by P. J. Fox
Primarily because, in his darkest and most destructive fantasies, she was with that man. A rival he couldn’t truly defeat, because he existed only in Aria’s heart. Or would she want to be with a different man, a Solarian who shared her values, or at least understood them? With a man whose love didn’t require so much sacrifice?
She’d given up everything to be with him, and she accepted that now—but would she always?
Kisten had always taken for granted that he’d do whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted. He’d grown up in an environment of license and took it for his due, which of course was what had gotten him into his present predicament—but had also led him to find the love of his life, so he couldn’t be entirely sorry. He wasn’t an impetuous man by nature; rather, he was a highly decisive one. He could count on one hand the number of times in his life that he’d acted without the benefit of careful planning and deliberation. One of those times had been with Karan; another had been realizing that he had to marry Aria, even though he couldn’t explain his reasons even to himself and wasn’t convinced that he wanted to be married—to anyone.
He glanced down at Aria, her head warm against his chest as she let him hold her. He hadn’t realized how surprised he’d be, hearing her words to Naomi. Aria was right: there was so much to accept. More than even he, who was more knowledgeable about Solarian culture than most due to his brother being in intelligence, had realized.
She’d acclimatized so well, and so quickly that at first he’d been suspicious. Eventually it was his grandfather who’d pointed out that maybe her willingness to accept a different culture had something to do with Kisten. That she was doing this for him.
He tilted her chin up, so she was looking at him. “Am I a good husband to you?” he asked.
“Yes,” she replied.
“And do you….” He swallowed. He’d led men into battle, he’d survived being a prisoner of war. This shouldn’t be so hard—God, what was wrong with him? “Do you—”
“Yes,” she breathed. “Yes.”
He slid his hands over her, reveling in her soft flesh. He kissed her neck, inhaling the scent of roses.
“Make love to me.” Her request was barely audible.
He stroked her cheek with the back of his hand, his eyes on hers. They were still as frightened, and as trusting, as they’d been the night he’d pinned her to the table. She was just so beautiful. He’d never seen anything so beautiful. He’d been gentle with her on their first night together, and since then he’d taken her in almost every way possible: pushing her down into the grass, pinning her to the wall, ravishing her in the middle of the night after he finally—finally—came home. He liked pain and she didn’t, and her pain excited him. He couldn’t help it; there had always been something wrong with him, since he was little. But she accepted him, and he loved her for that, and he wanted to be gentle with her now.
He kissed her, and kept kissing her as he undressed her. She slid his coat off over his shoulders and then her delicate fingers went to work on the buttons of his shirt. Her brows knitted slightly in deliberation, which he found charming. When her hands found his belt buckle, it was all he could do to control himself. Undressing a woman was like peeling back the petals of a rose, each layer requiring delicate handling. He removed her veil, her sattika, her blouse, her underskirt, careful not to damage them because he’d like to see her in this ensemble again.
She blushed, but made no attempt to retreat as he took in the vision of her in her dainty, tiny lingerie. Seeing her dressed like this, the bare wisps of silk suggesting what they could cover, was more exciting than seeing her naked. His blood ran hot in his veins and he wanted her very badly. Stepping back, she spun slowly around to give him the full effect.
“I hope you’re satisfied with your purchase.” She smiled, knowing the effect she was having on him.
“Oh, God.” He swallowed.
She took his hand and placed it on her almost bare breast. He lost all power of rational thought. Her skin was warm and incredibly inviting and when he picked her up, she wrapped her legs around his waist and opened her mouth under his. He laid her down on the bed and she pulled him down on top of her, arching her back as he kissed her neck, her breasts, her hips, her stomach. Everywhere. Always, in the past, there had been some secret, hidden part of her that she’d kept locked away. She was affectionate, loving, even, and he could tell that her response to his touch was genuine…but some essential part of her was missing. Now, as she took him in her arms, he knew that he had all of her.
