Petur couldn’t help it. He began to laugh out loud. “Absolutely unbelievable. You have the audacity to claim that I’m something special, whenyou’rethe one doing the impossible. ‘Changing yourself is easy.’” He shook his head. “On the contrary, I believe our characters are fixed from a very early age. The gods know my parents would have loved me much better if I had been an easier child, calmer and more amenable to their will. I was none of these things, and I was punished for it routinely. Believe me, if I could have changed myself to please them back then, I would have.”
His gaze went a bit hazy as, with a melancholy heart, he remembered some of the sharper events of his childhood. “There was a time I would have done anything to have more of my parents’ love,” he said. “I didn’t get a chance to try. Theydied before I managed my first shift. Maybe they would have approved more of me if they had known how well disposed I am toward our magic.”
“The plague?” Deyvid asked quietly.
Petur nodded. “The plague,” he confirmed. When he was nine, a devastating sickness of the blood had swept through Delomar. Its source was unclear although prayers to the Triad indicated that it wasn’t magical in nature, at least. Whatever had caused it, no household was left untouched by death, the sufferers often drowning in their own fluids. By the time the sickness eventually burned itself out, Petur’s parents were its two best-known victims.
“I’m sorry.”
Petur shrugged with a nonchalance he didn’t quite feel. “It was a long time ago,” he replied. “Anyway, go on. You were in the middle of telling me a fairy tale.”
Deyvid rolled his eyes. “It’s not a fairy tale. I’m a living, breathing example of how you can make the decision to change your life and stand by it. I left everything behind when I decided to defy my clan and come down here. It’s been five years, and …” His voice trailed off, but Petur knew what he was thinking about.
“You wonder still,” he said. “About the people you left behind, whether or not you made the right decision, whether you could have changed things enough if you’d stayed.”
“I do. Of course, I do. It’s only natural to wonder, but I don’t let myself pine for it,” Deyvid replied. “I can’t. I would be immobilized if I did otherwise, unable to continue the everyday tasks of living. I did what I had to do, and then I put that life behind me forever.”
“I would argue that you didn’t change, though,” Petur said, leaning back in his chair and stretching his long legs out before him. If he pointed the toe of his right foot, he could easily reach the edge of Deyvid’s boot. He began to rub their feet together,delighting in the way that Deyvid jumped, then blushed. “I would argue thatyourcharacter has been fixed from a very early age.”
“How could you possibly know that?” Deyvid asked, taking a swallow of his own wine. If he was trying to calm himself down, it didn’t work. His face only became more flushed as Petur’s foot slowly trailed up his leg.
“I don’t need to have known you as a child to guess what you were like,” Petur said coyly. “I look at you now, and I imagine a boy with an overdeveloped sense of responsibility. I see a child on whom a great deal of expectation was placed, both by his mother and his father although only his father had nefarious purposes in mind for those expectations. I picture a young man who was willing to sever his own soul in order to live up to the heights that were asked of him.”
“More like down to the lows,” Deyvid muttered.
Petur shook his head. “No. You were asked to sacrifice immensely, and you did so. Probably without compunction, because you believed that it was the right thing to do. You didn’t obey your father because you loved him, did you? Or because you knew his judgment was superior to yours.”
Deyvid slowly shook his head.
“No.” Petur smiled with satisfaction. “No, you did it because you thought it was the right thing to do. Then when you were shown, finally, without a shadow of a doubt that what you were doing was wrong, it’s not your dedication that changed, Deyvid, or the strength of your belief. It was simply theobjectof that belief. You believed you needed to leave, and you did. You’re an all-or-nothing sort of man, the sort to take massive action in order to get, in order to do, what you think is right.
“And now.” Petur let a smirk crawl across his face. He knew it was an insufferable expression, but he also knew Deyvid, in particular, liked the look on him. “Now you’re here with me.Why? Because I’m unbearably sexy, and you want to do wicked things to my body? You do, of course, but that’s not the main reason.” Deyvid rolled his eyes as Petur went on. “You’re with me because you believe in my cause. You believe in what I’m asking for and what I’m trying to accomplish. You’re making the world a safer place for my people. That’s what you wanted to do with yourownpeople, and I’m not stupid enough to get between you and what you believe in.
“But I am smart enough,” he added, “to position myself to take advantage of it.”
“Gods above,” Deyvid said hoarsely. “You think you’re so clever, don’t you? And it’s absolutely galling to me that you’re right.”
“Hmm.” Petur smiled with satisfaction. “Does that mean you’ll let me take you to bed tonight? That would be new.” It was far from the first time he’d asked, but Deyvid had been resolute about staying in his quarters with the rest of the soldiers. Ever since he’d come there, they still hadn’t laid together in the way that Petur craved. But he’d known his patience would be rewarded.
“Yes,” Deyvid said at last, and a hot ember of satisfaction fell into Petur’s stomach and grew into an inferno of desire, spreading outward through all his limbs until he felt drunk with it.
“Excellent,” he growled, then got up from his chair. He rounded the table to Deyvid and held out a hand. “Come with me to the palace. Come to my bed.”
“I’ve been training all day,” Deyvid protested even as he got to his feet.
“I don’t care.”
“I smell like horse.”
“I don’tcare,” Petur repeated as he led Deyvid toward the door. They could be at the palace in ten minutes if he—
“I care,” Deyvid said, and Petur slowed down, then stopped. He turned to look at Deyvid, who was blushing hard but whose gaze was firm. “Give me half an hour to ready myself,” Deyvid told him. “Then I’ll come to you.”
“You won’t make it past the guards,” Petur said. “I need to escort you.”
Now it was Deyvid’s turn to smirk. “Oh, I’ll make it past the guards and all the way to your rooms without being seen.”
Triple gods, why was being sassed such a turn-on? Was this how his lovers felt when Petur did it to them?Formerlovers, he reminded himself. He only planned on having one for the foreseeable future. “If you don’t come …”
