Damon drops his hands away from his face and slumps back into the sofa chair with his arms crossed over his chest. He’s pouting. It’s hilarious.
“She killed the goldfish I won for her at the Colbie summer fair,” he reminds me.
“Ah, yes. Walter.” I sigh mournfully. “’Twas a tragedy, for sure. She was a good goldfish. Loyal and brave. Valiant and courageous. Gallant and honourable. Noble and virtuous. Heroic and—”
“Yes, Leo,” Damon interrupts me. Rudely. “I remember your eulogy. All seventeen and a half minutes of it.”
“You could have given the eulogy if you weren’t crying so much,” I remind him.
Damon doesn’t look even a little embarrassed to have gotten upset over a goldfish’s murder. I don’t blame him. If you can’t cry about your dead fish, then when can you cry?
King abandons my side to go join Damon, jumping up after a couple failed tries. Damon uncrosses his arms and hefts King more securely onto his lap, petting him absentmindedly.
“Walter was the best fish a man could have asked for,” he says.
I throw him an arch stare and admonish, “Don’t go out with a lunatic just because they’re fit, and you won’t lose fish in revenge plots.”
“Shewasfit,” Damon says as if that really does excuse fish murder.
“There’s no hope for you,” I declare, putting an end to that conversation.
I dismiss Damon and his ridiculousness, turning back to Rohan instead. His head is propped up on a flower-patterned cushion. He seems to be breathing evenly, which I take as a sign the clear liquid he was injected with really wasn’t meant to kill him. I’m very relieved by that because although Damon is a good friend, I don’t think that would stretch to dealing with a dead body. You can only expect so much of people before they stop answering your emergency texts.
Plus, Rex would turnmeinto a dead body if I dropped his boyfriend in any murder-related trouble.
Damon doesn’t comment on the fact that I’m watching Rohan with a frankly disturbing amount of focus.
I’d like to say that I’m watching him because I’m afraid he’ll wake up and have some sort of violent reaction to being in a strange, potentially dangerous place. But that’s not really true. Mostly, I just can’t get over how he responded to being injected with that stuff from the syringe. Or I suppose it was less about the clear liquid than it was about getting put to sleep to be presumably taken wherever Kitty was intending to deliver him.
It’s only when I hear the unmistakable sound of Kitty waking up that I leave my post at Rohan’s sofa side. I exchange a quick look with Damon and nod at the door.
“I’m gonna go deal with that. You look after this one.” I gesture at Rohan.
Damon doesn’t look like he agrees with that plan of action, but I don’t give him the chance to argue, leaving the room to go check out my toilet prisoner.
I’m careful about going into the bathroom, deciding to leave a healthy amount of distance between myself and Kitty. I stay close to the door, ready to dive out of it at a moment’s notice.
The safe-house bathroom is big and open enough that I can easily lock eyes with Kitty; I don’t have to look around any corners. It’s been modernised, the floor wooden and the walls tiled black and blue. The bathroom contains a walk-in shower, a large sink, and obviously, the toilet Kitty is cuffed to, which is furthest away from the door, set opposite the sink and shower. There are no windows or mirrors in the bathroom at all.
Kitty doesn’t look as pissed off as I’d expect a person to be when left on the floor with their arms wrapped around the bottom of a toilet. He doesn’t seem to be on speaking terms with any form of emotion, let alone one as passionate as anger. There’s not even a little bit of irritation to work with on his face. Kitty appears to have defaulted to an emotionally catatonic state, revealing nothing of how he’s feeling or what he could possibly be thinking.
I can’t read his body language either. He’s a blank slate, possessing a truly ostentatious amount of decorum for a person who is sprawled out on the bathroom floor of a stranger’s house. His body is primed but not so much that he appears tense. I think this is just how he naturally holds himself, ready and willing and dangerous.
I’ve seen his type before if not this exact make and model. I’ve seen people who have been transformed by the cruelty of those who hold power over them. The only difference from person to person is the who and the why. Plenty of people allow themselves to be refashioned into something others can use. Just because Kitty is young, doesn’t mean he didn’t choose this.
Kitty stares up at me exactly as he did on Chaos Street. There’s assessment in the way his eyes dart over me quickly from head to toe. He has to be wondering how much of a threat I am, possibly reassessing from earlier on tonight.
When we were in the car, I checked both Rohan and Kitty over for weapons. I was more careful with Kitty, patting him down thoroughly to make sure he didn’t have any more hiding places for weapons or syringes.
I found several knives and one gun each. Kitty’s appeared to be more of a street weapon and modified too. Rohan’s gun was FISA issued.
In the fluorescent light of the bathroom, Kitty looks somehow more attractive than he did on the street, which is really saying something. He’s got a beautiful face, the kind you only really see on magazine covers, the kind that aren’t supposed to be real and everyone says are airbrushed as fuck.
There’s a darkness to his beauty, though, as the case can sometimes be. If he was trained from a young age, which his skill level suggests, then he probably would have been taught to use his attractiveness the same as he was trained to use a gun or a knife or his hands to influence and kill. There are a lot of things you can get away with when you have a face like that, a truly outrageous amount you can be forgiven for.
I’ve seen that too, usually in the ritzier corners of the world. In high society, there’s nothing more lethal than a knife with a pretty handle, a distracting flash of glitz and glimmer before the blade slides past your ribs and into your heart.
I try not to let myself get distracted by the surface layer. There’s no doubt in my mind that Kitty is a weapon, carved and moulded out of flesh. Every well-honed curve and plane of him will have been put there for a reason, and that reason won’t be anything I can touch without expecting a scar or two in return.
