused on a point in the distance and wilfuly blind to everything on the way there. It sickens Laurent. He harnesses all his nauseous rage and turns his attention to writing.

He writes a first draft, chronological and linear and completely detached from his involvement. Then, for contrast, he writes a second from his own point of view—beginning from when Damen walked into his office, and detailing everything he has learned since.

He and Nicaise debate the two versions over pizza and half a box of donuts, sometime in the godless hours of early Monday morning. Nicaise eventually persuades him to go for the latter—it’ll be imperative to explain away Damen’s involvement at an early stage, to stamp out any arguments about a conflict of interest before they arise. Nicaise argues strongly that the story will live or die on their credibility, and Laurent can only concede the point.

He reworks the second draft into a third and delivers it to Halvik. At each stage, he makes Nicaise go through the whole article line by line, fact-checking everything. His reporting will have to be perfect, the data he uses to compile it impeccably organised. By the end of it, both of them have committed almost all of the 6,000 words to heart.

Sometimes, in a pause between sentences, or when he stops to rub his eyes awake, the spectre of the looming fallout comes to him. This story might make his name. It will certainly ruin Kastor’s. He doesn’t have any remaining energy to think about what it might do to Damen, professionally or privately. Or to Jokaste.

Three days pass. They haven’t left the office since Saturday morning. He and Nicaise take turns sleeping on the couch in his office while the news cycle continues around them. The sun rises and sets, but for Laurent and Nicaise, time stops.

Stops, that is, until Tuesday morning, when it violently restarts.

*~*~*

A timid knock comes to his door, at barely 10 in the morning. Nicaise is with Halvik. Laurent is alone.

He looks up from his laptop and blinks forcibly. His eyes are beginning to struggle with the constant readjustment between screen and reality. He rubs them down until light bursts behind them, and downs a sip of tea.

“Come in,” he says.

Martha enters. Immediately, Laurent notes the heartbreak in her eyes and the thin line of her mouth. Behind her, the office is silent enough to hear a flea jump. At her side is—a police officer.

Laurent stands up, tips of his fingers to the surface of his desk. It’s paltry support, but his legs might give way without it. Fear jolts through him, bursting a sudden and terrible energy in his muscles. Even without asking, he knows that the document in front of him is somehow the genesis of whatever’s coming. His mind cycles through what it might be, what new headache Kastor has sent his way. He can’t think of a thing.

“Sweetheart.” Martha says. Her tone is subdued, almost apologetic. “Constable Sideris would like a word. I’ll give you two some privacy.”

Laurent doesn’t answer her, only watches the officer step aside to let her leave, and then enter the room. He closes the door behind him.

Laurent thinks, I’m going to be arrested.

Then he realizes that they would have sent more officers, if they had come to take him and his documents away. He’s aware of every panicked pulse of his heartbeat, every breath that he has to remind himself to take.

Constable Sideris is a young man, barely older than Laurent’s 25 years. He watches Laurent wearily, the careful study of a man watching a flammable object near a lit match. He takes off his police hat and holds it in front of his chest.

“Mr Laurent DeVere?” He asks, in sober tones.

“Yes?”

“Brother of Dr Auguste DeVere?”

Laurent’s knees threaten to give way. He sits down before they can. He feels the tremors rise from his bones and settle in every muscle.

Auguste.

Auguste.

Faintly, he manages, “What happened?”

“Sir, there’s been—an altercation. Someone accosted your brother as he was leaving his house to go his clinic this morning.” The Constable pauses, as though he might measure his next few words before sharing them. “He was severely assaulted. Your brother’s alive, but he’s in hospital. They’re about to take him in to surgery.”

Each separate breath is a glass shard drawn out of Laurent’s lungs, rising but gashing across his flesh in the process.

He’s fifteen again, halfway through a calculus test. The school headmistress arrives at the door to his class, accompanied by two police officers, both as young as this one. She pauses the test and has a quiet word with the teacher. Then, of all the watching eyes and pounding hearts of the thirty pupils in the room, the adults look as one to Laurent.

He knows that the headmistress’s tone will break even before she speaks to him. He can see the gleam of her tears, even from the back of the class. She asks him to leave his test and gather his bag.

Auguste is waiting for him in her office, and gathers him tightly in his arms. That day, their family of four became half its size.

That, too, had been a Tuesday morning.

But this Tuesday morning, he bears the news alone.

“How bad?” Laurent asks, with a knife in his throat.

Constable Sideris blanches, clearly ill-equipped to answer. “He’s alive. I’m told he’ll recover—but he blacked out after the assault. His neighbours found him. He’s going into surgery for a broken bone in his face, but I don’t have any further information than that.”

