15. 14
Iknocked on the door of the House of Pain, my boots finding the path too easily, my throat dry.
Eliza answered the door, and I hated that I was disappointed it wasn’t the man himself.
“Hi, Annie,” she said, scanning my dusty boots. Her sleek hair fell over her face and masked her port-wine stain. Her eyebrow flicked. “Are you here for Davian?”
I swallowed past the implication in her tone and expression. “Yes.”
She waved me inside, and I followed her through to the lobby room.
The little white cat was sitting on the table as she had been before, trying her hardest to knock a cup off the top.
“Carnage, stop it,” Eliza said, dashing forwards to grab the cup right before it fell. She looked at me over her shoulder with a grimace. “Carry on through, he’s in the main room.”
I nodded, as if that were the natural order of things. As if it was totally fine for me to walk alone into the main room of the House of Pain. I squared my shoulders and walked into the corridor Davian had led me through before.
What was I doing? Two letters and a touch on the arm. Was I truly that easy? I blushed to my roots as I realised everything Davian had accused me of was probably true.
But I was already here, and despite my head thinking one thing, the heat in my blood, and my concern at his note, spurred me forwards. I pushed into the room, and covered my mouth as I coughed in the thick pipe smoke.
The room was as it had been before. Plant-covered, cushion-covered, and dimly lit.
I scanned its nooks for him, and when I didn’t immediately see him, I almost ran.
What if he was with a client? I thought of how Fella and Camriel had left their rooms; sweating and satisfied, and I shuddered. I didn’t want to see him like that.
That was a lie.
I did want to see him like that, but it would have hurt more knowing it was by someone else’s doing; that the cause of his shining skin was the delight of injuring some stranger. Not that I wanted to be injured. Or had any claim over him. Ekris above.
It was all too much, I shouldn’t have come. I placed my hand on the door behind me and found the cool metal handle. In turning, though, I looked to my right, into another alcove I hadn’t seen in my cursory sweep.
Hidden in the shadows, behind a cloud of smoke, he lay sprawled, propped up by one elbow as he stared at an empty glass on a table.
He was still masked, and yet his shirt was open entirely, creating an intimacy at odds with the formality of his mask.
In this position, half the shirt fell over him and covered most of his chest. Most. There was still a sliver of his right rib cage, the brown skin below ribbed with muscle that glowed in the candlelight.
That same glow caught on his mask, ever-present and aflame with golden light, as if he were being forged right then.
His eyes were dull, glazed over and unseeing.
He looked like a damned painting. He looked like Ragnifort; a vision of a muscled man of metal and fire, poised to call doom down upon some poor mortal.
I made a noise. I wasn’t even sure how to define the noise, only that it sprung before I could stop it. Somewhere between a whimper and a gasp. His snared mortal. A woman drowned.
His eyes met mine, and he blinked past the smoke between us. His lips parted, and the aspect of Ragnifort in him faded to ash as Davian took over entirely.
Davian stood in one enviably fluid motion, and his shirt fell open, allowing me an entirely sinful view of his chest that I had to look away from lest I betray Ekris then and there.
I stared up at the ceiling, noticing for the first time it was carved into rose-like moulds around the high chandeliers.
I tried to find that interesting enough to hold my line of sight, and failed miserably as he stepped over in what felt like a single breath.
I forced myself to breathe out, and in again. Then I met his gaze.
Davian stared down at me with an intensity that made my hand fall from the handle. “You came.”
I struggled not to wilt under his watch. “You apologised.”
There was a flash of rare uncertainty, then he forced a smile. “Yes, well.”
A pause held, where neither of us knew how to proceed. He stood before me, his breath smelling like smoke and his eyes pinning mine. I couldn’t move.
Something changed in his gaze, and he turned to his side. He held his hand towards the curtained door to the back. “Please. Come through.”
I followed him, dumb and mute. I saw no one else in the room, staring at the slope of Davian’s shoulders and the creased fabric as it swayed on his back.
He pulled open the curtain, and I drank in the smell of him as I edged past. What was happening to me?
