Rooks and Romanticide (29 page)

He let one hand sag down, off Levi's shoulder, and touched it to his face. Levi softened with the brush of skin. Cain smiled thinly. Levi was so pretty, clean-shaven in the morning and still soft by evening. Cain's smile faded.

“There will be no peace,” Cain whispered, and it hurt his heart to say it because he didn't want to see the disappointment in Levi's eyes when he shattered his beautiful vision of justice and ceasefire. The Rapier-A227 was cold on his skin. “Even if we draw up a contract, there will be no peace. Ever. It will be fake, a pretense, a shroud of play-pretend. Gangs will rip it apart again. We'll have no control. The people will forever want more. There will always be hatred—like with God and the Devil, people are always searching for somewhere to place the blame. And better yet, there will be no peace inside
us
because nobody will ever understand what
we
want.”

“You have got to be the most cynical man….” Levi's face darkened. “Listen, I want to teach you a lesson here. I may not have the right name, but I have twice the guts.”

Cain scowled in turn. “Don't you understand, Levi? Morally, you and I are ruined! We're sinful. We're going to burn in hell for so many transgressions! And we're
noble
. We're forever in the public eye and forever will be, and they don't care if we want to be left alone to each other. The only way we can be together is if our families stay divided in hatred.”

“That's ridiculous,” Levi hissed. “We'll find chances to be together whether they are or not. Whether people
judge us
or not. Why does it matter to you? Is reputation that important?”

“Christ, Levi, we're the faces of our families! We have
responsibilities
.”

“I don't understand how responsibilities could stand in the way—
”

“Why give up what we want for the good of the people? They never do anything for us, anyway. Why just give up and say, ‘All right, it's a truce?'
I
, for one, will never have peace, Levi. The betrayed blood of my family will never allow me to have peace so long as it flows through my veins. And maybe, if there is peace one day, and you and I
do
get what we want, maybe I won't have peace even then, because every time I look at you, I'll grow to hate you for your family's past wrongdoings. Or what if I avenge my family's pain, and every time I look at you, I grow to hate myself in guilt? What if the treaty we draw up works, and the feud ends, and we can be together freely, what then do I do about Emily? What do I say to those around me? She'll be devastated to know I can't love her that way, and neither of us will be happy in a forced marriage. There is no way, Levi! There is no peace. It does not exist. It will never exist—”

Cain cut off, choking on his breath, eyes widening again as Levi's hand moved. But the sounds of the gun he heard were not of the hammer cocking or the trigger moving. It was just the click of metal as Levi lifted it, unlocked and swung out the cylinder, and dumped the bullets and the empty revolver on the bed. Cain stiffened as one rolled down and touched his knuckle—cold, smooth metal. Like the tooth of a monster.

Levi thumbed hair out of Cain's face and pressed a kiss to his forehead, just above his gray eyes. Cain flinched back from it, squeezing his eyes shut instinctively. Levi's lips dusted his eyelids, the bridge of his nose, his cheeks, his chin.

Levi hovered over him, the seriousness on his face no longer cruel and hostile, but heated, desperate. Human, and only human. Cain tried to fight the emotion swelling in his chest, thickening in his throat, but he locked his arms around Levi's shoulders and pulled him down closer, giving in to everything. There was just no fighting it.

His heart jumped. A shiver rattled through him.

They made love.

 

 

R
OBBING
THE
cradle.
That was what Levi was doing, wasn't it? Cain was five years his junior, all angles and raw craving. But he was hardly innocent. So, then, it wasn't really robbing the cradle, so much as it was robbing a bed of red sheets and experience.

Bullets rolled in the bedding. Below him, aching and alluring, Cain looked vulnerable and yet somehow in control, hard and hungry, like all of this was happening just because he allowed it.

Guilt and injured pride coalesced with rampant desire, and the kisses started out biting. Maybe, at some point, Levi would be able to tell Cain that he knew where he'd been those long months, held captive under St. Mikael's, and that he'd seen him in Lovers' Lane, and that he knew who had been the mastermind of the plan in the first place. That he knew what kinds of sins had lionized his everlasting soul. But there was a smarter part of Levi, the part of his mind unaffected by things like emotion and impulse, and it reminded him that Cain had a pride he would carry to the grave. If he was aware Levi knew those things….