Relief—or one of its weaker, subtler cousins, at least—washes over Laurent. He’s grateful to be sitting down. At least he still has a brother, then.

“Non-fatal,” Laurent paraphrases, before allowing himself he indulgence of half a breath.

“Yes. I’m here to escort you to the hospital to see him. It’s not a good idea for you to drive after this kind of news.” Constable Sideris says. “Do you need a moment alone before we go?”

Laurent nods, hollow. The Constable retreats from the office and closes the door behind himself.

Laurent is frozen in his seat. He can’t move. He doesn’t want to think. The exhaustion he’s been keeping at bay since Saturday morning rises and crashes into him, once and then again. It throws around his body like flotsam. He’s dizzy with it. Drained by it.

And then, as the tide of it ebbs, a creeping fury rolls through Laurent to take its place.

He knows who did this, and knows who ordered it done. He’s spent the last three days—or weeks, really—occupied with Kastor, thinking on him with every breath. It seems that Kastor’s returned the favour and made his move.

Laurent reaches for his anger. He holds in his hands like rich cloth, rubbing its fibres between his fingers till they burn his skin. He dons it like a cloak and lets it settle on his shoulders. He grows comfortable in it, and under its weight.

He also vows—vows, on the graves of his mother and father, and on every injury inflicted on his brother’s body—to tear Kastor down.

He picks up his phone and makes a call. The line is answered after three rings.

“Hello, Laurent.”

“Hello, Nikandros.”

A pause comes from the other end of the line. Laurent doesn’t need to seal the gap with idle words. Nikandros knows exactly why he’s calling.  

Nikandros says, “I’ve just checked. Damen’s in his office today. Are we doing this?”

“Yes,” Laurent says. He feels a modicum of control again, for having set the wheels in motion. “We are.”

Damen’s working properly. It’s the first time he’s been able to say that with any degree of honesty in a week.

To his left is a pile of unread briefing papers. To his right is a pile of ones he’s already finished. There’s a plate of blueberry buttermilk muffins at the head of his desk, waiting for him when he finishes the whole stack, and he thinks he’ll have earned them by midday. It feels good to be working again, to apply his mind to something other than the problem of his brother, or his other problem: Laurent.

Nikandros knocks and enters before Damen can turn him away. He steps inside and closes the door behind him.

Damen opens his mouth for a sharp rebuke, but the way Nikandros had come in sets off sirens in his mind. He’s watched Nikandros enter and exit rooms for close to two decades, a tornado in and out both ways. He’s never done it with either this much care or quiet, and his brows are knotted in something fierce.

“What’s the matter?” Damen says bluntly.

Nikandros approaches his desk. He looks grim as he reaches for Damen’s desk phone and dials—Laurent’s number? No, it can’t be—before putting the call through on speaker.

And yet, sure enough, Laurent answers.

“Damen?” He asks.

There’s a peculiar quality to his tone, even in that single word. He sounds like himself and also not, still in control but the effort of it suddenly visible. It’s the first time that he’s heard Laurent upset. In the instant, he’d do anything to undo whatever’s caused it.

“Are you alright?” Damen says.

“I’m fine. Auguste isn’t. I’m on my way to the hospital.”

Damen’s mind whites blank; he half-moves to rise from his seat, even though he doesn’t know where he’d go, or which hospital Laurent’s referring to. His mind flips back to the weekend, to the little time he’s spent in Auguste’s company. Auguste is as big and imposing as Damen, a healthy young man in the spring of his youth.

People like Auguste didn’t belong in hospitals.

“What happened? Did he—“

“He’s been assaulted,” Laurent interrupts. “He’s been assaulted outside our home.”

Damen doesn’t move. He doesn’t breathe. He delays the inevitable question for as long as he can, until he can’t any longer.

“By who?” He asks.

But Damen already has his answer. If Laurent is calling with Nikandros as witness to the conversation, there can only be one explanation.

Laurent makes a helpless, humourless sound. “Who else could it be, Damen?”

Expecting the words doesn’t soften the blow when it lands. Restless energy spirals up from his feet to his trunk, looping around his chest and constricting his breathing. He tries to resist it. He forces himself to stay still. If Laurent can be calm in the face of whatever this has become, then Damen has no excuse to be anything else.

He dwells on that thought, and asks it.

“How? How are you so calm?”

“Because I don’t want to know what will happen if I stop long enough to feel anything else.” Laurent says. The first signs of strain show between each word, like thin strings of weakening glue between plywood. He adds, “There’s also something else you should know.”

Damen shakes his head against it, as if it might repel the news. His blood numbs beneath his skin.

“No. Please.”

