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Alphas were loud.
This was not prejudice. This was data. Seven years behind the bar of the Azalea—six of them as its owner—had furnished Louis de Pointe du Lac with a substantial sample size, and the findings were consistent. Alphas were loud. They smelled: cologne and pheromone laid one over the other until the air went chewy, and the smell got worse when they drank, which they did loudly, and they started trouble, which they did loudest of all. The average alpha could not enter a room without announcing himself to it, could not want something without taking its refusal personally, and could not, in Louis's long professional experience, tell the difference between charisma and volume.
There was, for instance, the state senator's son, twenty-two, who had taken exception to his own reflection in the back-bar mirror and gone at it with a cocktail shaker. Four hundred dollars of antique glass, three stitches in the kid's hand, and when Louis sent the invoice, an aide called to explain, in the patient tone of a man explaining gravity, that an alpha's blood runs hot. Louis paid for the mirror himself. It was cheaper than the fight.
And there was the evening, not a month past, when Louis had come out of the office to find a near-rutting alpha doing something to an unoccupied barstool—recently occupied by an omega, granted, but still—something the new waiter was watching with the paralyzed horror of a man witnessing a car accident. Louis walked the gentleman out in an arm lock while the man wept that it wasn't fair, the stool wanted it, and comped three tables whose evenings had been collateral damage.
Christ.
He said none of this out loud. He would have liked, some nights, to hang a sign in the front window—ALPHAS AND DOGS WILL NOT BE SERVED—and he had designed it more than once in his head: brass lettering, tasteful serif. But a sign like that bought nothing but lawsuits and bad press. Louis de Pointe du Lac was a businessman, and businessmen weighed costs. Alphas were a little more than half his liquor revenue and roughly all of his drywall repair, and you did not become a rare beta proprietor on his street in living memory by telling half the money in New Orleans to drink elsewhere. He was good at arithmetic like that. He had built a career on it.
Most of the time, anyway.
Because there was no arithmetic on God's green earth that could explain his current situation: naked, folded forward over the arm of his own sofa in his own apartment, the most celebrated nuisance of an alpha in three parishes wrapped around him from behind, one arm barred across his chest like a claim. And the swollen, insistent, alpha length of the man driving into him with a rhythm that kept whiting out the edges of Louis's vision every time it bottomed out.
"Tu es si beau comme ça," Lestat was saying—had been saying, in English, in French, in some greedy hybrid of both, for the better part of an hour. " Mon cœur, my beautiful Louis. Open for me, let me hear you—" and the bastard had the gall, to slide two fingers against Louis's sealed lips and pry his mouth open, until those long fingers curled over his tongue, until the sound that came out of him was cracked and trembling and nothing like the voice he had in daylight, running a property and a staff of twenty.
Louis came back to himself in pieces. The sofa arm under his cheek. The sweat cooling on his spine. The obscene, glorious weight still moving inside him.
How, he thought, with the last functioning corner of his brain, did this happen.
Lestat de Lioncourt arrived like trouble arriving—resplendent, the word came to Louis unbidden and unwelcome—the way some men entered a room as though the room had been built in anticipation and had only now been completed.
It was early June. The door opened on the thick gold light of a French Quarter dusk, and the light seemed to cling to him as the door swung shut. Tall, broad, hair the color of that same light, pushed back off a face that a Renaissance painter would have wept over and then charged double for. An asymmetric black leather jacket over a silk shirt, unbuttoned to a depth that had no business being legal. Leather trousers. Chelsea boots, pointed, immaculate, clicking across Louis's floor like the floor ought to be grateful.
Within five minutes of his arrival, two omega patrons settled their tabs and fled with their cheeks the color of the Azalea's house rosé, and even Louis — scent-blind as betas came — caught the trailing edge of something in the air. Brandy. Bergamot. Something sweet underneath, honey, maybe roses. Expensive and insolent
A rockstar, apparently. European, obviously. In New Orleans alone, for inspiration, which was the kind of sentence Louis had learned to translate as for trouble.
He treated the man the way he treated everyone who walked through his door: the smile he'd spent years perfecting, courteous and warm and containing absolutely nothing. "What can I get you?"
