Rooks and Romanticide

by J. I. Radke

  “I’ve fallen for you,” Levi confessed, with all the feel of an apology.

  Cain bristled. Why did those words alarm him so, the same as they warmed him? Why did they make his head light as if spinning giddily, while his heart leapt to his throat in a sick lurch? He wondered if he looked as full of desperate raw emotion to Levi as Levi did to him. It was a lovely sight.

  “Have you, now?” Cain husked, and then he smiled because it felt natural to do so.

  The ache was deep and sweet in the chest, like all the best songs and loveliest paintings. Levi’s need was contagious. Surely their two souls shivered together in the same cosmic continuity, and Cain’s fingers curled as he pulled Levi closer, closer, closer yet, but never close enough it felt.

  “Please say something,” Levi hissed. It was so discomfiting to see him stripped of his normal strength of character. What many traumas hid behind such a plea? Forgive me. What insecurities, what secrets?

  “I hope people hate you, because I can’t,” Cain croaked. He tried still to pull Levi closer and closer. “I’m livid, don’t doubt it, but I can’t hate you. I hope your family despises you, but don’t ever leave me. Just don’t. I wouldn’t be able to stand it, being alone.”

  Don’t ever leave me. Cain was terrified both of the fact and the fear itself. Shameful, but true. Yes, somewhere along the way it had become the truth. It was so uncomplicated and clear, he was shocked he hadn’t realized it before. But that was just the art of the soul changing colors, wasn’t it?

  Levi was silent, nose buried in the nape of Cain’s neck. Warm, present, real. His breath was a soft tickle behind his ear.

  Gently, Levi whispered, “Now I swear by the moon.”

  The stars were dim little pinpricks in the December blanket of clouds, and the moon was a soft, quarter-full glow. Midnight had come and gone. The time was nearing one in the morning. The echo of servants bustling in the big Dietrich house had finally settled, the last of the bedroom lights had been extinguished, and secluded on the balcony in the bitterly cold night, Cain chased body heat, clawing tighter against Levi’s chest. That was nice.

  There was the rustle of clothes and a startled gasp. The stone gargoyle watched as Cain arched into Levi’s covetous touch. The kisses were stolen with indulgence and abandon. They made Cain’s hips want to dance. And Cain wondered about Levi—about just what had happened to him that made him into such a child at times. His eyes were pools of honesty in the moonlight. He was sarcasm and cynicism transformed, but all the complexities and subtleties that had captivated Cain at first suddenly simplified as Levi buckled under the weight of seemingly tangled thoughts. After all, it wasn’t an unconditional and unquestioning clemency. Cain just didn’t feel like asking yet. There was reason to doubt anything Levi had said before, under that fabulous pretense of his. Unless in the way of the most effective lies, he had just told the truth, and all the stories of childhood memories and feelings and experiences he’d entertained Cain with were indeed the building blocks of the man he was.

  Levi smiled. The flash of innocence was gone. The lusting fiend was back with a vengeance in the sore wake of forgiveness. His hands moved up Cain’s legs and gave a little squeeze where he knew it would trigger a wonderful squirm. Cain’s stern scowl dissolved into little sighs of defeated delight.

  He surrendered. He gave up to the swell of passion and let it infect him, let Levi walk him backward into his room. He fell easily into the collection of pillows on a wide, sky blue daybed, and when Levi’s hand dived between his knees, Cain uttered an impatient groan. His toes curled tight. His heart jumped, the desire sparking in all his nerves.

  “Leave the lights down, keep them off,” he pleaded on a shivering sigh. “I can’t bear the shame of witnessing all this in the light, just let me love you the best I can….”

  Fingernails dug into skin the way teeth grazed a lower lip. Knees twitched apart. Levi clawed greedily at Cain’s naked chest, reaching up under his waistcoat, under his shirt. He left a trail of hot kisses all along Cain’s throat, teasing and pleading until Cain dropped those obstinate defenses and begged for what he truly wanted. Ah, how great was this collision of feelings, to have the son of the enemy in your arms and the foreign taste of pardon on your tongue!