“Nicaise, my research assistant.” Laurent continues. His tone is static, like he might be reading off a prompter. “Govart broke into his house the night of your brother’s party. Nicaise wasn’t home, but Govart trashed the place three ways to Sunday.”

“Are you certain it’s him?”

“Govart found the security camera and smiled right into it. I have the footage.”

“Then enough,” Damen says, abrupt. Nausea rises and raises bedlam in his chest. “Enough. This ends now. I’m going to Kastor.”

“No.” Nikandros interrupts. It’s his first contribution, and he makes it forcefully. “You’re not going anywhere. He comes here.”

Damen looks to his oldest friend. Nikandros is at the foot of his desk, the steel line of his spine a sharp mismatch to the uncertainty across the rest of his features.

“Why?”

“Because Kastor is a snake and I don’t trust him with your safety,” Nikandros says. Damen can here a trace element of fret at the end of each word. “Let him come to you, please.”

“Nikandros is right,” Laurent echoes. Worry is manifest in his voice, the loudest emotion Damen’s ever heard him express. “Kastor can’t be trusted. Please, Damen. I can’t bear—I don’t want something to happen to you too.”

Any other day, and Damen might have clung to that admission like a raft in white waters. Any other day and he would have taken it, stored it, brought it back out, replayed it, and examined it from every different angle, simmered in the thrill it might otherwise have given him, proof that Laurent cares.

But today is different. Damen exhales, a forced breath that takes more effort out of him than a reflex should. He throws a leash on every fugitive thought and reins it back in, willing himself to a quieter place from which to see through the rest of the day.

“Call my brother,” he says to Nikandros. “Tell him to come here, and tell him it’s urgent. If it’s come to this, I suspect he’ll know why I want to see him.” Then, to Laurent, he says, “Laurent, call me when Auguste’s out of surgery. I’ll have Nikandros arrange guards for you both. Neither you nor your brother are to leave the hospital without two of my men at your side. At least. Alright?”

“Thank you.” Laurent says.

“I’m sorry.” He blurts in response. It escapes him before he has a chance to dwell on how paltry it must be, in the shadow of emergency rooms and broken bones.

“I know you are.”

A pause, and then Laurent hangs up.

The room threatens to sink around Damen. He pushes back against its near-irresistible motion, and focuses his attention on Nikandros. The most fixed and stable point in his life becomes the most fixed and stable point in the room. He anchors himself to his best friend’s quiet tenacity.

“Call Kastor.” He says, one more time. “Tell him to come here, immediately.”

Nikandros eyes him carefully. “You don’t want to call him yourself?”

“No. I’m going to need a moment first.

Nikandros nods. Damen immediately rises and goes to the bathroom, leaving Nikandros alone in his office. He needs to be alone, behind a closed door. He has more thoughts on his plate than he can stomach.

He splashes ice-water on his face, shuddering as it hits his skin and shoots chills down his back. It doesn’t help, but Damen knows that nothing’s going to. He does it again and then dries his face, taking stock of his haunted expression in the mirror.

Damen has never met Nicaise, but he’s seen his work and heard the glowing tone with which Laurent speaks of him. Nicaise is practically a child, and a professional, and doing his job, and Kastor paid someone to scare the safety out of him. Just like he did with Berenger. Just like he did with Aimeric. Kastor has mastered the art of breathing down someone’s neck without being there at all.

And Auguste.

Auguste, who had done nothing more than welcome Damen into his home.

He re-emerges into his office, now empty, and paces up and down the length of it. He cracks his knuckles restlessly to stop himself from forcing them through something. He does anything, everything, to avoid sitting still and having the full tide of what’s happening break over him.

Kastor arrives in less than an hour.

Damen hears a car stop on the road outside. He looks out from behind the curtains and sees Kastor emerging, in a dark suit and a heavy black coat that reaches his knees. He walks up to the front door with a folder in his hands, and for the entire world, he doesn’t look like he’s walking to the conversation they’re about to have.

Damen shutters the curtain and waits. He fights for control of his breathing. Footsteps approach in the corridor, and then, a knock on the door.

He exhales.

“Kastor.” He says. He wills his voice into an unbroken line. “Come in.”

Kastor enters and closes the door. He looks unperturbed, like butter wouldn’t melt. “Hello, Damen”.

The brothers regard each other for a long, burdened moment, and it’s clear from the look they share that certain things won’t need to be acknowledged this morning. Kastor has turned up as quickly as he’s been summoned: this says enough about what he knows, and what Damen knows, for them to bypass some of the groundwork.

And yet—still, and somehow—Damen struggles to reconcile the brother standing in front of him with the man he’s learned about. Kastor is the spit of their father, and the spit of Damen in turn. They stand shoulder to shoulder, symmetry in their fames and the dark, heavy set of their faces.

