Peters, now the color of puce, nodded and led them through the foyer and then left into a grand crescent dining room, complete with three tiers of seating, brass banisters, all the occupants looking down from their round tables at the band in the bottom most tier, the dancers pulsating around their stage.
This party was not one to be found in Belavere City, where the woman wore dresses with hoops and necklines to the throat, where the most scandalizing thing to occur would be a spilled drink or a muttered curse.
This was Rickers.
There was more flesh here than Theo had ever seen. Granted, he’d never been permitted beyond the smoking room as a boy. He tried to imagine his father in a room like this, with men wrapping their hands around women’s backsides, feeling for the edge of their hems. The laughter was louder, somehow savage. It stunk of abandon. Of sex.
The lights were low enough to disguise debauchery, tinged red to incite sin. The band was made of trumpets, fiddles, a piano, a man in reflective blue tails belting notes into a microphone, and the Artisans fumbled about in their delirium, drunk on the rebellion of it.
This was why Morland still stood, Theo thought, why the Crafters in the street were not yet starving. They offered the Artisans something important. Freedom. Temptation. Discretion.
“Welcome!” Tamir said, taking Nina’s hand and leading her to the edge of the first balcony. The men at a nearby table put down their drinks in succession, followed her with widening eyes, wet their lips.
And Theo abruptly blocked their view, staring daggers at them.
“Have you ever seen anything quite like it?” Tamir asked Nina, patting her hand, drinking in her expressions.
She was slack-mouthed. Her eyes stuck to two Artisan men dancing, connected stomach to stomach.
“No,” she said, incredulity making her quiet. It was her habit to become silent and thoughtful when she was overwhelmed. There was not so much of her that had changed, Theo knew, even if she insisted she was different. Her eyes would oscillate of their own accord, reams of thought shifting over them and never settling. Theo still thought he could read some of them.
He took her unoccupied hand. “Don’t be concerned,” he told her. “They might be drunk, but they’re still Artisans.”
Her torrent of thoughts seemed to halt abruptly, and her gaze flashed to him. “They aren’t Artisans,” she said, snatching her fingers free of his. “They’re animals.”
She lifted her chin, and the light turned her chest alabaster, then red,then gold. Theo reminded himself to look away. He placed his hands behind his back. “Still, they won’t cross any lines with a fellow.”
“I’mnottheir fellow,” Nina said bluntly in a voice Theo didn’t recognize. “And I don’t want your assistance.” Somewhere in his chest, where Nina had left his heart hacked and bleeding, another cut was etched.
He swallowed. For years she had clung to him, had welcomed him leading her, shielding her. He’d done so willingly, been proud to do it. He’d helped her, hadn’t he? Made school easier for her?
Now, he stepped back several inches, swallowing his shredded ego. “Of course,” he said, inclining his head.
Cold. She was always so outwardly cold toward him now.
And he’d earned it.
If only she could see inside him where guilt churned, slowly ruining him, enough that it had eroded the calcification of his former loyalties, his beliefs. Enough that none of it—honor, duty, tradition—seemed to matter now.
There was hurt in her hazel eyes when she looked at him, fissures of hatred. Blame. He deserved that, too. And if she bid him away again, he would go.
Though he thought it might break him to do it.
He’d tried to once, hadn’t he? He’d admitted defeat and left Kenton Hill. He’d only lasted a day before the draw of her thinned the anger, made it impossible to continue on.
It had taken him seven years to find her again. Seven tortuous, wretched years. He’d be damned if he lost her a second time of his own accord.
So he followed Nina and Tamir around the tables, around the standing parties, and to a group of men whose gaze traveled down the length of her before ever meeting her eye, and he didn’t say a thing. He’d stay for as long as she’d let him. He’d hope that one day those fissures would close, and he would show her that she wasn’t made for destruction.
She didn’t want this, not really.
And she hadn’t bid him away yet.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWONINA
Tamir introduced us first to an elderly man with arthritic knuckles. He took great gulps of liquor and spat when he talked, his lips luridly wet. His frame was bent almost double, yet he attempted, with great effort, to straighten as I approached.
“Richard!” he brayed first, toasting him, and Tamir lifted an eyebrow at me.See?he seemed to say.
