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“Oh!” Raul was an older man, possibly in his fifties, with dark hair and a charmingly crooked nose, and he was possibly the most submissive man Yves had seen in his life. He smiled at Yves and waved him over, but when Yves moved to place a hand on his arm, Raul took a careful step back.

“Hello,” Raul said. “You look…you look well.”

And you look familiar, Yves thought, but he couldn’t quite place it.

Perhaps Raul was one of Yves’ clients, an early one Yves hadn’t seen in a while.

He bowed as a Kallistoi submissive would, and Raul gave him an alarmed look before bowing back.

“What guild are you in? I noticed the stamp,” he added.

He was an easily startled man, Yves noted.

“I’m…” Raul said. Yves hadn’t known that a man’s face could get quite so pink. “I make… I make glass.”

“In Kallistos?” Yves asked. The poor man looked terrified. “You have an accent, that’s all. Don’t worry, I won’t press if you don’t want me to.”

“Yes, I, um.” Raul looked down at his hands.

“Well, I think glassmaking is fascinating,” Yves said. “There’s a window in the palace with little bees all over it. You have to see it sometime. Maybe I’ll show you.”

“Made it,” Raul mumbled. Or Yves thought that was what he said. Raul seemed to be transforming into a timid mouse the more Yves spoke.

“Really?” Yves almost grabbed his hands in excitement, but stopped himself in time. “How did you do it?”

“Trade secret,” Raul said, and a bashful smile emerged, swift and lovely, before disappearing. “But I c-can tell you a few things in the carriage.”

Yves doubted Raul would gather the courage to say more than a sentence or two, but he gamely played along. “You like the Prince’s Play and you’re an artist?” Yves smiled back. If only Charon were there. He’d love the chance to speak to an artist from Kallistos.

Yves’ thoughts ground to a halt. What was he doing? This wasn’t about Charon. Charon was leaving Staria soon, and he’d have all the time he wanted to see the glasswork of Kallistos in person.

If Yves wanted to ask Raul about the guilds, it wasn’t because Charon had a book on guild politics in his library. It was because he was being thoughtful. He was being a fucking gem. He wasn’t going to spend a lovely evening thinking about someone who wasn’t going to be there by the end of spring.

If he laughed a little too brightly at the play and had one too many glasses of the fizzy wine they served to the balconies, that was his prerogative.

He was just getting to know one of his suitors—and posing for the others, some of whom were surely watching from the other box seats and balconies.

And if he wanted to sweep in late, never mind that Laurent gave him a dressing-down for causing two clients to reschedule, that was fine—it wasn’t as though he needed to take care of his reputation anymore.

He breezed past a scowling Oleander, swung open the door to his room, grabbed his robe out of the closet, and flopped onto the chaise with a book from Charon’s shelf…

From Charon’s…

Yves looked up. Charon was sitting in his chair by the window, brows raised in a rare expression of true surprise.

He was in just an undershirt and sleep pants—he still dressed like an Arkoudai, without the robes and gowns favored by Starians.

Yves’ favorite tattoo was visible over his collarbone.

It was a tattoo of one of the hawks that spread wildfires in the mountains to scare out prey, carrying a flaming branch in its talons.

Yves stared at it for a solid five seconds before he realized why Charon was there.

This wasn’t Yves’ room.

“Sorry,” Yves said, sitting up on Charon’s chaise. “I was, you know, uh.” I forgot where I was and assumed we were still talking. “I’ve been away lately.”

“You have a wedding to plan for,” Charon said, in the still, level voice that meant he was hiding something.

He always spoke like that to his clients, and he hadn’t spoken to Yves in that way since Yves was new to the House of Onyx.

Yves scowled at him, and Charon’s mask slipped enough for a hint of alarm to peek through.

“Yes,” Yves said, “which we haven’t talked about. Just like we haven’t talked about you leaving.”

“I’ve been planning to travel for a while,” Charon said.

“Why now?”

“Why did you decide to have a marriage contest?” Charon asked. “We’ve both been at the House of Onyx long enough. It’s natural to want something new.”

“And it’s not because of me?” Yves asked.

Because he was too clingy, too besotted, too involved in every moment of Charon’s life.

Because he was starting to blur the lines between love and desire, thinking of Charon’s rough hands making tea while Yves fucked clients who called him beloved.

