Page 9

9

RAHIL

Rahil had not expected this.

To be fair, he hadn’t really known what to expect when he’d decided to tangle himself back up in Merc’s life without asking, but having the bulky man’s large hand wrapping delicately around his wrist was not it. His heart did an absurd little dance, thud-thudding against his ribcage so fast it made him dizzy. Merc’s scent wafted lightly throughout his shed—the rich tones of churned earth and the nuttiness of baking breads—but it washed over Rahil like an intoxicant as the man stepped into his space.

Rahil could do nothing but sigh, letting Merc lift his wrist above his head, Merc’s face so near, the lushness of his lips and the exposed side of his neck so close. He seemed not to even notice the effect of his breath on Rahil as he focused on Rahil’s hand until—

The cold, smooth skin of Merc’s trap-cords slid around Rahil’s wrist, taking the place of Merc’s warm fingers as he pulled back. Its path continued, snaking across Rahil’s shoulders and chest in an X that seemed more decorative than useful until Rahil leaned against it, and it tightened into place, nearly lifting him onto the tips of his toes with one arm bound behind his head. His heart thrummed even faster, and an awkward laugh bubbled out of him as his mind fought between fear and desire.

He trusted Merc. He thought he trusted Merc, but he worried now that perhaps what he’d trusted in was his own inability to care whether Merc was trustworthy or not so long as he touched Rahil in some capacity. Either way, he wouldn’t let Merc know that his palms were sweating again. Rahil grinned, wiggling the fingers of his bound hand experimentally.

“Kinky,” he said, somewhere on the edge between coyness and sexual harassment. “Have you always been this interested in bondage?”

Merc just stared at him, unfazed. “It’s to keep you from messing with anything you shouldn’t while I work.”

Rahil felt like there was more to it than just that—but he figured the more was probably just to fuck with him. He’d made it particularly easy. And he wasn’t exactly complaining. If he wasn’t going to be fucked, at least he could be fucked with .

Merc pulled over a small rolling counter and slid it in front of Rahil. Rahil lifted a brow at him, receiving nothing in response. That was almost a response in itself though—a frustrating but delightful one. After so many years focusing on the kind of people who would show him just how much they were enjoying his body in the moment, then throw him out the instant that pleasure passed, this stoic resistance felt like a breath of fresh air.

Even if Rahil had no hope of it actually going anywhere.

Except maybe a grave in the woods, based on the way Merc was eyeing his other wrist.

“So um, what are you planning to do to me?” Rahil playfully tried to tug his hand out of Merc’s reach, but Merc just waited for him to stop moving and smoothly caught him with a thumb and first-finger.

His gaze met Rahil’s as he held onto him, one brow lifting slightly. “Anything I want—that’s what you signed up for, after all.”

“To my ever-growing remorse,” Rahil lied. It was a lie, indeed—he could tell by the way his own body eased into Merc’s touch despite himself. Goddamn this man’s ability to make Rahil want to lay down his life for one more brush of skin. It was stupid, he knew. Stupid, and senseless, and with each gentle pressure as Merc laid Rahil’s arm across the table and bound it there using three of his trap’s silver cords, Rahil could not deny that the simple act of such nonsexual touch was turning something deep in his soul. Rahil relaxed into his bindings, tipping his head lazily as he watched Merc collect a variety of instruments along the other side of the mobile counter, including one small knife that looked sharp enough to cut an arm off if Merc set his mind to it. “Are you certain you’re not a serial killer after all?”

Merc did not confirm or deny it, but his lips quirked up on one side. He flashed his attention to Rahil and then back to his work, before saying, “Has anyone told you that you’re very calm for someone contemplating a terrible death?”

“All the time.” Rahil readjusted as much as he was capable of in his bonds, which turned out to be very little. “But really, what are you doing?”

“I’m trying to figure out why you react the way you do to holy silver.”

That caught Rahil off guard, in both the best and worst way. Merc was not only a craftsman, but a scientist of sorts, casting Rahil as his experiment, his project. But that project also involved holy silver. Rahil flinched involuntarily, nearly moving his arm out of Merc’s touch before the cords caught it.

Merc’s hand withdrew, concern flashing across his features. “Rahil,” he said softly, “I’m not in the business of hurting anyone. Not anymore.”

“You’ve said that.” Rahil wanted to believe him, too. His body betrayed him, though, tightening uncomfortably beneath bonds that had felt stabilizing only moments before. While his fangs were always out, he could sense them now in a way he couldn’t normally, like his brain was reminding him that he had points at the ends of his teeth for a reason. “I—I don’t know—” he began.

