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Hubert stands outside the dragon’s den for a long minute, steeling himself for the onslaught within. The heat unbearable, the noise cacophonous, every myriad sense driven to painful excess, and his heart crawling itself out of his throat thump by bloody thump—no battle holds higher risks than this, yet still he finds his way here time and again to tempt the everlasting halls of Adamantine.
He pushes open the door and lets the inferno take him.
Tonight the hall of the inn is thrumming with bodies, upright, packed shoulder to shoulder as they down their mugs of ale and sway to the beat of drum and flute. A handful of giants loom where children have scrambled onto the shoulders of their parents for a better look at the stage and its dancers, and hands flash through the air not with knives but with calls for another round, another glass, another spirit to burn them bright.
Normally, this would all make for the perfect distraction. Hubert would slip faceless and unknown into the mass of commoners, snip the throat of his target with ease, and disappear back into the night. But to linger bodily among the citizenry? Horrific. Better a hall of viper-tongued nobles than this.
Hubert shouldn’t be here. Everyone knows it. Like belongs with like, and each time they—Bernadetta—invites him back, it is only out of politeness. And next time you’re in the area, maybe…? The grim shadow that safeguarded her through the war should know better than to haunt her happy ending, but selfishness lingers once embraced.
His eyes sweep the room for Bernadetta’s favorite hiding spots, aching to feel her quietly covetous gaze upon him, but he cannot spot her within the crush of flesh. There must be some local festival for the Adamantine to be so crowded; normally they only serve the guests of their adjoining inn and a dozen or so regulars. Hubert should make his mental excuses and take back to the road rather than add one more body to the mercantile tally.
But a hand closes on Hubert’s shoulder, all his wiry muscle reduced to another chop of mutton within the possessive heat of that massive grip, and a sudden shiver arcs through Hubert’s entire body.
“Hubert!” hollers the mouth by his ear, as if it need struggle to be heard over the boisterous crowd. “Welcome!”
That monstrous hand spins him easily, and Hubert stiffly endures the solid wall of Raphael’s chest and arms wrapping around him in a ferocious hug.
“Still all bones?” Raphael laughs. The crowd parts as he ushers Hubert to a table by the roaring fireplace, and only then does Hubert realize he hasn’t felt his fingertips for over an hour. “Sit! Sit! We’ll stuff you right up again. Wait here—“
Raphael disappears as quickly as he arrived, that brutal magnetism switching on and off at will. This is why Bernadetta prefers his protection, Hubert knows. Place Raphael in a room and he will fill it with warmth, sucking in everyone’s attention and transmuting it to light like one of Bernadetta’s strange plants. She tends him carefully, pruning the rare frond with a hint of miserable mildew, and basks in the quiet edges of the spaces he cultivates for her in turn. A trick of presence instead of absence, so masterful that even Hubert finds himself, on rare occasion, breathing easier when he loiters within the garden’s periphery.
A thick pelt drops around Hubert’s shoulders, and a steaming bowl of spiced beef and barley appears on the table in front of him, and a clear glass fills with sparkling cider from the cellar’s finest casks, and every time Hubert startles for his pleasantries instead of his poisons, Raphael is already gone.
Hubert stares down at the soup bowl as its level recedes and its heat spreads within him. A distant shard of malingering pride splinters at this treatment, akin to a child swaddled and coddled by the fire, but his stomach wins out. Even at the Academy, Hubert recognized Raphael as a damn good cook.
Slowly, something in him settles. Awareness of Bernadetta’s absence at his side is all that keeps him from slumping over his soup and closing his eyes.
As much as it pains Hubert to admit it, upon hitting the unforeseen age of thirty, assassinations don’t energize him the way they used to. They are no longer The Work. Any quarry worth pursuing was picked off in the early days of the Reconstitution, if not eliminated during the war outright, and there is nothing more exhausting than wasting one’s talents on the undeserving. Yet certain individuals require a professional touch regardless of their personal inadequacy, so off Hubert goes to every corner of the continent to tidy up the way he knows best.
Now there is no rush of exhilaration at a job well done, no glory to find in three hours spent contorted in a dusty crawlspace waiting for the nattering maids to clear out so he could loop a garrote around his target’s dozing neck. His sinuses protest even now, two days later, and his shoulders ache. Another unwanted medal of service is scarcely worth the trouble.
He had planned to spite the family line by dying childless and unwed, a branch snuffed out. Now he wonders if early retirement would be insult enough.