The alpha looked at him for a beat too long, head tilting, as though Louis were the first interesting exhibit in a disappointing museum. "A Sazerac," he said, "if this city can still make one."
That should have been the end of it. Instead it was the beginning of the siege.
The man took the seat at the bar's center—not the end, where civilized customers sat, but the working heart of it, where Louis would pass him forty times a night—and proceeded to call him over like a metronome.
The Sazerac, to start. He praised it in terms Louis would have hesitated to apply to a religious experience, demanded the recipe, argued the recipe ("In Paris we rinse the glass with absinthe—" "It is rinsed with absinthe." "Then not enough absinthe."), and sent it back. Louis, who could have delegated this to any of three bartenders and chose not to, remade it himself. It came back again: now too much absinthe. Each complaint was delivered leaning halfway across the bar, blue eyes fixed not on the glass but on Louis's hands, and it took Louis an embarrassingly long time to understand that the drinks were not the point.
Then New Orleans. "You must tell me where the real city is," the man declared, producing a napkin. "Not the streets they sell to the tourists. The one underneath." Louis sketched it—Congo Square, the bones of Storyville, the joints on Claiborne where the brass players went after hours—and the man folded the napkin and tucked it into his breast pocket like a deed to something.
Then the oversharing, which was torrential. Paris, and why he was not currently in it (a disagreement with a government minister—"a very small man with a very small ministry"—the details of which shifted with each retelling). His band, The Vampire Lestat, a name Louis declined to comment on. And then, sometime after midnight, came the lyrics. Pages of them, scrawled on napkins and receipts, pressed into Louis's hands for his opinion. Louis gave it honestly—"It's very… straightforward"—and endured the resulting theatrical collapse against the bar top, the accusations of heartlessness, the vow to prove him wrong.
And by two, when Louis rang last call and then closing, the man lingered. Draped over his seat, inventing one last thing after another—one more question, one more story, the ice in his glass requiring supervision—dragging his boots toward the door at a pace that would have shamed a funeral procession, with the faint, unmistakable air of a man waiting to be asked to stay.
He was not asked.
The second night, the same. The third. The fourth. By the end of the first week Louis had begun to seriously entertain the theory that the man's nose was broken—that some European nasal defect had him reading Louis as an omega and courting accordingly—because the alternative, that an alpha who could crook a finger at anyone in this bar was choosing to spend his nights pestering the beta owner, did not parse.
Though. Louis was honest enough to admit, if only in the privacy of his own ledger-keeping mind: the man could, sometimes, be enchanting. It oozed out of him, whether he meant it or not. He could sit at any instrument in the bandstand and make it confess. When he hummed something under his breath, eyes lowered, an omega at the far end of the bar forgot to breathe. And then came the night Miss Yvette, the Azalea's pianist, went into a sudden, early heat halfway through the first set—poor woman, scarlet and mortified, bundled into a cab with her sister called to meet her—and the room sat in awkward silence, the piano bench empty; and Lestat de Lioncourt rose from his bar stool, unbuttoned his jacket, and took the bench without asking anyone's permission.
He played for two hours. He played the blues like he'd taken it apart and put it back together wrong on purpose, and swing like he'd found something the originals missed, and he played things Louis didn't know the names of, that turned the smoke in the room golden. The takings doubled. People drank standing up, three deep at the bar; the waiters gave up on the tables and just carried bottles through the crowd. And Louis, who had a professional obligation to keep one eye on the till, found his eye kept drifting to the bandstand—to the gold hair fallen loose, to the big, elegant hands doing violence and tenderness in alternation, to the face gone uncharacteristically serious, lit from below by the little piano lamp like something on an altar.
All right, he thought, counting out the drawer at two in the morning with the night still humming in his ears. He got it now—the appeal, the kind of beauty that made a person feel briefly illiterate.
If, after that, he talked a little more—if, once or twice a week, when the chairs were up and the lights were down, he found himself walking the levee with the man, the river black and indifferent beside them, the air finally cool—that was client maintenance. A valuable customer. A potential partner, even; he'd been turning over the idea of expanding: securing more capital, acquiring a plot of land, and launching another property—and Lestat, clearly, could be an investor to make it happen. It was business.
