Chapter Text
Tae is prodding his arm.
Porsche lets it happen. There hasn’t been a single second, since this evening began, that he hasn’t felt like a prized pet, all dolled up and paraded around on a leash for the world to see. He doesn’t see why that feeling should go away now, back in Kinn’s private booth, away from the prying eyes of the rest of the clubgoers.
“They really are real,” Tae says. “Kinn, where did you find him?”
Kinn flicks his dark eyes over Porsche. “In a bar,” he says.
“Must be some bar,” Tae says. “He looks expensive.”
Porsche’s hands are clenched into fists.
Kinn takes a sip of his drink. “He’s not for sale.”
Tae’s hand withdraws. “I guess not,” he says. “Does he talk?”
Kinn meets Porsche’s eyes, gaze intent. “He’s just shy. Aren’t you, Porsche?”
Porsche forces his hands to relax. It’s fine. Remember Porchay. It’s fine. “Yeah,” he says. “Sorry.”
Tae smiles with the kind of guileless ease Porsche inherently associates with second-generation wealth. It’s the kind of smile you can only give when your worst problem each day is the dreaded dilemma of what to wear. “Hey, it’s fine,” he says. “We’re all friends here. I guess I’m just a little surprised. Kinn’s not really the settling down type.”
Porsche looks at Kinn. Kinn stares back.
Tae flicks his eyes between the two of them. “You guys are kind of intense, huh?”
That’s one way to put it. Porsche smiles tightly. “Sure,” he says.
Tae’s smile takes on a wicked tilt. “Far be it from me to criticise a little intensity,” he says. “So long as everyone has fun.” He tilts his head. “Everyone does get to have fun, right?”
Kinn places his glass down on the table with an audible clink. “Tae, hasn’t Time been gone for a while?”
Tae waves his hand loosely. “He probably got lost on the way to the bathroom,” he says dismissively. “His sense of direction is shit when he’s wasted.”
“Maybe,” Kinn says, voice pitched to that low tone that says nothing about what he’s saying is a suggestion, “you should go and look for him.”
Tae pauses. He looks from Porsche, sat awkwardly, drinks untouched in front of him, to Kinn, with his dangerous posture and eyes fixed exactingly on Porsche. He smirks. “Sure,” he says. “I can go find Time. Maybe we’ll route back via the bar. Or maybe we’ll hang out in the bathroom by ourselves for a bit.” He meets Porsche’s eye and winks. “Enjoy your intensity.”
After he’s left, Kinn grasps Porsche’s collar, yanking him so their faces are inches apart. From a distance, they probably look like they’re kissing.
Kinn’s breath is hot and vaguely alcoholic. “I don’t pay you to be rude to my friends.”
Porsche curls his fingers into Kinn’s own collar. “You don’t pay me to be polite to them, either.”
“Maybe,” Kinn says, lips just inches away from Porsche’s ear, “I shouldn’t pay you at all.”
It’s not an unfamiliar threat. Porsche can remember Chan’s unending criticisms – of his form, of his intelligence, of his lack of grit. You’re not worth half as much as he pays you. Porsche looks into Kinn’s eyes, and doesn’t flinch.
“There are three exits to this bar,” he says. “The entrance, the fire escape, and the service corridors. You have a detail of three men positioned throughout the room: Big, watching the entrance and fire escape; Ken, by the service corridors; and Som, in the VIP section with us. There’s a chokepoint on the stairs up to the VIP section, but there’s barely any cover up here. If bullets start flying your best bet is to drop to the floor and use the table as cover. It’ll be harder for them to shoot up at a prone target from below. An added concern in case of attack is the crowd; as soon as a gunshot is heard, they’ll panic, and rush for the exits, impeding a successful extraction.
“That’s what you pay me for,” Porsche says. “Anything else,” he lets go of Kinn’s clothes, giving the hands still fisted in his shirt a pointed look, “is just window dressing.”
Kinn lets go. With more distance between them, Porsche finally feels like he can breathe.
Because this is the truth of it all: they are not in love. Porsche isn’t the beautiful bartender that lured the Theerapanyakul heir out of a eight year stint of bachelorhood. Kinn isn’t the besotted fool that fell in love with gutter trash and elevated him to near royalty.
