Chapter Text
“You’re going to be late, D.”
“I’m going,” Damen mutters, his voice barely above a whisper. It’s enough for the microphone nestled in his ear to pick up; it’s a very nice microphone. “Do I still have any blood in my hair?”
“No. Your hair is fine. It is slicked back into oblivion and it is fine ,” Nikandros hisses over the earpiece. In the background Damen can hear the squeak of Nik’s chair as he rolls around what they both mockingly refer to as ‘The Battlestation’: a cold, dark space deep underneath Damen’s mansion that holds enough computing power to run a small country. “Now get down there.”
“It’s just—I think I have mask lines.”
“You don’t, I promise you. Your face is as stupidly handsome as it always is. Well, except for the usual bags under your eyes.”
Damen ignores the barb. Nikandros is just trying to rile him up and he’s pretty sure that Nikandros has exact same matching bags under his own eyes. The two of them don’t get a lot of sleep, working two jobs like they do.
“You don’t see a bruise coming in? That guy sucker punched me pretty hard,” Damen says, rubbing at the sore spot on his jaw to emphasize his point just in case Nik was watching through the monitors.
“There probably is a bruise coming in, yes,” Nik says, his patience held back by a dam made of hollow concrete and cracks, “which is why you need to get down there right now and make up a believable cover story. We can get the tabloids to think it’s a lover's quarrel or some sordid affair if we play this right.”
“Alright, fine,” Damen says, annoyed, because it’s obvious at this point he’s not going to get out of this thing, bruise or no. He wasn’t even taking into account the hits he had taken that were now hidden under his tux, but if the resulting evidence of those hits couldn’t be snapped by a paparazzi Nikandros would hardly care about those. “What’s the battle plan, then?”
“The battle—there’s no battle plan, D. It’s a party. Go down there, have fun, get drunk, take home some beautiful woman and forget about all of…this.”
“You’re always scolding me for rushing into things without thinking,” Damen protests. “I’m trying to take your advice.”
“Rushing into fights without thinking,” Nik clarifies. “When I told you you needed to be more careful I was talking about you running into fights with six armed guys without a plan, not going to your own goddamned party.”
“Six armed guys? Is that six guys who are armed, or one guy with six arms?”
Nik must be really annoyed because that doesn’t even get a pretense of a laugh. “How about her?”
Damen's watch buzzes as a picture comes through, a headshot of a stunningly gorgeous blonde woman who looks vaguely familiar. It’s possible he’s met her before; also equally possible she just looks familiar because she’s been on a perfume ad somewhere, or on the cover of a swimsuit magazine. He looks out over the ballroom floor below him, all the bright glittery people shining underneath the expensive chandeliers he's currently hiding behind. He’s able to pick out the blonde from the picture, wearing a red dress with a slit all the way up her thigh, doing her best Jessica Rabbit impression and mostly succeeding, despite the odds.
“Can’t,” Damen says when his memory finally catches up to him. “I took her home the night of that masked gala and then ghosted her. I can’t imagine she’ll be too happy to see me.”
“Took her home?” Nik repeats, surprised. “You actually took someone home with you?”
“Not like it’s any of your business," Damen says, not even bothering to hide how intrusive he finds that question, "but I didn’t mean that as a euphemism, no. I literally took her home.”
“And did she know what kind of ride she was actually in for when she crawled into your Aston Martin?”
“It was the McLaren that night and no, obviously, she didn’t know. Which is why she’s not going to be very happy to see me.”
“Okay, okay, fine. Blondie is out. How about the girl in green?”
“Nik, I really don’t want to do this,” Damen says, hoping he doesn’t come off as whiny as he feels. “It’s so cheap.”
“Oh yes, how terrible for you,” Nik says, and Damen makes a mental note to write a nice review for the earpiece he’s wearing: ‘Sound so clear you can practically feel the sarcasm directly, like a wet willy in your ear’. “Having more money than God and supermodels throwing themselves at you must just be the most painful thing anyone can experience.”
Damen sighs, and knocks his head against the railing on the catwalk he’s currently crouched on. When it’s put like that he does sound like nothing more than a whiny, spoiled brat, but he’s been pretending at this playboy persona for years now, and it’s getting tiring. Whenever he imagines a crumpled, glittery, ten thousand dollar dress at the foot of his bed it makes his gut ache in the same way it does whenever he gets sucker punched there. Which happens more often than he'd like to admit.
“You know,” says Nik, with all the carefulness of a sniper lining up a shot, precise and clipped and aimed straight at his heart, “none of this was a problem before that diamond thief started showing up on the scene.”
“He only stole diamonds that one time,” Damen says, intentionally missing the point. “I don’t know why you keep calling him that.”
“Tell me what else to call him, D. Go on. You got a name you’re hiding from me? Something he whispered into your ear when the two of you were flirting and you turned off your earpiece, maybe?”
“We haven’t—he wasn’t flirting,” Damen says, tilting his face away from the cameras to hide his blush. When he closes his eyes he sees a flash of blue eyes under a domino and slender, muscular limbs encased in a dark navy uniform and he shakes his head, clearing the image. “Besides, you know what his name is as well as I do.”
“‘Viper’ is not a name, it’s a call sign. Not even that; it’s what the tabloids are calling him. We don’t even have any idea what he calls himself.”
