He stays there, just breathing, for a long time.
And then Erath sits up, slow, still inside him, and puts an arm around his waist and kisses him without hesitating, and Sidney kisses him back, more desperate than he wants. Erath's free hand comes up to cup his jaw, his thumb brushing under Sidney's eye where something wet has gathered without Sidney noticing, and he doesn't comment on it, doesn't ask, just kisses him again, softer this time.
Nothing hurts.
Nothing hurts at all.
When they pull apart, foreheads touching, Erath says, “Come to my room.”
Sidney hesitates. The old script surfaces, the one that says this is the part where it’s over, where the transaction is complete, where the man on the other side of the equation takes what he wanted and moves on. He opens his mouth and what comes out is the fear, dressed up as practicality: “If this is just because we’re linked, or whatever—”
Erath’s hand tangles in his hair and pulls him forward, gently, forehead against forehead, and his voice is low and steady and leaves no room for doubt. “I swear to you it’s not.”
Sidney lets out a shaky breath. It comes from somewhere deep, somewhere structural, and it carries with it something he’s been holding for a long time. Not all of it. Not everything. Just enough that the weight eases and the breath that follows is lighter and the man in front of him is close and warm and not going anywhere.
“Okay,” Sidney says.
Erath takes his hand and leads him down the hallway, past Penny’s cracked door and the sliver of light and the sound of a child sleeping, to the bedroom at the end. The room is dark and the bed is large and Erath lies down and pulls Sidney against him and Sidney’s head finds the hollow of Erath’s throat and his arm finds Erath’s waist and his body, his whole body, settles. Hesettles the way he settled on the couch the first night, fully and completely, without a foot on the floor, without an exit strategy, without a single part of himself held back.
Chapter 14
Sidney sleeps with his whole body.
It's an observation Erath wasn't prepared to make and is now incapable of unmaking. The man has an arm hooked around Erath's waist and a leg thrown over his thigh and his face pressed into the curve of Erath's neck, and the weight of him is warm and alive and staggeringly present in a way that the underworld has never been. Erath has existed in silence for so long that the sound of another heartbeat against his ribs feels almost obscene. The steady percussion of it, the heat radiating off Sidney's skin, the slow measured pull of his breathing. These are mortal things. Fragile, temporary, impossibly loud in the quiet dark, and Erath is lying very, very still because he's afraid that if he moves, the spell will break and all of this will have been a dream he wasn't supposed to be having.
He's not supposed to have this. He knows that with the kind of certainty that comes from being alive for longer than most civilizations, from watching love rot and erode and turn venomous in the mouths of people who once swore they'd die for each other. He watched it happen with Angelica. Watched herlove curdle into resentment, watched the way she looked at him shift from wonder to wariness to something cold and calculating that he should have recognized sooner. She had slept beside him too, once, curled against him in this very bed. But Angelica had always slept lightly. She'd always kept one foot on the floor, ready to leave, and he'd told himself that was just the way she was and not a warning he should have heeded.
Erath runs his fingers through the blond hair splayed across his chest and Sidney shifts, murmuring something incoherent, pressing closer. The bruises are gone from his face and his ribs are healed and the burn on his palm is nothing but memory, but there are other marks on Sidney that Erath can't undo with his mouth. There are marks that live underneath the skin, in the way Sidney had saidI don't like being held downwith the practiced calm of someone who has said it before, or wanted to say it before, or learned the hard way what happens when you don't say it at all. August's words sit heavy in Erath's chest. Sidney has a history with men who don't know how to be gentle with him. There's a violence in that sentence that makes Erath want to break something, preferably the bones of whoever taught Sidney to flinch when hands come too close.
He doesn't know their names. He doesn't need to. He knows them by the damage they've left behind in Sidney's body. The way he'd tensed when Erath leaned over him, the way his hands had flown to Erath's hair to push him away before he'd even decided whether he wanted to, the way he'd expected to have to struggle and then hadn't known what to do when there was nothing to struggle against. Sidney had kissed him with desperation, with the frantic urgency of someone who wants something and hates himself for wanting it, and Erath had felt every single one of those contradictions against his mouth and wanted to take them apart one by one until there was nothing left but the wanting.
He's getting ahead of himself. He's been getting ahead of himself since the moment he knocked on Sidney's door and a barefoot blond with pink toenails answered it and looked at him with exactly zero deference and an eyebrow raised and Erath had thought, absurdly, oh no.