Porsche is just another meat shield. A bodyguard paid in just the right currency to die for Kinn. To sit at his side and lie for him.
“Four,” Kinn says, after a beat.
Porsche quirks an eyebrow at him, straightening his shirt.
“There are four exits to this bar,” Kinn says. “Across from us, there’s a balcony for access to the lights.”
Porsche flicks his eyes across the room. Past the glare of the strobe lights, he can’t make out much.
Kinn reaches for his drink once more. “It’s on the floorplans for this place,” he says. He watches Porsche above his glass. “I’ve been drinking here since I was in college. There’s not an inch of this establishment that hasn’t been crawled over for tactical advantage. My team has this in hand.”
You can’t trust the security team, Chan had told Porsche. There’ve been issues in the past with turncoats and traitors. Khun Korn and Kinn are certain there’s a leak, somewhere in our forces.
And then, pointedly, I don’t think I need to tell you the life expectancy, of such men.
“No good security system has a single point of failure,” Kinn says. “Let them do their jobs. If someone doesn’t do theirs, the others can cover for whatever hole they’ve left. A place like this wouldn’t be ideal for a hit, anyway. Too high risk. Too…” He rolls the words around his mouth. “Messy.” He swirls his glass of whisky. “I don’t need a one-man army. You’re not here to replace my team.”
“Then what am I here for?”
Kinn’s eyes are a brand on Porsche’s skin as he swallows a mouthful of whisky. “I can think of a few things,” he says.
Porsche clenches his hands into fists. Porchay, he tells himself. I’m doing this for Porchay.
“If bullets start flying, it’s your job to die before me,” Kinn says. “Until then…” There’s a mocking twist to his mouth, not quite a smile, not quite a smirk. “You’re here to look pretty,” he puts his empty glass down on the table, “and be nice to my friends.”
He leans back in his seat. “Understood?”
Porchay, Porchay, Porchay. Porsche looks away. “Understood.”
--
There are five cameras in Kinn’s bedroom suite, that Porsche has noticed. They’re well-hidden – Porsche doesn’t know if he would have been able to spot them if he hadn’t spent so many nights in those rooms, staring up at the ceiling, unable to sleep. He certainly wouldn’t have known to look for them before Chan’s bodyguard bootcamp from hell.
Porsche’s instinctive conclusion, when he noticed the first of the lenses – hidden in a light-fitting above the bed – was that Kinn must have been some kind of pervert.
Then the tactical training kicked in. Porsche could hear Chan’s voice in his head: Never believe people indulgent and stupid, just because they’re quiet about their intelligence.
Kinn doesn’t have cameras in his bedroom because he’s a pervert who likes to watch himself fuck men. Kinn has cameras in his bedroom because he’s the second son of Thailand’s most powerful mafia family, and having any one room in his house not covered in cameras is the kind of gaping hole in his security that could get him killed.
Of course, Porsche reminds himself, that doesn’t mean he’s not also a pervert.
“—not exactly his type, is he?”
“Book.”
“What? We’ve all noticed it, Mai. Khun Kinn likes them delicate and pretty. Porsche is…”
“Sturdy?” A third voice.
“Sure. Hard to imagine someone like that, letting Khun Kinn—”
“Do not finish that sentence. We shouldn’t be talking about this.”
“C’mon, Mai. The man’s not exactly hiding it.”
“That doesn’t mean—”
Porsche is jolted out of his concentration on their conversation as a large heap of bed sheets is deposited next to him. He looks up from his laptop. “Sorry, Chana. Do you need me to move?”
Rochana shakes her head. “There are easier ways to find some peace and quiet in this compound,” she says.
Porsche grins. “But none so comfy,” he says, wriggling atop his mound of dirty bed linen.
Rochana’s responding look is flat. “And none so well-positioned to hear the gossip of the kitchen staff.” She pulls open the door of one of the industrial size dryers installed in the room. The scent of fresh laundry fills the air.
Porsche shrugs. With the service elevator so close to where the laundry trolleys are kept, it’s easy to overhear the conversations happening in the kitchen above them. “I like to know what people are saying about me.”
“If you knew half of what they said, you wouldn’t be so eager,” Rochana says.