Damen can’t look at him and see anything other than family. He can’t extinguish the effect of thirty years in his company, thirty years of looking up to him. and trying to emulate him, and seeking his counsel.

But he’ll have to learn how.

Damen forces himself to think over Ancel and Berenger, Aimeric and Jord. He turns his mind to Auguste, and Nicaise, and Laurent, on his way to the hospital.

“Kastor,” he begins, quietly. “This has to stop.”

His brother responds without repentance. He’s unnervingly calm. His eyes are cold and bright, and set in the middle of an expression that raises gooseflesh up Damen’s arms.

“This isn’t going to be a negotiation, Damen.”

“A man is in hospital, Kastor.”

“You put him there, you and your boyfriend both. You chose this route; and now, you finally bear its consequences.”

The words send nettles of ice into Damen’s bloodstream. He feels numb with it. He wants to go to his brother and grip him by the shoulders. He wants to shake him, or shake his old self back into him. But Damen can’t move. He stands rooted to the spot and asks himself how Kastor can wave away his distress.

“Jokaste told me what you have over her.” Damen says. He knows he’s grasping for a line of conversation he can control.

Kastor yanks it right out of his grip, immediately. “I know what she told you. She’s an obliging girl, my Jokaste. Shall I tell you everything else I know, so we can keep this brief?”

Damen blinks at him. He wants to sit down, to hold onto something. He wants to call Nikandros into the room. Instead, he asks the question asked of him, even though he doesn’t want to hear the answer.

“What do you know?”

“I know Jokaste gave Laurent a clone of my private hard drive, and that you called her and thanked her for the gift two nights ago. I know that Laurent hasn’t left his office in three days, and that you haven’t seen him since Nikandros picked you up from his brother’s. I know that’s where you spent Friday night. I know you’ve been meeting him at DeBrett’s in the middle of the afternoons to discuss this story. I also know that Aimeric and Berenger have spoken to Laurent on the record, and I know when and where they did it.” He pauses for a moment, to allow the sum of his words to sink in. When he continues, he does so with a cold finality. “I know everything, Damen. Everything. If you think I haven’t had phones tapped and people followed, then you mistake me for a fool.”

Damen closes his eyes against it. Just for a moment. Just long enough to find another feeling to replace the despair, which threatens to unlock its jaw and swallow him whole.

Blindly, he reaches out, and his fingers find their grip on a root of anger. He gives in and pulls it from the ground, curls it tightly in his fist. He thinks of their father and their mother, of the abundance in which they had been raised. He and Kastor had never been left wanting for a thing. Every lesson in ambition and drive had been given to them twinned with another, one in mercy and gratitude.

And yet—here was Kastor, unsatisfied, his cup never full enough.

It’s enough to sour blood.

“This?” Damen says, fortified. “This is how you honour our father’s memory? He gives you his blessing on his deathbed, and this is how you repay him?”

Kastor’s expression contorts with distaste. “No. I’m going to reach the one office he couldn’t achieve, and you’re not going to get in my way. In fact, you’re going to help me get there.”

“You’re too late. Laurent’s going to publish. The second this goes to print, your campaign is over, and you with it.”

“Laurent isn’t going to publish a word.” Kastor says.

He raises the manila folder in his hands and makes a show of opening it. Then, he lifts out a small stack of papers—A4, glossy, photographs, Damen realizes with a jolt—and tosses them onto the coffee table in front of him. They land on the wood with an exaggerated smack, and fan out as they fall.

Damen looks at his brother, and then looks down.

A dozen images, high-colour and in crystalline resolution, taken on the night of the announcement in Imbria in Damen’s bedroom. Photos of him and Laurent kissing. Photos of him pushing Laurent back on the bed. Photos of him over Laurent, perched between his knees, leaning down with mouth at his neck.

They’re both fully-clothed, but their bodies are arranged in an unmistakable prelude to a conflict of interest.

“I can destroy Laurent, if I have to.” Kastor says. Despite the threat, he sounds calmer than he’s been throughout the whole conversation. Perhaps it has something to do with regaining the upper hand. “I can destroy you too. I’d rather not do either of those things, but if Laurent publishes, you force my hand. If I fall, I take every single one of you down with me. Do you understand?”

Damen sits down. He can’t rip his eyes away from the photographs.

“Your game stops immediately.” Kastor says. “You destroy every bit of evidence about what the Guions and Berengers told you. Laurent doesn’t write another word of his article. He can tell his editor whatever he likes, but the story doesn’t see daylight.”

“You can’t blackmail your way to a presidency.”