We both stopped on the other side of the door before the staircase. I couldn't look at him. Not now, not when we were alone in such close quarters. This had been a mistake. I shouldn’t have come. I struggled to regain my composure.
His voice was low, and it pulled at my stomach. “Can I take your cloak?”
“Yes,” I whispered.
I turned, my breath shallow. He pulled the cloak from my shoulders without so much as brushing my flesh. I hated that it only made everything worse. He wasn’t even touching me and my skin felt more sensitive than it ever had in my life.
I took a deep breath into the soft noise of him folding my cloak over his arm. I had come here for a reason, and I was acting like I had the first night Ekris had beheld me. “What did you need me for?”
His voice was still thick. “What?”
“You said you needed my help.” I stared at the wall, still not turning back to him. “That there had been a development.”
Davian paused, and I could feel how close he was to me. All I had to do was lean back, and the skin on my arm would brush his chest. I imagined I could already feel the warmth of his skin.
He cleared his throat. “Oh, yes.”
I felt him move away. The first step creaked. The distance gave me the strength to look at him, and the light was dim enough that he was nothing more than a silhouette in front of me.
I could manage this.
He beckoned. “Follow me.”
I did, keeping three steps behind him, even when he tried to slow as if to let me catch up. In silence, we reached the landing. We didn’t stop at my door, as I had expected. It was still ajar, likely due to a certain roaming black cat.
Davian walked straight past it, to the end of the corridor.
“Where are we going?” I asked, relieved that my voice sounded like myself again.
He threw his reply over his shoulder. “My room.”
It was casual, and yet it undid every step of distance between us. I was only glad he hadn’t looked back at me, so he didn’t see how my hands clenched and how I had to reach out to the wall to stop from stumbling.
At the end of the corridor, there was another set of stairs.
Tighter, winding. He checked I was still behind him, then strode ahead.
I followed, glad for the time to recover.
It was just a bedroom. Somewhere we could discuss the murder of his wife in peace.
His wife. Murdered. He needed me to help him solve it.
Once I had chanted murder another few times in my head, we had reached the top of the stairs, to find just the one door.
There was nothing special about it. A pine door with a normal handle.
He opened the door, and pushed it open. Then he waited in the doorframe for me to pass him. What could be perceived as gentlemanly was scourged by the heat still in his eyes. I wasn’t inventing this, whatever fire had sparked beneath us. But he wasn’t acting on it. I would not act on it.
Murder. Murder.
So, with the composure of a goddess of etiquette and the innocence of a lamb to the slaughter, I stepped past him and only barely inhaled his scent. Then I was inside Davian’s room.
I stopped dead, not clear of the doorframe. If I had the sense to predict his room in advance, I might have expected something dark and plain. Something that gave away nothing, with dark-painted walls and nothing to adorn it but a bed.
I was wrong. The room was… ornate.
In the next breath, he reached out and nudged the small of my back. I stumbled forwards a step, too quickly. Skittish. At least I hadn’t gasped this time.
I glanced back to see Davian close the door by leaning against it. He smirked, staring at me with a heavy gaze. “This is home.”
I turned back to the room.
On every available inch of the wall was a painting or the frame holding it in its claws. I could barely see the yellow paint through the constant barrage of artwork. On the surfaces were nicknacks which betrayed a whimsy I hadn't believed Davian was capable of.
His floor had several rugs, overlapping like waves against each other, not one in the same pattern or colour.
The bed was the only neutral space, the beige sheets a blank canvas against the gallery running riot in his room.
That too, was adorned. But by Whip, curled up asleep near the foot, his tail rising and falling in shallow thumps against the linen.
“Not what I expected.”
He stepped around me, and into the centre of his room. His smile was expectant. “Why?”
I nodded my head to the wall opposite me. “The art.”
He glanced at it with a hum. Explaining nothing, expanding on nothing.
I turned around, taking in the one wall I hadn’t seen yet.
Here, a piece of art stood out, for it was the only one that wasn’t of a landscape.
The others showed expansive moors, the seas at nighttime with a ship in peril the only source of blazing light, a misted wood, or opulent cities and babbling waterfalls.