The fire in the other room has burned low and the light bleeding through the cracked bedroom door has gone from sapphire to a dim, bruised blue. The underworld doesn't have a sunrise. It doesn't have weather, or seasons, or any of the markers that mortals use to divide their days into something manageable. Time here is measured in the passage of souls, in the slow churn of the river, in the way the light shifts and settles and never quite goes out. But tonight the underworld is quieter than its been in months. The souls are moving untroubled through the river, the grounds are still, and the usual hum of activity that thrums through the bedrock beneath him has gone soft and low and almost peaceful. He realizes, with something approaching alarm, that it's because Penny is here. And Sidney is here. And the three of them, linked by whatever power Penny has woven between them, are anchoring this place in a way it hasn't been anchored since Angelica left.
He thinks about what comes next and doesn't like any of the answers.
The Coven isn't going to stop. They can't afford to. Whatever Anabeth is building, whatever Angelica is whispering in her ear, it requires Penny, and they're going to keep coming until they get her or until every last one of them is dead. Erath can protect Penny here, in his domain, where his power is absolute and no witch or golem or coven can touch her. But he can't keep her here forever. She's half mortal. She needs the sun and the noise and the overwhelming mundanity of the world above, and keeping her locked in the underworld to keep her safe is just another kind of cage.
And then there's Sidney. Sidney, who is brave and sharp and entirely too human for any of this. Sidney, who told two witches from the most dangerous coven in Haven to touch grass and didn't blink. Sidney, who climbed down a fire escape with cracked ribs and a child on his back and descended into the literal underworld because a five-year-old asked him to. Sidney, who is now tangled up in the politics of death and the machinations of a coven and the complicated wreckage of Erath's failed marriage, all because he saw a scared little girl in a bar booth and decided she was worth protecting.
The Coven already knows his face. They've already put hands on him. They will do it again, and they will not be as restrained the next time, because the next time they won't be looking for information. They'll be looking for leverage. And Sidney, stubborn and brave and infuriatingly mortal, will plant his feet and look them in the eye and refuse to bend and they will break him for it.
The safest place for Sidney is beside Erath, where the bond Penny has forged extends Erath's protection over him, where his proximity alone makes Sidney untouchable by anything that falls within his jurisdiction. And the most dangerous place for Sidney is beside Erath, because the closer he gets, the more he becomes a target, and because Erath is not gentle by nature. He is patient, and he is deliberate, and tonight he held his hands at Sidney's waist and let him set the pace and kissed him back when Sidney kissed him, but he is still the god of death. His hands are not clean. His history is not kind. And he is falling for a man who flinches at sudden movements and sleeps with his whole body because he's decided, for whatever reason, that the arms around him are safe enough to stop guarding against.
Erath doesn't deserve that trust. He's aware of it in the way you're aware of a wound you're trying not to look at. Sidney gave it freely, or freely enough, and Erath took it because hewanted to and because Sidney wanted him to and because the way Sidney said okay and let Erath pull him into his bed had been so quiet, so careful, that turning him away would have been crueler than letting him in. But deserving it is a different thing. Deserving it requires being the kind of man who doesn't get the people around him killed, and Erath's track record on that front is not encouraging.
He closes his eyes. He doesn't sleep. He has never slept, not once in the entirety of his existence, because sleep is a rehearsal for death and he is death and there's nothing to rehearse. But he rests there, with Sidney's heartbeat against his ribs and Sidney's breath warm on his throat and Sidney's hand curled loosely against his chest, and he lets himself have this. One night. One stretch of quiet in the dark before the world above comes crashing back down on all of them.
Sidney shifts in his sleep and mumbles something that sounds suspiciously like a complaint, and Erath huffs out a breath that is almost, very nearly, a laugh.
He pulls the blanket higher over Sidney's shoulder, presses his mouth against the top of his head, and holds on.
Chapter 15
It's been three days in the underworld and Penny is climbing the walls. Not literally. Figuratively. But there's a fine line with a five-year-old and Sidney doesn't know how much longer it's going to be until she's hanging from the rafters. He's pretty tired of being in the doom and gloom himself. Not to mention he's been wearing Erath's clothes for three days, because he has none of his own, and while there's certainly something warm and fuzzy about wearing the clothes of the guy you're sleeping with, Sidney desperately wants to wear underwear again. And to have clothes that actually fit him. Pants that don't pool at his ankles. A shirt that doesn't hang off his shoulders and smell so distractingly good that he keeps catching himself pressing his nose into the collar when no one's looking.
Which is why, when Erath is gone and can't loom over them and insist they die of boredom in the underworld, Sidney puts on Penny's coat, zips it to her chin, and takes her back up the subway stairs into the glorious, overcast light of the above.
