Page 62

He looks up. Indrie's eyes are open and they are on him, and they are too knowing by half. Indrie lifts one wet hand out of the water and puts it on Eskil's face.

"I'm here," Indrie says. "I'm right here."

Eskil turns his face into the palm and puts his mouth against it and holds still. He has been running for three days on rage and logistics and the kind of narrow, deliberate focus that keeps a man from feeling anything until the job is finished. The job is finished. Everything he shut away behind that door is shoving at it now all at once.

He does not open it. Not yet. He kisses the palm. He kisses the inside of the wrist, carefully, right at the edge of the raw skin, and Indrie makes a sound he does not mean to make.

Then Eskil picks up the soap and goes back to work, because if he does not do something with his hands he is going to fall apart on the floor.

He does Indrie's back, all the way down his spine. His chest. His stomach, and the soft skin under his navel, where Indrie has always been ticklish, and Indrie squirms and Eskil's mouth twitches against his will. He does Indrie's legs, one at a time, lifting each foot clear of the water and cleaning between the toes, and Indrie huffs out a laugh at that and covers his face.

"You're going to spoil me," Indrie says. "I'm never going to wash myself again."

"Fine by me," Eskil tells him.

His hand goes up the inside of Indrie's thigh under the water. Slow. Giving him every chance to close his legs. Indrie's breath stutters, and then his knees fall open against the copper, and Eskil washes him there too, the crease of his groin, the heavy softness of his balls, the length of his cock, which is not soft anymore by the time Eskil has soaped it twice. Indrie's hips twitch. Color is spreading down his throat into the water.

Eskil does not linger. Not yet. He rinses him clean and lets go, and Indrie makes a frustrated noise that Eskil files away with vicious satisfaction.

Then the hair.

He tips water over Indrie's head and Indrie lifts his chin and shuts his eyes, and the water runs down his face, and the short hair goes flat against his skull and his temples and the back of his neck. Eskil works the soap into it. There is nothing to work it into. A week ago he could have buried both hands to the wrist in this man's hair and lost them, and now his fingertips hit scalp almost at once.

He rinses it and pushes it back off Indrie's forehead and looks at him. The short hair changes his face. His cheekbones are sharper without all that dark falling around them, and his jaw shows, and his eyes look bigger.

Eskil's first thought, and it arrives with no warning at all, is that he is gorgeous. He is gorgeous and he is alive, and Eskil is going to spend the rest of his life looking at that face if he has any say in the matter, and he has a great deal of say in the matter, because he is the fucking king.

"It'll grow back," Indrie says. He sounds hesitant, the way he does when he is worried over a thing he has decided is too important to leave alone. "I know it's short. I'm sorry if it's not…"

He trails off.

"If it's not what?"

Indrie swallows. "I don't know. If it's not what you like."

Eskil stares at him.

"My grievance is with someone taking something from you against your will," Eskil tells him in no uncertain terms. "I have been completely fucking useless over you since we met and one haircut isn't going to change that."

Indrie's eyes go wet. His mouth presses flat and his chin trembles once before he catches it, and then he leans forward in the water and puts his face against Eskil's chest and takes two fistfuls of Eskil's filthy shirt and hangs on. Eskil gets both arms around him and holds him against the wet leather and lets the water soak all the way through.

"I'd kill the one who cut it," Eskil says into the top of his head, "if I hadn't already."

Indrie says nothing.

He is not silent because he has nothing to say. He is silent because he is holding something in his mouth and deciding whether to let it out, and Eskil knows every one of Indrie's silences by now. He pulls back far enough to look down at him.

Indrie's face is pressed against his chest and he is very still.

Eskil puts a hand flat against Indrie's cheek and waits until he looks up. His thumb finds the bruise there and skirts around it, and he looks into those dark eyes and waits.

"I did not see him," Indrie says quietly. "Among the dead."

Eskil's hand goes still on his face.

"What do you remember?" Eskil asks.

Indrie swallows. His fingers are still knotted in Eskil's shirt and he does not let go.