Chapter 11 #3
Evran wants to argue that he was not wrapped around him, that every point of contact was Torsten's doing and not his own.
But that is not who he is supposed to be right now.
Right now he is the wine-flushed, half-coherent southerner who followed a handsome man to a card game and lost his footing.
Right now he is harmless and pliable and exactly what Torsten wants him to be.
He smiles up at Torsten, and it takes everything he has.
"I've had a lovely evening," he says, and makes his voice soft, a little slurred.
Torsten's eyes drop to his mouth.
He reaches out, and his thumb touches Evran's cheek, tracing the line of his cheekbone, a touch that tests a boundary and watches to see if it holds.
Evran makes his eyes go half-lidded, the look of someone leaning into the touch rather than enduring it.
He has seen people do this. He has watched the courtiers at Lord Galen's manor play these games with each other, trading glances and touches the way others trade currency.
He did not understand it then. He understands it now, in the worst possible way, understands it because he is living it, because he is performing desire for a man who wants to kill his husband, and the understanding tastes like ash and burns worse than Fire Wine.
Torsten's thumb moves from his cheekbone to his lip and brushes along the lower one, just barely.
Evran fakes a gasp.
Small, a tiny intake of breath, parted lips, a flutter of lashes. A sound that could mean surprise or desire or both, a sound that Torsten will interpret as invitation because that is what he needs it to be.
Torsten's hand stills. His eyes are locked on Evran's mouth, and for one terrible, suspended moment he looks willing to risk his life to press Evran against the wall and take him.
The hunger in his face is raw and unmasked, the thin veneer of charm burned away by proximity and opportunity and the reckless certainty that he has already won, and what is underneath is greedy and sharp and utterly without conscience.
A noise from further down the hallway.
A door closing, footsteps, the muffled sound of a guard shifting at his post.
Torsten recoils, straightens, takes a full step back, and the mask drops into place again so fast it is dizzying, the charming smile and the easy posture and the casual confidence all snapping back as though they never left.
The transformation is so complete and so instantaneous that it confirms everything Evran already knows about this man, that the charm is performance and the performance is flawless and beneath both of them there is nothing but appetite and calculation.
This is a man too craven to fight for what he wants, a man who takes in the dark because the light would show the ugliness of it.
"I'll see you again soon," Torsten says, his voice carrying the studied lightness of someone pretending nothing just happened.
"Goodnight, Torsten."
"Goodnight, pretty bird."
He turns and walks away, his stride unhurried, his hands in his pockets, returning from what anyone watching would take for an innocent evening of cards and conversation. He rounds the corner and is gone.
Evran sits on the bench and stares at the wall opposite.
The hallway is silent, the torches flickering and the stone cold beneath him, and his face is still flushed from the Fire Wine and he can feel the ghost of a thumb on his lip.
The sensation lingers there, unwanted, persistent, the unclean feeling that does not wash off with water, and Evran wants to scrub his face until the skin is raw but he is still sitting in a corridor where anyone might pass and he cannot afford to let the mask slip until he is behind a closed door.
He blows out a long, slow breath.
Then he stands up. His head is still foggy at the edges from the wine and the exhaustion and the sustained effort of pretending to be someone he is not for three hours, but his legs are steady and his mind is clear enough.
He was never as far gone as he let Torsten believe.
The slumping, the stumbling, the heavy-lidded compliance were all performance, and the performance worked, and now he has information that Torsten never intended him to have, and the weight of it sits in his chest alongside the revulsion and the fear and the grim, unwavering determination to use it.
He walks to the door of their room, opens it, and steps inside.
The room is dark, the fire banked to embers, the shutters closed and bolted, and the extra guards are a quiet presence beyond the door. The bed is empty.
Vaike is not here. He is in council with the other leaders, Bran mentioned it this morning, a late session to discuss the summit's security protocols, the kind of meeting that runs long because everyone has an opinion and the mead keeps flowing.
Evran stands in the empty room and listens to the silence.
He raises his hand to his face, touches his cheek where Torsten's thumb was, touches his lip where Torsten's thumb pressed.
He hesitates for only a moment.
Then he crosses to the basin, plunges his head into the water, and holds it there.
The cold is a shock, sharp, immediate, total, flooding his ears and his closed eyes and the skin of his scalp and driving out everything else.
He stays under until his lungs burn, then comes up gasping, water streaming down his face and neck and soaking the front of his tunic.
He grips the edge of the basin with both hands and breathes, and breathes, and the phantom sensation of a thumb on his mouth dissolves in the cold water that drips from his chin.
He dries his face, changes his tunic, climbs into the empty bed, pulls the furs up to his chin, and stares at the ceiling and waits for his husband to come home.