Rooks and Romanticide (13 page)

Picturing a future where he was married and content with the world seemed bleak and purposeless without Levi. Because Levi didn't judge him, and Levi saw right through him. Levi didn't condemn him. He listened to his angriest words and talked sense back into him. He didn't look at him in that quiet way as if to say,
You're severely damaged, but I can't point out just precisely how because you're the Earl
. Levi made him laugh,
real
laughter that hurt Cain's sides and left him breathless. Levi made him smile, and without thinking about it. Levi made him feel peaceful in the dark of St. Vincent's and on his balcony, and Levi was on his mind even in the daylight.

Levi was like a friend. Cain didn't want to get rid of him, ever. And that was a strange and unfamiliar longing that sank its claws into him and wouldn't let go.

“You won't want me in ten years, when I'm older and bitter and worse for the wear,” Cain assumed, sitting with Levi outside his room and watching the sky change colors over New London as the sunrise struggled to shake off the blanket of night.

Levi uttered a little sympathetic sigh. “You won't love me when I'm no longer young and beautiful either,” he argued, and it was the perfect moment for his confession, so Cain craned in, whispering along Levi's lower lip:

“Yes…. Levi, yes, I want you to be my dirty secret forever. I want to whisper your name to the priest day after day. That is, if I still saw the priest. I want it to be your name on my lips when I fall asleep at night and when I wake in the morning.”

He was a little ashamed of the honesty, but honesty it was, and Levi gawked at him like it was slowly dawning on him in turn the brazen truth of Cain's words, all wrapped up in sensuality as they were.

Levi made him feel alive.

To feel that way was a deep and aching need, like a rebirth of hope that was cold and sharp.

“Are you trying to seduce me?” Levi teased in a whisper, with his little half-cocked smirk and hooded eyes. Cain threw back his head and laughed. Because yes, yes, for once, he was the one doing the charming, and he believed it had worked.

“I want you forever,” Cain promised, breathless, wrapping his arms about Levi's shoulders.

Levi's smirk softened. A heated look sparked in his eyes.

At his touch Cain arched like a cat, lashes lowering. “I want you forever as my friend, and my fighter, and my lover.”

There was a brisk silence, a tense pause.

“Only if you'll have me forever,” Levi finally acquiesced, voice raw and ragged and full of surrender.

Ah, it seemed a worthy crusade now, but who could know if it would stand the test of time? Perhaps it wasn't going to last forever, perhaps it was, but in that moment the warm feelings inside felt infinite. Nothing else—responsibilities, engagements, revenge—nothing else seemed as important as kissing Levi long and soft before he climbed down from the balcony and left for his lodgings on the Rue.

And the next afternoon, utterly unaware of the dreamy look on his face, Cain smiled faintly and pointed to the papers his uncle and guards laid out before him in his office. He really needed to stop daydreaming and get on with business. Did everyone around him wonder why he was so calm and content today, so moved to smiles and nods instead of insults? Did it strike them as odd?

“St. Mikael's,” Cain murmured, running a finger over the papers. Police records, documents from the Yard. St. Vincent's was so much nicer than St. Mikael's—no, stay on topic…. “Yes, the gang connected to what happened at St. Mikael's back then… I want to know who they are. Find them for me. They're going to die.”

He waved a dismissive hand and turned around in his leather chair to prop his feet up against the windowsill behind his desk. Soon—but not soon enough—the meeting would be over. Thank God. All he wanted to do was look out at the brumal sun and think of Levi.

 

 

H
E
NEVER
said, “Let's talk of the world.” It just sort of happened.

“If heaven is for clean people, it's got to be empty. No one is clean. Not truly. We're sinful creatures, and that's the way it is,” Cain declared, standing under the bowed face of the Virgin in the dark of St. Vincent's, where he'd wanted to meet again after Levi's task for the evening. There was something quite disturbing but beautiful about the way his guns looked along his sides. Levi had yet to actually see him use them.