“He responds to Viper. Or, he did, the last time we—” a split second pause, “—saw each other.”
The last time they had seen each other was last week, when Damen had been called out to stop a burglary that was underway at the Museum of Delpha. The museum was displaying some rare Veretian crown jewels: a scepter, a crown, and a few other assorted necklaces and such, all in a famously touted impenetrable glass case, a claim that hadn’t gone unnoticed by the criminal community and which had already landed four ambitious thieving rings behind bars. Damen had known that Viper would attempt to get it sooner or later, because by that point Damen knew enough of him to understand that it was the challenge that he liked even more than the items being stolen, and an impenetrable case and priceless jewels were too much for someone like him to just ignore.
By the time Damen had reached the Museum after the first silent alarm had been tripped he found Viper already sitting on the roof waiting for him, wearing a priceless crown on top of his head with as much care as if it were a cheap carnival bauble won at a game of luck.
He had already stashed the scepter somewhere. Damen still hadn't found it.
They had raced through the city after that, flinging themselves from rooftop to rooftop, Viper’s laughter carried away by the wind. They flew over rooftops and balconies and through some abandoned houses and some that turned out to be not so abandoned.
Damen had caught him, eventually. Had the zip ties out and ready, trapped him without any hope of escape against a brick wall at the end of an alley. And then—flushed and brilliant with the exertion of their chase, his eyes a dazzling, electric blue in the night—Viper had kissed him.
Damen had kissed him back. And then Damen had let him go.
Nik doesn’t have all the details—specifically the part about the kissing—but he’s still a little salty about the whole thing—specifically the part where he found out that Viper ‘escaped’. Understandably so, maybe, but Damen could hardly bring himself to care, or wish that absolutely anything had turned out differently from the way it did.
Except for finding that damn scepter, maybe.
“The last time you saw each other,” Nik says, his wry tone dragging Damen away from his daydream, “your eyes were too busy turning into giant hearts exploding out of your head for them to be of much use. So spare me, please.”
“Giant hearts? Really? You’ve been watching too many cartoons.”
“Yeah, well, excuse me if I don’t want to watch every second of footage of you trying to flirt with that criminal,” Nik says.
“Okay, well then, find me someone else to flirt with,” Damen says, because explaining to Nik that Viper wasn’t really a criminal (except in the most technical sense, because he really did steal those diamonds that one time) but was in fact more akin to a misunderstood vigilante (oh, and there was also that incident with the sapphires) who cared more about protecting the city than anything else (and that crown and scepter, obviously) wasn’t a fight that he was going to win. “Someone who isn’t a criminal. Good luck finding someone like that here.”
“Point,” Nik concedes, but Damen can hear him typing and knows that he’s going to try anyway.
Damen looks down at the scene beneath him. From his vantage point he can see at least five senators, a handful of CEOs from various multinational corporations, a smattering of tech bros who always think that it’s the height of hilarity to dress in a tux and Converse, and who were not disappointing in that regard tonight. Probably more criminals among the lot than the entire population of Delpha Penitentiary, the only difference being that these men could afford good lawyers and could pay the corrupt cops to look the other way.
“Got one,” Nik says, and Damen’s watch buzzes as Nik sends him another photo. “Photography major, spends her free time taking animal photos for the local shelter. Only one mark on her file, an arrest for protesting police brutality during the riots a few years ago. She’s cute, too.”
Damen glances down at the picture, sees green eyes staring back, raven hair cascading in soft curls around her face. She’s smiling and is, in fact, very pretty. She does look nice.
Viper had thrown a dagger at his head, one time, and it lodged so far into the brick wall behind him that Damen couldn’t pull it out, and had to come back later with tools so that he could extract it and take it back to his lab for examination. He doesn’t know what color hair Viper has; he always wears a cap, and his domino hides his eyebrows. If Viper ever smiled, Damen’s sure he’d be able to see his fangs.
“No,” Damen says, swiping the picture away. “She sounds too nice. What else you got?”
“It’s not a buffet, D,” Nik snaps. “You can’t just go down the line until you see something that piques your interest.”
“That’s exactly what I’ve always done. Haven’t you been telling me all night to return to my roots? To my hedonistic youth?”
“D,” Nik says, completely over the entire argument already, “I’m just trying to help. You know that the tabloid stories about you have gone up fifteen percent in the last two months?”
“But I haven’t even—”
“And that’s the point,” Nik interrupts him. “They’re starting to make stuff up because you haven’t given them anything exciting. You haven’t taken anyone home. You haven’t jumped into a fountain at some executive’s birthday party. You haven’t shown up to a board meeting drunk out of your mind.”
“I’ve never been drunk at a board meeting, everyone just thought I was because of the poison gas that was still in my system from the night before—”
“I know,” Nik says patiently. “D, trust me, I know, I helped you code the antidote to that poison, remember? But it was a great cover story, and scandalous enough to keep the tabloids busy for months. They’ll always talk about you, D, for as long as you are who you are. Better they talk about your abysmal love life or your ‘drinking problem’ than go digging any deeper into what you do in your free time. That’s the whole point of this, remember?”
And Damen, fully chastened by now, sighs. He remembers. How could he not? His entire life had been pretending at something else or the other—pretending that he knew how to run his father’s billion dollar corporation, pretending that the only things he cared about were women, booze and loud cars.