“I’ll stop now if you’re uncomfortable,” Merc cut in.

It was the last thing Rahil expected. It shouldn’t have been. It was only reasonable, only fair, and yet… Rahil swallowed against the lump forming in his throat and released a shaky breath. His limbs tried to turn to putty beneath the weight of his conflicting emotions, but he managed to jumpstart his brain fast enough to respond with, “Explain it to me, and we’ll see?”

Merc nodded. “I’m trying to make a metal that will lessen the effects of vampirism without the pain or burning that holy silver causes. It’s not to sell, either. It’s to aid in research that will create products for vampires.” The emotion in his voice was so unusual that it took Rahil a moment to parse it—it was love, he thought. Love, and pain. “This could be the first step in giving vampires agency over their bodies. That’s my hope, anyway. It might turn into nothing.” Merc rubbed his palm across his cheek to fiddle with a tiny piece of metal in his ear: a little gray earring, small and round. “I’m partnering with a brilliant scientist on this, one I know is not a stranger to helping people who have no one else to turn to. He’s done a lot of good for a number of nonhumans, and wants to believe this will be good too, if we can make it work.”

A lot of good. It sounded too good to be true: just one piece of metal for one honest scientist to better the lives of vampires. But it was a piece of metal designed as a more humane version of holy silver, and while the research field might have been a place where that was necessary, Rahil could easily see it pitched in other settings: anywhere it might be nice to eliminate a vampire’s unnatural abilities without receiving judgement from the more compassionate public. But, it was just one piece. Chances were, no one who might hold those views would ever see it.

This felt like too many if s and and s, and frankly, that was not what Rahil had risked tangling himself in Mercer’s trap for. It seemed callous, though, to ask if the alternative to helping was being kicked out. How selfish was it to potentially risk the future of his community for one more day standing in this shed?

But what if the potential truly was for salvation instead of sacrifice...

As though he could read Rahil’s mind, Merc asked, “I can show you the kinds of experimentation it will take to produce such a metal, and then you can decide?”

How was he supposed to say no to that? Rahil shrugged, as though his beautiful torturer hadn’t offered him exactly what his body was begging for. “I suppose I can submit to that.”

“Good. Then I’ll begin.” Merc nodded solemnly to himself.

Rahil watched Merc with a mixture of anticipation and horror as the smith drew from his lockbox a larger holy silver charm, then a full bar of the terrible metal. He could feel his arm hair standing on edge, like his very cells could sense the pain and terror this substance had caused his race for thousands of years, those horrors reinvigorated as new generations of vampires lost contact with their community’s elders and their cautionary knowledge. But that pain didn’t befall him . As Merc touched the metal to Rahil’s skin, soft tingles raced up his arms.

Rahil made the mistake of wondering what sensation they might produce if pressed to other regions of his body and his dick raised a nearly literal hand to volunteer.

Merc watched Rahil’s expression, and when Rahil smiled, he nodded slowly and placed the holy silver into line with his other tools. Then, he got to work. Rahil couldn’t tell exactly what Merc was trying to accomplish, but he seemed confident as he cupped Rahil’s arm, pressing different metals—including the holy silver—to Rahil’s skin before changing them slightly: heating and blending and cooling, dipping them in a series of liquids or sparking a current through them. He jotted notes between each new iteration, his brow furrowed.

Despite losing himself in thought for minutes at a time, he was clearly keeping an eye on Rahil’s reactions, switching out his arms and adjusting his bonds just as Rahil started to ache. With his focus so complete and his strong hands delicately working Rahil’s limbs, his thick muscles flexing and trembles running through the heft around them, Rahil was mesmerized by him. Merc aimed his attention like a looming storm, intense and certain. Every waft of his sweet, earthen fragrance made Rahil’s mouth water, and every professional brush of his skin against Rahil’s sent as many tingles through him as the strongest iterations of holy silver. Though breathtaking he was—and as much as Rahil knew he’d promised to be quiet—watching him work only made Rahil more and more confused.

As Merc chewed on the end of his pen, staring hard at Rahil’s skin for no obvious reason—certainly no sexual one, anyway—Rahil finally broke the quiet. “What are you looking for?”

“I don’t know.” Merc withdrew his pen from between his lips; no bite marks, but the barrel glistened. He narrowed his eyes and dragged his thumb across the back of Rahil’s arm. “At this point, I’m just trying to understand you.”