And Lestat, it turned out, was an outrageously good listener. It was the last thing Louis had expected from a man who treated silence as an adversary. But when Louis talked, Lestat stopped—stopped performing, stopped glittering—and watched him, chin in hand, and took it all in like it mattered. Louis told him about Florence, who was failing by inches in the old house on Esplanade. About Grace, who deserved better options than this town was about to give her. About Paul, whom Louis loved with a ferocity that frightened him, and whose bad spells were getting longer. And one night, very late, with the river doing its slow black work beside them, Louis heard himself say the thing he'd never said to anyone but his brother: that he'd had offers waiting in New York, that there'd been a future, a whole other Louis who'd died the day his father did, and that he'd buried that Louis himself, with his own hands, and that some nights he still went to visit the grave.
He stopped, appalled at himself.
Lestat didn't offer pity, or a joke, or some alpha platitude about duty. He was quiet for a long moment, then, softly: "You didn't bury him. He's the one who walked you back here."
No mockery. Not a flicker of it. Louis remembered thinking, as they walked back through the sleeping streets, that European betas had clearly fought their fights. That this alpha at least bore no resemblance to the ones of the New Orleans establishment, those peacocks in seersucker who ran the city like a plantation with better PR.
Which brought him, in memory, to the Cavelier gala.
The Caveliers were old Garden District money—cotton once, shipping now, politicians always—and their spring fundraiser was one of those evenings Louis attended the way he attended root canals: necessary, expensive, over as fast as he could make it. A ballroom full of alphas in evening dress was a ballroom full of perfume and testosterone and the kind of courtesy that was just contempt wearing gloves. Louis, so good to see you. The hotel is doing… well? For its size? He knew the shape of every smile in that room and what was under it.
Usually he found Armand by the second drink and they made the rounds together. Armand, who owned the Night Gallery on Royal, who was quiet and fine-boned and smelled like nothing—a beta, blessedly—who was gentle and tasteful and never once, in years of occasional shared beds, asked for more than Louis had already given. An island of sense in a swamp of musk.
That night, Louis exchanged no more than a few words with Armand.
Lestat arrived forty minutes late, in a velvet jacket the color of arterial blood, kissed Mrs. Cavelier's hand, said something that made her blush like a debutante, and then crossed the entire ballroom— past senators, past oil men, past the whole perfumed hierarchy—to Louis's elbow, where he stayed for the rest of the evening, as though marking a territory no one else had thought to claim.
It was masterful, what he did, and Louis, no slouch himself at the craft of rooms, watched it the way a craftsman watches a better craftsman. Judge Hennicutt began one of his little numbers—"One hotel's a fine thing, Louis, but I hear you're thinking of another? Ambitious. For a man in your—" and Lestat turned, all idle curiosity, and asked the judge, in front of a circle of eight, whether it was true that Louisiana judges were elected, because how extraordinary, in France one trained for decades, but perhaps the American way produced a more natural justice—and the judge spent the next ten minutes explaining himself, and the subject never came back. Old man Breaux made a remark about "your sort of proprietor" and Lestat, cheerful as a viper, inquired after the Breaux shipping contract with the port, which he had "heard mentioned in Paris, of all places—isn't the world small," and old Breaux went the color of his own boutonnière and discovered an urgent need to find his wife. They could not afford to offend him. A French rock star of independent means, foreign connections, and a touring schedule that meant he didn't give a damn about next year's zoning board—he was the one man in the room unreachable by the usual levers, and he chose to stand at Louis's shoulder, and that was the one thing no one in that room knew how to price.
It had been, against his expectations, a genuinely pleasant evening.
Across the room, at some point in the third hour, he caught Armand looking at him. Those amber eyes, dark-rimmed—the gallery owner had a stillness about him that always made Louis think of deep water—and for one unguarded second the expression in them looked almost bereft, a cat watching through glass. Then Armand raised his glass a half-inch, courteous as ever, and turned back to the curator he was talking with.
Armand would understand. Armand always understood; it was one of his best qualities, the total absence of scenes. Louis made a note to stop by the gallery that week.