Pretending that he could make a difference in this world, even if it was just by stopping one mugging at a time.
Sometimes he wasn’t sure there was any part of him that existed that wasn’t some sort of pretense or the other. If the tabloids dug down and tried to find out who was underneath Damianos Vallis, heir to the billion dollar Vallis Corporation, son to a dead father, brother to a murderous traitor—
All they would find are empty masks, all the way down.
“Okay, I’ve got another one. How about—oh shit ,” Nik hisses. “What the hell—”
“‘Oh shit’ what?” Damen asks, perking up. That’s just what this night could use—a good old fashioned break-in that required his attention. It would be too much to hope it was Viper causing trouble somewhere. Or maybe there was a family out there getting mugged, and needed help—
Jesus. Was he really hoping someone would get mugged, just so he could get out of this terrible party? He scans the room again, trying to see if he can find anything there that could have offended Nik so, something that would cause him to mute the mic so that Damen couldn’t hear whatever swear words he was assuredly spitting right now.
Sweeping across the floor Damen’s eye catches on a flash of blond hair, a suit that can’t quite hold up to the grandeur of the five thousand dollar Armani jackets that are scattered throughout the room and yet is worn by a man with all the easy elegance of those whose bank accounts never dip below eight digits. He’s holding a champagne flute in one hand and the other—insouciant, bored—is on his hip. He’s speaking to a sitting senator with the same amount of care one would show to a solicitor who showed up unannounced at the door.
“Is that Laurent?” Damen asks, not even bothering to hide his smile from the cameras. “He should work just fine for what I need to do here, don’t you think?”
“Not Laurent,” Nik hisses, coming back on the earpiece immediately. If Damen hadn’t been sure that the ‘oh shit’ declaration was muttered because of Laurent, he is now. “You know that he wasn’t invited. I’ve already got security handling it.”
“Tell them to back off. I’ll handle it myself,” Damen says, swinging his legs over the catwalk and jumping over to the platform that leads to the stairs, taking them two at a time.
“You won’t handle it, I know you, idiot, the two of you are as likely to start throwing bacon wrapped shrimp at each other—”
“There’s bacon wrapped shrimp? You should have started with that.”
“—and the last time you were together the two of you were nearly arrested for setting an entire buffet table on fire, which I only got you out of, if I can remind you, because I bribed the maitre d’—”
“Your concerns have been noted, Nik,” Damen says gallantly, jumping over the stair balcony and landing neatly on the ground floor. “And you make some very valid points. But you’ve forgotten the most important thing.”
“And what’s that,” Nik says flatly.
“My dear Nikandros,” Damen says, winking at the waiter he passes who’s holding a tray full of champagne glasses. “Just think of what the tabloids will say.”
And he yanks his earpiece out, dropping it into one of the champagne glasses that the flustered waiter is carrying, and goes to find Laurent.
Damen sticks to the service halls, the back rooms, the seldom used passageways. This is his party, his hotel, and so he knows the best way to get around the crush of people in the ballroom without being seen. He knows where the exits are, too, knows how easy it would be to slip out one of the back doors, find the nearest safehouse and grab a bike that would get him out of here and away from all these people he'd rather not talk to. But the situation isn’t that dire yet, definitely not dire enough to be worth the inevitable lecture he’d get from Nik if he did end up going through with that.
And besides, Laurent is here. They’re not quite friends, the two of them—Damen can hardly afford something like a real friend, not with all the secrets he carries—but what they have can almost be called friendly, if he can ignore the relentless crush he’s been nursing since the first moment he set eyes on him so many years ago now. But Laurent doesn’t hold it against him, and besides that he’s brilliant and challenging to talk to, and he doesn’t look at him like everyone else does, like he’s a walking bag of money with only half a brain to go along with it, just a sorry excuse of a man just waiting to be taken advantage of by someone stronger and more savvy. When Damen talks Laurent listens to him, really listens, and doesn’t hesitate to let him know—bluntly, candidly—when he thinks Damen is being disingenuous, or pretending.
In all honesty, it’s exactly that reason why Nik tries to separate them every chance he gets. Laurent sees too much, and Damen’s not nearly good enough at hiding to prevent him from seeing something he shouldn’t.
Damen thinks he should be more concerned about that than he is.
He can see Laurent lounging against one of the archways that line the room, almost completely hidden from wandering eyes but at an angle that gives him an unobstructed view out into the ballroom. To see out, yet not be seen. Damen has to admire the ingenuity of it. It’s a wonder Nik was even able to catch him on the cameras at all, although it’s not out of the question that Laurent showed himself on purpose just to annoy the man. They had never gotten along very well, not that either one of them had ever tried very hard.
Damen knows how to walk silently, how to disguise his footfalls. Laurent’s attention is on the scene before him, and not on the lone figure creeping from behind.
“I’ve been told there’s been a breach in my security,” Damen says once he’s near enough to be heard over the noise of the ballroom, his voice low in Laurent’s ear.
Laurent doesn’t even give him the courtesy of feigned surprise.
“‘Breach’ is perhaps too strong of a word to use.” His hand doesn’t waver as he brings his glass of champagne up to his lips, and he takes an unhurried sip before continuing. “Is there a word for, 'I pretended to be part of a Senator’s posse and no one stopped me because one of the prostitutes he brought in dropped a bag of coke and caused a big scene at the entrance'? Because that describes the situation a bit more accurately.”
