He stands. Slings his satchel over his shoulder. Meets Zazyrus's eyes, briefly, and what he sees there makes his breath catch. The beast is looking at him with an expression that is unguarded and intent and focused entirely on Lethe and the heat in it is unmistakable and Lethe's body responds, instant and devastating, warmth pooling low in his belly and his skin going tight.
He looks away.
"See you tomorrow," he says, and his voice is almost normal. Almost.
He walks up the corridor. He doesn't press his back to the wall this time. He doesn't stop. He walks to his room and he closes the door and he sits on his cot and he presses his hands over his face.
I have to stop this.
He knows he won't.
He sits there in the quiet of his room with the ghost of Zazyrus's skin on his fingertip and the sound of that breath in his ears and the knowledge, settled and certain and terrifying, that whatever is happening between them is no longer something he can choose to walk away from. It's in his body now. In his muscle memory. In the way his hands reach without permission and his eyes linger without consent and his heartbeat quickens the moment his feet hit the stairs to the deep kennels.
He lies back on the cot. Stares at the ceiling. Presses his fingertip to his own sternum and traces a line down the center of his chest, the same path his finger took across Zazyrus's body,and his skin shivers beneath his own touch and he closes his eyes and breathes and thinksI have to stop thisand knows, with the bone-deep certainty of a man who has already fallen, that he won't.
Chapter fourteen
Chapter 14
The boy came in wrong today.
Zazyrus knows it before the cage door is fully open. He knows it the way he knows guard rotations and chain lengths, through observation so constant and so finely tuned that the data arrives before conscious thought can process it. The footsteps in the corridor were wrong. Uneven. One stride shorter than the other, the left foot landing lighter than the right, the cadence of someone compensating for pain on one side of their body.
Limping.
The cage door opens and Lethe steps inside and Zazyrus catalogs everything in the span of a breath.
Stiff. The boy's spine is rigid, held in the particular, careful straightness of someone managing pain by minimizing the movement of their core. His shoulders are drawn up and forward, protective, curling around his center of gravity. His left arm stays close to his body, guarding his side. His right hand grips his satchel strap with white knuckles.
Quiet. No greeting. No narration. No steady stream of words filling the cage the way it has every visit for weeks. Lethe crosses to his usual spot and lowers himself to his knees and the lowering is wrong, too slow, too careful, his face blanking out for a moment as his weight settles and something in his body protests.
He opens his satchel. His hands are steady. Of course they are. The boy's hands are always steady. It's the rest of him that tells the truth.
"Morning," Lethe says. The word is thin. Stripped. A single syllable delivered with the mechanical competence of someone who has a script and is sticking to it regardless of what's happening offstage. "I need to check your ribs."
He reaches for the bandage and his shirt rides up.
Zazyrus sees the bruise.
It's on his hip. Left side. A dark, sprawling bloom of purple and black that extends from the crest of his hipbone down toward his thigh, visible for only a moment before the shirt falls back into place, but a moment is enough. A moment is more than enough. The bruise is fresh. Hours old, not days. The color is deep and saturated, the kind that comes from significant force applied to thin skin over bone, and the shape of it is not the shape of an accident. It's not the shape of a fall or a collision or the incidental contact of daily life in the pits.
It's the shape of a hand.
Fingers. Spread wide. Gripping hard enough to burst capillaries across an area the size of Zazyrus's palm. A hand on the boy's hip, holding him still, holding him down, holding him in place while something happened that required him to be held.
Zazyrus's vision goes red.
Not the slow, familiar burn. Not the banked fire that sits in his chest and smolders constantly. This is different. This is sudden and total and devastating, a detonation of rage so complete thathis body responds before his mind can catch it. His claws extend, involuntary, scraping against the stone. His muscles lock. His jaw clenches so hard his teeth grind and a sound builds in his chest, low and enormous, rising from somewhere primal, somewhere older than thought, a sound that is not a growl because a growl implies warning and this is not a warning. This is fury. This is the sound a creature makes when it has found the thing it wants to destroy and is being held back by nothing except the thin, fraying thread of its own will.
He will see Demos burn.
The thought arrives with the clarity of prophecy. Not if. When. He will make the pit lord pay for every bruise, every mark, every night the boy walked out of that room limping and scrubbed raw and silent. He will take the hands that did this and he will remove them from the body that owns them and he will do it slowly and he will not look away.
Lethe flinches.
The flinch is small and quick and devastating. A contraction of his whole body, shoulders hunching, chin tucking, hands pulling in toward his chest, the instinctive protective curl of a creature that has learned, through repetition, that anger in proximity means pain is coming. The boy looks at Zazyrus and sees the rigid body and the extended claws and the fury written in every line of him, and the boy's first thought, his immediate, instinctive, conditioned response, is that the anger is aimed at him.
That flinch is worse than the bruise.
