Page 112 of Rears & Vices

“Absolutely none of your concern?” D’Arcy dashed away tears and glared.

“None of my concern,” Everard agreed quickly. “Er… but a consensual none of my concern?”

“For fuck’s…” D’Arcy sighed. “Yes. I… believe so. So far as I can… Yes?” He raked his hands through his curls, making them fluff every which way. “What d’you take me for, anyway, that I would stand aside if I thought it weren’t?”

Someone with secrets I can’t conceive of. “No,” Everard said, rather patiently, all things considered, “I merely wondered if I’d have to back you against a half dozen pirates with fists alone.”

“Oh, well, then.” D’Arcy slumped into a bunk, sending a cloud of sawdust flying.

“So…” Everard hesitated.

D’Arcy groaned. “Christ, no, sod off.”

“You really aren’t…?”

“No. For the love of God, no.” D’Arcy laughed, gave into desperate snorting, face in an elbow. “I don’t know why it’s funny,” he said at last, sighing. “As neither of us is qualified to judge.”

“Definitely not,” Everard agreed.

The thought of that—they and Vitaliy, and everything that had transpired between them—sobered them both considerably.

Everard sat beside D’Arcy, hunching so he fit in the cot. He wove his left hand in the other man’s, held it tight with the thumb.

D’Arcy groaned again, leaned away. “No, no, no. Should’ve stayed abovedecks, where we’d be overheard,” he muttered.

But Everard wouldn’t be dissuaded. Not now.

“What don’t I know, Preston?”

Twenty-Eight

It was worse than Everard could’ve imagined.

“It had to be real,” D’Arcy stressed, for perhaps the third time. “Real bruises, real blood—pirates are too known for their theatre and falsehood. They’d see through pig’s blood and paint.”

Everard clung to D’Arcy’s hand and couldn’t breathe. Harder to leave a man alive than to kill him by accident.

“No,” he muttered, disbelieving. “Vitya… couldn’t have.” It couldn’t have been him. Gentle but ruthless Vitya— “No.”

“He enjoyed it about as much as I did,” D’Arcy went on quickly. “Which is to say not at all. If that helps.”

“No.” Everard shook his head. “No, it doesn’t.”

“He asked if I’d broken anything, and I told him about my rib—from the Wanderer, you remember?—he insisted on avoiding it, though I told him you’d maybe see it and wonder…it seemed so conspicuous after…”

Everard jerked away, pushed his forehead into the heels of his hands, and keened. D’Arcy put a tentative palm on the curve of his back.

“No one else could do it, Ever. René knew—knows—but she wasn’t strong enough. No one else knew, not even Stephan. And it had to look like several men.”

Fists, boots, a belt or two. A strong arm around his throat, holding back his arms… One man.

“But why? And when…” Everard gulped. “You weren’t actually drunk, the day of the San Telmo.”

D’Arcy chuckled uneasily. “We-elll… as I had to look rather unconscious…”

Vitaliy, shaking after; Everard, comforting him, thinking it to be normal, commonplace battle shock. Vitya, lying to him, every moment of the past fortnight.

Everard moaned. “… I am going to be sick.”