  The desire was a burning need, leaving him feverish as he ripped at Levi’s clothes, longing for the feel of skin against skin in this secret ritual of theirs that had become so vital. The lovemaking was nearly brutal, an awkward but worthwhile twist of limbs on the daybed, like the drunken, impatient trysts of youth’s wildest romance. Tears of concession dried sticky and cold on his flushed face as Levi’s fingers prodded and pried into intimately sensitive places. The flesh of an arousal was so torturously sensitive it was sweet, throbbing in long, hot fingers. The swirl of Levi’s thumb at the tip of his sex nearly yanked Cain over the edge into the shuddering depths of climax already. God, but Levi drove him nearly mad with the sensations!

  It was a culmination and outlet for all their subjugated anger at the world, and a safe place for the knotting of fear and lust and trust. Small scuffles of hands and elbows and knees were nothing but foreplay, interrupted by guilty gasps for breath as wet teeth grazed nipples and the stiff heat of Levi’s sex brushed Cain’s thigh, tantalizingly close and daunting.

  The closeness was dangerous in a thrilling way, sure destruction in the inevitable end, like all reckless indulgence always was. It was pleasure and relief and terror rushing through Cain’s body all at once, like the luscious daze of a bone-deep fever that leaves one smiling and giddy.

  Out the open balcony doors, winter clouds passed over the moon as gauzy as strips of sodden muslin. There were the quivering, heated shudders of orgasm, and then Cain’s incensed insistence that he dominate in the same fashion, trying to salvage the ragged shreds of control in the wake of utter surrender to feelings. He finished Levi off with his hand, silky skin as sweet and hot as the smooth satin of his eyelids. It dazed him fiercely to touch the hard, flushed length of Levi’s cock and know it was his.

  Cain couldn’t stop shaking, even when Levi discarded the dirty glances to drop kiss after loving kiss down his back. His entire body trembled like the last leaf on a tree in the advent of winter, and when he couldn’t stop shaking, he cried. He cried like a damn child, for all his lost hopes and dreams and convictions, and the fact that there was no light at the end of the tunnel for an earl who slept with the adversary’s son. There just wasn’t any more room for excuses for those who promised themselves they’d never give in to the weakness of love, only to crumble as every whisper of undiluted affection destroyed their defenses.

  “Those big beautiful eyes….” Levi whispered, and even his touch was a little different now, like a nervous boy’s, slightly awkward and rough as he thumbed away Cain’s tears. Beautiful eyes. Cain knew he did not mean to patronize him at all.

  Ah, this tender poison was more dangerous even than malice or vengeance. Love. The need for that loved one knew no subtlety or restraint in the face of stubborn denial. Because even in the wake of betrayal and revelation, he was still desperate to find a way for Levi to have his way with his heart, and he was determined to a fault.

  The heady fragrance of sex lingered on Cain’s hands and in the bed. The moonlight kissed Levi’s bare shoulder as he fought sleep, his lashes fluttering, some sort of delicate and tortured Adonis fallen and lying there next to him in Cain’s tangled bedding.

  “Would you really want me to kill you if I didn’t forgive you?” Cain ventured.

  Levi stirred as if woken from a dream. He cut Cain the most crestfallen glance, all the darkest shadows of his soul in those grave eyes. “Yes,” he confessed in a low, grim voice. It was the cold sophistication of guilt. “I couldn’t ever trouble you, and I can’t bear troubling anyone anymore….”

  “You could never trouble me,” Cain whispered, his eyes heavy. “You anger me—you anger me greatly—but somehow, you can’t trouble me. And I’m forever damned for it.�
�

  What noxious beauty in that quiet truth.

  LEVI FELT like a ghost, perhaps the only soul still awake in the most secret corners of the Dietrich manor.

  He watched Cain as he slept. Cain looked utterly vulnerable there, nestled up in the blankets, his hair still disheveled from their coming together in those expensive sheets not too long ago. His shirt was unfastened halfway, and his eyelids just looked so silky and soft, Levi wanted to run his mouth over them and those long lashes.

  Did everyone look so defenseless and simple in sleep? Eyes shut, mouth parted, warm slender fingers curled limply on the pillows? So capable of trust, so devoid of hatred and compunction?

  There was something so dark and sad about Cain, so very dark and sad and tragic that it became lovely and fascinating, as was characteristic of all disasters spinning out of control. His very name spoke to his character—Cain. The murderous brother, the brother who surrendered to sin.