Porsche knows much more than half. Ever since Kinn brought him home, he’s been something of a favourite subject for the household gossip in the Theerapanyakul Compound. There’s been a fair amount of derision – of his background, of his intelligence, of his position as Kinn’s resident bedwarmer – and a fair amount of doubts as to his longevity. It’s all very quiet, of course – just a few shades too lurid to be respectful – but Porsche has always been good at getting people to talk.
It made him a great bartender. It also makes him a half-decent intelligence asset.
So Porsche knows all about Kinn’s preferences. He knows about the – apparently gleefully documented – parade of dainty, feminine rent boys that up until a month ago were trotted up to Kinn’s suite at a rate of two a week. He knows that they would leave, usually two or three hours later, limping. He knows they never stayed overnight.
And he knows what all that supposedly says about him. That beneath his veneer of charm and grace, he’s just another submissive bitch that Kinn likes to take to heel.
“Eh,” Porsche says, waving his hand. “I used to work in a bar, Chana. I’m not so easy to scandalise.”
Rochana raises an eyebrow at him, like she doesn’t quite believe that.
“C’mon, Chana,” Porsche says, “you mean to tell me you’ve never confessed some deep dark secret to your bartender? I used to get told all sorts of sordid things – there are at least twenty philandering spouses who owe their marriages to my discretion.”
“If I have a secret,” Rochana says, pulling the sheets out of the machine, “I keep it to myself.”
Porsche smiles. “You’re no fun.”
“I work for the Theerapanyakul family,” she says. “Even if I just do the laundry, it’s not in my best interests to be loose-lipped.”
It sounds chiding. It’s probably meant to be. But Porsche, sitting on a pile of dirty laundry, chatting to Kinn’s laundry girl, with a laptop open so he can pretend to be writing an assignment for a college he had to drop out of when he started working for Kinn – Porsche can’t help but feel that Rochana really has no idea the secrets Porsche is keeping to himself.
Or maybe she does. She does do Kinn’s laundry, after all.
--
One of the things Porsche has come to appreciate since he started circling as Kinn’s tagalong boytoy is that people are immediately and instinctively dismissive of him.
Part of it comes from how Kinn treats him at public events like this one, tolerating his proximity without directly engaging or even acknowledging him. People tend to take their cues from Kinn without realising it, mirroring his body language, his tone, his level of formality.
The other part seems to be some sort of cultural game of the upper class. Pretty women and – more rarely – pretty men are considered part of the backdrop. Knowing not to stare is just one part of the intricate power games that people play when money makes everyday concerns irrelevant.
So, for the most part, people’s eyes slide onto him, and then slide right back off again.
It’s helpful. It means that people don’t notice that he’s been holding the same champagne glass all evening, and hasn’t so much as taken a sip. They don’t notice that his eyes drift when Kinn’s talking, flicking across the room and all its vantage points and security measures.
“—of course, I’d love to talk more about it, somewhere a little more private.”
Kinn has this specific look he gets on his face when he’s trying to make nice. It’s not quite a smile, but his lips curl upwards at the edges, and he looks at you with dark, hooded eyes. “Of course, Khun Chet. Porsche, why don’t you go get yourself another drink at the bar?”
Porsche shouldn’t. The whole point of his attendance at events like these – sparkling galas for the rich and corrupt – is to stick to Kinn far closer than a conventional security detail can. Chan will have his head.
Kinn must notice his hesitance, because he places his own empty glass in Porsche’s hands. “Get something for me, too.”
Porchay, Porchay, Porchay. Porsche smiles. “Anything in particular?”
“Surprise me.”
Porsche wants nothing more to do just that. Porsche peels off from Kinn’s side, and crosses the ballroom to the bar.
He puts his champagne flute and Kinn’s empty tumbler down on the bar top and smiles at the bartender. “A fresh glass of champagne,” he says. “And…” he trails off, eyes sticking to Kinn.
He shouldn’t. He really shouldn’t. There’s already more distance between him and Kinn than he’s meant to permit. Adding an obstacle would just be stupid. But—
Well, Kinn did ask to be surprised.
Porsche leans over the bar top. “Five thousand baht if you let me come back there and make my boyfriend’s drink myself.”
--
Kinn is unamused when he finds his way to the bar, twenty minutes later, and finds Porsche behind it. Or maybe he’s unamused by the crowd of society wives that have amassed around the scene, or even Porsche’s state of undress, his suit jacket thrown over the back of a barstool, shirt unbuttoned to the navel.
