Arran Alexander’s bed is the nicest they’ve ever been in. Theo luxuriates in the sensation of soft, clean linen against their skin, stretching out pleasantly to accommodate the new little aches and pops in their legs and lower back. They don’t bother hiding their enjoyment—Theodora Arlot, were she to actually exist, would no doubt feel the same way.
The candles have burned low since the pair of them crashed through the door, breathless with giddy laughter, but the rising moon through the large bay window shines brightly, illuminating the dark Sargasso Sea far below. Lying head to opposite toe, Theo can make out Arran’s face in the moonlight as he reaches over to draw a finger lightly down the underside of their foot. Jerking back, they aim a kick his way.
He laughs, then says, “Truth.”
“Have you ever peed in a pool?”
“Obviously.”
“Gross.”
They throw a pillow at him. He bats it away before it hits his face. “Like you haven’t.”
“I don’t have to answer that. Yet. Truth.”
Arran takes time to consider, humming slightly as soft, questioning fingers trace the length of Theo’s left calf, down along the ugly, puckered, jagged thing where shattered bone once poked through on both sides. “Where’d you get this one?”
“What if I said I was mauled by a coyote?”
“I’d say you weren’t taking the game seriously, and I’d be offended.”
“And I’d say you were being really insensitive about my childhood trauma.” He laughs, and this time they actually do kick him, because it’s the truth.
Much of tonight has turned out to be an exercise in the truth, actually—a turn of events that could have shocked no one more than themself. Theo hadn’t managed a real conversation with Selah during the viewing, nothing beyond a brief moment where they briefly caught one another’s gaze across the room, and Theo couldn’t help but feel altogether sorry for the girl. The gaggle of important patricians and would-be-important social climbers had followed her around like a cloud of noxious smoke, ambition choking any real moment of personal connection that tried to slip through. But Theo had expected that. And they had a different target tonight.
The dead Historian’s wayward son was an obvious mark. Theo hadn’t known that he existed, actually, for the first month or so in Naevia Kleios’s office. It was Selah herself who’d first mentioned him, obvious affection shining through.
“He’d have done so well at the universitas,” Selah had told them over hibiscus tea at that meridiem jav, as if to explain the barrage of questions over Theo’s own invented education. Apparently she was collecting ideas for some kind of reform scheme. Sweet girl, really. Sweet and so, so blind. “He’ll be back soon, though,” she’d added, brightening at the prospect. “The legions should have sent him home a month ago, so we’re expecting him in a few weeks.”
So, yes, Arran Alexander was the obvious mark, now that they know Griff wants Selah on their side. Get close to her half-caste brother, the one no doubt responsible for Selah’s more liberal inclinations in the first place, and Theo’s miles closer to turning both the new Historian and this weapon she has to the Revenant cause.
Except. Well.
Sleeping with him had been part of the plan. Actually liking him definitely had not.
“If you say so,” Arran says now, sitting up, though he definitely looks as though he’s going to laugh at them again. “Truth, then.”
Theo’s brain is feeling hot and stupid from drink and sex and the October heat. “What’s your middle name?”
“Don’t have one. I don’t think. My mima named me and Dad just kind of went with it.”
“So ask her.”
“Yeah, I’d do that, only she’s dead.”
Well, shit. Now it’s their turn to sit up, an apology ready on their lips, but Arran doesn’t seem all that upset. “Don’t worry,” he says. “It’s been a minute. Birth . . . stuff.”
That, Theo thinks, doesn’t make it better at all.
“I mean, she was nineteen, so . . .”
“She was just a kid.”
“Yeah, but so was my dad.”
As though that makes it any less messed up. Theo may not know the exact details of what might compel the son of a patrician familia to knock up a teenage serva, but they don’t have to imagine very hard. They’ve known too many mothers to insist their child has no father.
Those children, however, don’t usually come to their father’s defense. Then again, those children don’t usually grow up with every luxury in the empires thrown at them.
“He did what he could with me,” Arran says, avoiding their gaze, and they can tell that their frown is making him uncomfortable, “but . . .”
“Parents from different castes never really get it.”
Arran looks up at them, curious, and mentally they kick themself. Theodora Arlot has a history that he already knows something of, the daughter of a freedman rising to success out of her own hard work and sheer determination. Theo Nix, however, is a very different story. And their heart doubles over in their chest as they realize that they don’t really want to lie.
“My dad,” they tell him, fishing for the right words to find that seed of truth, “had all of these deeply rooted ideas that were just . . . so at odds with what I knew. I . . . he,” they catch themself, “had a really damaging childhood, and that shit sticks.”
He nods quietly, taking in their words. “Had?”
“Hm?”
“You keep using the past tense.”
“Oh.” They lie back down, the truth coming out more easily now. “Yeah. The old story. Couldn’t assimilate to the new life. Drank a lot. Died young.” So maybe Jarol had fallen from pleb to serva, not the other way around, but the end result was the same.