“There’s very little to understand, frankly. I’m a pathetic mess who happens also to be breathtakingly gorgeous and relentlessly kind and a useless people-pleaser.” Which was probably why he hadn’t managed to kick Violet out of his life despite how bad an influence he was on the poor kid. Huh. Well, who needed a therapist when a hot craftsman was available with ropes and probing inquiries.

Merc’s lips quirked again. “I meant biologically. But thank you, that does clarify things.”

“Aw, well, biologically, I’m easily contained but rather hardier than I appear, and, again, breathtakingly gorgeous.” Rahil raised a brow. “What things did I clarify?”

“Useless people-pleaser.” Merc lifted his gaze long enough to give Rahil a little smile, deep in a way that caught Rahil off guard and made his heart flutter up into his throat. Merc’s next words only added to the effect, made worse, somehow, by the fact that he turned back to Rahil’s skin, gently holding his arm as he said, “Though your assistance is far from useless right now.”

“Ha.” Rahil tried to force the feeling away with a laugh. “Says the man who’s trying to understand me by staring hard enough.” Except that Rahil had been watching Merc all this time, watching him forge his metal like it was another part of himself and press his fingers to Rahil’s skin as if he could feel beyond Rahil’s flesh to something deeper. “Which is preposterous, you know, unless, by chance, you’re not human.”

Merc swallowed so slowly that Rahil would have missed it if he wasn’t staring. “Why would you say that?”

“You can make holy silver, for one. Not a lot of people know that its creation is more than a strongly-guarded secret. You need a special touch for it, one found originally in a few places across Europe, a number of African tribes, and the Aboriginal people,” Rahil explained. Merc’s brow lifted and his mouth opened, but Rahil caught him before he could ask the question, a little smirk on his lips as he said, “I’ve been a vampire for more of my life than I haven’t. I’ve learned things. And I’ve been staring at you for too many hours not to see the effect you have on your creations. It’s almost as humbling as the effect you have on me.”

Merc swallowed a second time, his strong neck undulating, but he held Rahil’s gaze, and Rahil held it right back. When Merc breathed out, he seemed to relax. “I’m what often gets called a fairy or fae, in Western cultures.”

Rahil hadn’t been quite sure that was the right term for them, but it made sense. “One of the more privileged nonhumans.”

“I am lucky enough to be from a lineage that, in recent years, has been ignored by a lot of the cruelty that targets vampires and werewolves, but it hasn’t always been like this,” Merc said. “Do you know why it’s called holy silver? Because the Catholic Church of the Dark Ages produced it, back when vampires were half myth, and all myths were half real. Fairies were the only ones who could make it, and we did not make it because we wanted to. We fought the stealing of our children and the indoctrination and the bondage until the industrial revolution, and then…” He shook his head. “Our perceived freedom has come at the cost of my ancestors assimilating until our sense of community and culture has been all but extinguished. I’m what some people call a last generation.”

Rahil could hear the pain in Merc’s voice, and he knew—even if it wasn’t his own story—that it was real, and deep, and traumatizing, because the story of his own ancestors was only so different; the same worn trope packaged in a new plot. He knew what a last generation meant, too, but only from a long life of picking up rumors of nonhumans wherever he could. “Your genetics are so mixed that your biological children with a human would no longer be fae.”

Merc shot Rahil a scowl, like the warning pin of a cat’s ears. “All my children would always be fae, because they’re mine .”

“Of course. You know far more of this than I do,” Rahil conceded.

Merc’s anger dwindled out with a sigh. “You’re not entirely wrong, though. Biological children of last generation fae don’t have the same capacity for minor material alteration—that being what we call the spark, and humans once called magic, though we now know it’s no more magical than a vampire’s transformation. Occasionally, their inability to access the spark… harms them; causes fatigue, heart palpitations, seizures, and eventually neuropathy and organ failure. For most of history, the more severe cases of it have been fatal.” He twisted his pen around in one hand as he spoke, clicking the point in and out in rapid succession. With a shaky inhale, he shook his head. “Why am I telling you all this?”

“Because I’m a good listener?” Despite the teasing edge to his words, Rahil spoke gently—Merc certainly seemed to need it. And Rahil didn’t blame him. He knew what it was like to watch his children suffer in ways he could do little about, and if he had known to expect that going into parenthood, he wasn’t sure he would have chosen that path. He still wasn’t sure he deserved to have survived it.

Merc broke the layers of tension with a snort. “It’s certainly better than your flirting.”

Rahil relaxed into a grin. “Now, that’s just cruel.”

“Sometimes the truth hurts.”

“I’d rather be hurt in other ways, thanks. I happen to have preferred entry points for pain and neither of them are my ears.” He winked.