Though that is part of what this strange arrangement is, he supposes. In the old days Hubert could have warped back to Enbarr and its sterile comforts after any job no matter how far. Now such irresponsible use of his magic takes too great a toll on His Lady’s heart, and he has been sternly requested to travel as mere mortals do. Horse, carriage, battered bones. The occasional stay at an inn to tuck into a good meal and a warm bath with his friend from the war.
And interaction with…people. Hubert avoids paying anyone much attention after he initially clears a room, but the others at his table are especially hard to ignore when they allow their toddlers to crawl all around the furnishings like termites, putting their grubby hands and mouths on whatever they please. In the Prime Minister’s idealistic polemic, this must be what is called remembering who we serve.
Another bowl of soup appears. Hubert pulls it in toward his chest and away from small seeking fingers.
“Bern’s on the road,” Raphael offers when he swings by to refill some nearby glasses. He roars with a laugh lost in the din. “Think she planned it?”
He means to avoid the crowd, but the soup curdles in Hubert’s stomach.
She knew Hubert was coming.
She left.
The crackling fireplace and the prattling children drown out everything else, a slow hum of magic that Hubert has never grasped. All he ever had to offer her was stark isolation; at the time of their not-quite-courtship, Hubert had thought that was what Bernadetta wanted. But Raphael gave her a place to bloom in community, an occasional test of her boundaries as she let her heart grow brave and bold, and together they built a home for weary travelers out of nothing but smiles and soup.
There is dried blood beneath Hubert’s leathers that isn’t his own. That she ever curled into his side at all, once upon a time, is enough.
Hubert slides a few sovereigns under the half-finished bowl and stands to take his leave. There isn’t anything here for him.
He only makes it halfway across the room before a warm body fills the space behind him, braces him by the hip, and asks, “Heading upstairs?”
No.
Hubert thinks he says it. His mouth forms the shape. His breath fades beneath the press of the crowd.
There’s a room they save for him on the third floor, right next to the owners’ bedroom. The space on that floor is rarely rented out, mostly used for diplomats and officials passing through, all former classmates. Jeritza, sometimes, when he has quarry of his own. The wooden walls are not especially soundproof, and though Hubert offered to Silence the entire floor at no cost, Bernadetta brushed off the offer and promptly scurried away. No use screaming if no one can hear it, Raphael explained, with an open joy that still whispers lightning down Hubert’s spine.
The answer has to be no.
Raphael is frowning when Hubert turns, on his own this time. There are over two hundred customers down here waiting to empty their pockets for him, and Raphael’s gaze is fixed squarely on Hubert’s, like he never learned not to look a wild thing in the eye.
He always looks at Hubert that way, because Bernadetta is there, and Raphael will shape the world into whatever Bernadetta wants with his own two hands. Thankless, dutiful service, the kind Hubert knows how to appreciate. Even when Bernadetta’s hunger runs to malingering bone-bags destined for a nameless crypt, Raphael serves them up on a silver platter like the finest rack of lamb.
But Bernadetta is not here, and Raphael’s teeth are sharp and white where his lips part around some too-affable argument, and the hand on Hubert’s hip hasn’t moved.
“Six and six, right?” Raphael asks. That’s how Hubert always excused these lapses. Six hours of company and six hours of sleep, and then he would be on the road again. Never more. Never less.
“Might not be as good of company as the Miss, but—”
“It has nothing to do with her,” snarls Hubert, on edge for reasons that keep shivering right out of his brain. Everyone else in the crowd has faded into a distant rumble of thunder while Hubert stands in the heart of the bear’s den, trying to argue sense against his own base nature when he can barely remember the words.
“Right. Just you and me. That a problem?”
Raphael’s hands retreat to the fall of his apron, knuckles bulging as he wipes off his palms against the weathered fabric. Sometimes he lets those hands linger over the flat of Hubert’s stomach, to check if he’s full, to remember how deep he’s been. Once he pinned Hubert by the neck with a single palm just to prove he could, because Hubert wouldn’t stop running his mouth yet still never asked for what he wanted, and Bernadetta told him to settle, so Raphael made it happen.
Now he sees Hubert looking, and before Hubert can make his excuses, Raphael pins him down with five easy words.
“I’ll run you a bath.”
—
Something must be wrong with him, clinically speaking.
There is nothing abnormal about adrenaline spiking in the field of battle, with base survival and human rationality at odds with frenetic misfiring nerves, but the onslaught crests and crashes, and then it is done. Even the Emperor experiences it this way, despite her too-many Crests, and the Prime Minister’s unnatural momentum cannot carry even him beyond the normal boundaries. But it should be no surprise that a Vestra’s body, so honed to repression and sublimation, banks even that momentary energy boost like a dinner knife slipped from the table and tucked into a sleeve. A weapon for another time.
