Rei
Rei lifted his eyes. Sevastyan was quiet.
Too quiet. His eyes were unfocused and distant, looking at nothing.
Lisa twitched, glancing towards Rei. Rei pressed his lips together in a grimace, acknowledging the wrongness.
Fear creased Lisa’s forehead. His aura had been anxious ever since he realized he was being left behind.
And now Sevastyan was gone, even if his body was still standing there.
Rei stood and moved forward slowly. He pushed Sevastyan towards the couch and down onto the cushions. “Phone,” he told Lisa.
Lisa rose from his knees and fetched. Rei climbed into Sevastyan’s lap, facing him.
His master was there, somewhere, feeling everything to the point that he appeared to feel nothing.
Rei leaned in against him, letting his body and his warmth settle against Sevastyan.
With one hand, he typed out a message to Ellisandre.
An answer came back in less than a minute.
Rei dropped the phone. “Go get clothes on. Alice is coming over. Just . . . give me a while please.”
Lisa’s eyes widened. But he stood and left for the bedroom.
Rei drew in a slow breath and ran his hands down over Sevastyan’s cheeks. It was always coming to this, the two of them in the dark. Now, even a little bit of light burned.
“Sevastyan.”
Sevastyan’s breath caught and rattled in his chest. His eyelids fluttered. Rei kissed his cheekbones.
“I’m here.”
Sevastyan’s arms came up. His large hands spread and clasped Rei’s waist. “I’m sorry.”
“Why?”
Sevastyan’s breath labored between his ribs. His face was wet. He pressed his forehead against Rei’s chest and clung to him. Rei threaded his fingers through Sevastyan’s hair, pulling it back over his shoulders.
“I—” Sevastyan cut himself off. He gathered himself and tried again. “I want you to be free. I want you to be happy. I will let you go. That’s the point?—”
Rei covered Sevastyan’s mouth with his hand. Sevastyan lifted his head, meeting Rei’s eyes.
“You think—” Rei chose his words carefully, his pulse drumming in his ears. “—you’re going to lose me.”
Sevastyan nodded, choking up. He looked away.
Rei flung himself forward, his shoulder catching Sevastyan’s jaw, but he didn’t stop. Arms and legs, he wrapped himself around Sevastyan’s larger body and held on.
“You. Are. Mine,” Rei hissed. His own chest throbbed. “I am not okay without you. I am not going to be okay without you.”
“But they . . .”
Rei pushed back, hands still gripping Sevastyan’s shoulder. He forced Sevastyan to look him in the eye. “I. Am. NOT. Okay. Without you.”
Sevastyan blinked—slowly—face flushed, lips trembling. “They are the light, Rei.”
“And you are my light.”
Sevastyan’s hands spasmed against Rei’s waist. “I’m nobody’s light, Rei.”
“Then I’m nobody, because you are my light. And if you’re not a light, then you’re what I want instead of a light. You are the air I breathe, the reason I am breathing. The reason I chose to stay alive.”
Rei thumped his fist against Sevastyan’s chest and fisted his shirt. “You promised to never leave me.”
“I’m not leaving you.” Tears rolled down Sevastyan’s cheeks. “I’d be letting you go. Be letting you free. I can’t—I won’t—keep you a slave.”
“You’ve never kept me a slave.”
“I have.”
“The Merchari have kept me a slave, not you.”
“But you are my slave.”
Rei laughed. He wiped at his face and went right back to gripping Sevastyan.
“I’m a slave, Sevastyan. And you’re my master, because I chose you. But I’m yours. Not your slave, just yours. You’re my master because you protect me. You keep me breathing. You make me brave. You put weapons in my hands and make me more than I was without you. But you never made me a slave.
That was what I was before you.”
Rei drove his finger against Sevastyan’s chest with each word of his last sentence.
“If I was really your slave, you wouldn’t free me. You’d cling to me even when I didn’t want you, like Alexi.”
“I’m not Alexi.”
“No, you’re not.”
Sevastyan drew in a shuddering breath. “We’re not, I’m not . . . I’m evil, Rei.”
Rei cupped his hand over Sevastyan’s mouth. “If I’m the victim, then I get to say who is evil. And you’re not evil. You’re dangerous. You’re dark. You’re made out of nightmares. I need that.”
Sevastyan stilled.
Rei closed his eyes. Some truths that were hard to say. “You think you’ve been using me,” he whispered. “But what if I’ve been using you?”
“You, no.” Sevastyan pushed Rei’s hand away and tried to move off the back of the couch.