“Guion and Berenger and Herode have sung like a choir for me. I have designs for every other person who plans to get in my way. Every Senator looking at the nomination and every one on the opposing ticket will get what’s coming to them. Wait and watch.”

Something bitter and scalding gathers in Damen’s chest. He doesn’t trust it over his words, but it’s the most stable thing in his grasp. He reaches for it, twines it around his anger.

“You didn’t deserve his blessing.”

Kastor’s mouth thins, a line of contempt. “If it means that much to you, he never gave it to me. I made that up for the speech. He always thought that you were better made for it. He said he was sorry to die, before he saw you run.”

It’s the most painful thing he could have said, in the circumstances.

Damen feels, with a force that threatens to choke him on his own breath, that he’s let their father down. His father would have sensed something was amiss long ago. His father would have found the words to talk down Kastor from his anger. His father had always known what to do.

But his father’s dead, and Damen fits in the space he’s left behind with too much room to spare. His presence is barely a deterrent. It stings, to know that Kastor sees him as an inconvenience to strategize around.

“We’re not done, Damen.” Kastor says. “There’s something else you’re going to do for me.”

Damen stares up at him, despondent. “What the hell else could I possibly give you?”

“Father was right about one thing. You’re well-liked, even if you’ve squandered it on mediocrity.” Kastor says. He pauses, and Damen can feel how much he’s enjoying the power of holding something else over his head. “So—you’re going to run as my vice-president.”

A horrible pause. The worst one yet. Damen feels pinned to the floor, with Kastor’s boot pressing down on his neck.

“Kastor—“

But his brother shakes his head. He registers the horror on Damen’s face and bulldozes through it, continuing as though Damen hadn’t spoken. “Like I said. This isn’t a negotiation.”

“And if I say no?”

Kastor gestures towards the photographs. “You already have my contingency plan. Refuse, and I publish these and the ones with Jokaste. You might recover from it, but will he? Will she? Could you do that to them?”

“No. But you won’t get away with this.”

A light flickers on in Kastor’s eyes, a bloodhound on the scent of unmistakable victory. Damen looks at him and sees a stranger, someone who looks and sounds like his brother, but with a different soul animating the same body. This Kastor’s hid himself well, concealed in plain sight.

Damen breathes through it, and feels out the corners of grief for the person his brother used to be.

“You won’t get away with this.” Damen repeats.

“I just did.” Kastor says, savagely.

And then he’s gone, door slammed in his wake.

Damen wants to be alone with a bottle of rum and no thoughts. He wants to punch a separate hole in every panel of all four walls of his room. He hasn’t cried since his father died. Now, more desperately than ever, he wishes him alive. His father would have known what to do.

But he has less than a minute with his misery. He hears the sound of Kastor’s car driving away, and within seconds, Nikandros is in his office.

Damen looks up at him helplessly.

“Nik, he—“

“Quiet,” says Nikandros. “Don’t speak.”

He goes to Damen’s desk, picks up a pile of three folders, and pushes them aside. From underneath them, he pulls out something small. It’s a slim black device, no wider than two fingers and no longer than his thumb. He presses a button and exhales, and the tension drains out of his body.  

Damen looks from Nikandros to the device. “What is that?”

Nikandros ignores him. He presses buttons that Damen can’t make out from this distance, and then, presses down one final time, emphatically with his thumb. Two voices emerge from the device, loud enough to fill the whole room, and clear enough for Damen to feel like he’s stepped back 10 minutes.

It’s his conversation with Kastor. The whole thing, from the moment Kastor walked in to the moment he stormed out. Damen stares as Nikandros listens through to the whole thing. Any trauma he might have felt at reliving it so quickly is numbed and superseded by the shock of what Nikandros appears to have done.

Nikandros is oblivious to him. He wears a peculiar expression as he listens, distaste lined with something else. Resolve, maybe. Damen doesn’t have the spoons to work it out. Only when it’s done does he finally pay a moment’s attention to Damen.

“You recorded me.” Damen says. If he could rein in his shock, it might have come out angry.

“Call Laurent.”

“Laurent? Why? Nik—“

Nikandros fixes him with an unyielding stare. “Damen, please. Pick up your damn phone and call Laurent. And put him on speaker. Now.”

Damen does as he’s told, an automaton. He moves to his desk and sinks into his chair, grateful for its high back and the existence of something to collapse against. He dials Laurent’s number and puts the call on speaker mode. Laurent answers halfway through the first ring, as though he’s been expecting them.

“Well?” He snaps. He sounds more nervous than Damen has ever heard him. His voice crests enough to betray his nerves.

“What do you mean, well?” Damen says.

“It’s done.” Nikandros responds, staring down at the phone, clearly speaking to Laurent. “I listened to it. Kastor laid it all out for Damen.”

