Amberlough(22)

It earned him a scowl. “Maybe I just decided to treat myself.”

“Cyril, p-p-please. From one professional liar to another, d-d-don’t work tired. Your t-t-t-technique suffers.” He finished his coffee. He’d been hoping for the gratification of Cyril’s trust, but settled for his shock instead. “Now. Why don’t we retire somewhere more p-p-private, and you can tell me all about Nuesklend.” Because of course it was Nuesklend. Aristide paid enough attention to politics to know what was at stake there.

Cyril’s expression settled between fury and affection. “Why do I consistently underestimate you?”

Aristide pushed his chair away from the table and stood. “A p-p-pretty face will do that. You, of all p-p-people, ought to know.”

*

Aristide had always been an insomniac. Usually, it didn’t bother him—he lived in a good city for wakeful people. But now he stared dry-eyed into the cavern of drapery above his bed. Beside him, Cyril’s sleep was fitful, more so than usual. Aristide was used to the twitches, the soft dream mutterings, but tonight Cyril was sweating, his face drawn into a deep frown.

It wasn’t unwarranted. Besides Cyril’s obvious misgivings about his upcoming trip, they’d sniped and hissed at each other on the walk back from the Crabtree House. Cyril accused Aristide of interrogation. Aristide acted grossly offended, but they both knew it was true. The upshot was that Cyril hadn’t told Aristide much about where he was going, or why.

They’d put fighting aside at the door to the flat. No use in wasting what time they had left.

Low against the column of Aristide’s spine, a tight muscle that had been threatening all evening finally curled into a spasm. He bit back a curse. Careful not to disturb Cyril, he eased himself up against the headboard and reached for the drawer of his bedside table. The chemist on Barley Street had mixed him a tincture of morphine and valerian to help with sleeplessness and back pain. He rarely used it for the former, but had needed it more and more for the latter.

Ten drops later, he set the bottle aside and closed his eyes, waiting impatiently for relief. He was just drifting off when Cyril jerked and came awake with a strangled yelp. Aristide startled, undoing all the good the drugs had wrought on his recalcitrant muscles.

“Sorry.” Cyril’s voice was hoarse and thick. A bar of light coming between the curtains showed his cheeks were wet.

He seemed to realize it too, and slashed at his face with the heel of his palm. “Damnation.” He took a deep, uneven breath, and went limp against the pillows. After a long moment spent considering the canopy above, he ran a shaky hand through his hair and looked at Aristide, and the bottle on the nightstand. “Trouble sleeping?”

Aristide nodded, his neck stiff. “My back.”

“Turn over.”

He complied, folding his arms and tucking his face into the crook of his elbow. Cyril lifted the covers away, exposing the aching length of Aristide’s back to the cold. Aristide felt the movement of air over his spine, and then the pad of Cyril’s thumb pushed into the center of the spasm. Aristide groaned. “Perdition.”

Cyril dug in harder, and Aristide could only exhale and blink against the pain. Tense muscles uncoiled like a knot of angry snakes teased apart. “They’d better count those ballots quickly. I’ll pay Culpepper very well to make sure you’re reassigned to—oof—my beat.” A tingling jolt ran down Aristide’s leg, and his foot twitched. “Cyril,” he said. Then, “Cyril.”

The pressure on his back let up, fast. “Too hard?”

“No. You’re just quiet.”

“Sorry.” Cyril’s hands settled into a rhythm again. After a moment, he said, “I haven’t had one of those in a while. Not since—well.”

Aristide turned his head so his cheek rested on his forearm, and he could see Cyril’s face. “Nightmares?”

One corner of his mouth quirked up. “Oh, no. I’ve had plenty of those. Just … I haven’t woken myself up screaming.”

“More of a squeak.”

Cyril’s smile was haunted, and he didn’t meet Aristide’s eyes. Abruptly, he patted the curve of Aristide’s hip and lay back down, turning his face away.

From their first meeting—outside the theatre, in the rain, after weeks of cat and mouse through various informants—Aristide had never asked questions. He didn’t want to hear Cyril’s answers. What he knew was secondhand, through reliable sources, and that was enough. It let him separate his own Cyril from the Foxhole’s.

He suspected Cyril practiced the same delicate art of compartmentalization. There was the Aristide lying beside him in bed—the charming performer and monarch of the demimonde—and there was the other Aristide, the one he was supposed to arrest and interrogate. The one whose life and livelihood he was meant to raze.

They both knew where the boundaries lay. It was impossible to love someone when you spent your time digging at their secrets in the hopes of undermining their career. And vice versa. But suddenly this Cyril, his Cyril, was crying out in his sleep because the other Cyril was afraid.

Aristide swallowed another ten drops of opiate, and considered his scruples.

When the tension began to drain from his limbs, he slid back beneath the covers. Wrapping himself around the fetal curve of Cyril’s spine, Aristide slipped an arm into the divot of his waist, pulling him close.