“Ouch,” Damen says, and then wonders if it would be uncouth to reveal that little fact to a reporter so that the poor Senator could take the brunt of the tabloid gossip tomorrow, and not him—and then decides with a shrug that it’s never uncouth to expose politicians’ seedy underbellies to the media. “I don’t suppose there’s a word for that, no.”
“And so are you here to escort me out, then? Parade me in front of your guests as you frog march me out of here?” Laurent asks, putting his wrists together to demonstrate, as if Damen were going to clap handcuffs on him personally. It’s an awkward gesture, what with him trying to also hold his champagne glass, but luckily the glass is already half empty and nothing spills out onto the floor.
Damen takes the glass on the pretense that he is, in fact, going to tie up Laurent’s hands—a train of thought he doesn’t let himself indulge in too thoroughly—but instead of breaking out the zip ties he’s got stashed somewhere in his suit (or—maybe it was his other suit that had them) he drains the glass in one gulp.
Laurent frowns. “That bad already? You don’t usually drink.”
And it’s this—this level of scrutiny, of remembering patterns, of picking up on the little things that no one else observes that makes Laurent so dangerous. One day Damen would forget to take off his mask and Laurent would be the only one who would notice, because he’s the only one who ever really looks at him.
He should have taken that escape door when he still had the chance.
“You could have just called me, you know,” he says, instead of answering. “If you wanted an invitation so badly.”
“And where’s the fun in that?”
“Less fun than sneaking in, maybe, but more fun than being thrown out of here by two bodybuilders who are both named Ivan,” Damen says, nodding towards the two nearly identical bald security guards who stand at uneasy attention on either side of the open bar, watching every guest who passes with unadorned hostility. “Which is an outcome you only barely escaped, I’ll have you know.”
“My hero,” Laurent purrs.
“I just meant that I could have helped you,” Damen says, ignoring the way Laurent’s appreciation makes his heart flutter even though it was said with enough sarcasm to drown a whale. “I wouldn’t have minded hearing from you, either.”
“I’m not going to be one of those people who only calls you for favors. Besides, you can’t always be depended on for every single solution to life’s problems, Damianos.”
The way Laurent says it is pointed, and cutting; meant to be a criticism, although Damen can’t rightly see how. Solving the various injustices of the world isn’t possible, of course, but not wanting to even try is just as impossible, in Damen’s mind.
“Maybe a solution to all of life’s problems are out of my reach,” Damen says, a concession he can’t fully put the weight of truth behind. “But now I have to solve you. You being here has just created more problems for me.”
“The title of my memoir,” Laurent murmurs.
“And so now I have to decide—do I kick you out of here, fulfilling my duty as a responsible host, or do I let you stay, acting selfishly in my own best interest? You’ve put me at quite the crossroads.”
“And right there—that’s your problem, Damianos. When everything you see is black and white, you forget that there are other colors.”
“Let me guess: you’re about to show me an entirely new color which doesn’t involve kicking you out of here.”
Laurent huffs. “You’re not going to kick me out, so let’s cut the hand wringing, shall we? You need me just as much as I need you. Do you really not understand why you came straight to me, out of all the shiny, bright people you could have picked to spend time with instead?”
“It's because you have such a timid, easy-going personality,” Damen deadpans. “And because you never ask leading questions.”
“It’s because,” Laurent says, quelling him with a look, “I’m the best option for what you need here tonight. You’ve never liked the politicians even before I let it slip that one of them may have some questionable companionship you won’t want to be seen with. And you hate listening to the tech wizards try to sell you on whatever ridiculous privacy invading program masquerading as a new social media site they’re trying to get you to invest in this week. Not to mention that those interactions are going to be even more difficult than usual since to all appearances you've ditched your butler for the night.”
“You know he hates it when you call him that,” Damen says, only confident enough to dispute the last point Laurent had brought up. “You might find an invitation in your mailbox every once in a while if you called him by his name.”
“Too bad Nikandros ,” Laurent says, rolling out the name on his tongue, “wouldn’t be able to hear it if I did. Unless you’ve got listening devices scattered around the ballroom. Wouldn’t surprise me,” he mutters, almost to himself, before turning back to Damen. “And so that only leaves one more subset of guests that you’ve chosen to ignore in favor of me. Less vicious than the others, in some respects, but more bloodthirsty.”
“I can’t imagine anyone more bloodthirsty than you,” Damen says.
“Usually I’d say you’re right, except there’s a blonde in a red dress who’s been smoldering at you ever since you’ve appeared by my side, alternating between that and what I can only describe as a death glare at me. She’s excellent at both, don’t get me wrong. I’m definitely taking notes.”
Laurent’s gaze never leaves Damen’s face, but Damen turns his head, slightly, to find that the woman in a red dress is, in fact, currently smoldering at him. She turns away when she catches him looking, raising her chin in defiance—and invitation.
Damen ignores her and turns back to Laurent, adopting a casual, almost bored tone.
“So I wanted to avoid seeing a one-night stand before I caused some messy drama in front of my guests. Can you blame me?”