Damen stares at him, shell-shocked. “Wait—what is this?”

“All of it?” Laurent responds, but again, to Nikandros.

“Everything.” Nikandros confirms. “Berenger and Aimeric, and Jokaste and Damen. He said he had plans for more. Gods, he—“, and here he falters, unable to wrap his mouth around the words in his anger, “—he tried to blackmail Damen to run as his vice.”

Damen looks from the phone to Nikandros and back down at the phone. His frustration wraps itself around his confusion and drags him to the edge of a cliff. Nikandros and Laurent have met once. They’ve spoken once. And yet here they are, speaking about him, over him, and about something that he doesn’t understand, as though he isn’t even in the room.

But Damen’s lost enough control for one day.

His next words come out a demand, a roar.

“What is going on?”

They come out far louder than he intends, perhaps, but certainly more calmly than he feels. The day has taken him for a violent spin, swinging him from calamity to calamity in a sickening swing-dance, from Laurent’s call about Auguste to his revelation about Nicaise, to the meeting with Kastor and the photographs, to whatever the hell this conversation happens to be.

He realizes, then, that in the face of his anger, Nikandros has frozen mute, and that Laurent is equally silent on the other end of the line. Damen draws a deep breath, and sinks back further into his chair. His head pounds at him.

“I’m sorry.” He says. “I am. I just—I need someone to explain to me what’s going on.”

Apology notwithstanding, Nikandros looks at him like he’s an abandoned briefcase in the middle of a busy street.

Nikandros says, “Laurent? Maybe you can—?”

“Of course.” Laurent says. He has the grace to sound chastened. “I figured, after the night at your brother’s, that you were going to confront him. I also figured that if Kastor was ever going to admit a word of this to anyone who wasn’t involved, it would be to you.”

“So you—recorded me?”

“Yes. Your word—or gods, your sworn testimony, at this rate—about anything he said would have been enough, but I wanted something more concrete if we could get. I wanted the words directly out of Kastor’s own mouth. I came to Nikandros alone a few weeks ago. He agreed to help. I wasn’t certain that we could nudge the confrontation to occur at your office, but it was worth the gamble if it meant we could catch him out.”

“You used me to trap my brother.”

Nikandros grimaces. “You don’t need to put it like that.”

Damen’s eyes snap towards him. His rage stirs again, a new crackle in dying fire. “Then how else would you put it?”

“No, Damen’s right.” Laurent says. For the first time, a whisper of atonement breaks through his voice. “We did use you. You speaking to him was an inevitability. I wanted to twist it to our advantage. “

“You manipulated me.” Damen says. The dawning truth cuts lines into his palms, and salts them. “You could have told me.”

“No, I couldn’t. Don’t you see? He’s your brother. He will always be your brother. You’re too honest to bait him knowingly, or well, and the less you knew, the more he was forced to tell you throughout the conversation. I couldn’t risk him suspecting that it was ordained.”

Laurent’s words fall through him like a sieve. He tries to catch their stream, to grasp them long enough to examine them, but he can’t. The only thing that forms clearly in his mind is his exhaustion, a reality as sudden and heavy over his bones as a weighted vest.

“At least,” he says torridly, “Can you understand why I’m not—jumping for joy?”

“Yes. I don’t expect you to forgive me for what I’ve done, but I had to do it. Can you at least understand why?"

Damen can.

It doesn’t make him feel any better. It doesn’t make him feel any more generous towards Laurent or Nikandros. But it does make some kind of sense, even if it’s a sense to which he’s not immediately receptive.

Laurent is waiting for an answer. Damen can’t summon the will to give him one, much less the one he wants.

Nikandros says, “This is why you went to him, Damen. It was your idea. You can’t fault him for doing the job you asked him to do.”

“Whose side are you on?” Damen says, tiredly.

“Yours.” Nikandros says. “And so is Laurent. Don’t lose sight of that.”

More than any other strange bend in this convoluted conversation, it’s this one that throws him off course: Nikandros and Laurent, working in score.

On another day, he would have laughed. He had yearned for this very thing less than a week ago. Hadn’t he? He had wanted his old friend and this strange, irresistible enigma of a man to see eye to eye for his sake.

The universe had delivered him exactly that, with a backhand to the face.

He closes his eyes, realigns his priorities. Kastor had walked into his office and committed a crime. His brother had developed a propensity for criminality, and neither honour nor family was enough to break the pattern of his behaviour. Laurent was right. Of course he was.

“Is that it?” Damen asks. “Do you have enough to publish your story, now?”

“Yes. But Halvik and I are taking this to the Police first.”