“Porsche,” he says levelly.
Porsche just smiles. “Lovely talking to you, ladies,” he says, winking at his crowd of admirers, “but I better head off. My man’s the jealous type.”
It’s certainly a more palatable explanation than the true thoughts that lie behind Kinn’s current expression. He wants to throttle me, Porsche thinks with no lack of amusement.
There are pouts and wolf-whistles as Porsche slides over the top of the bar, landing at Kinn’s side. Kinn grasps his wrist, and Porsche just has time to snatch up his blazer, before he’s being tugged out of the bar, down corridors, out of sight of the main party.
When they reach a bathroom, Kinn forces him through the door. “Do up your shirt,” he spits. “You look like a whore.”
There’s this moment, stood there with Kinn’s hand wrapped around his wrist like a shackle, where Porsche considers letting it go. He’s let so much go, since he started working for Kinn – his morals, his pride, his privacy. What’s one more insult?
But Porsche’s blood is rushing in his ears. His pulse is thrumming beneath his skin. And suddenly, he wants to fight – wants to know what it will take for Kinn’s precious façade to crumble, even slightly. Even in anger.
So Porsche meets his gaze head-on. “You mean I’m not one?” he asks. “What was it you pay me for? Looking pretty. Being nice to your friends. Sure sounds a little bit like a whore.”
Kinn’s face is stony. Fine. Porsche can cut deeper.
He wrenches his hand out of Kinn’s grip, and starts to do up his buttons. “Or maybe you’re mad I’m not one,” he says. “Biddable and breakable – isn’t that how your tastes usually run?” He leans in closer. “Does it burn to know I won’t bend, just because you ask me to?”
Kinn inhales sharply. He raises a hand to Porsche’s neck. Porsche lets him, unflinching.
“You’ll bend,” Kinn says, “just the moment I want you to.”
Kinn’s fingers twist around the final few buttons of Porsche’s shirt. He’s so close Porsche can smell his shampoo – sandalwood, and shea butter – along with the faintest hint of alcohol on his breath and the acrid tang of gunpowder. Porsche’s heart is loud in his ears.
The moment passes. Kinn leans back.
“Clean yourself up,” he says. “Your hands reek of liquor.”
He turns and leaves.
Porsche stands there, legs weak, and breathes. Hey, c’mon, Porsche, what the hell was that? He closes his eyes, and hates the way his brain takes him back to Kinn – Kinn’s scent, Kinn’s breath close, Kinn’s hands at his throat. Porchay, he tells himself. You’re doing this for Porchay.
The door to the bathroom opens. Porsche opens his eyes. “Oh,” he says, to the woman standing in the doorway. “Sorry, I guess I missed the sign.”
She smiles at him. “You didn’t.”
And then she strikes.
Porsche manages to dodge the first hit on nothing more than instinct. He ducks low, scraping beneath the swing of her—is that a baton? How did she hide that in her dress? Nope, not the time—
She hits hard, he discovers quickly, as she pushes him back further into the bathroom, cutting off his space to dodge. He catches her next strike before it can make contact with his face, gripping her wrist to control the weapon, and takes a stiletto to the diaphragm for the trouble.
Shit. Porsche staggers back, breath knocked out of him, arm catching on an abandoned champagne glass by the sink, sending it crashing to the ground.
You stumble in close-quarters, Chan’s voice is loud in his ears. You don’t know how to fight without room to move.
She’s on him in a second.
A strike to the face has his ears ringing. Porsche reaches out blindly, and finds purchase in her hair. He slams her head down into his knee, and she comes up bloody.
And then—
Porsche’s entire body contorts as 150,000 volts of electricity course through him. He drops like a stone.
A weight on top of him. A hand on his cheek. “Well, you are a pretty one, at least.”
The hands circle around his neck. “Too bad.”
Porsche can’t breathe. Porsche can’t breathe, and he’s going to die in a bathroom at a hotel he can’t afford, and no-one’s going to know. Porsche can’t breathe, and Kinn will let him die.
His fingers close blindly around something thin and cool. The champagne glass, broken on the ground next to him. His vision starts to dim. He only has one shot.
“Goodbye, Porsche,” she tells him.
And then Porsche drives the broken stem of the champagne glass straight into her throat.
