“I’ve no interest in helping anyone win his contest,” Charon said.
“I know! I’m sure you don’t!” Raul hadn’t risen from his knees. “But you have to understand. It’s going to ruin him. Those nobles don’t care what happens to him when they’re done, and they certainly aren’t willing to marry him, not for more than a season.”
Charon raised his brows. “But you will?”
Raul blinked, but it wasn’t the shifting, rapid blinking of a liar. “I know what it’s like. And I…I owe him.”
Charon stayed where he was, his shadow falling over the shaking submissive on the floor. In Arktos, when he was Nikos, his mentor had been a quiet, skinny submissive with a conciliatory air that ran at odds with his skill with the knife.
“It’s against the law of nearly every country in Iperios to use your dominance to intimidate the truth out of a prisoner,” his mentor had said when he’d first brought Charon into his office, only thirteen and already too big for the little chair in front of the desk. “But there are some places where the laws don’t reach, and we must use the gifts we are given.”
Charon looked down at Raul. All it would take would be a touch—on his wrists, most likely, since Raul kept covering them with his hands. It was remarkable how easily a person could reveal the source of their own private horrors. Raul would blurt out his true reason to pursue Yves, and Charon would deal with the fallout when he complained to Laurent later.
Instead, Charon went to the fireplace and pulled down his kettle. “Do you like tea?”
“What?” Raul shuffled on his knees behind him. “I suppose. Nothing sweet, but I can always—it’s my job?—”
“Not all submissives prefer service,” Charon said. Yves liked it well enough, even if it wasn’t his specialty. He dusted Charon’s shelves when he’d had a busy evening and needed to wind down, but he always let Charon handle the tea. Some rituals meant more than dominance and submission. Tea was transformative.It took time and required patience, and that patience reminded Charon that he was not just his dominance.
“You say you owe Yves,” Charon said. “Was this from your time in the House of Silver?”
“You knew that?” Raul choked out the words. “But I don’t think you were here then.”
“It’s in the way you kneel.”
“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.”
Yveswouldhelp 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.
Ifhe 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 theheadof 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.
