Work Text:
It was fully light out when I woke up again. The duvet I had dragged onto the rooftop terrace was now back on the bed and rumpled around my body like a particularly unkempt pigeon’s nest. This time when I woke, I wasn’t alone.
Caspian was there beside me, like a dream come to life. I knew it before I even opened my eyes. I could smell the faded scent of his aftershave and sweat, feel the dip of his weight on the mattress and the warmth of his skin on mine. He was holding my hand, touching me so gently that everything in the world, in that moment, felt weightless and airy and perfect. For those few precious seconds, I allowed myself to soak it in: this special kind of heaven I had thought I would only ever dream about again.
When I was good and heaven-sated, I peeled my eyes open, an effortless smile curling onto my face as I looked up at him, and—
And the smile flattened.
“Arden.” Caspian’s voice was barely a whisper. His eyes, sharp with awareness, were fixed singularly on my hand.
No, not my hand. My wrist.
Shit.
The swirls of purple and blue were stark in the daylight, no longer concealed by the shadows afforded to us the night before—first at the “party,” then in the moonlit streets, the car, and the bedroom. Honestly, so much had happened in twenty-four hours, any cognizance of the pain or discomfort had been reduced to a low simmer on the back burner. Now, though, that my own attention was directed to the evidence on my wrists, the nauseating thrum of anxiety was back with a vengeance.
Caspian’s brows dipped in the middle, that crease making its home in the space I had seen it too often already. “Arden,” he repeated. “I don’t… I don’t recall that I— That is… Last night, we didn’t…?”
I closed my eyes. So much for tucking this one away for another day.
“No, Caspian,” I said quietly, matching him for softness. “It wasn’t you.” When I opened my eyes again, he was finally looking back at me, the crease deepening. He offered no response, but I could practically hear the gears turning in his head, churning out every worst case scenario.
The most horrible part was that the truth of what happened was probably worse than all of them.
I swallowed. “I need to tell you something,” I said evenly, turning our hands so that it was mine taking the weight of his instead. “But I need you to promise me something first.”
“Arden, you’re not making this easy for me.”
There was no easy way about this. I suddenly felt a brand new sympathy for Caspian, for the way he had struggled to confide in me that night in One Hyde Park. The words were lodged in my throat like splinters. Like I had picked up a stick—or maybe an entire fucking tree branch— and tried to swallow it whole, and now I was trying to force it back up.
“I just… need you to remember that talk we had. About how using your billions for hired murder is, generally, a bad thing to do.”
Caspian’s eyes snapped up to mine. “Someone hurt you.”
Well. There was no evading a direct statement.
“Last night,” I began, then paused when I heard just how shaky my voice was. I cleared my throat and started again. “The reason I knew you were at the party with Nathaniel is because someone told me what he planned to do.”
Something in his face flickered in recognition, as if he had been so caught up in the chaos and beauty and terror of last night that this piece of the puzzle hadn’t occurred to him until now.
“Someone?” His words took on the dark, gravelly tone that normally would have stirred up an entirely different feeling, but now I just felt sick. Caspian was watching me so intently, and suddenly I couldn’t bear lying naked under the hot scrutiny of his gaze. I pushed myself up and clutched the duvet to my naked chest. I kept my face turned pointedly away.
Breathe in. Breathe out. You can do this.
“It was Lancaster Steyne.”
A very, very long silence. And then…
“What.”
It wasn’t so much a question as it was the involuntary sound of shock in the vague shape of a word. I pinched my eyes shut again, horrified to feel the burn of tears gathering behind them. “Sorry,” I whispered, desperately wanting to spare him the added burden of my tears. “I’m sorry.”
“Arden,” came Caspian’s broken voice a few moments later, still as a statue behind me. “Please tell me I… Tell me I misheard you.”
The first of the tears escaped down my cheek. I shook my head. “He came to the warehouse. Ellery wasn’t home. He told me…He wanted me to…” I broke off, clamping my lips tightly together. My heart rate had picked up like a rocket preparing for launch inside my chest.
The memories were tactile and vivid in both my mind and my body; the weight of him on me, sandwiching my lungs between his ribs and the couch, his hands like iron manacles around my wrists. I pulled them in front of me, rubbing softly at the bruises that marked where his hands had been. The same hands that had so badly wounded the man I loved, and would inevitably do so again by forcing me to disclose the truth of our encounter.
There was a part of me that wanted to stop talking. To cut it off and keep the secret locked down inside of me as a revolt against Lancaster motherfucking Steyne’s wishes.
