Chapter 8

CHAPTER

8

Dinah Vaunt was making admiring eyes at Matti’s back as Luca came to collect him from the front hall of the boardinghouse. She shot Luca a look that promised him extra daisy-cakes for breakfast if he spilled all the details about his handsome visitor the next morning. Dinah was eternally hungry for gossip, even by Glassport standards, and clearly didn’t care about the extent to which Luca’s stories were true so long as he built them around a skeleton of plausibility, so that she could then pass them on to her own friends.

He couldn’t blame her for looking. Luca had grown accustomed to seeing Matti in practice clothes, loose trousers and old tucked-in shirts, and now that they were in the latter half of summer there were fewer opportunities to see him in that mouthwatering wool coat.

Here and now in the Vaunts’ house stood Mattinesh Jay, scion of Jay House, with the expensive and self-collected appearance that had drawn Luca’s eye on the evening they met. The toes of his boots were polished. His waistcoat was a simple but glowing amber-brown, like spirits poured into a glass and whispering the song of their oak barrel home. The almost-curls of Matti’s hair were brushed smoother than they’d ever been inside the practice room. He looked as though he’d taken care with his appearance. There was a wine bottle in his hand.

No wonder Dinah was lingering in the door, flashing her eyes and drinking him in. Luca’s own eyes ached as though he’d walked from a dark lane into a sunlit square. He wanted to look, and look. And after he’d looked his fill he wanted to set all the speed and talent of his hands to seeing how dis ordered he could make Matti’s neat appearance.

“I’m upstairs,” Luca said.

“A pleasure to meet you, Miss Vaunt,” said Matti. He followed Luca to the staircase and up.

Luca concentrated on the smoothness of the banister beneath his hand, and the familiar place where the Vaunts’ spoiled cat liked to sit in a puddle of sunlight and dig her claws into the runner that protected the stairs, leaving a patch of the woollen rug fluffy and indistinct. Neither he nor Matti spoke until the dimness of the long corridor had given way to the lamplit interior of Luca’s room. There were three other bedrooms for boarders on this floor alone, and although there were no objections made to visitors, disturbing the boardinghouse’s other paying occupants was rude.

The room looked smaller than usual, in the yellow light. Cosier. More intimate. A shiver of anticipation brushed fingers across the nape of Luca’s neck.

“So,” he said, as the door closed behind Matti, “family business let you escape for the evening?” And then could have cheerfully stabbed himself in the leg, because the last thing he wanted to do was make Matti feel guilty for taking a break, when he was doing it at Luca’s request.

“Yes.”

“What was the excuse? Did you tell them you’re so bad at dancing that I’m demanding remedial lessons? Late at night? Because they might suspect some kind of ulterior motives on your dancing instructor’s behalf, in that case.”

“Is that what they are,” Matti murmured, “your motives?”

“Ulterior?” Luca clutched a hand to his chest. He needed to do something with it so that he didn’t just reach out and drag Matti’s mouth against his with a handful of Matti’s shirt. “How dare you, Mr. Jay.”

“Actually, I told them the truth. I said I’d offered to get to know my best man better, over a drink.” Matti looked rueful. “My mother’s quite hopeful at the idea that I might be making a friend. It’s not something I’ve ever been very good at.”

Luca gave that the dubious expression it deserved. Matti was so likeable . You could cut him in half like fresh bread and he’d be warm all the way through. Albeit with seams and flecks that were of great interest to Luca, half of whose mind was still dwelling in the incredulous and satisfied flash that had devoured Matti’s eyes as Luca’s tongue slid over his fingers.

He waved Matti into the single chair in the room, which at least had a cushioned seat.

“I did say I’d provide the drinks,” Luca said. “Mediocre or otherwise. So I’m forced to assume you’ve either taken to robbing wine traders or repurposed a wine bottle in order to bring water, which I’m sure our heads will thank us for later considering the likely quality of what I managed to pick up.”

“Actually,” Matti said, and held out the bottle.