That night, alone in his apartment, Louis did something he hadn't done in the six weeks of Lestat's campaign: he took the record out. The Vampire Lestat, the cover all cheekbones and mascara. He put it on the turntable, poured two fingers of rye, and listened to the whole first side.
His verdict was unchanged. It was noise. It was expensive, well-produced noise, and he truly did not understand rock and roll, and he understood Lestat's rock and roll least of all. He listened to the whole side anyway, and then flipped the record, and did not examine either decision.
There was, by now, no reading of the evidence that did not end in the same place. Lestat wanted him. The looks had acquired weight; sometimes, over the bar, they'd land on him with a heat that even he could feel, and he'd catch himself thinking that if he'd been born an omega he'd have gone into heat somewhere around night three and saved everyone the suspense. So on the night in August when the walk along the river stretched past three, Lestat coaxed him—wheedled, commanded, all but got down on the sidewalk—up to the suite the record company kept at the Monteleone, just to hear the new composition, just the new composition, Louis, and then you may tell me it's loud and break my heart—Louis knew exactly which door he was walking through. He walked through it anyway. He told himself it was to get it over with.
Lestat poured him wine. He sat at the piano—an actual grand, crammed into the suite at his lordly insistence, the bed shoved aside to make room—and began to play. Louis leaned against the piano's lid with his glass, and watched, and did not hurry. He was almost impressed—for a man who had spent two months circling him like a comet, Lestat gave a very credible performance of a man thinking only about music.
And the piece was good. Irritatingly. It was quiet, and it was good.
Louis set his glass down. Crossed to the sofa, sat, and began—deliberately, holding the blue eyes that had already flicked up from the keys—to unbutton his waistcoat. The playing faltered. He took off his cufflinks, one, two, set them side by side on the side table like a man with nowhere to be. The music stumbled through a chord it hadn't planned. Louis met the stare across the room, let his lips curve, and opened the top button of his shirt. The second.
The music stopped in the middle of a bar, mid-phrase.
Seven minutes, he noted, with deep professional satisfaction. A good record to start with.
It was—God, it had been years, Louis hadn't been with an alpha since he was nineteen and stupid, and he'd forgotten—he'd genuinely forgotten—what it was like. His mouth, his hands, the weight of him—pressing, claiming, everywhere—and that scent going heady and dark, flooding the room until even Louis's feeble beta senses were drunk on it. The bed didn't happen. Louis's back hit the wall beside the window before he'd registered the movement—shirt gone, trousers somewhere—thighs locked around the alpha's hips, feet merely touching the floor, his whole weight pinned there on the thickness pushing up into him, and—
Christ. The fill of it. The sheer thick stretch of an alpha's cock, swelling further once it was seated in you, engineering designed by a perverse God to make a body understand it had been taken. Louis's head knocked back against the plaster. He tried to brace, to take less of it—but his feet only slipped, his thigh trembled, and Lestat drove even deeper, every thrust punched the breath out of him in a grunt he had no governance over; and the pleasure was building in him like a fire in a stairwell, roaring upward, so hot it almost frightened him.
—This. This is why I only took betas to bed.
Goddammit. He should have stuck to his principles.
He really, truly should have stuck to his principles.
If he had—if he'd kept his head, or at least his lower half, under proper management—he would not, on this particular night, have come home after fourteen hours of ledgers, suppliers, one flooded kitchen and two separate fights he'd had to personally de-escalate, opened his bedroom door craving nothing but sleep—and found, a cocoon.
An enormous cocoon. On his bed. Built, with evident artistry and zero shame, out of his things: his quilt dragged to the center and mounded up, half a dozen of his shirts, his good waistcoat, his undershirts—and the off-season sweaters and the cashmere scarf from the back of the closet, the shelf he'd had to stand on his toes to reach, which meant the intruder had stood on something and dug.
The room was drenched in heat-scent. Brandy and cypress and a honeyed sweetness underneath, turned fever-hot, so thick it had texture—and underneath that, something Louis had no name for, a thin fragile note like a wire about to snap.