Merc stared at him, stoically unamused. “You know you’re only proving my point, right?”

Rahil faked a dramatic sigh. “It shames me, and yet I can’t be stopped.” He smirked as he added, “You know, I think you’re wrong about being fae. You’re not a fairy, you’re a bear.”

Merc’s eyes narrowed. “I can make you regret that.”

“Please do.”

The flow of their conversation felt so natural that as Merc leaned toward him, Rahil thought, just for a moment, that the fae smith intended to kiss him. The press of the holy silver to his neck shuddered him out of the delusion. Of course Merc wasn’t looking at his mouth—not for anything sexual, anyway. But the fleeting hope was enough to drag a groan out of Rahil, his lips tingling with unsated want.

It made it all the worse as Merc asked. “How does that feel?”

“Like my world is coming apart,” Rahil muttered, closing his eyes and imagining the sensation was more than merely scientific. “Fuck.”

“Fuck?” Merc asked, clinically.

“Yes, please,” was all Rahil managed as Merc drew the silver along the front of his throat, the experimental slide of it paired with the pressure of two fingers to the side of his neck—two fingers like vampire fangs, Rahil thought, except instead of venom, it was the fae’s microscopic power bleeding through him, sensing some shift within his cells. Feeling him on a level no one ever had before.

“So, it’s sensual then?” Merc sounded mildly quizzical, and despite all of Rahil’s expectations, he didn’t pull away, seeming to accept Rahil’s attraction without participating in it himself.

That was better than nothing—and as much as he yearned for the full thing, he forced himself to admit that this was, in fact, best . If Rahil could benefit from Merc’s touch and gaze and the pressure of his holy silver without worrying that he was dragging the smith into something that would ultimately destroy him, perhaps they could both get out of this intact. If he could push Merc for more.

That push couldn’t entail lying to him, though.

“The feeling of the holy silver itself isn’t sensual,” Rahil admitted, “I think that’s, uh, your presence in it. The pure sensation is just a tingling, and I can feel some of the strength leaving my body, but when you place your hands like that…”

“Hmm.” Merc narrowed his eyes on the skin between his touch and the holy silver, pressing just a little harder. “I can sense a molecular shift in your cellular makeup, but a constructive one, not a destructive one.”

Rahil swallowed, trying not to squirm with delight against the cords that held him. “In my cells?”

“I’ve no biological training and the body is infinitely more complex than the simple metals and glasses I typically work with; the knowledge is more of a feeling than anything.” He withdrew his fingers, like the touch had meant nothing.

Rahil knew he’d have the phantom sensation of it for days yet, a pinch of ecstasy left behind.

“But I think I can use it,” Merc continued, putting the holy silver back on the table. “If you still feel content to help me? With one word, you can shut this project down. I wasn’t making any progress before you, and I’m not even certain I’ll make any with you, either.”

Shut this project down, he said.

This project, which was Rahil.

He tried to remind himself that there could be so much more at stake here than his own selfish desire for Merc’s attention, but Merc’s intentions were for good. He was genuinely trying to help vampires, not harm them. And if he could help support one particular vampire’s fantasies while he was at it… Saying no would be safe, but it would be an end to this. And saying yes—well. Rahil imagined days or weeks of feeling Merc’s fingertips on him, of getting to watch him work, catch his gaze, his scent, his attention from across the room. Rahil thought he’d have done anything for that. “My body is yours. Conduct all the experiments you want.”

“Your flirting truly is horrendous,” Merc replied.

Perhaps it should have hurt him to continue being insulted in this manner, but instead Rahil laughed, a bubbling, joyous sound that felt foreign to his lungs. It made him breathless and lightheaded and he didn’t mind. Right now, he was pretty sure all he could care about was the little crook in Merc’s lips, a soft chuckle accompanying it.

Rahil had, technically, none of the power—except the power to invade Merc’s life, he supposed—but now that he knew what to expect of the answer, he managed to be a halfway-decent person and asked, “Should I stop the flirtation?”

Merc shrugged, though his face revealed more than simple neutrality, his friendly smile lingering. “It’s amusing. So long as you don’t expect anything of it.”

“You did swipe right on me,” Rahil teased. “Though I suppose you ghosted me after, which should have been a sign?”

“You were confused whether the ghosting was metaphorical or metaphysical. I understand.”

After a delayed moment where his brain fought to make sense of the pun, Rahil cracked up. He was still laughing when Merc resumed his metalwork, but he could spot the humor on the smith’s face, and he vowed to himself that somehow, someday, he’d turn that gentle quirk into a proper smile.