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Rather than imagining Mer’s head being separated from his body, as will ultimately transpire, Lilari tries to guess what matters to Mer at this stage of his life.

She’s never known him this…obedient. Perhaps that’s not a fair assessment, given that she’s been away from him for half their lives, but she does feel as if she knows him, or that she used to know him, once.

Mer was an orphan (Lilari, by contrast, one of too many children) who seldom engaged with anyone, something Lilari observed whenever she came to the orphanage as part of her father’s routine ministry.

Mer’s natural stoicism was why Lilari committed nearly everything he did say to memory, incidentally inscribing his every thought on the very meat and marrow of what she was.

As a boy, Mer only ever spoke to come to the defense of others.

He suffered no fools, and would say one word where other boys would use hundreds.

Mer, even at eleven or so, could be incisive to the point of humorlessness, as if in his estimation, nothing was ever funny. But Lilari always knew that wasn’t true – that in quieter moments, Mer had an easy smile, and a full and throaty laugh.

But this is not the time for remembering. There will be plenty of that later, and for ample guilt as well. Lilari clears her throat at the sudden piercing jab in her chest, brought back to the present circumstances.

“There is one other thing,” she says. “Dometico is…Well, he has a reputation.”

“Yes,” Mer agrees. “For carnage.” Pointedly, he whistles a little shanty about Dometico the monster, who makes the seas run red with blood.

“Well—” Lilari swats this away for the nonsense it is, not that she’s getting into it right now. The violence that colors the name Dometico is very necessary, even for someone who could conceivably understand the truth. “I mean more along the lines of Dometico’s… reputation .”

Mer looks blankly at her. “You just said that.”

“Yes, but—” Lilari tosses herself beside him on the bed with a sigh. “I’ll just say it. You’re going to need to, you know. Woo me.” Fuck me, she means.

It looks for a moment as if something inside Mer has briefly disconnected, like maybe his brain is no longer attached to his ears. “What?”

“Nicano and I were lovers for a time,” Lilari says.

She can’t help a smile at the thought of it.

Halcyon days, truly. How she longs for the inattentiveness of her dead husband, who didn’t believe her capable of real – or any – harm (because she was a woman and therefore incapable of complex thought).

Moromaso, by contrast, will keep her locked up tight; it’s why Dometico is no longer an option.

A momentary sinkhole fills her chest. Then: “Nicano will only help us if he believes you’re Dometico, plain and simple.

And you’re already testing the constraints of believability,” she adds with a lying sweep over Mer’s physique, as if his aesthetic is in any way disappointing aside from in this single, stupid regard.

Mer’s face is blank.

Lilari feels an impatience that is actually, definitely, guilt.

Mer deserves better treatment, and a far better fate, but at what cost?

Her life? Even if that was a price she was willing to pay for anyone or anything, how could she explain her predicament to him?

The loneliness, the desperation, the unavoidable fallout from years and years of self-imploding lies?

“You said you wanted to help me, didn’t you?” she snaps. “I never forced you to come along.”

“Do you necessarily require criminality from your lovers?” Mer poses archly. “Nicano Asco the thief, Teorestro Dometico the murderer—”

“He isn’t—” Lilari grits her teeth, then gives up before she starts. “Fine, do as you like. I’m only asking for a bit of… mmmmm .” She moans, taking several thunking strides around the room, choreographing a prelude to lovemaking of the most desperate, rutting kind.

“Oh, Dometico,” she says, throwing her head back, “ yes—”

“They can hear us,” Mer mumbles, his eyes fixed with apparent mortification on his lap.

“Well, precisely,” Lilari hisses at him.

“Didn’t you listen to a word I said? Oh, Dometico, yes, there!

” She gives a shrill, almost yelping sound, which startles Mer into looking up at her.

“Okay, now you’ll want to—” She gestures for Mer to toss her gamely into the wall, but Mer seems to comprehend none of this.

So Lilari does the work herself, yanking Mer up so that at least two sets of footsteps will be heard tripping over themselves. “Dometico, oh, ohhhhh—”

She feels her cheeks heat for real when Mer’s eyes slip down to the top of her dressing gown, the one she’s been wearing since Kasalka cornered her last night.

It’s designed for maximum enticement, so as to procure her betrothal to Moromaso, and it’s very clear now that it works.