In the center of the nest, wrapped in Louis's quilt, with his face buried in the shirt Louis had worn yesterday, was Lestat de Lioncourt. At the sound of the door he lifted his head. His blue eyes had the washed-out, overlit look of a sky after a storm—haggard, glittering.
Louis braced a hand on the doorframe. He took a moment. He took two.
"How did you get in."
"The balcony." Lestat's voice was ruined, hoarse. "Don't be cross. I feel dreadful. Your pillow smells of you."
"It smells like me because it is my pillow."
"Then may I borrow it." He wound the shirt tighter around himself, chin tucked into the collar, and looked up at Louis with eyes gone red-rimmed and luminous with fever, and the worst of it—the very worst—was that he didn't even look ridiculous. He looked like saint in a triptych. Beautiful and doomed and fragile.
Louis stood in his own doorway. He should call the front desk at Lestat's hotel, have them send a car and two strong bellhops, have the man conveyed back to his own suite and his own linens and his own scent-soaked crisis. That was what a reasonable man would do, with a rutting alpha found squatting in his bedroom.
But Lestat was trembling. Lestat de Lioncourt—preening, tyrannical, the most arrogant creature to walk into Louis's bar in a decade of arrogant creatures—was trembling.
"Louis." Barely a voice at all. Almost a plea. "Close the door."
Louis closed the door.
He sat on the edge of the bed, where the nest had left invitingly open, and attempted, to reason. "You took your suppressants?"
"Of course I took them. I am not an animal." This with tremendous dignity, from inside the quilt. "The heat came early. The injections need time to take hold. Twelve hours, the doctor said. I only have to survive twelve hours."
"So survive them at the Monteleone."
"Everyone at the Monteleone would smell me." Lestat's lip curled, then his voice went small and aggrieved. "And anyway. It's your fault."
Louis blinked. "My fault."
"The last time we—" A grand, vague gesture that nonetheless managed to be extremely specific. "Something was off. After. I felt it. So yes. Yours."
Louis laughed. He couldn't help it; it came out of him short and incredulous. "Let me make sure I have this." He said. "An alpha is blaming a beta for triggering his heat. You should publish, you know. The medical journals would fight over you."
"Mock me while I suffer. It's very becoming."
"Is there genuinely nowhere else you could be?" Louis pressed on, because he was a man of solutions. "Half this city lights up when your name comes up. Find some sweet-natured omega, give them a night they'll tell their grandchildren about, take your temporary mark. I've watched it run in my bar a hundred times."
The look Lestat turned on him contained actual betrayal. "Do you take me for some common—" He struggled for a word filthy enough, and failed, and switched to French for a passage that Louis could only partly follow but whose tone crossed all language barriers. "I have never once—not once, Louis—"
"You flirted with me inside of a minute, the first night you walked in," Louis said, amused. "Sent back two Sazeracs you knew were perfect just to make me stand there. Forgive me for misreading your chastity."
"You understand nothing." And there it was again—that red-rimmed, overbright flash, anger and hurt fused into one thing. "You don't even remember the first time you met me."
"It was a Tuesday in June. You ordered a Sazerac and sent it back twice."
Lestat's mouth shut like a door. For a moment he looked at Louis with such concentrated, furious knowing—as though he were holding a whole other history in his hands and deciding, with hurt pride, not to share it—that Louis felt an unsettled flicker of curiosity.
"What?" he said.
"Nothing."
"Lestat."
But the alpha lunged up out of the nest and hauled him down instead, swallowing whatever came next. The kiss was messy, desperate, all teeth and tongue and the copper taste of Lestat's bitten lip. Louis tried to turn his head, to get a word in, and sneezed violently as a particularly thick wave of pheromones hit his sinuses.
Lestat froze. Drew back. His eyes—wild, wounded—fixed on Louis's face with an expression of such profound offense that Louis felt both amused and, against his will, slightly guilty.
"...Did you just," Lestat said.
"It's a reflex, it's not a review—"
"You sneezed at my scent—" and the alpha attacked the shirt with twice the violence, and Louis's buttons — good buttons, mother-of-pearl, he'd had that shirt made — went ticking off across the floorboards like dice.
"Those were custom—"
"I will buy you a factory—"
The next twenty-four hours survived in Louis's memory mostly as fragments, the way a hurricane survives in a town: as damage, and echoes.
