"I'll come back tomorrow," he says. He stands. His knees ache from the cold stone and he's grateful for the ache because it's grounding, real, something to focus on that isn't the heat still sitting in the pit of his stomach. "Those hip stitches especially need monitoring. Deep wounds in that area are prone to reopening."
He makes it to the cage door. Calls for the guards. The lock turns.
He does not look back.
***
In his cot that night, Lethe stares at the ceiling and his body won't settle.
He lies on his back with his hands folded over his stomach and he thinks about Zazyrus's grip on his wrist. The controlled strength of it. The way his clawed fingers curled around the bones with a pressure that saidstopand notI will hurt you.The distinction matters. It matters enormously, and Lethe keeps turning it over in his mind, examining it from every angle, because the creatures in the pits don't make that distinction. They react. They lash out. They bite and claw and snap because they're afraid and in pain and have learned that violence is the only language humans understand.
Zazyrus didn't lash out. He stopped Lethe with exactly as much force as was needed and not an ounce more. He communicated a boundary without breaking bone, without drawing blood, without doing any of the things he is clearly capable of doing. And when Lethe explained the necessity, he let go.
He chose not to.
The phrase echoes in Lethe's head. Notcouldn't movebutchose not to.The chains are thick, yes, but Lethe has been around fighters long enough to know the difference between a creature restrained by iron and a creature restrained by decision. Zazyrus could have had his hand around Lethe's throat before the guards registered the sound. The chains are for show. They both know it. The beast sits still because he decides to sit still, and that decision is the only thing standing between Lethe and a very brief, very final end.
He should be terrified by that.
He rolls onto his side and presses his face into his pillow and breathes and his body is still warm, still restless, still thrumming with something that isn't fear. The sense-memory of skin under his hands. The heat of Zazyrus's hip against his palm. The smell of him, warm, alive, male, nothing at all like the cold, wine-sour stench of Demos that Lethe associates with touch and intimacy and the things that happen in the dark.
He hasn't been attracted to anyone in years. Hasn't felt this pull, this ache, this specific, targeted wanting that fixes on one body and won't let go. He thought he was past it. He thought the years of Demos had scraped him clean of anything resembling desire, leaving only function and endurance and the blank, practiced absence he retreats into when his body is being used.
But today, kneeling between Zazyrus's legs with his face inches from the beast's hip, Lethe's body remembered something he thought it had forgotten. And now it won't let him sleep.
He presses his face harder into the pillow. His skin is hot. His stomach is tight. He can feel his own pulse in places he hasn't felt it in years, insistent and undeniable, and he thinksno. Not this. Not now. Not him.
Because wanting is dangerous. Wanting in the pits is suicide. Wanting a fighter, a beast, a creature who kills humans on instinct and has every reason to kill Lethe too, is a particular kind of madness that he cannot afford. He can't want Zazyrus. He can't want anyone. The last time he wanted something, Demos found out, and what Demos does to the things Lethe wants is the reason Lethe stopped wanting.
He rolls onto his back. Stares at the ceiling. The bells ring in the corridor outside. A guard passes, boots heavy on the stone.
He thinks about Zazyrus's hand on his wrist. The weight of it. The warmth. The careful, deliberate release.
He thinks:don't do this to yourself.
He doesn't sleep for a long time.
Chapter four
Chapter 4
The lamb keeps coming.
Days pass. Fights pass. The routine of the pits grinds forward in its ugly, predictable rhythm, bells and blood and the roar of crowds that Zazyrus hears through stone and hates with a consistency that borders on devotion. And every day, between the first bell and the second, the cage door opens and the boy comes in with his satchel and his steady hands and his voice that fills every corner of the silence Zazyrus has built around himself.
He learns the boy's name from the guards. They use it occasionally, when they bother to use it at all, calling it down the corridor when they need him somewhere.Lethe. Lethe, the beast in cage four needs stitching. Lethe, Demos wants the roster updated.More often they call him Lamb, and the boy answers to both with the same quiet compliance that Zazyrus is beginning to suspect is a performance so thorough it has become indistinguishable from the real thing.
Lethe.
He turns the name over in his mind the way he turns everything over, examining it, cataloging its weight and shape.It's a small name. Soft on the tongue. It suits the boy the way the pits don't, something gentle and clean in a place that is neither.
Lethe speaks to him the way no one has spoken to him in years. Perhaps ever. He talks while he works, a steady, unhurried current of words that washes over Zazyrus and doesn't demand anything in return. No commands. No threats. No questions designed to probe for weakness. He narrates his movements, explains what he's doing and why, and between the medical commentary he talks about other things. Ordinary things. Things that have no purpose or utility and exist, apparently, just because the boy needs to fill the air.
He talks about a cat.
Not a fighting beast. Not some creature in the cages. A kitchen cat, apparently, who produced a litter of kittens three weeks ago, and the boy has named one of them Soot because it's black and because he is, by his own admission, not creative. He tells Zazyrus this while changing the bandages on his ribs, his fingers light and careful, and his voice carries a warmth that Zazyrus doesn't know what to do with.
"She's getting braver," Lethe says. "Yesterday she climbed into a stock pot. Maren nearly had a fit. I told her Soot was just conducting an inspection and she threw a ladle at me, which I think is an overreaction."