She was so sweetly yielding, so passionate; her every touch inflamed him. After all this time, she was his. He knew it as surely as he knew anything. For all his lovers, in that moment he might as well have been a virgin; this emotional connection, this trust, it was all new.
He’d always thought that banning other women from his attentions would be no compliment to Aria; the true proof of his genuine and lasting affection would be that after each dalliance—should such a dalliance even occur, which with his schedule was by no means certain—he’d return all the more ardently to her. Thus demonstrating that, for all the willing flesh in the world, her charms were the charms that mattered. But now, with her in his arms, he knew that the truth was much simpler: no matter what he did, no other woman would ever exist for him.
She sighed, shuddering. He could see her clearly in the low light, see the arching curve of her bare neck as her eyes fluttered closed. Her lips parted slightly, and he kissed her. She kissed him back, her arms about his neck a mute entreaty not to move. Always, before, sex had been about the pleasure of the act. He’d never used it to express himself. But this…he wanted Aria to feel cherished, loved. To know that he cared more about her happiness than his own.
Rolling over onto his side, he nestled her against him and held her. He listened to her breathe and felt the beat of her heart and neither of them spoke. Moonlight poured through the windows, lending their bower the grayscale effect of an old photograph. It was simply furnished and the bed was damned uncomfortable, but he couldn’t have cared less.
She giggled.
“What, heart of my heart and flesh of my flesh, is so amusing?”
“I was thinking about the fact that I feel like a naughty teenager—except I never did anything naughty as a teenager. That, and that the furniture in here is really awful.”
Kisten agreed with her, and had concluded long ago that the army existed partly to employ those miserable souls who’d washed out of design school. He propped himself up on his elbow. “You never did anything naughty?” he asked.
She considered his question. “I liberated the frogs from the biology lab.”
“My father walked in on me being schooled in the arts of love by one of our more generous chamber maids.” He smiled. “Thus began my personal rule of never sleeping with the household help.”
“You’re awful,” she said, but utterly without rancor.
“No, awful is looking up, expecting to see the heaving bosom of your first lover and seeing your father.”
Aria collapsed back on the bed, laughing. After a moment she quieted and grew serious. “I don’t want to go back,” she said, “although I guess we have to.” She turned her head. “I want to stay here, like this. I—don’t want real life to intrude.”
He knew what she meant. But then something wonderful occurred to him. “This is our real life.”
“It doesn’t seem possible.” Her tone was thoughtful.
“No,” he agreed, “it doesn’t.”
SEVENTY-FOUR
Deputy Commissioner Ram Saghred hadn’t been at his house. He hadn’t been in his office, either, when Kisten came to call. Which, to Kisten’s mind, left one remaining option.
He was at that option now, and he was not pleased. His driver, Finn, leaned against the car with his arms crossed. His lazy-lidded eyes were unexpectedly observant, flickering from the shadows cast by the buildings to the rooftops high above. Kisten’s bodyguard stood at his shoulde
r, the lines of his compact physique radiating tension.
Kisten himself studied the building in front of him, for all the world oblivious to danger. For they were, truly, in the worst part of the city: a slum that sprawled from the refineries to the river, a rabbit warren of illness and despair where the poor lived out their unhappy days.
A few feet above Kisten’s head, a cracked wooden sign proclaimed the charmless hovel to be the shop of one E. G. Drood, Druggist and assured him further that all manner of antibiotics, headache remedies, sticking plasters and other necessaries could be had within. As, Kisten was sure, could a great many less legal substances. E. G. Drood, Druggist, like the shops to either side, boasted windows so caked with grime as to be almost opaque and something appeared to have died on the front steps. The street itself was so narrow that a man could reach out and touch the walls on either side of him, walls that seemed to bow inward with their own weight. The balconies above blocked out most of the light, leaving the street below in gloom.