  Welsh for fair.

  Levi wanted to lie down next to him and fall asleep in that pocket of warmth, pressed against his side and smelling his hair, but he couldn’t. He had to get back home soon.

  He was frustrated he hadn’t gotten a chance to voice his idea, the core reason he’d come seeking forgiveness in the first place. The reprieve had simply been too great and distracting, and the sex had been sticky and long. He was sore from it, deliciously tired and sore. Maybe it had been the culmination of the last week and a half’s self-torture, which they’d both submitted to after Dmitri’s Pavilion, a crucifixion of feelings finally relieved. That was just what happened when a man pent up his desires, anyway. They consumed him and took control of him, and when his knuckles brushed tempting skin, nothing else mattered anymore but the need.

  The last of the fire under the marvelous mantel popped and spit embers at him. Levi’s frown tightened. The room had warmed up once they’d closed the balcony doors, but he was still cold.

  THERE WAS movement in the room.

  The curtains danced at the open balcony doors. Morning light spilled into the room and tried to burn through his closed eyes. Cain grimaced, burying deeper into his pillows. Cool air tickled his cheeks. He shifted in his blankets, curling in on the pocket of warmth sleep had created. His head hurt. He didn’t want to get up. What day was it? The thirteenth of December. And last night he and Levi had fucked, and it had been perhaps the most intimate coalescence of feelings and lust that he’d ever encountered—

  Perhaps Levi had never left. Cain smiled as the morning kissed his eyelids. Maybe Levi was the one moving around, parting the curtains, opening the balcony. Was he leaving? He’d be seen, the fool. It was broad daylight. Cain’s smile widened. He tried to smell Levi on his pillow. What did he smell like? Sweet hair, hot skin, tobacco smoke, gunpowder, and expensive cologne.

  Footsteps swept across the bedroom, muffled by the white fur of the rug. Cain opened his eyes, and immediately his smile fell.

  It was just a maid crossing his room again, carrying his clothes for the day, stirring the coke in the hearth. Not Levi. He’d left in the night of course, like the lying sneak he was. Flitted right out like a rook off the eaves.

  “Good morning, sir,” the maid said.

  “Morning,” Cain grumbled in return, and hid his face in his pillow again.

  ACT FOUR

  RED

  Although I joy in thee, I have no joy in this contract tonight. It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden; too like the lightning, which doth cease to be ere one can say, “It lightens.”

  William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

  SCENE ONE

  THERE WAS a strange sense of liberation in the filthy secret.

  Cain hated himself for allowing it to happen, the return to normalcy—whatever had been “normal” about the world at all before the untangling of Levi’s lies and regrets. But he didn’t want to cut loose his contracted gunslinger, because, conceivably, what other spy could ever be better than the son of his family’s enemy?

  He hated himself for melting under Levi’s eyes, and he hated the way all the reasons to distrust Levi bent and broke under the instinctive understanding that Levi’s admission of guilt was nothing but true. He hated himself for smiling gaily when Levi complained that it was difficult running around for Cain with his household breathing down his neck about where he went at night.

  “The prodigal son,” Cain hummed gleefully. “You bad thing. I like that.”

  “That this liaison is ruining me?” Levi pressed, with a little knot in his brow.

  “Yes,” Cain whispered, privately understanding the strain of loyalty and personal need, a series of relatives’ condemning glances passing through the back of his mind. Levi leaned near and Cain mumbled, “Don’t touch me. Don’t kiss me. I need time, Levi. I’m still mad.”

  Time. Yes, time to sulk and time to capitulate. Because by the end of the night—a business meeting in a church, a rendezvous on a balcony—his head was on Levi’s shoulder, and they shared a Turkish cigarette, and Cain knew with a cold little shiver of clarity that Levi’s allegiance to his own family was fraying and uncoiling.

  He found a greedy satisfaction in that.

  What better way to destroy the Ruslanivs than by weakening family fidelity with kisses and longing glances?

  Ah, little did he know that Ruslaniv loyalty was unraveling on its own.

  Aunt Ophelia met him at his bedroom doorway one December morning, and Cain pretended not to notice the way her eyes roamed over him as if searching for signs of errant affairs among his mess of uncombed hair and wrinkled nightshirt. “Cain, my nephew, New Year’s is approaching.”