--
It takes three days for the doctors at the Theerapanyakul Compound to give Porsche the all clear to speak. He spends the first of those three days drifting in and out of consciousness in Kinn’s bed, kept company by the rhythmic sounds of Kinn’s laptop keyboard, and the steady beat of the heart monitor that they dragged into the room.
The second day, he feels more human, but no less tired. The heart monitor disappears, as does Kinn. Porsche endures a painful debrief with Chan, scribbling answers to the man’s questions on a pad of lined paper, before being left in bed to type up a formal incident report.
Kinn doesn’t come back that night.
By day three, Porsche is ready to orchestrate a jail break. He makes it about fifty feet down the corridor before he’s swarmed by staff and bodyguards alike, all suddenly far more deferential than they’ve ever been before. It’s all Khun Porsche and sentences ending in khrub – he feels every shred of their formal speech like an itch beneath his skin. Before he knows what’s happening, he’s back in Kinn’s bedroom, lying on freshly changed sheets, a fresh glass of water and bowl of soup sitting untouched at his bedside.
That night, he falls asleep before Kinn gets back. He hears him come in, though – feels the weight of him settling beside Porsche on the bed. He’s gone by the time Porsche wakes up the next morning.
On day four, the doctors finally let him leave bed. He’s taken off vocal rest, and permitted to take ‘gentle strolls’ around the Compound. He celebrates his newfound freedom with a shower – the first time he’s been able to bathe unattended since the incident took place.
The water is warm on his face.
“—I know, I know, I know. Shh, I know it hurts. We have to get the blood off before you can see a doctor. Bear with it, Porsche. Bear with it—”
“So you’re Porsche.”
Porsche snaps around, reaching for a gun that he’s not carrying, and comes face-to-face with the most offensively dressed man he’s ever seen. Porsche recognises him immediately: this is Tankhun, Kinn’s older brother. Chan’s profile on the man had included words such as capricious andshut-in. Given that Kinn’s had stated he was decisive and charismatic, Porsche had thought it impressive that those were the nicest things Chan could think to say.
“Oh, wow,” Tankhun says, peering closer to Porsche. “She really did try to kill you.” He lowers his sunglasses – which he’s wearing not just inside but inside a bathroom – as he drags his eyes across the bruising around Porsche’s neck. “They look like they hurt. Did she use rope?”
Porsche takes a moment to appreciate the situation in all its angles, before concluding that he has no idea what to do. Does he turn off the shower and take a towel? Keep going? Will Kinn be pissed if Porsche gets his brother’s designer clothes wet? “Uh,” he says, frozen beneath the spray. “No. Just her hands.”
Tankhun hums, eyes a little distant. “That’s good,” he says, leaning back. “Rope burn is the worst.”
You know what? Fine. Porsche gives in. This might as well happen. Porsche turns off the shower. “Can you grab my towel?” he asks.
Tankhun blinks a few times.
“My towel,” Porsche repeats, pointing at the rack behind Tankhun. Tankhun turns, and grabs the item in question. “Thanks.”
As he wraps it around his waist, Porsche glances behind Tankhun to Kinn’s bedroom. “Where’s your detail?” he asks, because it feels like the safest place to start.
Tankhun waves a hand. “Around,” he says. “You’ve got nice hair. You should dye it.”
Porsche runs a hand through his hair self-consciously. “Ah, I think Kinn likes it best this colour.”
“Who cares what Kinn likes?” Tankhun says. “It’s your hair.”
Porsche pauses. It’s your hair. His eyes fall on the bottles lining the inside of the shower, catching on Kinn’s expensive sandalwood and shea butter shampoo and body wash before skittering across the bathroom, first to the discarded pyjamas on the floor – silk, the kind of thing Porsche couldn’t afford to even touch before Kinn – and then to the shirt and dress pants hanging off the back of the door. There isn’t a single thing in this room that he owns. Not even himself.
You’ll bend just the moment I want you to.
Porsche’s hands are clenched at his sides. “Okay.”
“Okay?” Tankhun echoes.
“Okay, let’s dye my hair,” Porsche says.
Tankhun’s face splits into a bright grin. “Really?”
Porsche sighs. “Really.”
“No take-backs, Porsche,” Tankhun warns. “You agreed so you have to do it. Even if it looks bad.”