Mer’s hardly breathing, which amuses Lilari, but also excites her, a bit.

She’s spent so much time with shameless lotharios that she’s forgotten just how lovely restraint can be.

“It would be just magnificent if you’d contribute to the performance,” she says, managing to remember the context of their imaginary tryst.

Though the words come out…breathless, which she didn’t plan.

She didn’t factor in the possibility that Mer might have an effect on her, not when she’s been so unmoved by so many people over so many years.

But she can’t very well have Nicano overhearing, can she?

So when she speaks, she murmurs in Mer’s ear, her lips warm and soft and practical beside his bearded jaw.

In answer, he lets out a barely audible groan. Oh god, but what a groan it is, all manly and rough and intoxicating in its ambiguity – in the fact that Lilari can’t tell if he’s acting or if it actually escaped him, slipping through the clutches of even his extravagant restraints.

“Yes, good, like that—” Another hot breath in his ear, meant to be reassurance, though it comes off as sultry praise, almost as if she’d like him to keep going, yes, yes, good, never stop . “Perhaps another, if it wouldn’t trouble you too much—”

She yanks him flush against her, and he trips.

He falls, actually, into her, and they collapse together against the door with a satisfying thud.

But because Mer is genuinely not expecting it, he fumbles for her waist to catch himself, to keep them both upright.

The sound that leaves his mouth when he touches her is nearly feral, a strangled gasp that slips through his teeth.

“Yes, that’s perfect, you’re doing so well,” Lilari whispers.

Mer chokes on something, maybe a laugh, maybe something deeper, darker, more intimate.

He has his eyes closed now, one hand balled in a fist, the other floating carefully over her bodice.

Ready to catch them again if necessary, but offering nothing more.

There’s a tenseness to his jaw and Lilari touches it softly, with a fingertip, before moaning again.

“Oh, yes,” she whines. A sensual whine, a heady panting.

“Yes, YES, YES—Now you’ll want to, you know,” she whispers to Mer mid-performance, gesturing wordlessly to the fact that by now, they’d be rutting straight into the wood with every intention for property damage.

Mer looks blankly at her and she throws her head back, miming the throes of pleasure.

“You know? Like…YES, DOMETICO, HARDER—”

“You can’t seriously think this is how I would do things.” Mer’s got a slightly hangdog look to him, a palpable disappointment. At first Lilari thinks it’s directed at her, clocking that she’s a shameless harlot after all, but then she realizes that isn’t it.

“I would never—” His eyes rise painfully to hers. Beautiful, pleading, sad.

Then his gaze caresses her lips. “Lilari,” he says, his voice brittle, as if he’s managed to fit half a lifetime of craving between the cracks.

For a moment, Lilari falls silent. She forgets the theater of it all, though she knows Nicano is still listening.

She tries to imagine what this moment would be if it were the continuation of their playacted sex, but now she can only think of it as it is, which is also, somehow, sex.

She can already see the two of them coiled up in sun-soaked sheets, the sweat glistening on Mer’s shoulders, the way he’d pull away just to stare at her, the kind of honesty that edges perilously close to fealty, or love.

But that’s not the kind of sex she unilaterally decided they were having, and now she understands Mer’s disappointment, that she didn’t properly understand the way he would have done this with her if it were real.

She surprises herself when she leans forward and catches his lips with hers. Another sound escapes him, something helpless, impossible to commit to memory or articulation. Like chasing after fate and finally catching up.

He breathes into her mouth. She sighs soundlessly into his.

“I’m not—” he begins. “I can’t—”

Then there’s a knock on the door behind them.

“Open up, my bloodthirsty lovebirds,” says Nicano. “I’ve found that lost trinket of yours.”

***

The unspoken is becoming more noticeable, weighing on Mer as he considers the events of the past twenty-four hours – the real things and the false ones, the abject lies and their incidental truths.

As is his practice, he feels the presence of the uncomfortable and instead edges blindly around it, as if he doesn’t see it and can’t be made to look.

He focuses his attention on the information Nicano Asco has given them, which is that the thing Adelion wants from Lilari – the thing that can potentially save her life, Mer’s procurement of which would be heroically within the bounds of his forthcoming oaths to the Brotherhood, despite the impure thoughts he had while pressed against her – is located in the home of the Earl and Countess of Coricain, just north of the port of Setain.