A Lily Among Thorns(56)

Elijah was silent a moment, looking at René with his fashionably tousled hair and his brocade dressing gown. Marquis du Sacreval. Christ. “Yes, I rather think I have.”

René opened the door a little further, and Elijah went in and put down his candle.

He tried to cast a professional eye over the room, looking for anything incriminating. But all he saw was René’s burgundy coat hanging over a chair before René seized him by the shoulders and slammed him up against the wall. The door swung shut with a heavy clunk.

“Thierry—you—you—” René kissed him, hard.





Chapter 13


Elijah kissed him back, too numb to put up any resistance, or even to put his arms around René’s neck. He leaned against the wall as René’s hands roughly untied his cravat. René’s hands—

Tears stung his eyes. He closed them. Despair and heat pooled in his chest, a surprisingly intoxicating mixture. Surely it wouldn’t be wrong to allow himself this, one last time. One last time before—he failed to finish the thought as René began on his buttons.

Suddenly, from any number of long Palm Sunday services he’d daydreamed through in his father’s church, a verse came back to him. Now he that betrayed him gave them a sign, saying, Whomsoever I shall kiss, that same is he: hold him fast.

Elijah opened his eyes and took René’s familiar hands—which were on their last waistcoat button—in his. They were large and brown, with firm wrists and strong fingers. A baker’s hands. “I never thought I’d see you again.” If only he hadn’t.

“C’est la faute de qui, ça?” René asked shakily.

Elijah raised his eyes to René’s face. “It was my fault. But what would you have had me do? Leave you my address? Stay with you? The week before I left, Napoleon came back from exile, or don’t you remember that? Every hour I spent with you was an hour I risked discovery—an hour I risked arrest. If any of you had noticed anything amiss with my accent—”

Of course, he’d already been living in Paris as a Frenchman for over a year then, as an under-clerk at the Ministry of Police. But with Napoleon back and seeing spies and assassins in every shadow, and the British Foreign Office desperate for anything he could give them, he hadn’t been able to risk anyone getting to know him too closely. He hadn’t been able to risk anyone asking what was in that locked trunk at the foot of his bed, or wanting to meet the fictitious sister he visited so often in Le Havre. But the lies flowed so naturally, so smoothly, that Elijah was almost surprised when a little bit of truth slipped in. “I only stayed so long because I couldn’t—after I left, it was weeks before I learned how to fall asleep without you again.”

“Me, I still have not learned,” René said raggedly and dove in for another kiss. “What is this I taste? Salt? Ah, Thierry—”

René’s mouth traced the tear tracks down his cheek. Elijah bit his tongue, hard, to keep from saying something else foolish. Soon René’s hands began, more gently this time, to tug Elijah’s shirt out of his breeches. “But now things will be as they were,” he murmured.

Elijah pushed him away, at the same time propelling himself off of the wall. “René, they can’t ever. We can’t ever.”

René stood still, breathing hard. “But why not?” He seemed almost menacing, standing so close in the darkness with an angry note in his voice. It sent shivers down Elijah’s spine. The good sort.

Elijah struggled to think over the deafening pounding of his heart. “I—you can’t possibly understand—”

René sighed and took a step back. “But I do understand. I know perfectly why you do not want us to be as we were.”

Elijah stared. René knew he was a spy? He wished that he had his knife, but it was still in his boots down the hall. “You do?” he asked stupidly.

René’s eyes gleamed. “Of course I do. Do you think that I am an idiot?”

Elijah thought of all the times he had seen candlelight reflected in René’s eyes, and how different those times had been. Even the inn’s fine beeswax gave a clearer, crueler light than the cheap tallow they’d used in Paris. He wished he could crawl back into that earlier, welcoming darkness and pull it over him. “No, I never thought that.”

“It is because of your brother, evidemment. It is clear that he knows nothing.”