“See, that was my first thought as well,” Laurent says, and when he smiles it’s a victorious thing, like some secret theory of his had just been confirmed, or like Damen had just played into whatever trap he had been laying. “But then I thought—she seems familiar. And then I remembered that The Daily Star ran a piece last week about how she had been seen hanging off the arm of handsome billionaire Damianos Vallis. Not out of character for you, I’ll admit, but she doesn’t strike me as looking like a particularly jilted lover. I want to say that she looks—unfulfilled? No, that would be out of character. Thwarted, perhaps, would be a better word.”
“I didn’t know you were such a religious reader of the tabloids,” Damen says neutrally.
Laurent shrugs. “Jord leaves them on the break room table sometimes. It was just luck that I saw it.”
“And so did you ever consider, in your labyrinthine mind full of conspiracy theories, that I just came over here because I wanted to talk to you?”
Laurent waves a hand, dismissing the notion. “And when was the last time you actually did something you wanted , Damen? People like us—we don’t get to want. Our world is hedged in by obligation. By duty. By tradition. And we can find tiny ways in which to rebel against that but at the end of the day we are beholden to powers beyond our control. And you can tell me that you wanted to come over and talk to me out of all the other people here, but I don't think I need to remind you that the last time we were together we were responsible for setting a buffet table on fire, a story that the tabloids ran with for months ."
"We?" Damen repeats. "If I recall correctly you were the one with the lighter."
"Yes, and I told you it was likely to spark, didn't I?" Laurent says with all the despair of a guilty party unfairly accused. "And tonight you came over once again because you know that we’ll probably get up to some trouble one way or the other. And then the tabloids will run with that story and you’ll dominate the news cycle for another month."
"As if I want to be accused of being an arsonist again."
"Doesn't really matter as long as people are talking, right? And you'll get your name in the papers, and everyone will be so wrapped up in your drama—or our drama, I suppose—that no one will look too closely at that bruise that’s coming in quite nicely on your jaw.”
Nik was right. Laurent is too dangerous to talk to, had always been able to see too much. It must be some sort of fatalistic urge that has him seeking out Laurent’s company any time he was around; there is a small, self-destructive part of him that knows that the only way it could ever be between them would be built on lies and half truths.
“You make it sound so mercenary,” Damen says, his jaw tight.
“No,” Laurent says, and to Damen’s surprise he winces slightly as he says it, like he had overstepped his mark. “Not mercenary. Necessary, maybe. For survival.”
“If I were that concerned about survival, I wouldn’t—”
I wouldn’t fling myself off of buildings. I wouldn’t put myself in harm’s way, night after night after night. I wouldn’t find myself daydreaming about a man in a black domino with blue eyes who kissed me and threw a dagger at my head, once. Or about a man in a cheap suit who sees through me more clearly than anyone else has ever cared to.
“—I wouldn’t have come over and talked to you,” he finishes.
“Yes,” Laurent says, and in an achingly tender gesture he reaches up and brushes his fingers lightly over the bruise that’s coming in on Damen’s chin. “I can see that you’re probably not as concerned about your own survival as you should be.”
Laurent’s touch on his skin is gentle, barely even there, but it feels just as brutal as it did when the goon had given it to him in the first place. Damen must make some sort of noise, some intake of breath, because Laurent drops his hand suddenly, his eyes widening in surprise like he couldn’t quite believe he’d been so forward.
“I—”
“Oh, Laurent! I’ve been looking everywhere for you, I’m sorry I took so long, I— oh .”
The thread connecting the two of them breaks as they both turn as one to look at their intruder. Damen puts a little bit of space between them, needing it to clear his head as much as for propriety. The two of them had probably looked very comfortable together, closer than they should have been for what was supposed to only be a polite conversation.
And it only takes one look at the man who had spoken—the way he’s standing a little off kilter, the surprise in his eyes—for Damen to realize that he is the intruder, and not the other way around. The man is older, in his forties, if Damen had to guess, with a closely trimmed beard and a decently tailored suit that he wears with all the unease of a man more used to wearing personal protective gear than regular clothes. He has a champagne glass in each hand, and Laurent reaches out to take one of the glasses without needing to have it offered to him.
So Laurent had known this man would interrupt them, then, just as he knew that Damen would come over and talk to him. Damn him and his schemes.
Before the silence between them gets to be too embarrassing Damen recalls his manners as well as the name of the man standing in front of him. Mentally he thanks Nik for forcing him to memorize the guest list.
“Dr. Patrasson,” Damen greets him. If he still had Nik in his ear he’d be receiving the name of the man’s favorite food, whether or not he was married, and the title of his doctoral thesis, but since he had ditched Nik earlier Damen would have to play this by—well, play it by not-ear. “Laurent and I were just catching up. Good of you to come to my party, thank you so much for attending.”
“Mr. Vallis,” the man says, and if there was any lingering disappointment from not finding Laurent alone it disappears entirely when he recognizes who Damen is. “I have to say that despite your invitation I didn’t expect to actually meet you in person. Please, call me Torveld. I cannot tell you how excited I was to receive an invitation from you, believe me.”
“Yes, Damen truly only invites the best and brightest to his parties,” Laurent murmurs, leaning back and taking a sip of the champagne.
Torveld’s eyes slip over to Laurent, taking in his relaxed posture, the use of Damen’s small name, but he’s too shrewd of a businessman to let anything like regret show in his face.