Damen’s grip on the arms of his chair becomes white-knuckled, but he doesn’t say anything. For the first time, he forces himself to stare down the coming weeks and months.

His brother is going to jail.

Nikandros sighs. He seems to deflate with it, exhaling worry like it had held a mass and shape in his lungs. “At least it’s done, now.” He says. “The truth can come out. This game can end. It’s over.”

Damen shakes his head.

“No.” He says blankly. “No, it’s barely begun.”

*~*~*

That afternoon, Auguste emerges from surgery. Damen’s on the phone to Laurent when he wakes up in recovery. The doctors are optimistic about his prognosis, and assure Laurent that it looks far worse than it actually is.

Laurent, having satisfied himself that his brother will be fine, makes a discreet visit to the Police with Halvik. He takes over the finalised draft of the story and everything that went into making it: the two interviews with Aimeric and Damen; the blackmail material that had been used against their fathers; the CCTV footage from Nicaise’s address; the cloned hard drives; and finally—but most importantly—the secret recording.

He hands it all over. That night, Kastor is arrested is at home.

Laurent’s story breaks in the Ios Tribune the following morning. It’s accompanied by colour photographs of Kastor being led out from his mansion in a black suit, handcuffed to a Detective and surrounded by no less than ten other police officers. He walks with his head held up and his eyes forward, the corner of his mouth curved disdainfully at the world.

Laurent’s story is lengthy. So lengthy, in fact, that the Tribune can only publish a précis on the front page. The full article is reproduced in a separate pull-out, nestled within the paper as a special edition. When it hits the public domain, Laurent’s profile explodes—an inevitability, given the attention he had already attracted on Damen’s arm. Suddenly, he’s everywhere, interviewed on every major television program and sought for comment by the rest of the press. The story of his and Damen’s deception attracts as much attention as the crime it uncovered.

Laurent steps into the limelight, but Damen steps back into the wings.

He retreats to their childhood home, and waits out the storm with his mother. The press descend on the house like locusts and soon, the retreat becomes a barricade. At the continuous coverage, and with every new detail, his mother’s health declines sharply. She becomes weaker and frailer. She begins refusing food. They call for a doctor and the man can barely get into the property, for all the concentric layers of press that surround their house. He orders her to rest and forbids Damen from listening to the news around her.

He obeys, but he can’t tear his eyes away from his own sake. Every day brings a new, bitter development, and he forces himself to swallow it down. Criminal or not, this is his brother. He can’t support him, but he can’t ignore him either. Each night, Damen falls asleep in front of the television and wonders what he’ll wake up to the following morning.

Someone leaks Kastor’s mugshot. It’s a dissonant image, his eyes as bold and unrepentant as they had been in Damen’s office. Charges are formally laid by the District Prosecutor. The indictment lists 40 charges across eight pages, everything from blackmail (which Damen expected), to being a party to the unlawful production of an intimate visual recording (which Damen did not). Kastor is denied bail and remanded in custody for a week, when he’s to return before the High Court and enter pleas on all charges.

The Police locate and arrest Govart Borel. He agrees to testify against Kastor in exchange for a plea deal. Then, a series of days where key players visit the Central Ios Police Precinct to give formal written statements. First is Jokaste. She looks like porcelain, and she’s dressed in the same modest suit that Damen had last seen her in. She hides behind large sunglasses and a scarf. After her, Senators Guion and Berenger and Herode do the same.

At no point is there any mention of Ancel and Berenger, or Jord and Aimeric, and Damen is grateful for that at least.

Then it’s Damen’s turn. He’s summoned by the Police to make a statement for the prosecution. It’s easily his worst day yet. His driver barely manages to exit the house, for all the press still hounding their gate. When he arrives at the station, no one seem to know how to deal with or react to him. A lot of people avert their eyes, or make themselves look busy, but he notices how all of them turn back and whisper in his wake. The interview takes place in a small room with nothing but a recorder, a table, and two chairs. It lasts for three hours, its purpose mostly to corroborate Laurent’s extensive account. At the end of it, the Detective has the grace to ask him if he’s alright.

Then, on the seventh day after the arrest, comes the plea appearance. Damen watches it live on television and holds his breath for 40 recitations of not guilty.

To his surprise: Kastor folds. Govart’s evidence is apparently the final nail in an ironclad coffin.

He pleads guilty to every single charge.

*~*~*

For a myriad of reasons, a whole month passes before he sees Laurent. They barely speak in that time.

Mostly, Damen can’t bring himself to call him. His temporary retreat from public life splits his time in two directions: first, in looking after his mother, and second, in grieving for the loss of his brother. He might not see Kastor outside of gated walls for decades. His mother likely won’t see him face to face before she dies. The splintering of his family splinters the entire architecture of Damen’s world, and he gives himself the time to reorient.

