Page 20 of Peculiar Engagements

Yves knocked back. A muffled voice spoke, and Yves answered with a wicked humor. “No, I wasn’t tapping out, I was just bored. Weren’t you going to paddle me? Oh, that was you trying? Oh, no, daddy, I’m so sorry!”

There was an audible smack, and Yves laughed. Charon wasn’t sure that Yves liked being spanked, but he did seem to enjoy the power he held over his dominant clients, who would fall over themselves to possess a piece of him.

Yet, Charon had seen him go weak every time he met a person over six feet tall. Yves only showed his true desires whenhe was with someone strong enough to overpower him. His eyes went hot and dark, a black pit surrounded by a ring of green, and he blushed past his neck and over his freckled chest. Charon imagined holding him down, his grip protective, secure. The slightest touch of fear would flicker in Yves’ face, preceding the flush of desire and a shuddering gasp as he’d give way to it.

“I’ll be so good for you,” Yves said, and there was a muffled sound to his voice now, as though he had his lips pressed to the wall. The teasing lilt to his speech was gone. Charon worked himself faster, head bowed, his free hand braced against the wall. When he came, he bit his lower lip to silence himself, and he tasted blood on his tongue as he softly struggled to breathe.

Yves’ voice was so loud, he might have been a ghost standing in Charon’s bedroom. “So why don’t you want to keep me?”

Charon looked up, alarmed. Yves didn’t usually speak that way to a client. Who was he with? Not Raul, certainly. One of the lords who’d salivated at the door to the House of Onyx that first day? One of the men dropping off bells in a basket?

“What’s that?” Yves’ client had the accent of a local noble.

There was a slight shuffling sound. “Oh. Just thinking about sending you an invitation to the next contest, that’s all.”

Charon pushed away from the wall. This was ridiculous. Yves had his priorities, and Charon needed to focus on his own, instead of acting like a besotted fool over something that could never happen. For someone who prided himself on his meticulous manner, Charon still hadn’t mapped his journey through Gerakia, and he didn’t have long before his departure from Duciel.

He briskly cleaned up, opened his maps, and spread them out over the floor. He forced himself to chart a path, smudged out the markings, and tried again. He rewrote his journey a dozen times in his dimly lit room, from Staria to Gerakia, from Staria to Thalassa, to Katoikos, to Kallistos, to Lukos, but noneof them felt right. He removed the journey markers, marching them back across Iperios to the capital of Staria, up the winding streets, and to the door of the House of Onyx yet again.

Yves woke at a truly deplorable hour to Oleander standing in his doorway with the cat in a sling around their chest. The cat—now named Melite, after a Katoikos imperator—looked thoroughly pleased with himself, and Yves suspected that Oleander was one of those cat owners who never let their cats’ paws touch the ground. They certainly weren’t letting him now, with the cat bundled up like an enormous furry baby and purring like a barrel of gravel tumbling down a hillside.

“He looks fine,” Yves said, and rolled over.

“It’s not the cat.” Oleander held out a letter. “A messenger came to drop this off. He said his name was…Sunny?”

Yves sat up. “Sunny?” His youngest brother went by Sunny. He’d only been a toddler when Yves had left home, but he wrote letters like clockwork. “How old was he?”

“I don’t know. Twelve? Fifteen?” Oleander shrugged and dropped the letter on the desk. “And I’m only passing it on because you helped with Melite.”

Melite blinked up at Oleander with the slow, patient look of a cat in love. Oh, well, Yves thought. There was no accounting for taste.

He ripped open the letter as soon as Oleander left.

Two minutes later, Charon swung Yves’ door open. Yves, who was about to tie the letter to a paperweight and sling it out the window, stopped to stare.

“Just a letter,” he said. Charon looked down at the chair Yves had kicked over. “It’s from my mother. She’s in town, and shewants to introduce me to a dominant. Someone respectable, she says.”

That was the kindest way he could have summed up his mother’s message. It wasn’t a letter so much as it was a summons, written in the blunt, stern tone of a general giving orders to an unruly subordinate. His mother didn’t outright say that she was mortified by Yves throwing the city into a frenzy, but she didn’t have to, and the fact that she’d brought Yves’ favorite brother meant she was prepared to play dirty if she had to. She knew Yves couldn’t make a scene in front of Sunny. It was underhanded and calculating, and exactly what Yves would have done in her position.

Charon righted the chair. “I take it he lives close to home.”

“He probably does.” Charon was the only one in the House of Onyx who didn’t seem entirely charmed by Yves’ family. Even at their most judgmental, they were still determined to appear as nice as possible in public, which meant they sent little gifts to the other courtesans on holidays and made a point of gushing over their “Darling” where others could see. Peter’s confrontation over the invitation had been their discontent boiling over. Most of them would rather eat sand than make a scene.

“Did she give you a meeting place?” Charon asked. His dominance was evident in his voice, but it was more subdued than usual, smoothing Yves’ ruffled edges. Charon lay a hand on Yves’ shoulder, and Yves gave him the letter and the paperweight. “You can offer another location instead. If you control the time and place, it may disarm her.”

“Mother is never disarmed,” Yves said. He flopped onto his bed. “Trust me, I’ve tried. The closest I came to disarming her was when I told her I was cominghere.”

They’d had an almighty row about it, of course, but he’d expected that. Yves’ mother had told him that if he wanted to run off and become a whore, he might as well not spend anothernight in the house, and Yves had shouted,fine, maybe I don’t want to stay here!He’d stormed off into the barn and sat there with his sister’s favorite cat, hating the smell, the sounds, and the way the farm seemed to constrict him on all sides. If he stayed there, he knew that he’d end up just like everyone else, living in the same old house with the same old people for the rest of his life.

His mother had shown up an hour later, with none of the dominance that usually poured off her like water. She’d stared down at Yves with a small, soft look of confusion that had hurt Yves more than any harsh word ever could.

“Come back inside,” she’d said. It was the closest Yves would ever get to an apology.

Now, what felt like a world away from that small barn, Yves still turned into an awkward teenager the moment his mother entered his life.

“She’s leaving most of her thoughts out of this,” Charon said, going over the letter. “Is this usual for her?”

“Not really. Most of her letters are five pages long at least.” Yves hadn’t even considered that. “Why? Do you think something’s wrong? She’d mention it if it was.”

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