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Enzo ought to have felt at ease. Fiore had almost wholly recovered. His chirurgical wound had closed over; bandages were now necessary only for bracing during labor, and as Fiore was not a bricklayer or fisher or gondolier, his labor hours were short indeed.
But Enzo had arrived at theKingfisherthat morning already on edge. He carried with him tidings which weighed upon his own heart—and this question off-put him further.
“I know why you wear it to see me of course,” Fiore explained into the silence Enzo had let settle between them. “But you were already wearing it at the opera as well. Am I correct in supposing you’re not oft without it?”
Enzo, still staggering in the wake of the “of course” that had dropt so casually from Fiore’s lips—as if he assumed Enzo considered him something to be ashamed of, and worse yet, believed it himself—took another moment to reply. “You are correct.”
Fiore cocked his head at him with a look of one who awaited further explanation.
Enzo wanted to tell him everything. But he knew he’d already revealed far more than he ought. His face alone told too much. If Fiore had likewise glimpsed the Scaevola crest on either the silverware or Carlotta’s livery…
Gently—far more gently than Enzo deserved—Fiore asked, “Is it because of your scars?”
“To a point,” Enzo admitted. They certainly formed some of the reasons.
Fiore looked unaccountably disturbed by this answer. He held Enzo’s gaze for a moment with furrowed brow. Then he raised his tender hand to trace the scar that ran across Enzo’s face, from brow to chin, his fingertips lingering where it crossed Enzo’s lips.
“I think,” Fiore said, his voice softer than silk as he ran his thumb over the scar on Enzo’s cheekbone, “they look rather dashing.”
The sympathetic compliment, as superfluous as it might have been, nonetheless drew a smile out of Enzo. Though he wondered how Fiore would feel about them if he knew under what shameful circumstances he’d acquired them. Still, “They don’t vex me.”
Fiore raised his brows with a smile. “I’m glad to hear so. Though then I must wonder again why you go about masked everywhere.”
“For the sake of my family,” Enzo confessed. It seemed safe enough to tell Fiore so. He needn’t divulge which family in particular.
And, to Enzo’s relief, Fiore didn’t ask. He simply gave him a sage nod. Enzo supposed many others amongst his gentlemen had preferred to keep their liaisons separate and secret from their own families.
Which only made it far more urgent for Enzo to disabuse Fiore of the notion that he considered their affair a shameful secret. “And—because it is a relief to not have everyone looking at me.”
A far truer reason than he had yet divulged to anyone else in the world.
Fiore cocked his head again; somehow, not unkindly. “Folk don’t stare at a black bauta?”
“They gawk at the mask,” Enzo explained. “At the cape and hood and costume. Not at me.”
Fiore’s furrowed brow suggested he did not yet comprehend him.
Enzo plucked up the article in question from the seat of Fiore’s chair; his cloak lay folded over the back. The black leather felt familiar in his fingertips. He rubbed them over where the interior suede had worn smooth from daily friction against his brow.
“Perhaps,” he ventured, hardly daring to look Fiore in the eye as he did so, “you might understand better if you wore it yourself?”
Silence met his proposal. Enzo forced his gaze up from the mask at last and found Fiore with brows raised. Still, the smile curling up one cheek bespoke intrigue rather than dismissal, and so Enzo relinquished the mask into Fiore’s outstretched hand.
To see someone else don his mask was more disconcerting than he’d anticipated. To be robbed of the sight of Fiore’s face in particular sent a queer sort of muted panic through his heart.
Fiore, however, appeared perfectly comfortable as he tied the cord ‘round the back of his skull. When he raised his head to meet Enzo’s gaze again, his dark eyes—the sole recognizable feature remaining in the mask’s blank void—gleamed.
“Rather comfortable,” Fiore declared.
Enzo certainly found it so.
Fiore turned his head this way and that, stroking down the beak’s length with his hand as another man might stroke a bearded chin in thought. He caught Enzo’s gaze again with smiling eyes. “You needn’t look so concerned. Unless it really doesn’t suit me at all. I’ll have to trust you for that—I haven’t a mirror.”
Enzo made a note to provide him with one at the earliest opportunity. Aloud he replied with honesty, “It suits you.”
For once Enzo made his peace with the absence of all Fiore’s other charming features, he found the mask heightened the expressive powers of the eyes, which captivated him even more now than they had before. The fluttering lash and the flickering glance could consume him if Fiore willed it.
All too late, Enzo understood the implications of declaring a man looked better with a mask on than without.