In the field there was always another job, another target, another piece of The Work to enact. It would’ve eaten him alive if not for Bernadetta. Their first night, she had been the one to startle him in the hallways of the derelict monastery, the one to spot something in him that scared her more than his grim features, and to pull him into the oblivion of her bed. She called it Safety. Something about his body needing a place to land, like a hawk on the wing much too long, a traveler in need of roots, a million whispered metaphors on her lips as he buried his face into the soft of her neck in dormitory rooms and camp tents and the elaborate bathtub here in her marital home. She put food in him, and kisses, and took his cock until it scarcely belonged to him anymore, and he would doze within a cocoon of hand-embroidered bedding until he felt somewhat himself again.
And all the while, Raphael kept the business and the whole world running without them. So that Bernadetta did not feel torn in too many directions. So that Hubert…
His heart rate won’t come down. He folds his hands behind his back and gazes into the darkness beyond the window, refusing to allow himself to so much as glance at the tub, and curses himself for Raphael’s brute entrapment. It’s—about Bernadetta. Whatever this is. And without her, there is no point.
Secondhand service has no appeal.
Still his throat goes dry when Raphael shoulders in through the doors with great buckets of steaming water strung from his arms like daisy chains. The sweltering heat catches Raphael full in the face when he pours them into the tub, and he rakes through the wild tangle of his hair with a laugh. He looks like a stablehand from one of Bernadetta’s novels, sweat-drenched and bursting his seams, as yet unaware he will be the fabled hero that vanquishes all challenges and puts evil to bed.
“Got a full house tonight,” Raphael says. He fails to nod his apologies and disappear back to his inn. His shirt is not at all appropriate for customers in its present state.
He backs Hubert in against the window and breathes deep, like he’s smelling him, which is the most atrociously erotic thing anyone has ever done to Hubert after a day in the saddle. “You okay if we share?”
It must be the steam, honey-sweet with one of Bernadetta’s strange mixes of flower and herb, that saps away at Hubert’s ironclad aversion. The steam and the cliff’s edge of adrenaline and the jarring warmth of Raphael’s hands settling easy on his shoulders, thumbs against collarbones, like it doesn’t matter if he’s within an inch of bloodying himself on a hidden blade, Hubert couldn’t hurt him anyway. Wouldn’t. Because of Bernadetta? She would be troubled, certainly, if left her home and husband a seething pit of miasma, but a man is entitled to defend himself against. Care.
Still Hubert claws for a thread of Reason. The signs won’t balance, the delta out of sequence; he cannot swallow the strange docility of this place, his domestication, against the violence inherent in a looming figure of sheer muscle, no matter the smile.
"Do you offer such charming amenities to all your customers?" Hubert inquires. He’s backed up against the window now, his fingers gripping the ledge. Insult is weapon enough.
Raphael laughs with his whole chest. There are less buttons than there were a moment ago, surely. “See anyone else up here?”
Hubert shrinks away, put off by the simple parry, but has nowhere else to go.
"The Miss doesn't like sharing what's hers. Lucky we both are, yeah?" Raphael’s smile inches wider. Like it’s that simple. Hers. "Lucky us."
Hubert swallows. "Indeed."
The hands on him are wrong, but the mouth that fits against his is perfect. Familiar. It is hardly the first time they have kissed, and not even the first without Bernadetta. The Adamantine’s owners have a breakfast tradition of trading slices of peach currant for kisses, and Hubert will do anything to claim his morning cup of coffee from Raphael’s bountiful tray.
What is painfully obvious, however, is that this is the first time Raphael has ever wrangled noble clothing. He paws for purchase at Hubert’s buckles like a target fumbling for a wrestling hold, motor skills fading and desperation growing at Hubert’s every groan, and even in this there is Bernadetta’s encouraging touch. More than once she has pulled an old court dress out of storage and asked Hubert to lace her in, only to have Raphael rend the corset bones with his bare hands, a caged thing freed, a fruit husked for devouring.
Hubert is only mealy bone and gaunt flesh. There is no treasure to uncover save the knives that clatter to the floor.
Raphael doesn’t so much as blink, though he does kick them away on reflex.
Somehow that’s what does it. That distant flicker of martial training is all the reminder Hubert needs, blades skewering through his final strings. Everything in this inn is under Raphael’s even-handed purview, under his control. He has built it, gladly, thanklessly, impossibly, into Bernadetta’s Safety.
If Hubert could ruin that, he wouldn’t be here. Raphael would’ve taken his head off his shoulders the moment he asked Bernadetta for one last dance at the wedding reception.
