Around fifty, the voices of his parents receded. Nearly three decades later, he wasn’t entirely sure itwastheir voices and not just a ten-year-old boy’s lens of his parents’ grief. Misinterpreting their lashing anguish and thrown accusation and unjustified blame in the heat of unimaginable pain. Kieran was wiser now. He understood that he was not to blame for the death of his two younger siblings. But believing it had been so easy once upon a time. Building his identity around the guilt and self-flagellation had started before he knew how to stop. Especially when his parents shut down. Shut him out.
It was grief, nothing more.
But he was ten. And alone. And he had thought it was all his fault.
The carriage stopped and Kieran opened the door, hopped down, and raised his hand in offering.
He gaped at the appendage like it had offended him. Offering a hand? Yes, it was expected to help a lady to and from a carriage, but Kieran had never offered his hand before—his limits for societal convention ended at physical contact. Was this an emotional response to her implications that she had received very little genuine kindness? Unacceptable.
Her fingers slipped into his hand before he could pull away and he was at once elated and horrified by the sensation of her skin.
And the sensation waseverywhere. Warmth and pressure, just as debilitating as when she touched his face earlier. Hestared at their hands as she let her fingernails drag along his palm eliciting a maddening trail of pleasure—the sort of pleasure that drives a man to desperate extremes for more. As her fingers slipped free and summer air hit his palm, Kieran realized he hadn’t taken a breath.
He closed his fingers, waiting for his pulse to regulate. His body had responded as if attacked, flooding him with adrenaline.
It was a reaction to touch, nothing more. Simple and, yet, infuriatingly inconvenient. This was a fleeting, but manageable desire for contact. He acceded that she appealed to his baser impulses, but this…intensitywas born of scarcity. Kieran had closed himself off all too well and now he was reaping the consequences. He would have to find a way to alleviate this problem in the future. It seemed that touch would be inevitable while in Sera’s company.
Sera craned her head to observe the entire structure of the Spire from the ground. Her body bent further and further. Her eyes traveled higher and higher. Kieran reached out to steady her, but pulled away before contact. No more lapses.
“What’s in there? I can’t even imagine all the stairs,” she said, but he was already at the door. He heard the light tap of her feet as she hustled to keep up. He entered the two-story building that comprised the base of the Spire, where most of his work took place. The Spire was a symbol, more than anything. He hadn’t gone inside in over a year.
Inside the office was a steady bustle of activity. Carpet runners muffled the sound of shoes, and were bordered on either side by elaborate marbled floor. A flight of stairs went to an upper balcony that held the offices for the nine alderman—one representative for each race including all four fae Courts—with lower level government workers and employees scattered below. Though he knew every face that passed him. No oneoffered him a wave or hello. Kieran did a habitual sweep of the room, checking for any shadows that may have appeared since yesterday.
There was one shadow that lingered each day. It hovered behind a clerk with a persistent medical condition for the past two years. Most days it was unchanged, then the clerk would be absent for a week and when he returned the shadow would be a touch larger, clearer. Kieran hadn’t told him about the shadow, as there was nothing to be done. The clerk noticed Kieran enter and scurried to look away. Today, the shadow was at his back, fully formed. A month. Maybe two.
None expressed hatred or revulsion to the idea of Kieran’s gift, but it had caused a division. Like it was Kieran waiting to claim their souls. Kieran had grown used to their fearful distance over the years and rarely felt the isolating shame anymore.
He ascended the stairs to his office, the first in the horseshoe configuration that bordered the base of the Spire. The entrance was marked by a circular archway and small antechamber with a desk and chairs. It served as a waiting area and a place for assistants or secretaries to work.
The desk was empty, vacated for several years now. The combination of his high degree of self-sufficiency, other’s distaste for his brisk manner, and his own need to sever any traces of emotional attachment had him cycling through secretaries faster than was prudent. So he had ceased to employ one.
Still, even his efficiency wasn’t enough to maintain every aspect of his work, so there were oversights. His workload had nearly doubled in the fallout of the Yarrow Graves debacle, supplies were running low and he’d filled two boxes with overlooked pages that needed to be properly filed. He’d spent the two weeks creating a list for her.
“Is this my desk?” she asked, hopping into the accompanying chair and immediately swiveling and spinning in incessant, fidgeting patterns. “I’ve never had a desk before.” She pulled the chair up and straightened her spine. “I feel so important.”
“Amusing,” he commented, tone droll and therefore shifting the admission into sarcasm. “I have a list of tasks for you.” He began to extract the list he’d written in neat, bulleted lines from an inner pocket. “What few supplies I had on hand are here.” He motioned to a box on the desk. “For you to arrange how you like. There’s no need to complete every task today.”
She eyed the paper in his hand, but made no move to take it from him as her smile dropped. “Oh… does this job require a lot of reading?”
“To a degree, yes.” Her posture slumped, her genuine smile falling fully into a frown. Was it possible she couldn’t read? He hadn’t thought to ask. No matter. He returned the list to his pocket. He’d simply alter it so that none of her tasks involved reading and instead appoint a single task each day verbally. There. Problem solved.
“For today, you can arrange your desk with the supplies I left for you. Now, I’m going to attempt to get some work done. I ask that you stay here until I return.”
“What do I do all day?”
“Sit,” he instructed. “Arrange.” He slid the box toward her, nearly hiding her completely until she rose from the chair.
“What if I have to use the bathroom?”
“Down the hall, to the left.” He pointed, then returned his arm behind his back. “Don’t talk to anyone and don’t leave this floor. You have no clearance and no credentials, I filed the paperwork the morning you arrived, but…” his voice dropped, “Accountscan be inefficient, to say the least. And I have yet to receive your worker’s pass.”
“Can I see your office?” She got up without invitation and scooted past him.
Resigned, he followed her.
“You know what,” she turned a slow circle in the center of the room, “it’s exactly as I pictured. Everything in its neat little place. Not a pin out of alignment. No art on the walls. No family pictures.” She perched on the edge of his desk. “How hard would I have to look to find a missed detail? A pencil out of place? A book not properly alphabetized?”
More games. He did not have time for games, though… it did sound more appealing than staring at the same pieces of paper he had for the past three weeks to no result.