Rei pushed him down, squeezing his thighs around his hips.
He gripped the front of Sevastyan’s shirt.
“If Anton had kept pulling back, letting the work go quiet, if you had not claimed me, would you still be here? You’d be lower ranked. Just a middling agent. You could have disengaged, like Anton did. Faded away. Taken fewer jobs. Gone mostly straight,
claimed an injury or an illness and slipped through their fingers, gotten away from it all.”
Sevastyan blinked like he’d never considered the option. Because he hadn’t. No matter what he thought of himself, he had a heart made for righteous war. He’d meant his oath to Anton, even if Anton had not.
It was time for a softer voice, even if it felt like his tones would shatter.
“But you found me. You pulled me out of the fire. Nursed me to health. You took on more jobs to make sure you had the wealth to care for me. Don’t think I didn’t notice. You built up your network and we caught Alexi’s eye. You rose from there. By then we were being watched at the highest level,
and not just because of where I’d been a slave. They started trusting you because you were at the right parties. And you were at those parties because of me. Too valuable to lose. Too many faces memorized to be allowed free. If you ever looked like you were going to go straight,
they would have taken me, or killed us both. You destroyed any freedom you had to leave—for me.”
“I—” Sevastyan swallowed and closed his eyes. “That’s not how—I was keeping my oath to Anton. I used you. My mother . . .”
“If it was just about keeping the oath, you could have picked a prettier bird,” Rei whispered. “One that wasn’t burned. One that didn’t want to die.”
Sevastyan shook his head. His hands were so tight on Rei’s hips they were going to bruise.
“You chose me,” Rei whispered. “And I chose you.”
“I’ve done unforgivable things to you.”
“You kept us alive.”
A sob racked Sevastyan’s inner being. Rei wrapped his arms around Sevastyan’s head and pressed Sevastyan’s face against his chest.
“We’re either both using each other, or we’re in this together.”
“How . . . how can you forgive me?”
“You’ve never done anything that required forgiveness. You’ve never hurt me. You’ve made choices. Dark choices. When there were no good ones.”
Rei cupped Sevastyan’s face in his hands, bracing them both to stare into each other’s eyes.
“There is nothing you have done to me that I have not done to myself. There is nothing you have done to me that you have not done to yourself.”
Deep grief had made Sevastyan’s eyes red. “It’s one thing to do it to yourself, and another to do it to someone else. I had all the power.”
Rei squeezed himself harder around Sevastyan. “You have exactly as much power as I’ve given you. I’ve always had the option to leave.”
“That kind of leaving, Rei . . . that’s not . . .”
“For me, it is. I chose to survive for my brothers, and then I chose to live because of you.”
“I took you without your consent.”
Rei cupped Sevastyan’s face between his hands again, pulling his love’s eyes up to his.
“You saved our lives. You gave me the choice to continue or not continue. It hurt. It broke me. It shattered you. We both became something that paid the ferryman for that river and still chose to go on with the marks. The other choice was . . .”
Rei choked up, tears on his own face. “The other choice was that it would have been someone else. I might have had to see someone take you and break you. I would have gone on, barely living, or died with that as my final moment. And instead—” Rei closed his eyes, tears sliding down his cheeks.
“Instead, you brought me here. And you saved Jun. I got to see him again. I got to see him free. Him and Jaewoong, and Geun, and Yoihei, and Su-jin. I got one more day with them. They didn’t know who I was, but I was there. I did their makeup, Sevastyan. I helped them make art. I was there,
feeling their feet through the floor when they danced. And that . . . that would never have happened if . . . if you hadn’t . . . if you hadn’t been strong enough to break us both and put us back together.”
“I’m not . . . I’m not back together,” Sevastyan whispered. “I hate myself. I had your blood on my hands. You weren’t even crying. You were just . . . there, on the floor, leaning against me, after everything I’d done to you.”
“It wasn’t you, it wasn’t what you did.”
Rei gripped Sevastyan’s collar with both hands.
Images of that horrible night were flashing behind his eyes, but he was here, in this moment, in this garishly white apartment that looked nothing like that dark, opulent room where they had both almost ended.
“Hundreds, there were hundreds,” he managed to say.
“It was them. The ones watching. Telling you what to do. I thought they would want a turn next. I thought their hands would be . . . on me next. I was scared of what they did to you, might do to you.”
“They did nothing to me.”
“Sevastyan.”
Sevastyan looked at Rei.
Rei gripped even harder. “You didn’t consent—either. We—both of us—we did not consent. There were two of us, that night.”
Sevastyan opened his mouth, denial on his face.