“What if we all create our own hell?” Levi echoed, sprawled casually in the front pew, arms folded behind his head and one leg crossed over the other. He was rather enjoying this talk of theirs and the level of leisure in the evening, the lack of formalities between them. Was that what it was to actually court someone? Was that what they were tangled up in—courtship they wouldn't admit?

“Of course we do,” Cain husked. “And we create our own demons, and our own monsters.”

“Perhaps.”

“Perhaps there is no hell, and no heaven either. What if the world is only what we make of it, and when we pray we're pleading with our own conscience?”

“Ah, tell me your soul really isn't as broken as that.”

“Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't.”

If it was so, Cain wore the misery well. He climbed onto the pew and sat on his knees next to Levi, narrowing those haunting, colorless eyes in his telltale sneaky way.

“What if we were to go at it, right here in this church, right now, like animals?” he prompted. “Do you think we'd be eternally damned?”

Levi threw back his head and laughed. Ah, it was moments where Cain was not a ruthless, vengeance-driven lord, but just a mischievous little boy—moments like that that absolutely took hold of Levi's heart.

“Turn down the lights, turn them down,” Cain hissed as he led the way into his room from the balcony one night. His room was empty, of course, at his request for privacy, and he swatted at Levi grumpily a few times before conceding to his hungry kisses and reckless embrace from behind as Levi followed him into the room. Cain turned down his own lights until they were both just silhouettes in the moonlight.

“You don't want to see who you're giving yourself to?” Levi teased.

“Why the hell should I?” Cain retorted, and Levi understood that what he meant was the feeling was more important than what he saw. Or perhaps the shame and self-destruction still hovered in the light, waiting to come down upon him in the safety of the shadows.

A mess of groping hands and greedy mouths, they made it to Cain's wide four-poster bed, with its elaborate carvings in the black walnut, and the light from the fire danced under a marble mantel. Cain's skin was flawless lily-white and possibly just as soft once Levi got his nightshirt open, trailing his fingers up and down that taut, smooth chest. Toes curled in the thick coverlets. Cain clawed at Levi's waistcoat and collar with a wild and possessive abandon that just fired Levi up even hotter.

“I want you!” Cain gasped. “I must have you….”

“You'll have me, you said you always get what you want when you want it,” Levi whispered back, and God, did it feel right to grind down against the stiff heat of Cain's sex.

The bedding rustled as they moved together, hips rocking. Cain covered his face with his arms when Levi dragged his thumbs over his nipples, and then he laughed and shoved his hands down the front of Levi's trousers.
Ah, release!
He was so hard and ready. Cain's fingers were skilled. With spit and more of that breathless laughter, he welcomed Levi—practically yanked him forward—and Cain rolled over on top, sending Levi in so deep, so far—

Well, it was no wonder Father Kelvin had cherished Cain so much.

Levi dreamt one night near the end of November of angels and choirboys and getting drunk on sacramental wine. Of bullets, and steam-powered gadgets, and pulling out the angels' wings feather by feather, and a little prince with a crown of thorns smiling down at skeletons. He dreamt of Finn, and at first he thought he was dreaming of the Earl.

It was a dreadful collision of feelings, of pain and an emptiness that might have been nostalgia or something else irretrievably lonely.

He dreamt of being fourteen, fresh out of training, and terrified he'd forget all he'd been taught before he could ever use it. The world had still been warm and full of sunlight back then, wandering through the stooping, sweeping, knotted old trees of the orchard, which had once been as big as the world before he'd learned a world existed outside the tall Ruslaniv walls. Finn was there, Finn in his plain tweed and charcoal-colored breeches, and Levi could still remember the way it felt to run his fingers through Finn's hair and listen to him talk about how he was jealous of the carriage hand, because the carriage hand didn't have to see the blood and the fighting like he did. Finn was one of Lord Ruslaniv's errand boys, and Levi could taste, as if he'd just tasted it the day before, that pouty lower lip. He could feel the way Finn had shivered against him and grabbed his wrists as if to push him away. But Finn, his father's errand boy, had only yanked him closer, and as the wind had rustled through the trees, they'd kissed and groaned and—and just like that, at the end of the summer, there was Levi's brother, Quinton, seething and snarling, and the way the blood had splattered across the paneled walls of Levi's old room had been strangely fascinating in the blue of the moonlight.

