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“Just a bullet.”
“Just.”
“Simple. That one wasn’t even magical. We thought it was—the regulars called us in—but it was fakery. Deception. Bank robbery. They only wanted money.”
“I thought you could stop bullets.”
“I can, sometimes, but not eight of them, from different directions, and not all aimed at me.”
“So you let one hit you. In place of your colleagues.”
“I knew it wasn’t going to be fatal.” John’s hand lay like sunlight on his skin. “And I was the senior constable. My call.”
John put his face into Sam’s chest, hid there for a second, and said, muffled, “You idiot.” The ink-swirl of his hair fell across Sam’s skin in a shower of satin.
“I’m not in the field much anymore. I have constables for that.” He dared to rest a hand on John’s back. Smooth golden skin, under his touch.
“You’re still you,” John said into his chest. “You—you’re still Sam.”
“Not sure I could be anyone else if I tried.”
“Please don’t.”
“I mean, I’m not Kit—Constable Thompson, who’s an actual empath, the best we’ve got—or young Sommersby, who, frankly, is something we don’t have a good classification for.”
“Really?”
“We’re all,” Sam said darkly, “extremely fortunate that he really is an honest, genuine, depressingly nice young man. You don’t want to know.”
“Now I sort of do. But not this instant.” John rubbed his face against Sam’s chest like a cat, and made a cozy sort of noise. “You feel nice.”
“So do you.”
John’s hand drifted along Sam’s arm, without looking; then came back, and rested over Sam’s heart. The touch was quiet, and contained whole worlds: bruises they both recalled, from years past. No scars from those encounters, not physically. The echoes of Viscount Rookwood’s shouts, the fury when his children or new wives or servants disappointed him, those flying powerful fists. Sam had tried, again and again, to step in. To take the blows, when he could.
Edmund had simply left, as soon and as much as possible. Eton, Oxford, the precise chilly rigor of an eldest son determined to do nothing wrong, to cause no waves, to remain on his father’s good side, no matter what that took, no matter what had to be ignored. Sam had never been able to walk away from injustice.
John moved, stirred, pressed soft lips to Sam’s chest, amid silvering threads in dark hair. “I like this. Being right here. Don’t let me go.”
“I won’t, then.”
“What’re we going to do?”
Sam traced a small circle across John’s back. Because he could, here and now. “I don’t know yet.”
“Is your favorite constable empath going to want me arrested?”
“I won’t let that happen.”
John lifted his head—his hair fell into his eyes—to gaze at Sam. “You mean that.”
“Of course I do.”
“You’d take my side.”
“I thought you were the one doing the taking. Of my backside.”
“Oh my gods.”