But I couldn’t. Caspian and I were taking a delicate first step into the version of us that we both desperately wanted and needed to be, and that involved telling the truth, wherever possible. After the amount of times I had practically demanded it of him, it would be vastly unfair to hold back now. No matter how much damage it might do.
“He told me Nathaniel had come to him.” The realization didn’t hit me until I heard the soft intake of breath behind me. This was news to him as well. I couldn’t let myself dwell on it, not now, or I would never get the rest out. “He asked for my help. Told me he wanted”—my lips twisted in disgust—“to work together, after. To bring you back after the damage it would cause. Rest assured, I told him exactly where he could shove that idea, but he…” I squeezed my eyes shut. “He…”
Oh god. Oh no.
Much to my horror, a sob tumbled free of its own volition, and I lifted the duvet to muffle the sound a moment too late. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the shadow of a movement; Caspian’s arm reaching out for me before stopping, hovering midair, then falling onto the sheets between us.
I tried to keep going. My mouth formed the words, but all that came out was a broken sound, which then devolved into more sobbing.
I was being ridiculous. Sure, it was traumatic, and sure, maybe it was probably the most terrifying thing that had ever happened to me, which was saying something given the events of the past few months. Still, some part of me felt I had no right to be reacting this way. Especially not in the face of the man who had suffered far worse at the hands of the same monster and survived it.
“Arden.” This time, his voice was barely recognizable. I’d only heard this note once before, less than a day ago, as Caspian knelt on velvet-red carpet and broke apart at Nathaniel’s feet. “Arden, did he…? Did… did Lan—oh god.” Before he could wrestle the words out, there was a quick flash of movement in my periphery, and I turned just in time to see Caspian stagger backward from the bed, his knuckles pressed to his mouth. “I’m going to be sick.”
“Caspian—”
He was out the door before I could stop him, stumbling into the en suite bathroom and onto his knees. I dropped the duvet from around me and padded after him, legs like jello beneath me. I found him on his knees, hunched, but not over the toilet. It appeared as though his limbs had given out on him halfway, and instead of throwing up, he had one hand clamped tightly over his chest as he gasped, over and over, for air.
My knees found the tile beside him, as natural as breathing. I placed my hand on the back of his sweat-damp shirt, rubbing circles between his shoulder blades. “Oh, Caspian,” I said, as gently as I could given the adrenaline coursing through my veins. “Breathe, sweetheart. In with me—there you go—and out. Again. Good. Again.”
His free hand was clamped hard around mine by the time he was drawing oxygen again. I squeezed back with everything I had.
“Are you…?” I tried. “Are you alright?”
He pulled his hand out of mine to bury his face in both palms. “No,” he choked out. “Nothing about this is alright.”
“Caspian, he didn’t—I…” I stopped. Swallowed. Took a breath. “He didn’t.” I couldn’t bring myself to say the word.
When he lowered his hands, his eyes were bloodshot and wild, wet with unshed tears. “But he tried,” he croaked out.
At a loss, I simply nodded. “I’m sorry,” I tried to say around another garbled cry. “I’m sorry, I know I should have told you right away, but you—I—”
And then his arms were around me, so tight I could feel the air whoosh from my lungs, along with any other pathetic words I had stored. His face burrowed against my neck, hands barely missing the still-fresh wound on my back. His whole body was vibrating. “I’m so sorry,” he cried into my skin. “Arden, I am so sorry.”
What I wanted to do was lift my hands to his hair, to console him as much as he was consoling me. But, restrained as they were against my sides at the moment, the most my arms could manage was sort of curling around his back, clinging onto his shirt for all I was worth. Which, at the moment, felt not like a lot. “It isn’t your fault,” I whispered.
Caspian made a pained, somewhat frustrated noise against me, tightening his hold. “He did this to hurt me,” he said. “He hurt you to punish me. How was I so careless to introduce you to him? To bring you to Ellery’s party when I knew—I should have guessed he would be there, and I—”
“Enough.” My own voice was sharp enough to startle us both in the small, faintly echoey space of the bathroom. I pushed away from his grasp, holding him out at arm’s length. “Caspian Hart, you have shouldered enough of that man’s blame for one lifetime, and I’ll…” I scrambled for words. “I’ll fucking… roll over and die before I let you take on more of it.”
He blinked at me, so utterly stricken and wounded that it tore through my chest like a knife. And then he pulled away. Rather… alarmingly abruptly.