“Is it going to look bad?”
“Maybe!”
Porsche reaches for his pants. “That’s fine,” he says. It might even be better. Kinn’s reaction to a dye job alone promises to be interesting – a bad dye job should be that much more entertaining.
“Ooh, we can do red,” Tankhun says. “Then we’ll match.”
Red, running down his face, circling the drain—
“No red,” Porsche gasps.
Tankhun looks at him strangely. “Fine,” he agrees, just a little too easily. “No red.”
--
“You’re a braver man than I am.”
Porsche tears his gaze away from Tankhun, who’s gleefully mixing up a batch of hair dye. Stood behind him is one of Tankhun’s bodyguards – the short one with the young face. “How so?” he asks.
The bodyguard gestures at his hair. “The moment the young master moved towards me with bleach, I’d have run the opposite direction.”
Porsche touches his hair. It’s a little dry, from the bleach, but not really worse for wear at all. “It’s just hair.”
“As I said,” the bodyguard says. “A braver man than me. I’m Pete, by the way. I’m not sure if Tankhun got around to introductions, before he put you in the hotseat.”
“Porsche,” Porsche responds. He holds out his hand.
Pete looks a little bemused, but he shakes Porsche’s hand.
“You’re on Tankhun’s security detail, right?” Porsche says.
Pete shrugs. “Either that or I’m being hazed.” In the background, Tankhun starts to yell at one of his bodyguards for fetching the wrong tinting brush. “I’m genuinely not sure which it is.”
“Given what I know of this family,” Porsche says, “it’s probably both.”
Pete huffs out a laugh.
“Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep!” Tankhun crows. “Make way for the hair dye express! Ai’Pete, move, move, move!”
Pete dutifully ducks out of the way.
Tankhun puts a bowl filled with a thick, dark liquid in it down on the table in front of the mirror. When Porsche moves to look at it, Tankhun cuffs him lightly around the back of his head. “No peeking,” he says.
Porsche meets his eye in the mirror.
“Aow, I’m so excited,” Tankhun cries. “Porsche, you’re going to look so good!”
In the mirror, Porsche can see Pete give him a little encouraging fist pump, mouthing, Good luck!
Not for the first time since he met Kinn, Porsche finds himself wondering what the hell he’s signed himself up for.
--
The hair looks really good. Almost offensively good, actually.
Tankhun is a font of barely contained glee behind him. “It looks good doesn’t it?” he asks, practically vibrating on the spot.
Porsche fingers a lock of his dark blue hair. It’s subtler than he was expecting – in dim light, it’ll probably look black. He actually kind of likes it. “Yeah,” he says, after a beat. “It looks good, Tankhun.”
Tankhun claps his hands together. “I did such a good job!” he says. “Didn’t I do a good job, guys?”
His bodyguards hurry to agree.
“You know, I had my doubts when Kinn brought you back,” Tankhun says, “but you really know how to have fun, don’t you Porsche?”
From the look Pete is shooting him over Tankhun’s shoulder, that proclamation is much more dangerous than it at first seems. Porsche smiles tightly.
“Ah, I can’t wait until Kinn sees,” Tankhun says.
“Until I see what?”
A mad flurry runs through Tankhun’s security detail as they scramble out of the way and drop into hasty bows. “Khun Kinn!”
Porsche doesn’t move. He meets Kinn’s eyes in the mirror.
“We dyed Porsche’s hair,” Tankhun says. “Doesn’t it look good?”
“I can see that,” Kinn says. His eyes flick downwards, and linger on the bruises around Porsche’s neck, before coming back up to his face. “You weren’t in the rooms when I got back. It took a while to track you down.”
Porsche shrugs. “Tankhun ambushed me in the shower. There wasn’t really time to write a note.”
Kinn reaches for Porsche’s hair. He runs a hand through it. Porsche lets him. He’s grown used to the many and varied ways Kinn puts his hands on him. “It looks good, Tankhun,” he says, after a moment. “Thanks for looking after him today.”
The idea of Tankhun and duty of care appearing in the same paragraph is almost laughable, let alone the same sentence, but Tankhun doesn’t protest. He just waves his hand dismissively. “Whatever,” he says. “Take him back with you now. I’ve got a movie night planned.”