“Did you want to do that to me?”
Sevastyan shook his head. He didn’t look like he could speak.
Rei nodded. “Then everything you think you did to me, that was what they did to you. They didn’t use their own bodies. They used me, and they used you.”
Sevastyan cracked. He folded forward, arms around Rei, back heaving with silent waves of emotion that could not be contained.
Rei held him. Held him in the way that he had been too broken to hold Sevastyan that night when they’d finally gotten away.
Held him the way Sevastyan had needed to be held the next morning when he found Rei in the bathroom.
Held him the way Sevastyan had needed holding for weeks after but Rei still hadn’t been able to understand.
By the time he’d come out of his own haze, all the cracks in Sevastyan had been painted over.
He had put on his armor and swallowed down the pain of the violation and denied it all under a layer of guilt.
A guilt that had never let him acknowledge the wrongs that had been done to him.
“I still feel wrong,” Sevastyan whispered.
“I think feeling wrong is part of it.” Rei laid his cheek against Sevastyan’s crown.
“I feel ugly, sometimes, when I think about what I did with my first owner, the way I pushed myself to please. I told myself I had to keep Jun and the others safe. And it still felt wrong. Because I did it to myself”
“No good choices,” Sevastyan whispered. “You did what you had to.”
“No bloodless choices,” Rei whispered. “We just chose what kind of harm we would swallow. And we chose the harm that let us exist, with all the crimes that placed in our hands.”
“I think I became a ghost with all those crimes.”
“We both have.”
Sevastyan took a shuddering breath. “It’s terrifying. To meet Richard. And the rest. They’re . . .”
“Bright, yeah.” Rei wiped his face and gave Sevastyan a lopsided smile. “It’s easier to only be half alive. It hurt, the whole day, filming, but it was easier, because they didn’t know who I was. I felt like a ghost. But now . . .”
“Now someone is going to see us.”
“Why doesn’t it feel the same way with Ellisandre?”
“Ellisandre is almost as fucked up as we are.”
Rei laughed darkly and Sevastyan smiled back. He ran his hands over the bruises on Rei’s skin he'd left there three days before. “The first time Ellisandre saw me, they shot me, twice. They don’t feel like the outside world, like living in the light.”
“No, they’re dark enough to understand.”
Rei took a fortifying breath. “Jun will understand, a little. He made dark choices. They’ve all made choices.”
Rei leaned in against Sevastyan’s chest and dug his fingers into Sevastyan’s back.
“Don’t give me away. Not even for a good reason. Don’t let me go.”
“I can’t. Gods, Rei. I don’t know if I’m a good enough man to try.”
“I’m telling you not to try.” Rei pushed up so he could see Sevastyan again. He needed his love to understand. “You said you wouldn’t leave me.”
“I won’t.”
“Then you have to claim me.”
“You want to be mine.” It wasn’t a question, but it was still a request for confirmation. Rei’s heart hurt.
“I am yours. And if you don’t agree, if you don’t make it real, I . . .” Rei couldn’t speak. There were no words for a world where he wasn’t Sevastyan’s. It just wasn’t allowed. He wasn’t going to exist in such a place.
Sevastyan grabbed him. “You’re mine. I still need you to tell me what that means. But you’re mine.”
Rei kissed him. He had to. He put his heart into his mouth and pressed it against Sevastyan’s, buried his hands in his hair and gripped tight, holding himself up. Sevastyan’s hands were steel on his ass and back, pressing the two of them together.
Air became necessary. Sevastyan let Rei loose. His forehead fell on Sevastyan’s shoulder and they stayed like that, just breathing.
“If we’re going to finish this, I still have to be your master,” Sevastyan said.
“If we’re going to finish this, I’m demanding you be my master.” Rei pulled on Sevastyan’s hair. “I can only be the perfect slave for a perfect master.”
Sevastyan’s lips turned up into a bittersweet smile. Then he threaded his fingers through Rei’s hair, pulled him forward, and bit just above his collarbone at the base of his neck.
Rei groaned, leaning into the sweet pain. He tangled his own hands into Sevastyan’s hair, pulling on it, pinning Sevastyan’s mouth against his throat. This was what he needed. This was what he wanted.
Sevastyan let go with his teeth and kissed the bruise. “Mine.”
Rei tugged Sevastyan’s face up to his and bit at Sevastyan’s lip. “Mine.”
It wasn’t perfect. Not everything that needed to be said had been said, but it was enough. For the moment. As long as Sevastyan was his and he was Sevastyan’s, they could figure out the rest.