Not just on him.Onhim. The distinction is important. Zazyrus has been watched his entire life. Watched by owners appraising his value, by handlers assessing his threat, by crowds screaming for his blood. He knows what those gazes feel like. They are calculating, or hungry, or afraid.
This is none of those things.
The boy's gaze tracks across his shoulders, his chest, the expanse of his body where it breaks the surface of the water. Zazyrus doesn't have to look to know this. He can feel the path of it, warm and specific, and when he does glance toward the boy, the evidence is plain. Lethe's hands have stopped moving in the basin. His lips are parted. His cheeks carry a flush that the cold air in the cistern should not allow, and his eyes are focused on the point where the water meets Zazyrus's abdomen, where his skin disappears into the dark pool, where the cut of his hips and the dip of the V below his navel vanishes beneath the surface.
Lethe is looking at him the way someone looks at a thing they want and are terrified of wanting.
Zazyrus knows the shape of that particular expression. He just never expected to see it on the face of a human looking at him.
But the boy is not the only one who is looking.
Lethe is bare to the waist. His shirt is folded neatly on the dry stone behind him, removed to keep it from getting soaked while he works, and the lamplight in the cistern catches the lines of his body in a way that the dim cage never has. He is pale. The word feels insufficient. His skin is luminous in the low light, scattered with freckles across his shoulders and the bridge of his nose and the tops of his arms, and Zazyrus finds himself tracing the pattern of them the way his eyes trace the markings on his own body, following constellations.
He's slender but not malnourished. There is muscle in his shoulders and his forearms that speaks to the work he does, the wrestling of creatures twice his size into compliance, the lifting and carrying and brute daily labor of keeping the pits' investments alive. It makes him lean. Not soft. Just enough definition to catch the lamplight along the ridges of his arms, the cut of his collarbones, the flat plane of his stomach where his pants sit low on narrow hips.
Zazyrus should feel nothing looking at him except anger and disgust. A human. Another filthy human in a long procession of them, another body that happens to be in the same room, unremarkable and irrelevant.
That's not what he's feeling.
Something hot settles low in his core, heavy and unfamiliar, and he doesn't examine it. He doesn't trace it to its source, doesn't hold it up to the light and name it. He is in the water and the boy is on the stone and the space between them is full of lamplight and cold air and the sound of water moving and something else, something charged and silent and heavy with attention.
The boy's eyes travel up from the waterline. Across Zazyrus's chest. His shoulders. His throat. Up.
Their eyes meet.
Lethe looks away first. His gaze drops to the linens in his hands and his head ducks and the pink on his cheeks deepens to red, spreading across his nose and up to his ears and down his neck to his collarbones. His hands resume their work, too quickly, and he wrings a bandage so hard the soap shoots out of his grip and he catches it without looking up and his jaw is tight and his breathing is carefully, forcefully controlled.
Zazyrus files this away.
Zazyrus sinks lower into the water and closes his eyes and the heat in his core doesn't dissipate. He is aware of the boy across the chamber with a precision that is neither casual nor comfortable. The sound of his hands in the water. The rustle of linen on stone. The careful evenness of his breathing.
He doesn't kill anyone today. The guards collect him without incident. He lets them chain him. He walks back through the tunnels to his cage and the door closes and the lock turns and he lies on the cold stone and the heat is still there, low and persistent, and when he closes his eyes he sees pale skin andfreckled shoulders and the curve of slender hips and the pink flush on a face that turned away before it could be caught.
He tries not to think about it.
He fails.
Chapter five
Chapter 5
The summons comes at the late bell.
Not a knock this time. A guard, one of the newer ones whose name Lethe hasn't bothered to learn, standing in his doorway with his eyes fixed somewhere above Lethe's head because he can't quite look at him and say the words at the same time.
"Demos wants you."
Three words. That's all it takes. Three words and Lethe's body goes through the sequence it has memorized over six years: the cold drop in his stomach, the tightening of his throat, the brief and useless spike of adrenaline that has nowhere to go because there is nowhere to go. No running. No hiding. No locked door between him and the man who owns him.
He sets down the bandage he was rolling. "Now?"
"Now."
Lethe stands. Smooths his shirt. Runs his thumb along the strap of his satchel where it hangs on the hook by his door, a gesture that is habit and not comfort because comfort doesn't exist in this sequence. He follows the guard down the corridorand up the stairs and through the passage that leads to the pit lord's chambers, and his footsteps are even and his face is blank and inside his head he is already leaving.
He goes to the place he built years ago, the quiet room behind his eyes where none of this reaches. It has no walls and no ceiling and no door. It is simply absence. A space where he is not his body, where the things done to his body happen at a distance, muffled and removed, as though observed through thick glass. He has perfected this over time. He can maintain it through almost anything.
Almost.
