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“It won’t take years. It might not even take months. My convictions have failed me suddenly before,” Kadou said with a shaky laugh. “Hold my hand again and do that with your thumb and it’ll cut the wait a lot shorter.”
“This?” Another rub over his knuckles.
Kadou breathed carefully. “Yes.”
“Should I stop?”
“No,” he murmured. “Please don’t. No one would count holding hands as consummation, and I’ll go crazy if we just sit here in the dark.”
“We don’t have to just sit here. We could drink some of Sylvia’s wine.”
“No doubt we’re sitting amongst a very impressive collection,” Kadou said. “But if I get drunk right now, I guarantee you I’m going to try to . . . make poor decisions.” He didn’t trust himself not to seize Evemer and kiss him again. It was already hard enough not to now, without his reason impaired.
Evemer cleared his throat awkwardly. “Yes, I see.”
The chill of the room was beginning to set in. Kadou pressed up even closer against Evemer’s side, tucking his face against Evemer’s neck to steal more of his heat.Perhaps we couldjustkiss,a calculating part of his brain suggested.Just kissing would be safe.
But no, he couldn’t have even that right now, though the denial made his entire soul ache wretchedly. That way lay peril—if you walked along the edge of a cliff, you risked falling off it. Better to stay well away from cliffs and not even approach the edge. “I don’t suppose there’s any hope of a secret passageway out of here?”
“I saw the room before the door closed. There are racks of bottles against that wall,” Evemer used their joined hand to gesture, so Kadou could tell which direction he was indicating. “And that one. This is a blank wall. No other exits.”
“Damn,” Kadou said, squeezing his eyes closed. “The waiting is what’s really going to get to me.”
“My lord?”
“It’s been an emotional evening,” Kadou said, trying to sound light. He didn’t succeed. “I’m going to be paying for it later.”
Evemer squeezed his hand. “Will it help if I look again for another passage?”
“Patting around in the dark? It’s useless.”
“But would it feel like we were doing something? Would it help take your mind off of it?”
Kiss him again,suggested that stupid voice in Kadou’s head again.That’d take your mind off it nicely.
No,he said to it firmly. Aloud, he said, “I suppose it’s worth a try.”
He had a faint idea that Evemer would begin resenting him if Kadou took to a habit of kissing him whenever the whim seized him, but he had a firm enough handle on his thoughts, at least for the moment, to recognize that was merely a whisper from the fear-creature in his head. Easier to deny it now when it was just a whisper, before it spiraled into something far bigger, with far more sharp teeth.
Evemer got to his feet, pulling Kadou up with him. “You’re starting to shake.”
“Cold, I think, for the moment. Just cold.”
It was easy enough to stay oriented, at least; the crack of light under the door was not enough to see anything by, but it was a clear flag for the front of the room and, roughly, the midpoint of it. They fumbled with the wine racks, checking that the walls behind them were solid stone, and stamped on the flagstones here and there.
“They’ll come looking for us, won’t they?” Kadou said, and then immediately: “Silly thing to say. Of course they will. But . . . I mean, will they be able to find us?”
“Yes,” Evemer said firmly. “But we’ll escape before that.” He went to the door, testing it to see that it was locked.
Evemer could sense that Kadou, behind him, was thinking too hard. He really ought to be kissed more often. It seemed like it had done him a world of good for those few exquisite minutes. Evemer was beginning to see where Tadek had been coming from with all that outrageous flirting—it was a distraction tactic.
There was nothing unusual about the door—it had locked with a key, and . . .
The door had swung inward.
Evemer felt around the edges of the door—aha. Triumph. Kadou was going to be so pleased with him. “My lord, did you want to get out of this room?” he said, modulating his tone to utter neutrality. “Did I understand that right?”
There was a beat of profoundly confused silence from Kadou. “Yes?”
