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“What, good sex?”
“No! The bed!”
“Don’t put us down on my account.”
“I don’t even know how I did it!”
“Well, you were feeling splendid, and your particular gift involves shoving things around and lifting them, and—”
“Stop. Please.” He reached out, tentatively. Felt the shapes of the world, the objects. Like a touch, only without his hands. The bed listened, when he eased it back down.
John, continuing to radiate vast satisfaction, grinned at him. Naked, gold and onyx, bare skin and artistic hair, he put a hand on Sam’s arm. “Think your pet empath felt that one?”
“No,” Sam said, horror pure and instinctive.
John, being John, began laughing.
“Oh gods,” Sam said, and collapsed back into his bed, which held him up.
On his back, also naked, he stared at his ceiling. It was a nice ceiling. Plain. Undemanding. No complications.
No complications, as opposed to the fact that he’d just fallen into his own bed, where he did not bring men, with the man with whom he absolutely should not have fallen into any bed whatsoever. His no-longer-stepbrother. Twelve years younger. Beautiful and charming. Who’d stolen at least three paintings. And slept with at least one bandit.
Sam’s whole body ached with delicious weary wrung-out pleasure. He wasn’t in his twenties anymore, and he wasn’t pretty and golden and graceful. Drying release, sweat, exertion, prickled along his skin.
He didn’t want to move, or think, or understand everything he’d just done. Everything he’d given in to.
Lateness had snuck in while he’d been occupied. The deep well of night, after the supper-party they’d left, after finding John, after everything they’d just done. The most fashionable of the ton would still be out at card-parties and gaming hells; Sam had always kept working hours, at Bow Street, in the Preternatural Division offices. Serious. Sober. Respectable.
John wriggled over next to him, right up against him, unselfconscious. One of those musician’s hands wandered across Sam’s chest, stomach, left hip.
Sam shut his eyes. John trailed fingertips along the line of his hip, and then up. And then paused. “What’s this from?”
He knew which scar John meant. The lines themselves did not have much sensation, being older, silver-white; but the spaces between them did, across his side. “Jewel thief. Gift for lightning.”
“Lightning—”
“It wasn’t bad. Just a graze. That was the second case I ever worked, once I joined the Division.”
John didn’t say anything for a second. His fingers moved, found a different memory, above Sam’s knee.
“Metal. A fireplace poker. That one was…political. Blackmail. I can’t give you details.”
“I’m not asking. I didn’t think…I suppose I never thought about it. You. In the field. Taking cases. Taking chances.”
“I started as a constable. Like anyone else.” After his father had essentially cut him off—not disowned, but no funds, no family property. The cynical part of Sam’s head had always guessed that Viscount Rookwood hadn’t disowned him just to be sure there was a spare around, in case anything happened to Edmund.
He’d needed a job. He’d always been a good blunt-force instrument: physical gifts, moving pieces of the world. He wasn’t the strongest, he wasn’t legendary, but he could work hard. And he wanted to help people.
He’d seen firsthand how cruel the world could be. How important it could be, to try to help.
And he’d wanted to try to find John. He’d thought that, with the resources of the Division, in time, he might be able to.
“I heard some stories.” John’s voice shivered like leaves in autumn, held melody like mourning. “The heroic ones. You catching criminals, you and that sense of justice…I never really thought about what that meant. What you were doing.”
Sam opened his eyes. “I’m not a hero.”
John’s mouth was wry. “What’s this one from?” His fingers touched Sam’s shoulder, the small neat entry-point.
