Ari
Ari
“I’ve been told that Mozart is someone you know.”
Reed leans back against his couch and regards Ari with a thoughtful eye.
Ari holds his ground calmly, but his gaze sweeps around the penthouse, settling for a second on the guards stationed at the balcony and the door.
To Reed’s left, Isla sits with shades on, a clear sign that her sand-induced headaches are acting up. Rudra paces nearby.
“Do you know her well?” Reed muses at Ari’s silence.
“Not well,” Ari answers.
Reed lifts an eyebrow at him. “How not well?”
“She and I used to attend the same school.”
“Were you friends?”
“I wasn’t exactly given time to make friends,” Ari says pointedly. “But we were friendly.”
“Did you keep in touch with her?” Reed asks.
“No.”
Rudra stops pacing for a moment to shoot Ari a dark look. “Is that so?” he says. “For being so estranged, you seemed quite eager to let her go.”
“I didn’t let her go,” Ari says calmly. “She’s a polemist. She was too skilled for me to fight on my own.”
Rudra looks away in disgust and continues pacing.
“If you wanted to get in touch with her now, could you?” Reed asks.
The storm in Ari’s head roars, and he forces himself to stay steady. “I suppose it’s possible,” he replies.
“Did she know who you were?”
“Yes,” he says.
Reed leans back in his seat and ponders for a moment. While he does, Isla glances at Ari, as if checking on how he’s feeling. When he meets her eyes, she narrows hers, then shakes her head imperceptibly.
Tread carefully, she seems to be warning him with her gaze.
At last, Reed looks at Ari again. “You’re going to find out everything you can about your old friend. Get close to her without making your actions known to the rest of Grand Central. Make her talk to you.”
“Our chat last night didn’t exactly go well.”
“Give it another go,” Reed says. “Nostalgia is a powerful weapon, isn’t it?”
All Ari can think of is when he was still a new alchemist, and had first worked up the nerve to ask Reed directly about when he might see his family again.
Why? Reed had replied.
Because I miss them, Ari had said.
Of course you do, Reed had acknowledged, and never brought it up again.
“You want Sam to be an informant?” Ari asks now.
“An unsuspecting one. I want a direct line through her to Grand Central leadership. I want info that will take them apart, and I want you to get it.”
Sam weaving sea daisies into her dark hair, leaning against his shoulder, running her hand through the tide, staring out across the sea.
“I’ll find a way,” Ari says stiffly.
Reed regards him a moment longer, as if expecting more resistance, but Ari refuses to give it to him, to let him see the full extent of his weakness. After a while, Reed finally sighs and waves them away.
“It’s late,” he mutters, “and I’ve been kept up later than I wanted with this mess. Get out, all of you. We’ll reconvene in the morning.”
Ari steps out with Isla, and the two of them walk in silence in the same direction toward their apartments.
When they reach Ari’s door, Isla turns to face him.
Even through her shades, he can tell that the whites of her eyes are bloodshot with exhaustion, her pupils dilated. The sand has hit her hard today.
“You’re thinking about her,” she says.
Ari looks away from her. “What makes you think that?”
“I remember this look on your face. You’d get like this sometimes after we had a night together. You’d lie there in bed like you were somewhere else.”
“Maybe you just exhaust me,” he says dryly.
Her lips curve upward a bit. “Maybe,” she replies. “But Rudra said Mozart managed to get Will out of there because she has a knack for going undetected.” She casts him a sidelong glance. “Did you really let her go?”
He sighs at her. “What do you think? I took an oath, same as you.”
“Mm,” she murmurs thoughtfully.
Ari hates how Isla can do this, that without even having enough information, she still finds a way to make assumptions that are actually right. He refuses to react to her statement, choosing instead to meet her gaze steadily.
She leans toward him. “I know you’re not going to admit to anything out loud, that would be fucking stupid of you. And I’ll keep my mouth shut around the others. I’m just saying this to you because we’re alone here. Listen to me. All right? Are you listening?”
“Yes.”
“Watch yourself.” Her voice turns serious. “I know what it’s like, getting personal with those outside of our business. It can mess with your head, especially us bioalchemists, we’re so sensitive to moods and emotions.”
He’s still thinking of Sam, can’t get her out of his mind. He forces himself to focus on Isla instead, and frowns. “What do you mean, you know what it’s like?”
She shrugs. “I once fell for someone not affiliated with Lumines or Grand Central. For a few weeks, I was showing up late at the library and forgetting my place.” She laughs bitterly, like it’s funny. “Rudra beat the shit out of me for it.”
Ari suddenly recalls the one time she’d shown up to their afternoon study sessions with a black eye. He hadn’t thought much of it then, but now he remembers how often she’d been late in the weeks before that. So, that had been Rudra’s work.
“I didn’t know,” he says.
“Of course you didn’t.” There’s no emotion in her voice, no bitterness or trauma, nor does she elaborate on what happened to the person she’d loved.
“And I’m not saying whatever’s happening with you is the same thing, because what the hell do I know?
I’m just saying.” She winces as if her migraine has suddenly spiked.
Her eyes squeeze shut and she rubs her temples before continuing.
“I know you have some history with Mozart, and that’s fine.
We’ve all got weird connections in this city.
But you need to keep a clear head. She’s Grand Central.
She’s untouchable. You get that, right?”
