Page 7 of Prior Claim
He still looked one step away from running. They—Ellisandre—had done this to him. She had done this to him. The one they had been before. The one who’d chosen to die.
A soft part inside Ellisandre’s chest ached. There had been a time, however brief, when they had been his god and his goddess. When pronouns had been something they changed with their clothes and the pitch of their voice. All moments and identities that had ended in the ruins of that farm in eastern Europe, beneath a pile of bodies, and the crush of bombs.
Sevastyan was a devastation. In his youth he had been a darling boy, gangly like a fawn, pale half-tousled curling waves of hair over longing eyes, hands too large for limbs that held promise of the man he would become. The becoming had come. Time had gifted him a strong jaw and high cheek bones, wide expanses across the eyes from his north asian heritage, and a slender, prominent nose. The softness had been hewn away. A streak of pale blond, almost white hair had pulled loose from his knitted beanie. There were ten years of questions and ten years of loneliness etched in his face.
Was it age that had changed him, or a phone call?
He turned fully, to face them. His eyes were shot through with torture—red with it, even. He hesitated. “I can’t,” he whispered. His voice cracked on those two syllables.
Pain lanced across Ellisandre’s sternum. They would let it burn and ache to its fullest until it either became their new normal or burned itself out. “Tell me what you cannot, Vast.”
His throat worked, and still he said nothing.
“You came to say something else.”
Those were actual tears in his eyes. It was good the attendant had departed. The tears of Sevastyan were private, for the two of them alone. As it had been.
The memory was so clear—how he’d looked, kneeling in ropes, panting, wanting, and at peace. It would take so little to order the words out of his mouth, to have him on his knees once more. Ten years should have sown doubts, should have made the two of them shades of what they had once been to each other. Time had failed to degrade what existed. And yet there was missing knowledge. He might have someone else. But no, prior claim ruled that out. Sevastyan could have no other master, not while he served the oath. The power that had once flowed between them was still there, like a harp string strung between two souls, waiting to be plucked and stroked to life. Ellisandre stayed their hand and their tongue. They were his god and goddess. They would not be a cruel deity, acting without thought or foresight.
Too much was unknown.
Ellisandre reached for stable ground in the mundane. “You saved Gang Junseo.”
Sevastyan’s arm came up as if to shield himself. “He was saving himself. I facilitated.”
There was only one source from which Sevastyan would have gained knowledge of where Gang Junseo had been held prisoner—the criminals who had trafficked him. The Merchari were the most likely suspects. Ellisandre’s contacts in the shadow world agreed. Sevastyan’s appearance, then, and his message from a dead man, tied the past and present together. Whoever was behind the kidnapping of Gang Junseo in South Korea, then, was most likely also entangled in the disappearance of Collin’s father twelve years previous. Sevastyan wouldn’t have jumped criminal organizations if he still served his prior claim. Either the two criminal elements were aligned or they were one and the same.
“You’re Merchari now. Your old organization was fully absorbed.”
He nodded again, eyes as raw and frightened as before. He knew, intimately, what Ellisandre had been, what they likely still were.
Ellisandre glided one foot across the floor, then their other, just a single pace closer. Sevastyan’s hand clenched on the door bar, knuckles white. He wouldn’t have survived this long without better control, so it was this moment, Ellisandre themselves, causing this.
“You never stopped caring.” Ellisandre didn’t need confirmation. Sevastyan needed to know they knew.
“Did you think I would?”
“I left you,” Ellisandre said. He had the right to have ceased to care. They had given him reason. The living owed the dead nothing, unless they chose it.
“Like Ragnarök." Sevastyan almost spat the reference, but he was still speaking the language they had shared.
Ellisandre’s lips twitched towards a smile. Ragnarök. The Norse myth of the end of the world. Not quite properly applied, but they—Ellisandre—had died, in a sense, and come back, like the mythical Norse world. Sevastyan wasn’t a fool. He knew what he was saying. Ellisandre’s past self had been his world. They had left him behind in the maelstrom of destruction, leaving him un-reborn.
Ellisandre’s mind moved at the speed of light behind their impassive face. Sevastyan loved them still. He knew of them. Where they were. Who they were with. Knew Gang Junseo was romantically entangled with a member of their chosen family. These were details that could only be gleaned by careful collection.
So much was being left unsaid. A multitude of words that couldn’t be uttered in the here and now. Ellisandre reached for the mundane once more. “Thank you for returning Jun.”
“There may be a price.” The muscles in Sevastyan’s jaw clenched.
Ellisandre raised an eyebrow. It didn’t sound like he meant Jun would pay, or even Damian, Jun’s lover. Ellisandre’s voice curled in their throat, silent, a thousand questions all cut off by the look in his eye.
Perhaps it was time the Merchari were eliminated. A second Ragnarök of Ellisandre’s own making. Ellisandre would drag Sevastyan through a womb of blood and bring him into the world of the living, a realm he had only watched but never touched.
Their fingers curled slowly. If it were so simple, they would have done so already.
Instead, they moved the battlefield. “Vast. My ropes have never touched another. I have never touched another.”
He blinked fast and dropped his eyes. “I have.”