Luca sent fervent thanks to Huna and Pata both that he didn’t drop the bottle taking it from Matti’s hands as soon as he caught sight of the label.

“Fuck me sideways, is this a joke? They’re not due to release another Diamond Blend for three years yet.”

“You’re good with wine.”

“My brother’s enthusiasm is hard to escape. He could talk his way blindfolded through the cellars of a Vintner Guildmaster. Not that he could ever afford anything like this,” Luca added, smoothing the lie over the preceding truth like butter. “He’d probably stab me in the kidneys without remorse and step over my corpse on his way to find a set of clean glasses if he knew I was about to drink something this good.”

“This is from the last release. It was a gift. Benefits of the engagement.”

Luca set the bottle down carefully. He shot a look at Matti over his shoulder. “A gift like this, you’re probably meant to share it with the person who gave it to you.”

“I did offer!” Matti said. “Sofia laughed and said she’d tasted the blend to death before it was bottled, and then my parents insisted I take one of the bottles with me when they heard I was going out tonight.”

“No kidney stabbings at all,” Luca marvelled.

Matti darted his eyes around the small, cramped room, but there was no judgement in them. “My mother pointed out that the heir to Jay House would hardly expect a serviceman to buy him his drinks.”

“Keeping up the illusion.”

“Exactly.”

Luca winced at the bitterness in Matti’s tone. He’d borrowed a corkscrew from the kitchen, along with a couple of sturdy glasses, and he poured for them both. The wine was so purple-dark that you couldn’t even compare it to blood.

His fingers touched Matti’s as he handed the glass over. He couldn’t resist a stroke over Matti’s fingers, long enough to be unmistakably deliberate, and then looked right down into Matti’s eyes.

Matti paused with the wineglass poised a few inches from his mouth. He took a drink that possibly involved a more lingering press of lips and tongue to the edge of the glass than necessary. He kept his gaze fixed on Luca’s the whole time, and then finally looked down at his wine and swirled the glass.

“Needs some time to breathe,” said Matti.

“That makes two of us,” said Luca, without thinking.

Matti’s mouth—wine-wet, oh, gods—twitched into one of his incredulous half smiles. Luca wondered what would happen if he leaned down right now. Climbed into Matti’s lap, set a knee between the man’s thighs, and began the process of disordering.

He’d spent half the day cursing the impulse that had made him step back in the training room instead of sucking at Matti’s fingers one by one. Those stubborn ink-stained fingers, now holding a glass with the unthinking refined ease that was totally missing when they wrapped themselves around a sword.

Yet now that Matti was here, in his room, Luca felt like a child carefully setting aside the spun-sugar flower from atop a cake, keeping his eyes on it while eating the rest, savouring the anticipation. And the wait felt safer. Luca didn’t want to press too far, too fast, against Matti’s reserve. He would step carefully.

Luca was going to take his time with this.

He removed his boots, settled himself cross-legged on the end of the bed, and took a gulp of wine. Matti was right: it would benefit from some time in the air. It was an aggressive, fruity thing that needed to soften, and that was about as far as Luca’s wine vocabulary went. Perse would have been spouting comments about cherries and tannins and chocolate, and making a guess at the percentage of grape varietals that went into the famously secret blend that was the Diamond.

“Is he a duellist as well, your brother?” Matti asked.

Luca managed to keep himself from startling at the fact that Matti appeared to have read his mind. In fact, Matti had probably done exactly what Luca had done, and backtracked to the last safe topic of conversation.

“No. No, he’s… dutiful.”

Luca did some wine-swirling of his own. At the same time, he did some rapid editing and embellishing of his personal narrative. He recognised the danger of how he was feeling: affectionate and keen to impress. He couldn’t afford to be too truthful.

“My father was a duellist, but my mother wants us to move up in the world. There’s a branch of her cousins who are a generation away from getting the votes for House status, everyone thinks, and she wanted me to go and do clerking work for them. Do my duty by the family.” Careful, careful. He was the one sounding bitter now.

