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Between the smoke #ARhapsodyForTheCrownPrince #Fabian #timéo #AIBL

Timeo The show went well, afterwards, the flat on the Quai Voltaire was on the top floor of an old stone building, all tall windows and pale panelling, with a view straight across the black river to the lit windows of the Louvre. Caspian poured cognac, put on a record of a woman singing low in French, and didn’t turn on the lamps. The only light came from the city outside, silver and gold, falling through the long windows across the floor. He didn’t sit beside me on the sofa. He leaned against the window with his glass and watched me drink mine. “Did you like it?” “I loved it,” I said simply, he set his glass down on the windowsill. “Come here.” I didn’t go to him because he told me to. I went because he was beautiful in the silver light, with his collar open and his sleeves pushed back and the whole of Paris glittering behind him, and because I’d spent a week being frozen out by the man who should have been in his place, and because I wanted to know what was underneath that smile. I stopped in front of him. He didn’t touch me. He looked down at me for a long moment with those warm hazel eyes gone dark. “You’re wearing his cufflinks,” he said. “I won them.” “Take them off.” I laughed softly. “No.” Something flickered in his face, sharp and delighted. “No?” “I don’t take orders, darling,” I said, and reached up and took hold of his open collar, and pulled his mouth down to mine. He kissed like he’d been waiting for years. Not slowly. He took my face in both hands and kissed me hard, deep and hungry, his whole body pressing me back until my shoulders hit the cold glass of the window and the city blazed behind my head. I gasped against his mouth, and he swallowed the sound and kissed me harder. It had been a week. A week of a man who stood like marble when I kissed him, who held my face and then walked away, who used that voice on me and then went back to his treaties. Caspian didn’t walk away. Caspian wanted me with his whole mouth and both hands and didn’t hide a single bit of it, and after a week of starving, it went to my head like brandy. His hand slid down to my waist and gripped, and he lifted me, actually lifted me, and set me on the deep stone sill of the window with Paris at my back. I wrapped my legs around him. The glass was freezing through my thin silk. His body was burning. “God,” he breathed against my mouth. “You’re even better than I thought.” He tugged open my shirt. Not carefully. A button went, and skittered somewhere across the dark floor, and I laughed breathlessly and didn’t care, and his mouth was on my throat, then my collarbone, then lower, over my bare chest, hot and open and greedy, and I arched back against the cold glass with my eyes shut and my fingers in his hair, and heard myself make a sound I hadn’t made in a long time. “Yes,” I whispered. “There.” He did it again. It was dangerous. That was the thrill of it, and I knew it even then. The whole of Paris could see us. Anyone glancing up from the quai below would see two figures against the lit window, my bare back pressed to the glass and his dark head bent to my chest. His brother’s man was somewhere in this city, for all I knew, following us in a car with its lights off. I never felt so alive. Caspian came back up to my mouth and kissed me again, rougher now, and his hand went into my hair and closed and pulled my head back against the glass, baring my throat. I let him. I liked it. My breath caught. “You want him to do this,” he murmured against my neck. “Don’t you? You want my perfect brother to lose his temper and take you apart.” His teeth grazed the side of my throat, just under my jaw. “He won’t. He never does. He’ll stand there with his hands behind his back and let you go cold. But I won’t.” And he bit down. Not hard enough to hurt. Hard enough to mark. His mouth stayed there, sucking at the tender skin under my jaw, deliberate and slow, and a hot shock of sensation went through me so sharp I cried out and dug my fingers into his shoulders. That was when I saw it. Behind my eyes, without warning. A thumb resting on my lower lip, perfectly still, in a dark gallery. A hand under my jaw, holding my face as calmly as you’d hold something you had every intention of keeping. Not grabbing. Not biting. Just certain. Put it out. The heat that went through me then was so much worse than anything Caspian was doing. It came up from the soles of my feet and burned every inch of me, and it wasn’t for the man with his mouth on my throat. My eyes flew open. “Caspian,” I said. “Stop.” He stopped at once. He lifted his head and looked at me, breathing hard, his hair wild from my hands and his mouth red, his eyes very dark in the city light. For a second, I saw nothing in his face at all. No warmth, no charm, nothing golden. Just a flat, cold stillness, like a lake freezing over in an instant, and somewhere far down beneath it, something that looked very much like hatred, though not, I thought, for me. Then he smiled, and it was all back. “Of course,” he said lightly, stepping back. “It’s late, and you’ve had a very exciting evening.” He reached out and buttoned one of the remaining buttons of my ruined shirt, very gently. “There’s a guest room down the hall. Sleep well, Timéo.” He picked up his cognac from the windowsill and walked away into the dark of the flat. At the doorway, he paused and looked back at me, still sitting in the window. “I’d button that higher,” he said pleasantly, “before you go home.” Then he was gone. It wasn’t until I found the bathroom and turned on the light that I understood what he meant. There was a mark on my throat. Just beneath my jaw on the left side, where his mouth had been, a dark, unmistakable bruise, already deepening to purple, perfectly placed above any collar I owned. I stood in front of the mirror and touched it with my fingertips, and my stomach dropped. He’d done it on purpose. Every bit of it. The careful placement, the slow deliberate pressure, the advice at the door. He’d wanted me to go back to Versailles carrying his mark where his brother would see it. I didn’t stay. At a quarter past two, I buttoned my coat with its Russian fur up to my chin and let myself out as quietly as I could, and went down six flights of cold stone stairs. There was a long black car at the kerb, its engine running softly and its lights off, under a lamp beside the river. As I came out, the driver’s door opened and a man in a grey coat came round to open the rear door for me. “Monsieur Delacroix,” said Henri, Fabian’s valet. “His Highness thought you might want to go home.” I stood on the pavement with my collar turned up over the mark on my throat. “How long have you been here?” “Since midnight, monsieur. His Highness was of the opinion that you wouldn’t stay.” I got in. The seat was warm, as if someone had kept the heating running for hours. Beside me lay the dark green riding coat I’d worn at the hunt, cleaned, smelling only of cedar and rain, with a single cigarette on top of it. My brand. Nothing else. I didn’t pick up the cigarette. I sat in the back of Fabian’s car with Fabian’s coat beside me and Caspian’s mark beneath my collar, and as Henri pulled away from the kerb, I looked down at my hands in the passing light and saw they were shaking. Tomorrow, he was going to see my throat. I pulled his coat over my lap and up around my shoulders, and put my face in the collar, and breathed in, and for the first time in my life, I was afraid of what someone would think of me.

WHEN THE WORLD ENDED Halloween Special 🎃 Fabian & Timeo in the World of The Walking Dead A FAN-MADE STORY BY MAJOLICA #ARhapsodyForTheCrownPrince

#Timéo #ARhapsodyForTheCrownPrince