Kinn’s hand settles on Porsche’s shoulder. “Sure, Tankhun,” he says. “Have fun.”
Porsche knows when to take a cue to leave. He stands up, and sketches a short bow. “Thanks for the hair, Tankhun,” he says. No reason to burn bridges. He nods at the bodyguards. “Good to meet you guys.”
And then he lets Kinn lead him out of the room.
It takes him until they’re halfway back to Kinn’s rooms to realise that they’re holding hands. He quietly pulls away. Kinn lets him go.
“Tankhun’s not normally so bold,” Kinn says, after a beat.
Porsche glances at him out of the corner of his eye. “I find that hard to believe.”
Kinn exhales. “He keeps to himself, mostly,” he says. “He doesn’t usually take the initiative to meet new people.”
Porsche shrugs. “I’m his brother’s boyfriend,” he says. “It’s natural to be curious.”
Kinn looks back over his shoulder at Porsche. “Maybe,” he admits. He turns back away. “What did you think of his security detail?”
Porsche’s mind immediately falls back to the sight that had greeted him, when Tankhun marched him, still slightly damp, into his rooms. Tankhun’s detail had been in chaos, turning the place upside down looking for their runaway charge. One of them – Pon? Pol? Something like that – had been crying.
“Honestly?” Porsche asks.
“Honestly.”
“I spent the whole day with them and I still haven’t figured out who’s babysitting who in that arrangement.”
Kinn snorts. “For what it’s worth, Arm is very good at his job. Chan trained him personally.”
“Arm,” Porsche echoes. “The one with glasses?”
“Yes.”
He’d been the only guard that didn’t appear worried when Tankhun resurfaced. He’d been sat in the corner, looking at something on his iPad.
“Huh.”
“I take the security of my family very seriously,” Kinn says. He pushes open the door to his rooms. “Which is why we have one last matter to handle before we retire tonight.”
He holds the door open. Porsche walks in cautiously.
Lined up in Kinn’s reception room are seven men in suits. Porsche recognises a few of them easily: Big, with his ponytail and earrings; Ken, with his perpetual scowl; Som, with his shaved head. They’re most commonly assigned to Kinn’s security detail, so Porsche has seen his fair share of them. The others are less familiar.
Kinn closes the door behind him. “These are the men that were on duty the night of the product launch,” he says. “Family policy says that if you screw up, you get punished. But I’m not the one who was harmed by their negligence. So I thought I’d leave it up to you, the wounded party, to choose who to hold responsible.”
Porsche looks at the bodyguards, dutifully lined up, heads bowed, and then looks to Kinn. This is—
Kinn’s expression is not kind. “For example, the bathroom where you were attacked is part of Big’s sector,” he says. “Technically speaking, you were hurt on his watch.”
This is really—
“Monitoring of suspicious persons was Leo’s responsibility,” Kinn goes on. “Your attacker should have been flagged and tracked by him before she ever made a move.”
—some kind of sick, rich people bullshit.
Porsche closes his eyes. “Camera duty,” he says, opening them again. “Who was on camera duty?”
One of the unfamiliar men steps forward. “I was, Khun Porsche. Kit.”
“Body checks?”
“I was. Chaiya.”
“Guest list verification?”
Ken steps forward.
Porsche exhales. The worst thing about this situation, is that Porsche can’t tell who’s being used to bludgeon who. That’s Kinn in a nutshell, though: twisted and cruel, but never without efficiency. Never without motive.
“No good security system has a single point of failure,” Porsche says. “When something like this happens, it’s not just one person fucking up. It’s a whole chain of people fucking up.”
The bodyguards flinch.
Fucking hell. “Punish all of them,” Porsche says, “or punish none of them. I don’t care.”
Kinn’s eyebrows are raised. “Is that your answer?” he asks.
“Either that woman was just that good,” Porsche says, “and there was nothing they could have done, or they’re all incompetent. You know your men better than I do. Pick which one it is.”
Kinn’s lips curl.
Porsche meets his eye, a challenge. “I’m going to bed.”
Kinn lets him go.
As he strides past Kinn’s security detail, and enters their bedroom, he hears Kinn’s voice behind him, soft and dangerous: “Were I you, I would reflect on what you owe to Khun Porsche’s mercy. Dismissed.”
Porsche shuts the door behind him.