“You said was, ” said Matti, looking interested. “Did your father die in a duel?”

“Nobody dies in duels these days.” It was true, unless someone was unlucky or very unskilled, or had the misfortune to be the target of a personal grudge. Murder by the sword was still murder, and prosecuted as such. “He got sick, he died. Very boring,” he added, light.

“I’m sorry.”

“I was five. I don’t remember much about him.” A scrap of truth.

“And you decided you’d rather be a con artist,” said Matti.

The protest was half-formed in Luca’s mouth, but he let it die there. Matti looked composed. He was pressing a finger down on Luca’s nerves, reminding him. Here, Luca had the advantage of home ground, but none of the authority of the teacher, and Matti was clearly aware of that.

Luca took another drink and was relieved to see that Matti did the same. The wine was incredible.

“A con artist and a duellist,” said Luca, flippant. “All right, yes. I—I made some mistakes. Annoyed some people I shouldn’t have annoyed.”

Annoyed was a weak mask of a word compared to what he’d actually done, which was bring down the ire of an entire Guild and their goddess, not to mention flaunt the city’s own law. But he was hardly going to admit to that.

“You, annoying?” said Matti.

Luca grinned. “Either way, I wanted to leave Cienne, so I came here.”

“I wish I could do that. Just decide I’d like to see somewhere new, for a while, and go. I haven’t travelled since I was a child.”

“It wasn’t exactly a leisure trip so much as… fleeing,” said Luca frankly. “Even apart from the annoyed people, clerking didn’t suit me. I don’t like numbers.”

A long sigh from Matti, who stretched his legs out in front of him and gazed at his boots. “Neither do I. Not the numbers I spend most of my day staring at, anyway. I’m sure I would like them well enough if they moved into the black column.”

“Hah,” said Luca. “No, I’m equal opportunity. I hate all of them. I never liked adding and subtracting, let alone anything more complicated. I was never interested in learning to… be a clerk. Which is selfish, according to my family. Lazy.” A shrug. “Can’t argue.”

“I don’t think anyone gets as good as you are with a sword by being lazy.”

“That doesn’t count. I enjoy that.”

Matti bent his knees again and rested his elbows on them, watching Luca like he was trying to learn a new attack. “I enjoy it too,” he said. “But I’m not under any illusions that I’ve got any kind of gift for it. You do.”

“You’re not that —” Luca began, heroically, but couldn’t keep it up. He held his glass away from his body and laughed. “Gods, Matti, you’re so bad . I’m sorry.”

“I know,” Matti told the bottom of his own glass, somewhere between smug and tragic, and then they were both laughing.

Luca recovered his breath first. “I don’t know why you’re still going at it. I tried to learn piano, years ago, and I gave it up after two months. I could tell I was never going to be any good.”

Matti pointed a finger at him. “ You’ve no patience.”

That irked, the bee sting of truth delivered with no sweetener. “I don’t like wasting my time.”

“It’s not wasted if you’re enjoying it.”

Luca let the silence after that hang, so that Matti could hear what he’d said. Let it sink in. That statement was a few steps down the road from the Matti Jay who’d had to wrestle his own guilt to the ground in order to ask Luca for lessons that he didn’t need.

“I don’t enjoy being bad at things,” Luca said finally. “Does anyone?”

“Mm.” Now Matti was the one leaving the silence, as if he’d scored a point, though Luca couldn’t work out what it might be. After a while Matti went on, “I don’t know. It makes it so satisfying when I do get something right, when I can feel myself doing it the way you do it. And it’s fun. Compared to everything else I do in my day. It’s…”

“Different?”

“An escape.” Matti gazed at Luca, eyes fathomless and black, the lamplight making him look so brutally lovely that Luca felt a flutter like insect wings in his chest. Then Matti looked down at his wine as if betrayed by it.