Slat-ribbed dogs rooted in the litter of garbage and human excrement. The heat held, and the humidity was so intense that every foul odor hung heavy in the air. Even to Kisten, who’d grown up in a tropical climate, it was unbearable. Sweat trickled down his back beneath his starched cotton shirt and wool jacket. There was no such thing as tropical weight wool; wool wasn’t meant for the tropics.
He ascended the steps and, pushing open the door, entered a small cave of a room that reeked of dust, old age and evil. The grinning proprietor sat behind a high counter. His skin seemed too tight on his skull. His eyes glittered with an unwholesome light as he took in Kisten’s finely tailored suit, expensive jewelry and—perhaps most tellingly of all—clean shoes.
“Welcome, Subahdar,” he said. His grin widened. He didn’t recognize Kisten; he was only using the generic term for lord in the Bronte language. He’d looked at Kisten’s wardrobe and made an educated guess; besides, given the choice it was better to flatter people—especially people who, if they’d arrived at this hole in the wall, had ready cash and expensive tastes.
His newest customer, as he’d rightly concluded, was not here for sticking plasters. Above E. G. Drood, Druggist sat an infamous establishment known as The Twisted Lip. A hypocrisy of life in the Alliance was the relative concept of “vice.” The same behavior deemed intolerable in the working man was entirely acceptable in his noble counterpart; a man of means might acquit himself as revoltingly as he liked and not be frowned upon unless he carried his…amusements to extreme excess. In other words, until he spent through his funds.
Kisten had often speculated about the percentage of his peers who did have some sort of drug problem and concluded that it was probably much higher than anyone realized. His brother Arjun was an opium addict. Kisten himself was hardly temperate, although his relationship with vice had always been casual. The one thing he couldn’t give up was women. But he’d smoked opium before and he smelled it now in the faint, ghostlike haze of the shop: a cloying, pungent syrup that made his eyes water and his throat close up.
Ignoring the druggist’s protests, Kisten headed for the back stairs. His bodyguard followed him, disgust stamped on the man’s thin features.
The Twisted Lip catered to foreigners. Kisten had been in opium dens on Charon II and knew that the average customer could expect little better than a mat on the floor crawling with lice—not that he’d care, that was the beauty of opium. Kisten doubted that things in Haldon were much different. For centuries, opium had been the drug of the rich; in the past few decades, fueled by the zeal of the Charon II Company, it had become so affordable as to be prevalent in even the poorest slums. The poor, he reflected sourly, had the greatest need to forget.
Where carters, stockroom workers and ditch diggers lay in filth, their aristocratic counterparts destroyed themselves in style. Kisten gazed about the large space, blinking in the miasma of curling smoke. Gorgeous Caiphi carpets overlapped each other on the floor. What light there was came from crimson-tinted glass globes suspended from the low ceiling. He’d seen something similar in a brothel in Adra. An assortment of deep, sprawling couches and daybeds were scattered about along with a number of idols from the old religion, which apparently served as decoration.
An effeminate, blue-skinned man who looked remarkably like Kisten stared back at him. One ankle crossed over the other, frozen forever in the pose of playing the lute, his gentle gaze seemed somehow reproachful. He wondered how the God of Love had arrived here.
“No one should abandon duties, because he sees defects in them,” he murmured to himself. “Every action, every activity is surrounded by defects as a fire is surrounded by smoke.”
“What?”
Kisten looked up, and found himself looking into the wide eyes of a scrawny girl who couldn’t have been more than fifteen or sixteen—seventeen at the most. Her hair was matted to her head and filth grimed her skin. Slat-ribbed beneath her thin shift, she stared at him suspiciously. “Are you one of that God bothering lot?” she demanded. “Get out!”
“No,” he said slowly, “I’m not. I’m not here to preach to you.”
“Oh.” She relaxed a little as fear of the unknown gave way to the kind of fear she understood. “What…are you here for?”