  Cain flashed a dark glance in her direction, silently combatting her nosy frown. He knew what she was getting at. New Year’s and its delivery of updates and Dietrich decisions.

  “Yes, Auntie. I know that.”

  But first there was Yuletide, which was magical per usual, and New London was alive with red velvet ribbons and holly and carolers tromping through the slush on the streets. Bells rang from tower to tower. Hymns and lovely voices caressed even the dirtiest of storefronts, and gifts were exchanged midmorning Christmas Day, after the Mass the night before.

  It was all so rampant with tradition to Cain, and always slightly tedious and uncomfortable in that sense. Casting wishes in the bread pudding, telling ghost stories around the fire, and avoiding the mistletoe lest Emily be waiting and watching for the perfect moment to expect a kiss. Sneaking out of his own family’s Yule banquet to run off with Levi to Brackham’s House of Variety was perhaps the most reckless and illogical decision he’d made in a long while, but it felt so good to escape the manor like it wasn’t his and he wasn’t himself for the night.

  “We’ll wear masks and be perfect nobodies,” Levi had sworn, upon requesting Cain’s company for the soiree at Brackham’s. “Nobody has ever recognized me as Lord Ruslaniv’s son, Cain. You didn’t even know—“

  “You hush up,” Cain had hissed, and he felt as though Levi just didn’t understand things like responsibilities because he had none—because he was not the head of his family, because he was safe under the cover of carefully constructed mystery. Because apparently he’d always run around playing outlaw and had never been required to grow up.

  But Levi had convinced him a little sinful play couldn’t hurt either of them, and Cain wasn’t going to pretend he was averse to a little defiance.

  Brackham’s was holding glamorous holiday festivities, and nonpartisan ones at that. The kind of fêtes that those of higher class in the crowd would deny attending the morning after, as they pinched their noses and drank their coffee without milk to soothe the hangover. It had nothing to do with Dietrich or Ruslaniv, nor the feud between them, because it was a rowdy bash and frankly, to Cain, the thrill of really sneaking around was too much to deny.

  Over the wall they’d gone together, and Cain had never felt more exhilarated in his life.

  “You’ve made a vagrant lord out of me!” he scolde
d, swatting Levi away when he tried to steal kisses in the shadows between the streetlamps.

  “Lies! You’ve already got a wayward streak in you. You just throw the blame at me,” Levi retorted. Cain couldn’t argue that one.

  Cain had slicked his hair back and worn the dreariest clothes he’d been able to find in his wardrobe to complete the disguise. And oh, these discolored eyes? From a fever years ago, sir, more common than you’d think.

  “How cleverly you lie,” Levi purred.

  Cain gloried in the praise but gave Levi no credit for it.

  The crowds moved like a sea in the yawning shell of Brackham’s in all its Bohemian splendor, with its velvet-tasseled curtains and private lounges. There were handsome men in silk shirts, gorgeous ladies with lace fans, and beauties in drag showing off too much flesh, ostrich plumes, and scandalous little ruffled shorts. Voices and music collided in one great tumultuous sea of sounds as citizens danced and gambled and drank.

  They’d run into a few of Levi’s associates on the great open floor of the club, under the dancers on their swings. One Levi called the One with Glasses and the other he called the Blond One. At first they’d spoken together in low voices that seemed confidential and somehow significant, but Cain hadn’t paid attention. He probably should have. He didn’t want to. The vodka burned his throat as it went down, but it warmed him up and set his smile free. As if by a spell, the last of the pain of finding Levi in Dmitri’s Pavilion was dwindling away in all the glory of being disguised as just another nobody among the other nobodies at the theatre. No wonder Levi reveled in this.

  The adventure of it all, and the disregard for general inhibitions, sitting about the green-topped gambling tables and sharing a chair with Levi as the men around them smoked ship’s and Persian blends and Levi bet along with them in hands of Cassino. And Cain didn’t care that others looked at him like he was a Cleveland Street specialty or some other rented love, the way he sat half draped across Levi’s side like that Blond One did with Levi’s bespectacled friend, because nobody saw him for what he really was. Fooling them all was grand fun. Wasn’t it about time he acted like all the other noblemen in New London, with all the grand fun they had under the cover of night?