Chapter Seven #3
The light had got into the room in that thin gold way it does after a change, lying along the floorboards and up the side of the bed, and Sasha lay in it and let himself be looked at by a man who had not slept in seventy hours and was going about this the way he went about everything.
"Ask me your questions," Sasha said. "You've got about forty of them and you're doing them in your head in order. Ask them out loud, it's quicker."
"You'll be a Vetrov bonded to a Ferrante."
"Yes."
"Your uncle will say he arranged it."
"He'll say it whether it happens or not." Sasha shifted onto his elbow. "That's the part you keep getting wrong, and it's the only thing you've been stupid about. Konstantin doesn't need it to be true. He needs it to be sayable. He has been able to say it since the second week."
Matteo absorbed that.
"Next question," Sasha said.
"If it goes badly you can't leave."
"Neither can you."
"I'm not the one who was sold."
"No," Sasha agreed. "You're the one who bought." He let that sit exactly as long as it deserved. "Ask the next one."
And Matteo, who had asked four, stopped.
Sasha watched him arrive at the edge of it and not go over. Watched the whole apparatus -- the stillness, the eleven years, the thing that made four men rearrange themselves in a container yard -- come up out of habit and try to close over the top of it.
"There's one you're not asking," Sasha said.
"Yes."
"Ask it."
"No." Matteo's voice had gone somewhere low and careful. "Because I know the answer and I don't want it in this room."
"It's already in this room." Sasha sat up properly.
The sheet went where it went and he didn't care about that today; that was one of the several things three days had cost him.
"So we're going to do it now, in the daylight, while I'm lucid and you're terrified, because if we don't do it now I'll be doing it in four years in a kitchen over something about the bins. "
Matteo said nothing.
"Say what you did."
"Sasha--"
"Not I'm sorry. You've never once said a useful thing with an apology in it. Say the fact."
The garden was doing its small noises. Somewhere over towards Studley Park a dog was going off at nothing.
"I used my voice on you," Matteo said.
"Go on."
"In my own house. On an unbonded omega who could not have gone anywhere if he'd wanted to. To make you stop talking."
"Why."
"Because you were right." He said it flatly, without any attempt to arrange it. "That's the part. If you'd been wrong I'd have argued with you. I put it in my voice because I couldn't answer you and I wanted the noise to stop."
Sasha found that his hands were shaking again and that this time it had nothing to do with chemistry.
"I want to tell you what it was like," he said, "and I want you to not say anything at all until I've finished, because if you comfort me in the middle of it I'll never get to the end.
"You didn't hit me. I'm going to be precise about this for the rest of my life, so let's start now.
You said one word and my spine did what it was told.
My head went down. My shoulders came in.
I stood in front of your desk with my hands at my sides like a dog, Matteo, and the entire time I was watching it happen from somewhere up near the ceiling and there was nothing -- there was no part of me anywhere that could reach the controls.
" He stopped. Breathed. "I've spent my whole life being the cleverest thing in the room because it was the only leverage I was ever issued.
And you turned it off with one syllable.
You proved, in about a second and a half, in front of nobody, that everything I am is a courtesy. "
Matteo did not say anything. He had been told not to and he did not.
"I haven't forgiven you," Sasha said.
"No."
"I might not this year."
"No."
"And I'm going to let you bite me this afternoon anyway, and I need you to understand that those two things are both true and neither of them is going to cancel the other, and if you spend the next forty years trying to make the first one go away by being kind to me I will find it unbearable."
"What do I do instead?"
"You carry it," Sasha said. "That's all. You just carry it. You're strong, you can manage it."
Matteo's face did something then that Sasha had only seen once before, over an empty foil sleeve.
"Then why," he said. "That's the question I wasn't asking. You've just described the worst thing anybody's ever done to you and it was me, and you're lying in my bed asking for a permanent one. Why?"
And this was the part Sasha had had three days to think about, in the gaps, in the black hours, with a glass of water being held to his mouth by a man who had turned one instruction into a religion.
"Lygon Street," he said.
"That's not--"
"Don't tell me what it isn't, I'm the accountant.
" He got himself up onto his knees, unsteady, and put his hand flat on the man's chest. "Listen.
Everything you have ever done in front of me has been considered.
You considered the number in the container yard.
You considered where I sat at that table.
You considered the four names and you were right about them, and you considered me on Wednesday, and you were wrong, and I've told you what that cost. Every entry in the whole book is an entry you had time to cook.
"Except one.
"You put your hand on my chest and you pushed me down before you pushed yourself down.
No thought. There wasn't time for thought, you told me so yourself, you couldn't get the order of it right afterwards.
" His voice had gone unsteady and he let it.
"That's the only unfalsified line in the ledger, Matteo.
It's the one entry nobody had a chance to arrange.
And I've audited it about four thousand times in this room over three days and it comes out the same every single time and I cannot make it come out any other way. "
Matteo put his hand over Sasha's hand, on his own chest, and held it there.
"So no. I haven't forgiven you," Sasha said. "I'm just certain. Turns out they're different departments."
After a while he said: "Say my name."
Matteo looked at him.
"On Wednesday I told you not to dare." Sasha's mouth twisted. "I'm giving it back. It's the only thing I've got to give back and I'd like you to have it. Say it."
"Sasha."
"Again."
"Sasha."
"All right," he said, and went into him.
***
Here is what was different, and it was not the light, although it was partly the light.
It was that nothing was making them.