The Manor Has Moods #3
He saw me and stood halfway, then sat back down, then stood again, which was very Remy.
The jittery edge was gone. He had colour in his face now and he was wearing a clean jacket. He looked like my brother instead of the a stranger in my brother’s clothes.
“Nico.” He said my name like he wasn't sure he'd earned the right to.
“Sit down, Rem.”
“You look tired.”
“I'm fine.”
He held his hands around his mug and looked at me the way he had looked at me since we were kids — like he was trying to find the version of events that made him feel less responsible for the state of things. “Draco isn't exactly a normal guy to be living with.”
“No,” I agreed. “He's not.”
“I knew who he was when I got into the Ilya thing. Not everything. But enough. I knew Reed Holdings wasn't a regular company. I knew the man running it wasn't—” He stopped. “I didn't think it would get this far.”
“How much do you know?” I said.
“About Draco?” He wrapped both hands tighter around the mug. “I know what he is.” He met my eyes.
“You thought he'd kill me.”
“I thought a lot of things.”
“And now?”
Remy was quiet for a moment. “Now I think you're tired and you're not telling me everything.”
I drank my coffee and didn't answer that.
“Did you find out?” he asked carefully.
“I found out the hard way.”
Remy winced. “How hard?”
I set my cup down. “I'm not getting into it.”
Remy nodded and let that go. “Is he good to you?”
“Complicated,” I said.
“Complicated like bad?”
“I don't have a word for it yet. But no. Not bad.”
Remy nodded slowly, like he was filing that away somewhere careful.
“I'm going to therapy,” he said, after a pause.
I was honestly shocked and surprised.
“What?”
“He didn’t tell you?”
“No,” I said.
“He contacted me after you signed the contract. Said I had an obligation to get clean if my brother was carrying my debt.” Remy looked up. “He didn't use it as leverage. He didn't even mention it.”
I pressed my thumb into the handle of my mug and thought about a man who had kissed me in a kitchen this morning and reviewed his phone like it was any other Tuesday.
“Nico, I'm sorry.” Remy's voice dropped.
“I know I keep saying it and I know it doesn't undo it.
I know you paid for my mess. I know what it cost you to walk through that man's gate, and I know I had no right to put that on you, and I know sorry is the cheapest thing I can offer considering.” He exhaled. “I just need you to know I know.”
I looked at my brother across a coffee shop table and thought about what Draco had said on a balcony and thought about my father's hands and my mother's eyes and eleven years of being the one who held the pieces together while Remy broke them, and I thought about the fact that I was tired.
Deeply, structurally tired of the bleeding.
“It was shitty,” I said. “It was really fucking shitty, Rem.”
“I know.”
“You nearly got people killed. You nearly got me—” I stopped. “It cost me more than money, and I need you to understand that.”
“I do understand it.”
For the first time in two years, I actually believed him.
“Okay,” I said.
He looked at me. “Okay?”
“It happened. We can't change it. I love you, and I'm not going to keep bleeding over the same wound every day for the rest of my life.” I picked up my coffee. “But if you want back in, you stay clean. You show up. You stop making every disaster mine to clean up. Those aren't suggestions.”
He nodded.
“I have a job for you,” I said.
He blinked. “What?”
“The shop. Evie needs help with the floor while I'm at the manor. Inventory, client emails, keeping the lights on.” I held his eyes. “If you want it.”
“Evie hates me.”
“Evie hates everyone.”
“Evie specifically hates me, Nico, she once mailed me a glitter card on my birthday that just said stop.”
“She does that because you spent three years trying to borrow money from me through her and she had to be the one to say no.” I shrugged. “Prove her wrong, do the work and don't steal from the register.”
“I've never stolen from the register.”
“Yet. She's very worried about yet.”
We laughed at that.
The sex shop was four blocks from the coffee shop, which I was choosing to interpret as fate rather than coincidence.
Mateo was parked at the curb when I came back out with a black paper bag and twisted handles, and he looked at the bag and then looked very intently out the windshield at the traffic, which was not moving.
“Not a word,” I said, getting in.
“I enjoy breathing,” he said.
“Smart.”
The bag sat on my lap as Blackthorne appeared through the tinted glass, all dark stone and lit windows, watching the car come up the drive the way it always watched anything it considered its business, which was everything.
I thought about restraints and the particular way Draco's hands moved when he was being careful, and the specific quality of his voice when he said good in a kitchen with the morning light behind him.
The manor's front windows glowed warm against the early dark.
For the first time since I had signed my name in Draco Reed's study, it did not look like a cage.
It looked like trouble.
Worse, it looked like mine.