Page 4

“Oh. Oh, damn. I thought I’d kicked the habit.

” When Charon returned to his seat, Raul had moved back to the cushion.

“I wasn’t the best at it, you know. I had to be apprenticed for almost a year before I started taking clients, and the other submissives…

weren’t kind about my mistakes. I suppose they needed someone to turn on when they were frustrated, and, well…

” He blushed deeper, likely embarrassed by his babbling.

“I’d left by the time Lord de Rue opened the House of Onyx.

There was a nobleman who said he’d buy my debt. ”

Charon nodded. It was a common practice.

Most courtesans took on a debt to the house when they signed on, agreeing that the house lord would put money and gifts aside to bolster their savings when their debt was repaid.

That didn’t always happen, and many lords would manufacture reasons to add to the debt—one even hired men to break her courtesans’ windows during a hard winter.

Some laws were changing, but with the nobility already throwing a fuss over tax laws in the country, it would be some time before King Adrien addressed the Pleasure District.

In Raul’s day, there hadn’t been many options for courtesans.

They could hope for impossible popularity and a financial windfall, they could accept a noble’s offer to buy their debt and take them as a pet courtesan, or the house lord could sell their contract to the quarries.

Most courtesans dreaded the sound of the quarry cart rattling down the street in the early hours, and would do anything to escape it.

“He said he’d marry me,” Raul said. “I didn’t love him, but I thought it was the best chance I had, and I didn’t want to go home.

But it didn’t last. He was betrothed, and his fiancé wasn’t pleased to have a courtesan slinking around the house.

They claimed I’d stolen from them, and that meant hard labor. I…I ran.”

The kettle whistled, and Charon stood to prepare the tea. “And Yves?”

“He was an apprentice here.” Raul rubbed his wrists.

Had he been bound before? Perhaps it was something the noble had done, or the former proprietor of the House of Silver.

She’d been a cruel woman, prone to striking courtesans’ palms with her cane.

“He found me hiding in a garden. I’m afraid I blubbered all over him.

He didn’t have to, but when I told him that I was planning to run home, he took my arm and walked me through the city gates.

I was too terrified to pass the guards, but Yves kept me talking, and I almost forgot about them until I was out of Duciel.

I don’t know if I would have done it without him. ”

Yves would help a stranger evade the city guard without question.

He pretended to be self-serving, but he fed so many stray cats with his own money that a thriving colony lived in the back alley behind the House of Onyx.

He kept money in his purse for the beggars at the market and regularly paid for other courtesans’ orders at the tailor.

He claimed it was to keep them on their toes, but Charon knew better.

“So you’d like to repay him by marrying him?” Charon asked.

“If that’s what he wants,” Raul said. “But he needn’t be bound to me. I’ll give him what he needs to live comfortably, and he can go wherever he likes—be with whomever he wishes—and that would be enough. I can have a contract written up. We honor our contracts in Kallistos.”

“And if he’s looking for love?”

Raul stared at Charon, clearly too startled to look down at his knees.

“Is he? With a contest like this?” Charon didn’t answer.

“All I need is a chance. I know I’m not particularly charming.

I was a rotten courtesan. I can’t say the right words when I’m speaking to another submissive, not after the House of Silver.

They just won’t come. It’s as though there’s this wall, a glass wall I can’t break…

But that’s not your concern. If I could convince him to see that I mean him no harm, perhaps he won’t be hurt by someone else. ”

It must have been a blow to see the invitation, Charon thought.

Raul would have been thrown back to the memory of his own terrible arrangement with a Starian noble, and come to the conclusion that Yves was on the brink of disaster.

Still, if he was genuine, he was probably one of the few suitors who truly cared about Yves’ welfare.

If he was genuine.

Charon poured the tea and handed a cup to Raul.

He let his dominance sink into his voice, just as he had a thousand times before—soothing his mentor’s victims, comforting wealthy noble clients, sanding down the rough edges of a pleasure house full of ambitious courtesans.