Luca’s throat crowded with possibilities, with thirst, and with an unexpected willingness to maintain the rhythm of their conversation. He still wanted to bury his fingers in Matti’s hair, to turn his careful steps into a dance with a clear destination. But growing alongside that was the urge to crack himself open and whisper something true into the air between them. He wanted to draw all of Matti’s secrets out and turn them in his hands; he wanted to show Matti his own.

Strangely, the question that emerged from this muddle was: “What happened? Why is your House in such trouble?”

Matti stood up instead of answering immediately, and held out his hand for Luca’s glass. Once he’d refilled them both and reseated himself, he said, glum, “What didn’t happen? There was the drought, ten years ago—that hit the farmers worse than us, of course, but two of our major suppliers ended up selling their land and giving their flocks up for meat, and everyone else’s prices soared to the clouds at auction. We had a run of bad sales. Kept losing contracts that were up for renewal. One thing after another, we kept slipping and slipping, and then one day we were too deep in the rut to get out.”

“But you managed to hide this, somehow.” That was the part Luca was stuck on. “Doesn’t that turn into dishonesty, at some point?”

“We kept our name.” Matti closed his eyes and drank. “Down in the dust with Huna still kicking us for whatever offence we’d caused, but we kept our name. Jay House still meant something. Fair dealing. Good quality. After a while the name was most of what we had, so…”

“So you propped it up.”

“It’s not lying,” Matti said, soft. “And now we’re out of it. Or we will be. A marriage is the best solution. My father was meant to marry Sofia’s mother, you know. Back when that kind of money might have stopped all of this from happening in the first place.”

“Why didn’t he?”

“He went north,” said Matti. “He visited his mother’s family in Cantala, and he ducked up to Manisi as well, to look into opportunities for Jay House to open an office there. And when he came back, he was married to my mother. He doesn’t regret it, but he might feel guilty about it. I don’t know. He never talks about might-have-beens. He says what’s done is done.” Another drink. Matti’s controlled voice was growing new notes of expression. “For a while I wondered if that was why he ended up taking the risk that he did, on the black libelza.”

Luca pressed his lips together, took a breath, and reminded himself who he was pretending to be. “What’s that?”

“Wool,” said Matti. “Good wool. Libelza sheep aren’t bred or sold outside of Draka. They produce wool with a finer crimp than any of the Thesperan breeds, and it’s called black but actually it has almost no natural stain and it holds dye like—” He gave a silent laugh into the back of his hand. “You don’t care. You don’t need to care. It’s wool. And one of our agents bought five of the best fleece lots seen in years, at auction in Hazan, and the ship carrying them here from Fataf was lost with all hands somewhere in the Straits.”

The easiest trade route to Glassport from Draka, which was directly to the north of Ashfah, went through the southern Ashfahani port of Fataf. Luca’s usual struggle with mental geography almost made him overshoot the sudden cliff-drop of that story.

“Gods,” he breathed. “But surely the insurance—”

“It hadn’t gone through,” Matti said. “Clerical error. Papers lost in the wrong pile, or delivered to the wrong office. Something like that.”

Luca chewed on his lip. You’d have to have a skin of stone, or else no faith at all, to think that such a flood of misfortune didn’t represent some sort of judgement on the part of the goddess. Still, he couldn’t blame the Jays for trying to hide it. He’d probably have done the same.

Matti went on, “It might not have mattered. After the cost of the fleece we could only have afforded to insure for half value anyway. We have some other ventures underway now—I’ve written to Murtagh and Collins, with the robes suggestion—and we’re about to bid on an army contract here too. But to keep afloat in the meantime we’ve sold everything outside of the city that isn’t the ground beneath our factories, and there’s a huge loan coming due with Lourde House that we can’t extend any longer. So when we lost the ship… that was it, really.” This smile didn’t look like any of Matti’s real smiles. “That was when my parents first went to talk to the Coopers.”

Luca pulled himself out of the fit of smothering guilt that was trying to overcome him at this reminder of how seriously Matti took his responsibilities. Nobody would ever accuse Matti of not doing his duty by his family. He was about to duty himself right into a dull marriage. Luca wanted to grab him by the shoulders and shake.