She was a whore, of course. Although not, he suspected, by choice. He let her bring him a cup of tea, and she sat with him while he let it cool in the cup. It wasn’t unusual for opium dens to offer female companionship—or sometimes male—as well as the drug itself. An experienced opium user could prolong both intercourse and orgasm. The novice or saturated user often, conversely, found himself impotent; which didn’t stop him from trying.
The rituals of opium could, Kisten knew, be intensely erotic—but only if one was mildly affected. Sitting here now, sober, he hoped to God he’d never touched a girl this young and pathetic. She smiled shyly, and told him her story. She’d come to Haldon as a colonist with her parents, an army sergeant and his consort. She was from Brontes, originally, but had no family there. Her parents died in one of the uprisings when she was fifteen, and after that she’d gotten work as a clerk in a merchant’s office. The merchant in question had used her as his plaything and she, mistaking attention for the kindness she so desperately craved, had given no resistance.
Eventually he’d tired of her and turned her out on the streets. Thinking herself to be disgraced and ruined, she hadn’t dared ask for help. And then another man had come along, finding her crying in an alley because she was frightened of her customers. He’d said, come with me, and I’ll teach you how to forget. “And I’ve been here ever since,” she said simply. “That was two years ago.”
It didn’t seem possible that the piteous wreck in front of him was seventeen.
“I’ll be here until I die, I suppose.” She looked around her. “He was kind to me, and gave me a roof over my head. I don’t have to—on the streets, which is better. And there’s the opium.”
“Do you want to leave?”
She took back the teacup, and stood up. “No. I want no other home—now.” She shrugged. “It won’t be long, I don’t think.” With this sad declaration, she disappeared behind a curtain and was gone. Kisten stood up and walked over to the object of his search, who was reclining on an immense daybed carved from sandalwood. Its sweet, woodsy fragrance wasn’t entirely different from that of opium.
Deputy Commissioner Ram Saghred had almost vanished into a veritable sea of embroidered silk pillows. They were strewn about the floor, too. His pose was typical of the experienced user: lying down beforehand was a preventative measure, as some men tended to pass out. Moreover, an opium pipe was too long to be held comfortably while sitting. Saghred’s pipe had been carved from some kind of dark wood and chased with silver, the sort of pointless affectation that aristocrats loved. The opium would taste the same.
Ensconced in the pillows next to him was another girl, this one more content with her vocation. Her half-closed lids indicated that she was experienci
ng that peculiar state of comfort known only to true habitués. Rational thought vanished, along with all of its attendant burdens, leaving only a series of vaguely erotic visions in its place. Along with, of course, the unconquerable need for the next dose.
Saghred looked as though he’d had a great many doses, and Kisten’s lip curled in disgust. His waxy-pale skin glistened with a thin layer of sweat, and he smiled up at Kisten without really seeing him.
The girl shifted slightly, revealing a swell of naked breast. “I don’t do two for the price of one,” she said lazily. “It’s an extra fifty per, eighty for anal.”
Kisten’s stomach turned.
Saghred’s eyes narrowed. “You’re not Setji,” came his herculean declaration.
“No,” Kisten agreed.
“Why do you look like him? Are you real?” His tone became plaintive. “I saw a gold caterpillar climbing up my leg the other day, great big sucker, but he wasn’t real.”
“Are you aware,” Kisten asked, “that you have a job?”
Saghred nodded. “My assistant,” he said, tone affectionate, “is a good sort. Does all the real work—best way to arrange things, right?” He sighed. “I’m tired now. Please go away.” Kisten began to speak and Saghred flagged him off. “Tell it to the caterpillar, damn bugger. Left me the other day, hasn’t been back since. Right unsporting of him, wouldn’t you say?”
Kisten had been planning to inform the man that he was fired. Having uncovered him in the flesh, however, he realized that there was no point. Even if Saghred managed to remember, which he wouldn’t, he wasn’t about to pop in at the office by mistake. In fact, Kisten predicted, the only people likely to see him were already sitting in this room. Or, in the case of the proprietor, standing at his shoulder.