“I’m sorry.”
And that, too, is the truth. Jarol had been a mean and hopeless drunk, steadily sinking his family into debt and squalor, all the while refusing to see how he was in any way responsible for what ultimately became of them. The few bright memories Theo has of him—teaching them to restring a bow or enchanting a full mess hall with late-night tales of Ante Quietam heroes—are quickly overshadowed by the others. Starvation and beatings and the dark, endless choke of the underground. The unfocused eyes he’d looked at them through because there was nothing to be done. It was too late. He might be their father, but the Publica had come for them as much as him, because Theo was only three. Too little to be left on their own. So as much as they can tell themself otherwise, it was Jarol, really, in the end. His fault that their future was ripped away, replaced by a black brand and nothing but long years of service ahead. It had been a mercy for them both when he went.
Theo, however, has never been much good at self-pity, so they try smiling just a little instead into the comfortable silence that stretches out between them and Arran.
“My dad and I weren’t talking at the end,” he offers, after a moment, and they shift to look at him. Eyes gazing up toward the ceiling, his long, slender fingers running through messy brown curls, as though needing somewhere to put that restless energy. Anywhere but the words so clearly fighting to be let out.
“Why?”
He shrugs, flushing a little bit. “Ah . . . We said some things. He called me an idealistic individualist—which, trust me, was an insult coming from him. He said I was being willfully overdramatic.”
“And were you?” they ask, poking him with a toe.
“A little, yeah. I, uh. I told him he should have just let me grow up verna.”
“What?” Theo asks this a great deal more loudly than they had meant to, just short of a yelp. Because that has got to be the most insane thing they’ve ever heard anyone say. “Arran, that is so messed up.”
“Yeah, I know,” he says, having the decency at least to look embarrassed about it. “I was angry. I didn’t actually mean it.”
“Good. Because I’m with your dad on this one. That’s the stupidest . . . the blindest thing I’ve ever—”
“I know,” Arran says loudly, cutting them off before they can build up too much steam. “I’m not an idiot. I was just trying to . . . If I could have just grabbed him and shaken him and known it would’ve made some sort of difference, I’d have done that instead, but . . .” He breaks off, staring hard at the wall like the words he needs could be written on it somewhere if he looks hard enough. Theo watches with a level gaze, waiting for him to find them, and feels as though those words had better be good. It takes a very specific set of life experiences—or lack thereof—to even joke about something like that.
When Arran speaks again, his voice is calmer. “My dad . . . Terra knows how he did it, I never asked, but he got my contract commuted years before he was supposed to. And I am grateful for that, because I can’t even imagine . . . But it’s like you said, he never actually understood what doing that meant. From a practical standpoint.”
There’s a frank quiet in his voice, like if he can just put the words in the right order and get them out into the air between the two of them, then maybe Theo can comprehend their meaning without laying their own thoughts or truths over them. And Theo, who has never wanted anyone else’s anger or pity either, finds themself strangely inclined to listen.
“The world isn’t built for people like me to exist,” he says, “so effectively I don’t. This has been my bed my whole life, but it’s not actually mine. Nothing is. And there’s no way for me to change that or make my own money, not without joining the legions. So unless I do that, the rest of my life depends on how much my little sister likes me. And I don’t want to be angry about that. I know how lucky I am. But I guess I always thought he had some sort of plan for me . . . and it turns out he didn’t. What he did wasn’t about me at all, just making good with his own conscience. So, yeah. I’m angry. And I have no idea what the answer to that is.”
Arran stops, and Theo, for their part, feels their own anger abate. Though they still don’t know if they want to hug him or smack him. Probably both. Because as much as they want to yell at him again for daring to complain when he lives a life that most can barely dream of, he already knows. And they recognize the hurt that wraps around him, a complicated wound to the soul that will never really heal. They wear it themself. By now they just know how to live with it.
“The worst part,” he says, “is that I never knew if he did it out of love or guilt.”
“You don’t get angry like that with people you don’t love,” they tell him quietly.
“No, I know he loved me. But I don’t know if he loved her.”
• • •
The night creeps on and they find their way back into each other’s arms again. The heat between them is thicker now, with Arran’s fingers tracing the notches in Theo’s spine as they ride him, hard and slow, against the linen sheets. He sighs into the curve of their body, and throws his head back, and they bury trailing laughter down his throat even as they fight to stay underneath his skin. After, he traces along the thick sea-green ridges of their tattooed back with quiet, questioning fingernails until he drifts away to sleep.
Theo doesn’t sleep. They can’t.
Instead, sheets pulled up around them at the foot of the bed, they count the dark beauty marks that dot his neck and milk-pale face, and pushes away the voice that can’t help but wonder if they’ve made a huge mistake.