“Dr. DeVere and I were just discussing my research,” Torveld says, turning back to Damen with a determined expression. “Honestly I did not expect a chemical engineer of his renown to be interested in my simple, boring genetic research, but of course Laurent is probably only one one course away from having a PhD in genetics to add to his other—is it two, now?”
“Three,” Laurent says, his voice flat.
“Ah, of course, I should have known. Already three doctorates, and still so young. You do surround yourself with quite an interesting assortment of creatures, Mr. Vallis.”
Damen is used to making snap judgments of people. It's an instinct that only rarely steers him wrong; it's what makes him seem like he has superhuman reflexes, what lets him know that the thug in front of him is going to hook left instead of right, that the pleasant, smiling accountant is the one skimming money off the books, that the nervous presenter who can’t get a sentence out straight is the one with the billion dollar idea. And so he trusts those snap judgements, and takes them to heart.
His judgment on this man is not favorable, to say the least. For probably a few different reasons.
But he is nothing if not a pleasant host, and so he plasters on his most charming, insincere smile, and says, “One does what one can to amuse thyself, Doctor.”
“Exactly, Mr. Vallis, exactly,” Torveld says, mistaking Damen’s tone entirely. Damen can hear Laurent huff softly next to him, and stops himself from looking over to see if there’s a smile there too, which would no doubt be hidden by now anyway. “You know, although I was excited to come here tonight I was loath to leave my research. No offense intended, of course. We are quite on the edge of a truly extraordinary breakthrough and I did not want to be gone for so long during such an important time. You have heard of my research, Mr. Vallis, have you not?”
Right now Damen desperately regrets leaving Nik behind; not only for the immediately relevant information on Torveld’s research, but to log the dropped hint about his potential breakthrough. He would need to follow up on that. But Torveld is waiting for an answer, and so he says, “I believe—if I recall correctly it wasn’t human genetics you were researching, but aquatic animals of some kind, is that right?”
“You have heard of it,” Torveld says, looking pleased. “The octopodidae family, in particular, is my area of expertise. The octopus,” he clarifies, in the same manner one would pronounce it to a child learning the alphabet who had just reached the letter ‘O’.
Damen only realizes he's grinding his teeth when Laurent shifts, subtly, next to him, and clears his throat.
"I'm familiar," Damen says, and then, because he can't help it, "There’s a great restaurant right down the street that does them up particularly well, as I recall."
"Damen," Laurent murmurs.
“No, it’s all right, Laurent,” Torveld says. “I enjoy a well prepared calamari myself. In the sciences you can’t afford to have any warm fluffy feelings for your test subjects. And octopi aren’t even particularly fluffy!” Torveld says. Damen winces at the bad joke and turns it into a polite chuckle, which seems to mollify the man. “But as I was saying, even though we are quite at a delicate time in our research, I am glad that I chose to attend this party, and that I finally got to meet the great Dr. DeVere in person. And you as well, of course, Mr. Vallis,” Torveld amends quickly. “Your city is lovely. And not nearly as scary as I had thought it would be.”
“Delpha, scary?” Damen says, feeling easier about steering the conversation to less troubled waters. “We’re one of the safest cities in all of Artes, Doctor. At least as safe as Patras. There’s nothing to worry about.”
“Of course that’s easy for you to say,” Torveld says, his mouth quirked up in a private smile, a joke meant only for him to know. “The rest of us who do not live here, though, are not used to needing superheroes around to keep the peace.”
Well. So much for less troubled waters.
But before Damen can change the subject again or politely excuse himself from such a volatile subject, Laurent says, “The Lion isn’t a superhero,” in the same way he would say ‘Nitrogen isn’t flammable’ or ‘Fire codes are just a suggestion’. “He has a lot of fancy tools, certainly, but no one has ever reported evidence of him being anything other than a perfectly normal man.”
“‘Perfectly normal men’ don’t go running around on rooftops stopping crime,” Torveld says, and, honestly, Damen can’t fault him on that conclusion. “And especially not in costume. The Lion of Delpha may be many things, my dear, but he is certainly not normal.”
Damen waves a bored hand, adopting the tone of a man explaining a tired theory for the millionth time. “There’s really nothing to be concerned about, Doctor. The Lion is nothing more than an entertaining madman for the tabloids to gossip about. An unusual celebrity at best. Surely you know the type. You have impersonators of some kind in your tourist districts, do you not?”
Torveld nods. “Sure. People who dress up in frilly costumes and charge unsuspecting tourists twenty dollars for a picture with them.”
Damen shrugs, as if he doesn’t care one way or the other. “That’s all our Lion is, really. An amusement, and nothing more. Even if he doesn’t take twenty dollar pictures with tourists, what with the—you know. All the scrambling about on rooftops, and whatnot.”
“Now hold on a second,” Laurent says, frowning, his disapproving stare traveling in equal measures between both Torveld and Damen. “That’s not quite accurate though, is it? He isn’t just some local color who makes a scene on the side of the road every once in a while. He’s done real, investigative work for this city. He stopped that ring of smugglers down at the Delfleur docks not two months ago, the biggest chalis bust the city has ever seen. And he was seen prowling around those illegal chop shops right before the police got an anonymous tip to raid them. Not to mention all of the break-ins and muggings he stops.”