“Why marry him at all? You could convince him to leave the House of Onyx quietly instead.”

“That’s where I might be a little selfish,” Raul said.

“I mentioned our contracts in Kallistos. In order to name an heir to the family after I retire, I have to secure myself as the head of the family. That requires a marriage. Most marry into the other guild families, but I have no interest in politics. I’d like to keep working, ensure that my cousin’s daughter has the skills she needs to take over, and find a place in Thalassa when I’m done.

A marriage will give me the power of a guild leader.

I can oversee contracts, which means I can finally annul my cousin’s marriage and bring her and her daughter to the main house. It’s… it’s complicated, you see.”

Raul would have broken in seconds in the old Arkoudai interrogation rooms. He was spilling his soul out to Charon, revealing a nervous, gentle creature who hadn’t known what he wanted to be in his youth, escaping the bonds of his family only to be wound tight in the trap of the House of Silver.

The way he clutched his cup spoke of a need for comfort; his wry smile when discussing Yves was real, and he was, at heart, not an unkind man.

Charon’s old mentor had been certain that everyone was a criminal in private.

If they didn’t actively oppose the former Strategos, they thought about it, and it wouldn’t take much to push them to admit their seditious leanings.

He would have called Charon a naive idealist for believing otherwise, but Charon had seen too much of the world now.

He’d seen the brutality of life in the quarries, the charity of starving mountain villagers who accepted a fugitive Arkoudai at their table, and the camaraderie of the courtesans in the House of Onyx.

If he’d remained Nikos—if he’d never left those dark rooms where his mentor worked—he would have seen Raul as nothing more than a coward, and that cowards were malleable.

Instead, he saw an awkward man who understood the danger of being a courtesan beholden to the wealthy, and a piece of Charon thought, bitterly, that Yves would probably see it, too.

“I can’t convince Yves to choose you,” Charon said at last, when he’d refilled the tea several times and Raul had relaxed enough to sit comfortably on the cushion. “You know that.”

“Yes, but I’d like to try,” Raul said.

“You could have hired him, like you hired me.”

“Maybe, but I expect most of the others have done that already. You work with him. Laurent said you were an honorable man. If you think that I’m unsuitable, you don’t have to do anything, but if I’m to court Yves, I’ll need help.”

Charon drew back on the couch, trying to look at Raul as Yves would.

Yves deserved more than a former torturer-turned-courtesan.

Was Raul what he needed? He didn’t offer love, but love could bloom if Yves had the inclination, and Raul understood the pitfalls of a courtesan at the mercy of the nobility. Yves could do worse, surely.

Charon could never give Yves the love he needed, but he could at least give him a better option.

“Don’t write him poetry,” Charon said, ignoring the pain in his chest as he turned to pull a book down from the shelf. “And his favorite poem is in here.”

“A book?” Raul said, and he smiled. “Oh, it’s the Prince’s Play. It runs in Kallistos every spring. There’s a monologue by the woman who’s been turned into a peony that’s absolutely filthy, but it makes me laugh every time.”

“That’s the one,” Charon said. “It’s playing in the Sun Garden Theater right now.”

He’d taken Yves to see it three years before, and Yves had laughed so hard he wept.

Charon had given him the script a few weeks later, but Yves was always reading it in Charon’s room, so it had quietly moved there over the years.

It felt wrong to see someone else holding it, but Charon quietly forced his unease down.

“Thank you,” Raul said. He got up, hesitated, and reached forward to take Charon’s hand. “You won’t regret it.”

He already was, but Charon simply shook Raul’s hand and let go.

Raul beamed at him and turned to the door, leaving the book behind on the chaise.

Charon picked it up. He thought of Yves at the play, pressed up next to Charon in the cheap seats just beyond the pit, wiping tears from his eyes as he wheezed with laughter.

Then Charon put the book away, closed the door, and smothered the flames in the fireplace until there was nothing left but a heap of dying embers.