Cain didn't seem affected by anything of the sort, though, freed for the moment from the greedy clutch of the grudge that haunted him.

His fingertips were cold where they touched Levi's face. Levi kissed them. He rolled over, bringing Cain over to straddle his lap. Oh, the tempting heat of the places between his legs—and Cain was otherwise so loud and indignant, so cold and sarcastic, but the moment Levi's hand brushed his cheek or gathered him close enough to feel his heartbeat, or reached down between his thighs, he melted into a tangle of flushed limbs and stubborn glares as if ashamed of his weaknesses and still hiding behind that dark scowl. The words “clinging to the last shreds of dignity” sprang to Levi's mind.

Cain sat up straight and prim, still sitting atop Levi and arching like a cat in the middle of a stretch, and he regarded Levi down his nose like a prince should. Levi smiled faintly.

His jacket and his leather—
the Rook
, pistols, cartridges, holsters and weapons belt—all of it lay on the floor off the side of the big bed, beside his boots. The dying fire sizzled. There was intimidating quiet and the shift of clothes, the rustle of bedding, and tentative little breaths of calculation.

“Leave the lights up,” Cain hissed, finally, for once begging to be seen in the hot dance of the lamps. “Leave the room lit so I can look my shame in the face.”

“So be it,” Levi whispered, “because I want to look my love in the face.”

Cain crumpled down at that, grimacing under the weight of his own failures as vengeful earl. He couldn't keep up the front any longer, Levi knew. He was trying so hard. He buried his nose in Levi's neck. Levi loved the feel of his teeth on his skin. Ah, the sensations were surreal. The smell of Cain, the feel of him, the sound of him, the taste of him.

Levi pulled him into an openmouthed kiss. Cain held to him by the collar of his shirt and Levi shuddered. There was the press of him down against his sex again, titillating, and bracing, blood rushing every direction as his breath quickened. His passion stirred hotter and hotter. He ripped at the buttons of Cain's nightshirt. Ah, perfect skin, the warm pressure of his ass against Levi's hips.

Levi threw Cain back to the blankets, and Cain gasped like he was actually startled—but when Levi looked up, Cain was stoic again, and lying there fever hot, chest heaving, his eyes aflame.

Levi hovered over him with a racing heart. He'd never wanted someone so desperately before in his life, not even as a lusty adolescent. He'd never wanted to hurt someone and hold them in his arms at the same time, never wanted to come together so hard and fast that the pain bled together with the pleasure like colors running on a wet canvas. He felt like an animal, driven by primal need.

Cain glanced at Levi demurely and licked his lips. “You look a little lost,” he teased, dryly and indifferently, but the joke itself died away as Levi sputtered, “I've fallen in love with you.”

Cain's act as prince of passion seemed to falter for a moment. His brow knotted with the wordless question:
What
?

“I have,” Levi pressed, breathless.

Cain ran his hands down his back, and Levi shivered. Cain's hands drifted around to unfasten his trousers.

“I know you have,” Cain whispered. “But
show
me.”

They romped, kicking blankets off the side of the bed. Bullets lost in the sheets fell to the floor. Cain led the hot press and awkward friction, the way an experienced set of hips shifted to ease the initial pain of penetration. Sticky skin, flushed sex. Toes curled as gasps married with muffled cries of pleasure. Hips cramped. Muscles quivered. Cain dug his nails into Levi's naked chest, scraping his nipples, and Levi wasn't sure whether he should like it or not.

“You'll be the death of me!” Cain gasped, clutching Levi's face in his palms.

Levi kissed his nose and tightened his fingers on Cain's cock. “You make me feel alive,” he countered tenderly. But shuttling into those sweet, sensitive, secret places hard and fast, Levi was terrified of not feeling worthy of any of the delight at all. Not the carnal, not the spiritual, not a single bit of this closeness Cain gave him. Ah, surely he was a masochist. He would take a bullet for Cain even as Cain smiled behind the trigger.