“Did they even bother to ask you about it?”

“Don’t be stupid,” Matti said. “I told them to do it.”

“You told them?”

“I knew it was coming. It was the only option. And not a day too soon either. There’s word Harte House is expanding to wool, and Huna knows we can’t compete with them on the luxury end of the market while fighting off the Keseys at the other end.”

Luca, very carefully, set his empty glass down on the floor by the bed. A tension like a plucked clothesline flooded his arms, or tried to; the wine was getting in the way. The net effect made him momentarily queasy. He’d controlled his face by the time he was looking at Matti again. “Harte House. The silk traders.”

“They’re buying up warehouse space and booking ships from Fataf.” Matti sighed. “It was only a matter of time before someone else with enough capital looked at getting libelza to Glassport.”

Luca changed his mind about his glass. He held out a hand for Matti’s as well, and went over to the desk to refill them. The purple stream of wine shook unevenly as it left the bottle. Well then, Luca told himself savagely. There’s no point in being honest now . Ulterior motives wouldn’t even begin to cover it.

“Sounds like someone should tell the Hartes they aren’t guarding their secrets as well as they should,” Luca said.

“Now I’ve managed to get us talking business. I’m sorry. It’s like a pigeon that won’t get its claws out of my shoulder. And spends half its time shitting down my back,” Matti added, in the ponderously wry tones of the tipsy. “Are you holding my drink hostage, Mr. Piere?”

“Yes,” said Luca at once. “Your drink for the chair.”

Matti’s eyes darted to the floor, and lingered there for long enough that Luca had a heart-stopping memory of sitting cross-legged on the floor of the practice room. Then Matti moved himself, pivoting easily on one foot, to take the place where Luca had sat on the end of the bed.

As usual, Luca hadn’t thought far enough ahead of his tongue to decide what he was going to do, but it seemed obvious. He lifted the chair by the looped frame with his free hand, and moved it to its usual position beneath the desk.

Then he sat himself right back on the bed, at the midpoint between the headboard and Matti.

Matti looked at him, suddenly still, like someone mastering their balance. Luca looked back.

“I’ve complied with my end of the bargain,” Matti said.

Luca hastily handed over the glass. While he was pouring, Matti had unbuttoned his cuffs and shoved them untidily up his arms. Luca saw Matti’s arms every day, but not like this, emerging from the otherwise immaculate shell of such a good shirt. He gazed at them, trying desperately to convince himself that he still wanted nothing more than what he’d wanted when he first asked Matti over to share a drink.

It was no good. Somehow, Luca had managed to step himself right past the opening for simple physical pleasure and all the way here, into this space of quieter and stranger and more devastating intimacy.

Matti had trusted Luca. He had bared part of himself that had nothing to do with the shape of his arms, and Luca felt helpless to resist doing the same. It was like throwing a sword aside and laughing out an invitation to strike; in its own way it was as heady and delicious as every other stupid, impulsive, pleasure-seeking thing Luca had done in his life. He had just enough wits left to scramble for a truth that wasn’t going to spell disaster.

And he had one, right in his pocket.

“I have something to tell you,” Luca said.

“This sounds serious.”

“It might be. It probably is.”

And Luca told him what he’d seen and heard at Aleit Martens’s naming. Matti listened without interrupting. His brow furrowed and his whole body went tense when Luca mentioned the terms of the contract, though Luca couldn’t have remembered the exact numbers in question even if his boots had been held over a fire.

“You’re sure?” was all Matti said when Luca had finished. “You really heard all of that?”

“Why would I lie?” Luca managed to swill down the irony with another mouthful of wine.

“Serge and blankets.”

“Yes.”

The furrow between Matti’s brows was deepening. No wonder. Luca had just proved the existence of a gaping hole in Jay House’s much-needed secrecy.

“Almost nobody knows those terms,” Matti said. “We decided them, Dad and me. It’s our holdout line, in the negotiations with the city quartermaster. Those negotiations aren’t even due to start for another week. The tall man, can you tell me anything else about him?”

