Chapter 18
Demos comes back.
Three guards this time instead of four, and the cologne is different, and the wine is the same.
He stands outside the bars with his ringed fingers laced behind his back and his small eyes moving over Zazyrus with the calculating appraisal of a merchant reviewing his most profitable asset, and when he speaks his voice carries the particular lightness of a man who has discovered a new lever and is eager to test it.
"Your little lamb has been good for you," Demos says. "You fight harder when he tends to you. You win more. You earn more." A pause. The smile. "I wonder what you’d do if I took him away."
Zazyrus does not move.
"Or gave him to someone else. There are other beasts in this pit who’d appreciate a warm body.
Bigger ones than you, some of them. Less careful.
" Demos watches Zazyrus’s face with the avid attention of someone prodding a wound to see where it hurts.
"Or I could sell him. There’s a market for healers with his particular skills.
And his particular looks. He’d fetch a good price. "
Every word lands in Zazyrus’s chest.
He sits against the wall with his wrists on his knees and his face empty and his body still.
The stillness is the most important thing.
The stillness is the only thing between Demos and the understanding that every word out of his mouth is writing his death sentence in letters Zazyrus will carve with his own claws.
If the pit lord sees what’s happening behind Zazyrus’s eyes right now, if he reads the cold, absolute, patient intent that is coiling tighter with every syllable, he will never let Lethe near this cage again.
So Zazyrus gives him nothing.
Demos studies him. Waits. Probes. Zazyrus is stone.
The pit lord leaves, unsatisfied, and the guards lock the door and the footsteps fade and Zazyrus sits in the silence and the silence is very, very dangerous.
***
Lethe does not come.
The first day, Zazyrus tells himself it’s a schedule change. The roster shifting, rounds reassigned, nothing unusual. The first day is manageable.
The second day, a different healer appears.
He is older. Grey-haired. His hands shake when he unlocks the cage and his eyes dart to Zazyrus with the particular, twitching vigilance of a man who knows exactly how many handlers this beast has killed and is calculating his odds.
He sets his bag down at the maximum possible distance and calls instructions from the doorway.
Clean the wound yourself. Apply the salve. Wrap the bandage.
Zazyrus does not move.
The healer leaves. The wound stays open.
The third day, no one comes at all.
Zazyrus understands.
He understands with the same cold, analytical clarity he applies to guard rotations and chain mechanisms and escape routes.
Demos threatened Lethe. Not Zazyrus. Demos went to Lethe and told him that his visits to the deep cages were noticed and that the beast’s good behavior was noted and that the connection between them was a thing that could be leveraged, and Lethe, who has been surviving Demos for six years by being smarter than everyone around him, did the math.
Lethe is trying to sever the connection. He is trying to protect Zazyrus by removing himself from the equation, by eliminating the leverage, by taking away the thing Demos can threaten so that the threat loses its power. It is strategic. It is intelligent. It is exactly what a wolf would do.
It makes Zazyrus want to destroy everything in reach.
He tears his cage apart.
The straw goes first, shredded and scattered.
Then the water trough, wrenched from its bolts and hurled against the bars with a crash that echoes through the deep kennels.
He tears the manacle rings from the wall, his muscles screaming, stone dust raining down, and the sound of it is enormous, the rending of metal from rock, and the guards come running and stop at the end of the corridor and do not enter.
He refuses food. They push the tray through the slot and he sends it back through the bars hard enough to dent the metal.
He will not fight. They come for him on bout day and he sits against the wall and does not move and six guards with polearms cannot make him stand. They prod and threaten and he bares his teeth and the teeth are a promise and the guards retreat.
The replacement healer refuses to enter the cage. He takes one look at the destruction, at the beast sitting in the wreckage with bloodied knuckles and wild eyes, and he walks away.
Three days. Four. Five. Zazyrus sits in the ruins of his cage and eats nothing and does nothing and the rage burns and burns and burns.
Demos is losing money.
***
On the sixth day, the pit lord comes with Lethe.
Zazyrus hears them before he sees them. The familiar cologne, the wine, and beneath both, under the heavy tread of guards and the click of Demos’s boots, a lighter step. Quick. Uneven. The cadence of someone being pushed faster than they want to move.
