“I feel as if the world has turned upside down and I’m clinging to the earth by my fingertips,” he confessed, burying his face in his hands.
Charlie shifted to stand between his spread feet. He grasped Jonathan’s wrists and pulled his hands away from his face.
“Did you truly not know what became of the young men you photographed?” he asked, hoping Jonathan was innocent. Either way, he’d still been a fool, but an innocent fool was better than a complicit one.
“I didn’t know,” Jonathan answered, the pain of truth in his eyes.
“What would you have done?” Charlie asked. “If you had known.”
Jonathan took a deep breath, glancing past Charlie’s shoulder at the bed. “I want to say I would have helped them,” he said. “But I think we both know that isn’t true.”
He met Charlie’s eyes again.
“You helped me,” Charlie said.
“Because I wanted you,” Jonathan confessed quietly. “I was selfish. I’ve always been selfish.”
Charlie shrugged, because there was a good chance that was true.
“You can leave now, if you’d like,” Jonathan said, turning his face away as if trying to hide how much saying that hurt. “You don’t have to chain yourself to me. I’m not your master, not really.”
Charlie’s throat squeezed and his eyes stung. He probably should have walked away. It could be argued that Jonathan had failed him, failed a great many people, and that he would be better off in the world if he left the man to his fate.
But he couldn’t. Despite his flaws, Jonathan had entered his life like a beam of sunshine breaking through bleak clouds. He’d stopped the hand of Death from taking him, and even though Charlie had other paths open to him now, he could not abandon the man who had changed the course of his life.
He couldn’t abandon the man he’d fallen in love with, no matter how flawed he was.
He dropped to his knees between Jonathan’s feet, gazing up at him and pressing his hands flat against Jonathan’s chest. Jonathan’s heart beat hard under his touch.
“You might have abandoned all of them,” he said, “but you did not abandon me.”
“Charlie,” Jonathan said softly, like he would give Charlie a list of reasons they should never see each other again.
“Yes, we’ve been caught in other men’s games,” Charlie went on. “Fabian has been taken away and bad men rule this place.” It frustrated him that he couldn’t articulate the things he felt more clearly than that. “But I still believe The Zagreus Den is good.”
Jonathan gaped at him. “Good? Still?” he asked. “When Brutus and Titus sent us into this disaster?”
“Still,” Charlie said with full confidence.
He thought of Valentine. He thought of the other young men who had seemed so happy and relaxed with their masters during the two times he and Jonathan had visited the Den. He thought of how contented the young man Brutus had brought to the studio for Jonathan to take his picture had been.
It was a stark contrast to the servants of Fairford House and the way Hammond had looked at him when he’d offered Charlie a place in his own den.
Something about all those memories taken together suddenly allowed Charlie to see clearly.
“We are in the middle of someone else’s war,” he said, kneeling a bit taller. “We need to be on the right side.”
“There are no right sides,” Jonathan scoffed, grasping Charlie’s hands and holding them tighter to his heart. “There are only you and me and then all of them.Allof them.”
Charlie shook his head. “There is a war, and we’ve landed in the middle of it,” he insisted. “What is the war and who are the armies?”
Jonathan blinked at him. “I don’t know,” he said, then pinched his face tight. He glanced up at the ceiling, then said. “It’s all sin and slavery. And my father’s caught up in it.” His eyes went wide and he stared at Charlie again. “Myfatheris caught up in it.”
“Why?” Charlie asked.
Jonathan shook his head and shrugged. “I have no idea. He prides himself on respectability. He has always abhorred me for my vices. I still cannot believe he shares them.”
“Does he?”