“Perhaps those are not deliberate, and are just unintended consequences that arise when one skulks around as much as he does,” Torveld says. Damen forces out a polite laugh, the one he saves for excruciating shareholders and board meetings.
“Unintended or not, he’s still been more effective at stopping crime than our police force has been,” Laurent says. He’s annoyed, although Damen can’t rightly tell why the subject would cause him to be so. He’s certainly never voiced any opinion on the Lion in Damen’s presence before; Damen would have remembered something like that vividly. Probably accompanied by Nik pulling a fire alarm somewhere.
“The Lion stops some crime, maybe,” Damen finds himself saying, against his better judgment. “But I don’t know if we can say that’s he’s terribly effective at his job. He hasn’t caught the diamond thief, for instance.”
“Ah yes,” Torveld says, picking up the thread with a small measure of excitement, even though the comment had been intended for Laurent. “The elusive Viper. He’s been quite the darling subject of our tabloids over in Patras, you know. That’s another problem with these vigilantes. Once one of them gets popular they seem to multiply.”
“He hasn’t caught him yet ,” Laurent says, answering Damen’s challenge pointedly. “But I have a feeling he will eventually.”
“Oh? And what leads you to believe that,” Damen says blandly.
He should change the subject. He should get them talking about something, anything else, before he lets something slip about Viper that he shouldn’t. It would be easy enough to get Torveld to talk about his research again, or distract Laurent with an off color joke.
But for some reason he needs to hear what Laurent has to say. Laurent looks back at him for a moment that stretches out a bit too long, his gaze dark and unreadable.
“It’s just a feeling I have,” Laurent says, shrugging and turning back to Torveld. Whatever there had been between them—or what had almost been there—is gone. “A thief who breaks into buildings and steals diamonds so large and instantly recognizable he couldn’t possibly hope to sell them—someone like that can’t be too smart. He’ll get caught eventually, I’m sure.”
“Right into the Lion’s maw,” Torveld puts in.
“A particularly apt metaphor, I think,” Laurent mutters.
“But—you know,” Torveld says thoughtfully, “diamonds have other uses besides being pretty pieces of jewelry, or even just as items to fence for money. It’s possible your vigilante is a scientist himself, of some sort. Or maybe working at the behest of one.”
“And why do you say that?” Damen asks, hoping he comes across as a bored socialite indulging in another tedious conversation rather than an investigator closing in on a new lead.
Torveld shrugs. “We use diamonds in my lab for specific kinds of work. It’s hard to find sufficiently large ones, of course, at least for a price that we can afford with the kind of budget we have. But they’re incredibly useful in a lot of different areas. There’s even some prototypes of diamond equipment out there that can detect DNA and protein sequences, something that would be exceptionally helpful to my research.”
A proposition, of sorts, although an easy one to ignore. Damen ignores it.
“And how does something like that work, exactly?”
“Exactly? I believe the diamonds are used as a sort of electrical signal that holds receptor molecules. That was my understanding, at least. Laurent would probably be more knowledgeable about it; it’s more of a chemical engineering problem than a genetic one, which is where my specialty lies.”
“Torveld,” Laurent says, his voice half disapproving, half purr, “this is a party . Damen doesn’t want to hear about the chemical properties of diamonds, I promise you. The only diamonds he cares about are the ones around the necks of the supermodels that are waiting for him to take them home.”
Damen frowns, and says, with a warning note in his voice, “Laurent—”
“So why don’t you,” Laurent says, subtly gesturing for Damen to stand down while never breaking eye contact with Torveld, “go get me another glass of champagne, and when you get back, I’ll make sure that we can talk about such things that interest us without needing to pander to philistines.”
“Oh,” Torveld says on a breath, an excited smile taking over his face, “Of course, my dear. Anything you like.” Torveld grabs the empty glass of champagne from Laurent’s hand, too excited about the prospect of what’s being promised to him to protest the obvious insult against Damen’s character, which would have been the polite thing to do. “Mr. Vallis, it was nice meeting you. I’ll be back in a moment, Laurent.”
They’re silent as Torveld walks away from them with an embarrassing bounce in his step, but to the man’s credit he doesn’t turn back even once to stare longingly as he leaves Laurent’s side.
Damen has no such restraint. Laurent returns the look, an open challenge on his face.
“You snuck in here so that you could talk to him,” Damen says, after a moment.
“Yes,” Laurent answers.
“You don’t trust him,” Damen says, and now there’s a flash of something like surprise on Laurent’s face, there and gone before he barely has time to register it. “And I can tell you enjoy talking to him as much as I do. This is some sort of—corporate espionage, or something.”
Laurent scoffs. “Or something, sure. What’s wrong, Damianos? Worried I’m going to take him home to try and get his secrets out of him the old fashioned way?”
“If that was your plan you wouldn’t have gotten me to come over here and make it look like we were two seconds away from leaving together to go have a quick fuck in the supply room.”
“And where is that supply room, by the way? It might be helpful to know once Torveld comes back and I finish my champagne.”
“Yes, you’re certainly not restraining yourself tonight, are you? Is that your third glass?” Damen asks, and it’s this, after everything, that gets Laurent angry, blue eyes flashing in a way that almost has Damen nearly flinching to avoid a dagger he’s sure is going to be flying past his head in approximately two seconds.