But, equally, it’d be uncouth for him to be seen in public with Laurent, outside the context of this story. They’ve committed to the narrative of a purely professional arrangement, now they have to live with its consequences. The prospect of appearing with him for the press, of answering other people’s questions about his violently personal turmoil, stokes all the wrong angers in his blood.

If Laurent feels aggrieved by his sudden retreat, he doesn’t breathe a word of it to Damen. He throws himself headlong into his work, and all Damen has to do to see him is switch on the news. Laurent becomes ubiquitous, a media darling, beautiful and crusading. Watching him becomes a fresh kind of madness for Damen. He has no other means of seeing Laurent’s face, but seeing it fills him with a fresh grief for this strange other thing he’s lost.

He bides his time, till the story wanes a little. He knows it will, and it does. He waits till it’s the second daily bulletin, and then the fourth. Then, he waits till it drops from the coverage, appearing maybe once every two days.

In all, he waits a month.

He reaches the end of his patience at 10pm on a nondescript Friday night. He drives across town to Auguste’s, and hopes for the duration of the hour’s drive that Laurent will be there tonight. He takes an intentionally convoluted route in case he’s being tailed, and then drives through Auguste’s street multiple times to make sure that it’s quiet.

Laurent’s car is in the driveway. Damen parks and gets out, and huddles into the front entrance in the cold. Five knocks on the door summon footsteps from inside, and the door opens.

Behind it is Laurent, whose pupils blow into dinner plates at the sight of him. Without thinking, he roughly yanks Damen inside by the sleeve of his sweater. Then, he pokes his head out and looks furtively to the left and right, double-checking who else might be there. When he locks the door, he still doesn’t seem satisfied.

He turns back to Damen, who’s waiting for him with a smile. Laurent is the first good thing to stand in front of him in a damned month. There’s no holding back that feeling.

“Hello Laurent.”

“Hello Damen.”

A pause. Damen wants to reach for him and pull him close. He wants to feel the peculiar safety that comes with holding Laurent in his arms. He wants to take his hand and lead him to the bedroom, and beg him to pick up where they had left off. Damen’s mind and body are a cacophony of itemised desires, and every discordant one harmonises in Laurent’s direction.

“Are you well?” Laurent asks. He sounds genuinely concerned, and the sound of it it breaks ceramic over every chamber of Damen’s heart.

“I’ll be fine. Actually, I came to check up on Auguste.” Damen says. He’s clutching at straws and both of them know it. “I wanted to see how he’s doing.”

“You’re lying, and he’s been called to work.” Laurent says, emphatically. His eyes burn brightly with it, like he’s taken pleasure in calling Damen out. “You shouldn’t be here. You know that.”

“Are you going to turf me out?”

“I should” Laurent says. “But I won’t.”

Damen takes a step forward, cleaves the space between them in half. He senses Laurent’s awareness of him reach its highest dial, but Laurent doesn’t step back. He tilts his head up, cautious and curious in that same heady mix he used to unleash on Damen before the world turned to hell.

“I’ve missed you.” Damen says honestly. “I’ve missed this.”

“Even after I’ve landed your brother in jail?” Laurent asks. A pinprick of accusation creeps into his tone, like he’s bracing himself for disappointment.

Tentatively, Damen reaches for Laurent’s face and tilts it up towards him. He studies him closely. He can read Laurent’s concerns off his skin by now: the inconvenience of caring for a man whose life he’s changed irreversibly; the unprofessionalism of it all; the risk to his reputation, which will dog them forever like a shadow.

But Laurent doesn’t move away. He inches closer, and Damen knows a man who’s angling to be kissed when he sees one.

“Even so.” He confirms.

Damen’s thumb finds the bottom of Laurent’s lower lip and traces its edge. That simple touch, on its own, is enough to shudder a thrill through Laurent. Damen will never tire of his quiet displays of pleasure, nor of the knowledge that he can do that to someone as well pieced-together as Laurent. He wants to spend the rest of his life learning how to do it better.

“We can’t be seen in public,” Laurent says. “Not for a long time, anyway. No more lunches at Antipodes, or midday liaisons at DeBrett’s.”

“I don’t care. I want you to myself this time.”

His words rest on Laurent’s skin and draw blood to its surface. He reddens remarkably. It’s all Damen can do to hold himself still in front of it. Laurent moves for them both, closing the gap between their bodies and hooking both arms around Damen’s neck. He pulls Damen close.

“Well then, Senator.” He says, with a smile, and with fresh mischief dancing in his eyes. “We might need to set new ground rules.”