Levi awoke with a start, sweating and cold.

He threw back his furs and covers and moved swiftly out into the courtyard, where the stones of the patio were cold under his bare feet and the night was almost silent. He lit a cigarette and scowled up at the clouds over the moon. The Ruslaniv house was tranquil in such dead hours of the morning, when the sky was still black and nothing, no one, was stirring.

The foggy memory of Finn's face blended with Cain's, and Levi threw down his silver lighter and hissed, “
Shit
.”

He could deny it no longer.

He picked up his lighter again and slipped it into his breast pocket.

Something had changed.

It finally sank into Levi then, as he surveyed the Ruslaniv house washed in moonlight and smoked angrily, shivering and straining to shake the sick hold of his nightmare.

It sank into him that Cain Dietrich, the hated Earl, the morbid little prince wearing a crown of thorns, had become
worth
something to him. And any sense of loyalty to his own weary name could not make him hate that.

In fact, Levi
yearned
for it.

He yearned for Cain more fiercely than he'd yearned for anyone or anything in a very long time. He wanted him again and again, those damning glances and tricky smiles, and the way he laughed when they fell into bed together—and Quinton was gone, Quinton was long gone, so what was there to be afraid of?

Well, damn it all.

This was troublesome, wasn't it?

 

 

“H
ELLO
, P
RINCE
Charming.”

The Witch smiled at him over the pianoforte. The smile was harsh, just a shade or two of hate short of a sneer. Her blouse was unfastened over whalebone and leather, per usual, but the sight of too much bosom was one Levi had become well desensitized to.

He held his fingers over the keyboard, offering her the most uninterested stare he could muster. Behind her was William, looking uncomfortable as always. Eliott was nowhere to be seen. Across the hall, in the yawning threshold to the darkled salon, the Blond One and the One with Glasses lingered against the marble—Claude, Levi had discovered again the other night while cracking into his second bottle of Muscovian liquor. Perhaps it wasn't right to constantly forget the names of his own gang, but oh well.

“Yes?” Levi looked back at the Witch.

Her smile had crossed the line and become a pure simper, a few curls come loose from her tight braid and bouncing at her ears. The dark beauty mark on her left cheek made her look all the more ascetic. Gypsy, almost. She drummed her fingers atop the pianoforte, a sharp staccato of nails.

“We were just curious, darling,” she purred, and it was a shame the sound of it was so untrustworthy. “It's been nearly a month and a half now. You're never around. You're gone all night. You're neglecting your own duties as our commander. You won't speak of what you do, except to say that you're a ‘hidden ace' and ‘a make-believe gunslinger for hire.' Whatever. So how goes plan F, as it seems to be monopolizing so much of your precious time and energy?”

“Who named it plan F?” William's mouth twisted in doubt, but it might have just been his default frown of discomfort. The Witch didn't even spare him a glance. She rolled big brown eyes around sarcastically before settling them on Levi again, talking as if he'd been the one who'd asked.

“Plan
F
for
Fake
. Faking a friendship with the Earl, and so on. Snatching up his trust like a mole. You keep telling us it's getting on smoothly, there's no suspicions on his part, but—”

The Witch's nose wrinkled in a girlish snarl. Behind her, across the front hall in the marble archway to the salon, the Blond One started laughing from behind Claude's shoulder. Claude had pulled him tight in a suggestive embrace; everyone knew they were closer than they should have been. They must have been bored with the conversation already.

“—I want a serious update, Levi.
We
want a serious update. So, what's the scoop, oh fearful and respected leader?”

Oh, he just loved it, the way she still managed to slip the mockery in there. Levi saw William fidget in the periphery. He sighed, digging around for the will to involve himself again as he met the Witch's eyes. God, they all exhausted him sometimes. It wasn't so much reluctance or hesitance as it was a simple loathing of the people around him, and a little stab of distress as he reminded himself his affairs with the Dietrich heir were being closely monitored. He was not the only master of this game he played.