Luca closed his eyes, trying to call it up. “I don’t think he respected the other one, the one he was reporting to. Something about the way he spoke to him. But he was doing a good job of playing polite. Hm. Black hair, pushed away from his face. High forehead. Fair skin. And a beard.”

“A beard?”

“Is that strange?” After only a moment of thinking about it, Luca realised that it was. Facial hair was still an oddity in Glassport. The fashion for it had been rising for nearly two years in Cienne. It was irritating for Luca, who refused to tolerate the uneven bramble of a beard that improved his appearance not one jot, and of course it was downright inconvenient for his brother; Persemaine had about as much chance of growing a pair of wings. “More salt-and-pepper than the hair on his head. Neat.” Luca demonstrated the rounded V shape of it with his fingers.

Matti was silent, looking at his wine as though a portrait of the man had appeared there. “Tell me again what they said. From the beginning. You must have misunderstood something.”

“I know I’m just a failed clerk, ” Luca said, landing on the words with drunken sarcasm, “but I’m not an idiot.”

“It can’t…” Matti looked bewildered.

“You know who he is.”

Matti drank off the rest of his glass in two long gulps, and then winced. “Corus Vane. He’d know the terms if anyone does. And he looks like that.”

“Wait.” Luca struggled with a slippery fish of memory. The wine was getting its muffling breath into his bloodstream. He felt light and unserious. “Vane? Isn’t that the person I’m supposed to, you know.” He made a few sword-swishing motions.

“His father,” said Matti. “ Corus Vane . It makes no sense. He’s one of the most senior agents working for our House. His fortunes live and die with ours—why would he be working to undermine our success?”

“If he’s doing it, does the why matter all that much?”

“The why always matters.”

Luca sighed. “I know. I do know that.”

“He could be compromised,” Matti said. “Blackmailed. And you said they mentioned their hostess?”

“Not by name.” Luca could almost see the dart of Matti’s thoughts, like lantern kites slicing the night sky at a midwinter fair. “But we were in the Mason Guildhall, and I did think—”

“Lysbette Martens.”

Luca shrugged. “Is there any other reason your House’s agent would be at a Mason Guild naming?”

“I don’t know. But Lysbette wouldn’t care about the details of our army contracts. She doesn’t like Dad, but why would she—and if Corus— Oh, fuck everything, I’ve drunk too much to think about this properly. Why did the wine have to be so good?”

Luca snickered at the plaintive note in Matti’s voice. “Blame your betrothed, Mattinesh.”

“Corus has known my father for a long time. Practically since Maya was born. I thought he’d have come to us, if he was in trouble.”

“Gambling debts, maybe,” Luca contributed. “Or he could have just been bribed. Not much help you can be there. If it’s money. Sorry,” he added, stumbling into the belated realisation that this had not been a particularly sensitive thing to say.

“No, you’re right.” Matti was about to run a hand through his own hair, Luca could tell. Yes! There it went. “Martens House has money to spare. Fucking Huna’s fucking tits. Sorry.”

“Fuck off, Matti,” said Luca, delighted. “Don’t apologise. This is amazing. Swear away.” He drained the rest of his own glass, set it down one last time on the floor, and followed the gentle yearning of his body to be horizontal. He didn’t realise the full implications of this until his feet hit the headboard—he bent his knees to compensate—and his cheek landed on a warm, helpfully pillow-height surface that was, he realised after some investigative nuzzling, Matti’s leg.

The leg in question tensed for a brief moment. Luca didn’t think he was imagining the catch of Matti’s breath above him. Luca wriggled over until he was looking directly upwards, and clasped his hands tight over his own stomach. They weren’t done talking business, after all. Part of him still mourned the loss of opportunity, but he could hardly throw this gift of information in Matti’s lap and expect the mood to remain flirtatious. He’d known that. He’d done it anyway.

The fact that Luca had also thrown himself in Matti’s lap, and would very much have liked to explore the possibilities of this position, was not to be helped. He’d made his choice, and he couldn’t even find it in himself to regret it.