“I’m not interested in her,” Ari says coldly, but even as he says it, the words ring hollow to him, glaring in their falsehood.
“Didn’t ask if you were. You want to mess around with her, that’s fine, get it out of your system, that’s probably what Reed wants you to do anyway.
But that’s a means to an end, not a slippery slope for you to slide down.
Keep your head on straight and remember your loyalties.
If you feel like you’re slipping, you’d best tell Reed now and ask him to pull you off this mission. If not for your sake, then for hers.”
“And why would you care about her sake?” Ari says.
“I just don’t like seeing anyone burned when they don’t need to be, is all. Listen, we’re all in the same line of work. Let’s keep things as simple as possible, right?” She nods at his door. “Now go get some rest. You’ve got a date night with Charlotte.”
Ari forces his thoughts about Sam into a dark corner of his mind, where she continues to fester. But outwardly, he gives Isla a demure smile. “You worry too much about me,” he says.
She leans up to press an affectionate kiss to his lips. “I never worry about anyone,” she replies. “It’s how I ended up so well-adjusted.”
It is impossible for Ari to concentrate on his date with Charlotte.
The only thing he can think of is Sam, her image imprinted on his mind like a brand. Her wrist in his hand. Her expression of disbelief as he’d stepped back and let her go, then her figure disappearing into the car, driving off through the night.
But Charlotte is still the police chief’s daughter, so Ari gathers himself up and takes her out for dinner on Friday.
It is a chilly night in the city, and the palm trees sway from the wind, but inside, they pick a cozy window seat at the bar and talk by candlelight.
Ari is polite and thoughtful and attentive, and Charlotte is sweet and animated and smitten, and by the time they head out of the restaurant and in the direction of the Columbia lofts, she is rosy-cheeked and giddy with anticipation, whispering flirtatious jokes into his ear as she rubs his arm.
Back at his apartment, he follows Charlotte’s cues in silence as they shed their clothes and slide onto his bed.
But in the darkness, he can only see Sam.
She swims in his thoughts, fully formed, as real as if she were the one here with him.
Winged lion on her lapel. Smooth, pale hands gliding against brick.
Eyes dilated, yearning, filled with a hurt that had stabbed him through to the bone.
He closes his eyes and kisses Charlotte’s lips and throat, takes her nipples into his mouth, desperate to forget.
Charlotte moans and caresses his hair and whispers his name, but he can only hear Sam’s voice.
And when he makes his way down, down, past her stomach to where she has spread her legs for him, he can only remember the feeling of Sam’s smooth, slender wrist in his grasp, the graceful line of Sam’s throat outlined by streetlight.
Sam, Sam. Why are you back in my life?
“Ari,” Charlotte sighs, shuddering, arching against the bed as he kneels before her.
He runs a hand along the softness of her inner thigh until he reaches the pearl of nerves in her folds.
There, he massages her gently, sinks his fingers inside her, and conjures a steady wave of pleasure through her body, transmuting water molecules and blood cells into oxytocin and dopamine, adding on to the pleasure already building in her abdomen.
Her mouth opens in surprise, her eyes flutter shut.
He can nearly feel what she feels, realizes the unbearable sweetness of her ache, knows her muscles must be tingling with anticipation, that a delicious tide of heat is growing between her legs.
“Ari, oh my god.” She cries out and trembles in an orgasm more powerful than any she has ever experienced. She runs her hands through the dark curls of his hair as his tongue glides over and over across her dripping folds. It’s all she’s able to say. “Oh, Ari, how did you do that? Oh, my god.”
Then her words fade into shallow gasps and whimpers, and Ari imagines looking up past her wet thighs to see Sam’s straight silver hair spilling across his bed, plump little lips parted in the night.
The thought of her before him like this is so powerful tonight that he can almost weave the illusion across the scene, can see her here.
He’d forgotten how much of a hold she had on him, what it felt like to be subjected to her.
The way her head tilts thoughtfully. The way she glared at him.
The blade in her hand, pointed at his throat.
When Charlotte finally coaxes him up and wraps her legs around him, he buries himself deep in her.
Sam, Sam. Her name echoes in his mind as he rocks them back and forth in the darkness, transmuting waves of ecstasy relentlessly into her, hearing Sam’s cries in Charlotte’s voice, seeing Sam’s trembling body in Charlotte’s curves.
He feels feverish, his mind blurry and unsteady, like he isn’t really here.
Charlotte squeaks in surprise as he lifts her up effortlessly and pins her against the headboard, and then he’s thrusting into her hard and strong and over and over until she’s crying out again.
He keeps her precisely on the edge between orgasms, so that to her, it seems as if they never wholly end.
Her arms lock around his neck; her thighs shake, wet and sticky, around his hips.
It’s Sam. Silver hair, feather-soft, spilling over his shoulder.
Liquid dark eyes lidded with passion. Freckles faint in the night.
Mouth hot on his. Telling him to keep going, to do it like that, that she can’t believe it, she’s never felt like this, that she’s going to come once more.
He orgasms once, twice, loses count, his groans muffled against her neck, simultaneously lost in the moment and detached from it.
He feels like he’s suffocating. He is diving into a dark lake, and at the shore, he sees Sam standing alone, black eyes fixed on him, trying to decide whether or not to save him.
And would he? If she reached out her hand, would he just pull her into the water too? Would he drown her?
Will he?