“Excuse me,” he said quickly, barely casting a glance at me as he headed for the bedroom again. “I need to make a call.”
Um.
“Wait,” I tried, but my voice was barely a squeak.
Suddenly back to panicking, I scrambled onto my feet and after him, barely managing to reach him before he could pull the phone to his ear. He relented immediately under my touch, lowering the phone to look at me through glassy eyes. It was only then I noticed how desperately he was trembling. “Who are you calling?” I asked.
He blinked down at me, as if the answer was obvious. “Finesilver,” he said.
“What? Why?”
“Why?” he repeated incredulity dripping from the word. “Arden, he…” Caspian blinked hard. “He assaulted you. He cannot… He will not walk away from that.”
“I don’t think it’s that simple,” I tried, remembering the string of hypothetical headlines that flashed through my head in the aftermath. The visceral, violent ways the media would tear me apart if they got their hands on a story like that. “Caspian, I’m sure I don’t have to tell you this, of all people, but people like me against people like him—”
“You have me,” he nearly growled.
“Sure, I get that, but Caspian, he’s… he’s powerful--”
“So am I!” The outburst stunned us both into silence, cut only by the heaving breaths that drag out of Caspian. I watched him carefully, heart shattering once again for the wounded boy in a man’s skin. “S-Sorry.” He blinked, like he was coming back to himself after a bad dream. “I’m sorry, Arden, I didn’t… I have no business raising my voice at you like that. Please, forgive me.”
I really didn’t want to go there with him, but… desperate times and all that. “Caspian, the tabloids would have a field day with me if I went public with allegations against him. You know they would, Steyne would make sure of it.”
“We can contain them.”
“Not all of them. You can try, and you can do a damn good job of it, I’m sure, but at the end of the day… It’s my name that’s going to be out there. My face plastered on the front of every gossip rag and Twitter feed and… god fucking knows what else, calling me a slut with a history of asking for it, a gold-digger, a… a cheating bisexual and… and I can’t…”
I broke out of my spiral only when Caspian put a hand on either side of my face, gently lifting my gaze up to his, but his hands were the only gentle thing about the gesture. His eyes, finally brimming with the tears he had tried to conceal, were fierce and inarguable as the bore into mine.
“Don’t ever,” he said in his most menacing tone, “ever think of yourself in those terms again, Arden. Never.”
Despite the hammering in my chest, all my defense mechanisms were pointing toward deflection with big, shiny, neon signs. “Well,” I said, trying for a casual shrug and the hint of a sultry gaze. “Let’s not say never. I happen to remember a couple of instances—”
“Stop it,” he choked out. Then he was pulling me into a hug again. Crushing me against his chest, his mouth coming down to nuzzle a kiss into my hair. “Please, Arden. I can’t… I don’t know what…” He broke off again, and there was a distinct movement in his torso that told me he was crying again. Even the events of last night hadn’t prepared me for the utter devastation of watching it play out in front of me. “I don’t know how to make this right.”
“There is nothing for you to make right. You didn’t do anything wrong,” I said, then hesitated. “Just… please, promise me. Promise me you won’t turn this into a legal matter.”
His arms squeeze me a little tighter. “It is a legal matter. He broke the law.”
With what little leverage I had, I pressed against his stomach. Not surprisingly, he released me immediately, taking a step back. I fixed him with a serious look. “I’m serious, Caspian.”
There was a moment where it looked like he might push the subject again, but I saw the moment in his eyes when he relented. His shoulders deflated, a bit by force, and he nodded once.
“Of course,” he said. “As you wish.”
I had a feeling the conversation wasn’t over but I was relieved to table it for the moment. Caspian obviously needed some time to get his head around this information, and I needed… god, a drink? Massive amounts of therapy? Yes, to both. But mostly, at the present moment, what I needed was some time of my own. I hadn’t planned on this coming out now—if ever. It was just another choice that Lancaster had taken for his own.
“I’m going to take a shower, if you don’t mind,” I said.
Caspian nodded. “You needn’t seek permission from me. This space is freely yours, as long as you want to be here.”
That, at least, couldn’t fail to bring a smile to my face. “I could get used to that.”
He nodded again, but he was fidgeting now, that restless side of him making an appearance once again. “I… I think I’ll have a cigarette,” he said. “I’ll be on the terrace if you need me.”
I watched him disappear into the hallway, silently praying I hadn’t just set us back after all the progress we’d fought to make. Only after I heard the distant click of the terrace door did I drop the duvet and walk to the bathroom.