But Laurent, of course, doesn’t have any daggers on him, and so instead of decapitating him he grabs Damen’s arm and drags him into a small alcove behind the archway. Laurent’s surprisingly strong, and Damen finds himself out of balance as Laurent’s back hits the wall of the alcove. Damen puts a hand out to avoid slamming into him, and for a moment they only stare at each other, Damen’s hand right by Laurent’s head and Laurent breathing hard, his eyes dark and unreadable.
Damen desperately hopes there aren’t any photographers around right now. The position that they’re in can’t look anything except salacious, a scandalous faux pas that would be gracing the covers of the Delpha Star or the Daily Telegram for months. Laurent’s fingers are curled around his arm, keeping him from moving away.
It takes him a moment to realize that he wouldn’t move regardless, photographers be damned.
“You think you see everything,” Laurent says, his voice so low Damen isn’t sure that even his microphone would have picked it up, if he were still wearing it. “But you don’t. Sometimes I wonder how it is you haven’t been run over by a bus as you walk right into a busy street.”
“It’s because I don’t walk into busy streets. I have a chauffeur for a reason.”
“Gross,” Laurent says, making a face. “You’re such a–”
“Philistine?”
That makes Laurent laugh, at least, the sound of it a short, breathy puff of air that Damen can feel against his face, as close as they are. Laurent cocks a lazy eyebrow and says, “It got him to leave, didn’t it?”
“Don’t go home with him tonight,” Damen says. It’s more pleading than he would like, and he realizes the inadequacy of the request as he says it; he and Laurent are barely friends, certainly not anything like lovers. Damen has absolutely no right to ask this of him, and Laurent would have every right to tell Damen to go to hell and to stomp on his toes on the way out.
But he doesn’t.
“You want me to go home with you, instead.” He says it speculatively, like he might actually be considering it. Or—at least, considering what it is that Damen is really asking him.
And Damen thinks of the look on the woman’s face when he dropped her off at her hotel, when it became clear he wasn’t going to follow her up or invite her to his. He thinks of the look on Viper’s face that night he had caught him in the alley, the way Viper’s eyes went to Damen’s lips, only briefly, before deciding to reach in and kiss him.
He thinks of Laurent, looking at him now, waiting to see if he was going to blunder into that busy street regardless.
“Yes,” Damen says. “I do.”
“Ask me again,” Laurent says, his fingers digging harder into Damen’s arm until it’s almost painful. “Ask me, and this time, see me .”
And—Damen tries, he really does. The part of Damen that goes to parties, charity balls, galas, the part that makes small talk with senators, that goes home after a long day at work and collapses by the TV with a non alcoholic drink in his hand—that part of him does see Laurent. He sees a life they could have together. He sees himself opening the door of his Lamborghini and offering Laurent his hand, sees Laurent take it with that haughty, cool demeanor of his. He sees Laurent unfolding sweetly, quietly, slowly when they’re alone, without any eyes on them. He sees Laurent doing his brilliant work, being lauded for all of his accomplishments with Damen smiling and supporting him silently from the sidelines.
He sees all of that, and he wants it. He does, more than anything he’s ever wanted before.
But there’s another part of him that wants something different. Something darker.
And that part of him knows there’s no place in his life for soft moments or quiet dinners, not with Laurent, and not with anyone. There can’t be, not as long as he feels the need to prowl around after dark looking for people making trouble. Not as long as he can’t stop looking for the weakest, most unprotected people and spend his time working to protect them. Not as long as he has no qualms about launching himself into a fight with six armed men, as Nikandros had accused him of doing, and would do so without a second thought if it looked like someone needed help.
There’s no room for softness there. No room for people like Laurent, who could see too much. Indulging in something like that would get him killed, and would get the people he cared for killed. Allowing himself to imagine he had anything like a future with someone like Laurent—it was selfish. More than selfish, it was just—
Impossible.
And so he says, “Laurent,” because the part of him that wants this would never forgive himself if he didn’t, “come home with me.”
He knows what Laurent’s answer will be, even before the fingers on his arm relent and let go. He feels unmoored without Laurent’s grip on him, like he’ll just float away as easily as the bubbles of champagne in Laurent’s glass.
“I wonder,” Laurent says, still in that low voice, “what my answer would be, if you ever took off that mask you’re always wearing.”
Damen’s breath catches in his throat and he steps back, just the smallest amount, the pain against his chest the same as if Laurent had landed a blow there, right against his heart.
“What—I don’t—”
“You should go,” Laurent says, and he sounds tired now, like they’ve just been going a round. “Get out of here before Torveld comes back.”
“Laurent, I—”
“This is your party,” Laurent says. Damen can’t tell if his carefully clipped words are because he’s angry, or frustrated, or some mix of both. “Go out there and mingle. Go gossip with some corrupt senators and flirt with some hopeful supermodels. It will be a chore, I know. But you are used to it, and you will do what you have to, won’t you? To survive?”
Damen remembers where every single one of the exit doors are. He could be at one in less than thirty seconds. On his bike in less than a minute, if he ran.
He has never turned away from a fight. He’s never retreated as long as there was still some reason he could find to keep fighting.
He turns now, away from Laurent, and he flees.