Because Yves was, in the end, too much for even the most patient man in Iperios.

Charon stared at Yves, his expression open and startled for the first time in years.

“No,” he said. “It’s not you.”

Yves stood. “That,” he said, “was the worst lie you’ve ever told me.”

That was the worst lie you’ve ever told me.

Nikos was sixteen when he’d met Aster.

He’d been having trouble eating again. It hadn’t been an issue when he was a boy, but ever since he started his apprenticeship under Haris, his mentor in the Strategos’ interrogation rooms, he could barely keep anything down.

It wasn’t that he was squeamish. The others chosen for the apprenticeship were—two had to be carried out on the first day, and the third had only lasted four weeks before Haris had moved them back to the barracks.

Nikos was the only one who could look into the hollow pit that was once an eye and carefully clean it out while the man trembling beneath him opened bloody marks on his arms, reaching for any small comfort in the dark.

The trouble started when Nikos left for the day.

His old friends from the barracks had stopped eating with him after he’d been chosen for the interrogation rooms at thirteen, but he didn’t blame them.

Most Arkoudai thought the interrogation rooms were unlucky.

They held their breath when they passed them, and few interrogators had friends outside the department, if any.

So Nikos ate alone, went back to the house set aside for interrogators, and spent the rest of the evening in the privy.

In the end, the only food he could manage came from a small tea shop on the other side of Axon.

It didn’t look like much from the outside, but when Nikos first entered, he smelled honey—real honey, the kind they had in the south—and he sank into a seat by the window with a sigh of relief.

Something about the shop felt right, and when a young man Nikos’ age set a cup of tea down on the table, he met Nikos’ gaze and winked.

“Haven’t seen you around,” he said. “Where are you stationed?”

Nikos looked into the man’s beautiful, dark eyes, and said, “Marriage certifications.”

“Oh, that’s fun.” The man sat down in the other chair. “I bet you get a lot of stories there. I’m Aster. My parents own this place.”

“Nikos.” He hadn’t met many Arkoudai who grew up with their parents.

It was culturally acceptable to give your children to the army once they were old enough to walk and talk.

Even the Strategos did it, though his boys were put in the same barracks.

Still, couples could apply to keep their children at home.

He wondered how it worked. How did they handle discipline?

Did their children apply for jobs through the barracks, or did they have to depend on their parents having a business to pass down?

“Is it all right if I sit with you for a while?” Aster asked. He blinked at Nikos slowly, and Nikos felt something tickle in his chest, his dominance stirring uncertainly. Was Aster a submissive? “It’s so slow here that I might start screaming in the kitchen just for something to do.”

“Oh. Oh, sure.”

Nikos wasn’t sure if it was the meal itself or the fact that he finally had someone to talk through it, but he managed to keep his food down long enough to avoid running for the nearest exit.

Aster told him all about working in the tea shop—the fire dragons that slithered into the oven in the evening, the honey they bought from an apiary in the south, his parents’ arguments and the amusing customers.

He was only a few months older than Nikos, but he seemed to have a century of experience, and Nikos hung on his words with the hunger of a starving fox at the door.

“You should order the cookies next time,” Aster said, when Nikos had finished his third cup of tea. “I’ll put in extra honey for you.”

Nikos went back to his room that night with a strange, buzzing feeling in his fingers and chest, and he laid on his small bed above his mentor’s bedroom and thought of the way Aster’s fingers had traced circles over the table.

The next day, he helped Haris bury a man who’d died in the interrogation rooms overnight—that was how Haris put it, they died, they expired, they were found, never who or what killed them.

Everything they did was described in those terms, as though some mysterious ghost had done it all.

While Nikos wasn’t allowed to do more than provide a comforting dominance and a gentle hand after someone’s visit with Haris, he started to see his own actions as distant and vague, guided by another’s hand.

“What was his name?” Nikos asked, as they tossed the body into the pit they’d made. “That man down there.”

“It’s only a body,” Haris said. He leaned on his shovel and sighed.

“Bodies don’t need names. They don’t need mercy.

It is easy to confuse yourself when you do the work we’re training you for, but when we are done with you, you will know the difference between a body and a man.

There’s a trick to setting yourself aside when you do this work.

Look at me, Nikos. Do you see mercy in my eyes? ”