It’s not submitting to gravity, she told him so many, many times. It’s finding somewhere to land.
Gnarled and wretched as he is.
Yet if Hubert drops his eyes in momentary self-reproof, there is nowhere to look but the burgeoning advance of Raphael’s cock threatening to split another set of seams. With shaking hands he reaches for the remaining buttons of Raphael’s shirt, aiming to make himself useful, but Raphael swats away the attempt. In an instant he has pulled the condemned shirt over his head and dropped it soaking onto the pile of Hubert’s stripped undergarments.
Hubert forces himself to breathe. It is much easier when Bernadetta tells him where to look, when he is enacting a scene for her benefit, which is for his benefit, which.
Raphael’s hands settle on his hips, thick fingers brushing over the curve of his tailbone. “Come on. Water’s getting cold.”
It is no such thing. By the time they fold so many limbs into the limits of the tub, Hubert is boiling in his own skin. Water sloshes over the rim every time Raphael fills his lungs to capacity, his chest tucked so tightly against Hubert’s back that Hubert could count his ribs. Could, if Hubert weren’t already halfway to madness at the gentle prickle of each soft hair against his shoulder blades, each blade of rye golden in the light, to say nothing of the mattress of thick thigh beneath him and that burning brand of desire tucked against the narrow cleft of his ass.
His pulse flutters when Raphael’s hands rub a fine lather of soap against his chest, his neck, his throat. He tosses his head back in the sharp arch of a cut jugular, gasping, and his knees knock together in a sudden splash.
They should—talk. Raphael is not this quiet with Bernadetta, always filling the emptiness with warm chatter to banish her lingering loneliness, yet with Hubert he cannot find the right words. He is no noble; he doesn’t know how to spin dissimilitude and circumvent circumspection as easy as put on his socks. Hubert is masks and no honesty, his body a weapon stripped of sensation, and they cannot fit but their hunger cannot lie.
He is wound tight and well-taught all at once, and maybe that’s what this is, Bernadetta testing how well she’s got him trained when it isn’t her own hand on the leash, if he can be broken open even in her absence. She’s been absent before, in small ways. Darting off to bake breakfast buns while Raphael takes his time fingering Hubert open, each of them making a wonder of the pallid dough beneath their hands. Doing her morning stretches while Raphael folds Hubert flat as a letter and envelops him between floor and flesh. But mostly watching, with them and watching, watching Hubert’s face when she spreads her legs and offers the soft mess her husband has made of her, watching the tense muscle of Raphael’s stomach to stop him right on the edge, watching the script and the clock to pull off every meticulously staged scene with success, because instructions are easier than feelings, even when you’re happy.
But Raphael takes his time.
There is no goal here in this space. All blood and grime has long disappeared into the water, and now Raphael’s touch only scrubs away every other spare thought from Hubert’s weary head. With no one puppetting him through admittedly breathtaking visuals, it is impossible to ignore his incomprehensible hunger, his patience, and the care with which his hands slide down Hubert’s flanks and avoid an old arrow puncture that never healed quite right.
Meticulous as his wife in his own way, perfect in their dichotomy, a collection of opposites imbued of the same warmth. Bernadetta’s soapy breasts have never menaced Hubert’s last speck of rationality the way the beast of Leicester pressed against his buttocks is doing, however, which he can never admit to lest she take it as a challenge, and Raphael does not even readjust when Hubert’s patience at last gives out and he arches back with a guttural moan.
Hubert is as warm and willing and relaxed as he’ll ever be, as he’s ever been, for anyone except Bernadetta, and still Raphael has not so much as pressed a soapy thumb anywhere near his hole. Malicious, delicious torture, and Hubert will stand for no more of it.
He grinds down with a vengeance, all sharp bone save the depths of him, and if he can just get the right angle he can put an end to it. It will hurt, but let it, as long as the pain sparks his brain back into working order.
This time Raphael is not so obliging, and Hubert chokes on his impudent fury when a too-gentle hand takes him by the balls and squeezes tight.
“Easy.” The voice in his ear has none of the threat now turning Hubert’s blood to sweet lightning. “Let us take care of you.”
Us.
It is not surrender when Hubert melts into the thick of Raphael’s fist around his cock. He turns to kiss Raphael too ferociously for that.
Six and six bleeds into the dawn, into noon, and Hubert dreams only of a possessive arm around his back and a bouquet of peonies and foxglove planted between his lips. Fingers trail down the bumps of his spine, counting, like they’re planning a banquet for each.
“She’ll be home in two days,” Raphael murmurs into the rat’s nest of Hubert’s hair. “Will you stay?”