The entourage stops at the cage. Demos looks at the wreckage with an expression that is furious and calculating and, beneath both, afraid.
He is losing his best fighter. He is losing money.
The threats were the wrong lever and the realization is written across his face in the tight set of his jaw and the way his ringed fingers flex at his sides.
"I’ll make this simple," Demos says. He grabs Lethe by the arm and pushes him toward the cage door. "You can have what you want. He’s yours. As long as you win me fights, he’s yours. Understood?"
The lock turns. The door opens. Lethe stumbles through.
The door slams shut. The lock turns. The entourage retreats.
Zazyrus does not look at Lethe.
He sits against the far wall with his knees drawn up and his bloodied hands on his thighs and his eyes fixed on the stone floor.
He does not look because looking will tell the boy everything and the boy is here against his will.
The boy was pushed through the door. The boy did not choose this and Zazyrus will not add the weight of his wanting to the list of things being forced on the person he cares about most in this pit.
The silence is enormous.
It fills the cage, dense and heavy, and Zazyrus can hear Lethe’s breathing, quick and shallow at first, and then slowing. He can hear the boy’s footsteps, soft on the stone, and they do not retreat toward the door. They come closer.
Zazyrus keeps his eyes on the floor.
The footsteps stop. There is a rustle of fabric. The sound of knees meeting stone.
Lethe kneels in front of him.
Two hands find his face.
The palms are warm. They barely span his jaw, small and steady and sure, and they cup his face with a gentleness that has nothing clinical in it. Lethe’s palms rest against his cheekbones. The pads of his fingers rest at the base of Zazyrus’s horns.
Deliberate.
Knowing.
After what happened last time.
Zazyrus shudders. The tremor runs through his entire body, violent, uncontrolled, starting at the point of contact and spreading outward through his skull and down his spine and into every limb.
His eyes fall half-shut. His lips part. A groan catches in his throat, low and guttural and raw, and his hands fly up and grip the edge of the stone behind him because if he grips anything else right now it will be the boy and he does not trust himself.
Lethe holds his gaze.
"I won’t leave you again."'
The words are steady. Certain. Said with the voice that does not break, the one Lethe uses for frightened creatures and impossible situations, except this time there is something underneath the steadiness that is fierce and tender and absolute.
His hands move.
They trace the smallest circle at the base of Zazyrus’s horns, a slow, deliberate rotation over the nerve-dense root where bone meets skull, and the sensation is devastating.
It floods Zazyrus’s body with heat so intense his vision whites at the edges and his hips jerk involuntarily and the groan that was caught in his throat escapes, loud and broken, filling the cage.
Zazyrus’s hands release the stone.
They find Lethe’s wrists. Not to stop him. To pull him forward.
Into his lap.
Lethe goes willingly.
His legs part over Zazyrus’s thick thighs, settling on either side, and his weight comes down into the cradle of Zazyrus’s hips and the position is deliberate and the flush that spreads across Lethe’s face and down his neck and below his collar is vivid and immediate.
He is flushed down to his chest. Zazyrus can see it blooming at the edge of his shirt, the pink spreading over pale skin, and his thumbs are still at the base of Zazyrus’s horns and his eyes are still on Zazyrus’s face and he is not afraid.
Zazyrus’s hands find the hem of Lethe’s shirt.
His clawed fingers work underneath the thin fabric, searching, seeking, pressing against the warm skin beneath.
Lethe does not stop him. Lethe arches into the touch, his breath catching, his lips parting, a sound escaping him that is small and encouraging and does devastating things to Zazyrus’s control.
For the first time in a long time, Lethe wants someone to touch him.
The wanting is written in every line of his body, in the way he presses closer, in the way his thumbs keep circling at the base of Zazyrus’s horns, sending lightning through his body with every pass.
Zazyrus’s hands roam upward beneath the shirt. His claws are careful, his touch reduced to the broad, calloused pads of his fingers and thumbs, and they travel the terrain of Lethe’s torso, over ribs, over the flat plane of his stomach, up the center of his chest. His thumbs find Lethe’s nipples.
Lethe keens.