Matti blinked down at him.

“I hope you don’t mind,” said Luca, in his most dignified company voice.

Sure enough, Matti’s natural courtesy rose to the fore: “No, by all means,” and Luca settled his shoulders with a sigh.

“Then please do continue with your obscenities.”

A pause. “Fuck you,” said Matti, slow and polite, and Luca laughed. “The problem is, what do I do now? If, if you’re right—”

“If?”

“It wouldn’t be smart to just confront him.” Matti spoke even more slowly now, like he was dragging his thoughts through a muddy field. “If I know and he doesn’t know that I know…”

In the pause, Luca yawned. The yawn rose and infected Matti, who lifted a hand to cover his mouth.

“And if I’m going to tell the rest of my family, your word’s not enough to go on— Oh, I believe you,” Matti said, with a smile down at Luca. “But I need harder evidence. Proof. Exactly who he’s working with, and how Martens House is involved, if at all. A sense of what he might do next.”

“I’m not tailing him for you,” said Luca. “You haven’t paid me enough to be a private investigator on top of everything else, and as wide and glorious as my skill set is, I’m not exactly—”

“I wasn’t going to ask you to—”

“I could break into his house. Look for evidence.”

A pause. Luca beamed up at Matti, pleased with his own wine-fuelled brilliance.

“You could what?”

“I have many talents.” A small voice in Luca was trying to say something about the fact that he was lying low, that was the point.

But Matti was looking thoughtful, and one of his hands came to rest with its fingertips just touching Luca’s scalp, which prickled with a sudden eruption of yearning heat. The small voice was going to be outvoted.

“And what’ll that cost me?” Matti said.

That landed like a slap. It shouldn’t have hurt, Luca told himself; he had only himself to blame. This was the nature of their relationship, even if that fact felt as slippery as memory, lying here in the aftermath of unfamiliar honesty with Matti’s thigh so warm beneath him. Luca bit the inside of his cheek. “Did I ask for anything for telling you this?” he said. It came out harsh.

“Did you want something?”

What stung was the knowledge that he had wanted something in exchange, even if that something was… intangible, soft, and undefined. Something like the fact that Matti had made no move to push Luca away, even as he asked the price.

“No,” Luca lied. “No, there’s nothing I want.”

“You’re just doing me a favour.”

“I…” Luca was suddenly tired beyond belief. He felt dizzy and endangered. He should sit up, move away. He let his eyes fall closed. “Matti, I found out through the luck of the gods, and I thought you should know, so I told you. And now I do want to know the why, so I’ll help you discover it. There. That’s what I want.”

A long silence. Luca kept his breathing steady, his muscles softening into the bed. The feeling of danger passed.

The touch by the side of his closed eyelid was so soft that it felt like a stray piece of hair. Just as Luca was trying to persuade his sluggish arms to lift and brush it away, the touch firmed, becoming the recognisable contact of fingertips. A sigh came from Matti. “All right. Thank you. So this is why you asked me over for a drink. To tell me this. I thought…” Matti’s hand smoothed down the side of Luca’s face, then up again, curling slowly though some of his hair.

Luca heard himself make a truly embarrassing sound of comfortable bliss. The dark behind his eyelids was cosy and his head was heavy. The slow movement of Matti’s fingers was hypnotic. He didn’t ever want it to end.

“You thought,” Luca mumbled. “Hm? Were you saying something?”

A soft laugh. Luca considered opening his eyes to see the face that went with it, but he was so very comfortable, and his eyelids were heavier than the rest of his head combined. “Nothing in particular.”

If the fingers had stopped, Luca would have complained, but they didn’t. He let out a long, slow breath. He felt rocked by waves.

After some time he heard Matti say, quiet and distant as though through a wall, “What are you doing in my life, Luca Piere?”

Making it more interesting, Luca said, or meant to. But he didn’t manage to say it aloud. Halfway between the thought and the action he was falling asleep.