“Cain, what do you say? Shall we make the pact? Shall we seek to end the fighting together?”

“I can't be without you,” Cain moaned, perfect surrender, and Levi didn't care that it wasn't a straight answer.

Levi came with a sharp dance of the hips. Although he'd finished, he kept going—numb, tender, slick—but he was determined, and he didn't stop until Cain pulled away, and Levi reached around his sides and brought him to the climax of pleasure in turn.

And maybe… maybe those were tears shimmering in Cain's eyes, or just the glaze of sex. He didn't smile. He didn't look soft. He looked as dark and morbid as ever, but the love in his pale stare was obvious, heavy, overwhelming, and Levi buried into his chest and ignored how pitiful that was. He, a grown man, gunslinger and gentleman, and he was blushing in the arms of a man hardly twenty.

Cain ran his fingers through Levi's hair. Nothing was said, no questions were asked. They lay in silence, bodies tingling. The fire had gone out. The flames in the lamps shivered.

Cain drifted off. Levi resituated to hold Cain to his chest again, looking up at the notches and designs on the coffered ceiling as the need for sleep burned at the backs of his eyes and he thought about everything, without really thinking at all. The recurring thought was
Just a little longer, and then I'll leave
.
Just a little longer
….

Daylight broke, and the son of Lord Ruslaniv was comfortably tangled with Cain Dietrich in one arm and the other flung out, hanging off the side of the bed, like a little boy passed out for a nap.

He was asleep.

The day breaks not, it is my heart
.

John Donne,
Break of Day

 

 

M
AGGIE
WAS
a strong woman. Full lips, an oval face, and a straight nose made her a very staid-looking maid, but there was a tenderness in her eyes that created a sort of gypsy-like beauty out of it all. Dark hair contrasted with her smooth olive-colored skin lusciously, and she was far from the frail, petite, birdlike thing girls and ladies struggled to be. She was voluptuous and broad shouldered, and there was something of an accent to her words that was familiar and nostalgic.

It was Maggie who had been Cain's nurse when he was younger. He remembered her face from his earliest memories, in the background of foggy recollections, floating behind his parents, his aunt, other workers, and servants. She had taken care of him: snacks, naps, playtime, a careful eye on the prodigious only son of the Dietrichs. Cain remembered her sitting in the corner while he played. He remembered her looking sad when he disobeyed, maybe because she knew she'd be punished, because how could she not listen to her young master, even though he was simply a temperamental three-year-old?

Cain remembered Maggie sometimes tucking him into bed when his mother was talking with his father in the den. Maggie used to make little flowers out of folded paper for Cain and his friend, the Byron boy. Maggie had been stern, but never reprimanding. As Cain had gotten older, he'd tormented her with questions about the world (most she couldn't answer), and managed to manipulate his way out of her watchful eye for an hour or two before she came bursting through the door, red-faced and panicked, only to sink down beside him, kiss his forehead, and whisper something like, “Thank God, thank God, the Lady would have killed me….”

And it was Maggie who found them then, the son of Lord Ruslaniv and the Earl, tangled comfortably in expensive sheets as the January air trickled in through the grate and daylight pried through the curtains.

Cain wasn't fully awake yet when the door opened with a weak whine of hinges. The silence that followed was quite loud enough. There was the echo of the house waking and, dark hair in its usual plaits, Maggie stood wordless and staring.

Shit.

Cain's heart fell. For a moment he was confused, even though the dread was thick and familiar in his gut. He looked from Levi to Maggie and back, brow creased. It wasn't the first time someone had walked in on him and a bedmate, but this was Maggie, and she'd never witnessed him in such a scandalous state. This was not something he could fix with a finger pressed to the lips—
shh
….

Levi was waking gently. His tousled blond hair fell across his temple in such a lovely way. His muscles flickered beneath bare skin. He looked childish and soft as his eyes opened and then closed again, not yet past the horizon of sleep.