An alpha in heat, he learned, was a mad dog. That was the clinical term for it, and he'd defend the diagnosis anywhere.
The first time, Louis kept some control of himself. That was a point of pride he'd insist on in any audit. Lestat pulled him down into the wreckage of the nest, into the scent of him, and Louis—out of principles he no longer remembered drafting—let it happen: let the fever-hot hands strip him, let that wonderful, ruinous mouth go to work on his throat and his chest, let himself be opened up slowly and achingly well on two, then three slicked fingers while Lestat murmured against his sternum in continuous, cracked French, half prayer and half obscenity. When Lestat finally pushed into him, Louis made a sound—once, bitten off—and then set his teeth and gave the alpha nothing but his breathing for a long, dignified while.
The second time, pride began to default on its loans. Lestat had him from behind, folded over the wrecked duvet, and the pace was brutal—deep, driving, the wet slap of it going on and on past all decency, that thick alpha cock dragging over the spot inside him on every stroke until Louis's arms gave out and his cheek hit the pillow and the noises coming out of him were no longer under any management he recognized.
By the third time—or was it the fourth—Louis was on his back with his knees over the alpha's shoulders, being driven into the mattress so hard the headboard had developed a syncopation with the wall, and then the maddening pleasure finally broke over him and it broke loud—he sobbed out a long, drawn-out wail that was Lestat's name and a curse and a plead all at once, the sound so obscenely wrecked he would have been mortified by if he'd had any blood left above the waist. And Lestat—Lestat flamed at the sound, lit up like a man who'd been handed a trophy, and went at him harder, deeper, murmuring oui, comme ça, laisse-moi t'entendre, Louis, crie pour moi, qu'ils sachent—
Encouragement was a tactical error. Louis noted that for the record. He noted nothing else for some time.
But under the pleasure—threaded through it, tangled in it, poisoning the edges of it—Louis began to feel the other thing.
Lestat's mouth at his nape. Again. The drag of lips, fever-hot, over the flat of his neck where a gland would be swollen and begging, if Louis had been built differently. The graze of teeth. The careful, deliberate bite — not to hurt, but with intent, the urge to sink his teeth into the gland at his partner's nape and claim, mark, lay down a signature in the flesh that would tell every creature with a working nose this one is taken, this one is mine.
And, again, nothing. The smooth, dormant, indifferent nothing of a beta neck. No answer. The instinct hurled itself at the locked door of Louis's biology and slid down it.
Lestat tried again. And again. Louis felt the pattern of it change across the hours like weather turning: the first bites hungry, almost casual, appetite playing; then intent; then urgent; then—by the fourth round—desperate. The teeth came back to his nape with a fixation that had stopped being pleasure and started being grief. Bite, and lick, and bite again, harder, a shaking exhale against his skin, a small cracked sound in the alpha's throat.
The body in front of him—Louis's body, stubborn, beta, unwritable—gave back nothing. No alpha had ever marked him, no mark would ever hold.
The fifth time, Louis discovered the outer boundary of himself.
He was face-down, wrung out, past trembling into a strange humming numbness—his body used so thoroughly that the pleasure had gone metallic, oversensitive, pleasure tipping into a bright ache that was its own kind of high. He couldn't have lifted his arms if the building caught fire. And still Lestat moved in him, deep and slow now, grinding, murmuring—and still, still, that mouth kept returning to his nape, licking, worrying, pressing kisses onto the unanswering skin like a man knocking on a door he knows is empty.
Something in Louis—exhaustion, honesty, the part of him that only surfaced when every defense had been fucked flat—couldn't take it anymore. He pushed up on elbows and crawled, one knee, two, a pathetic bid for eight inches of respite.
A hand closed around his hip and dragged him back like a rip current. Lestat drove back into him to the hilt in one stroke, so deep Louis saw actual black at the edges of his vision, heard his own breath come out of him in a punched-out whine.
"Enough—" He got a hand back, pushed weakly at the golden head at his neck. "Stop gnawing on me. You can't—" a gasp, another thrust, his voice shredded to wire, "—you can't mark me, are you an idiot, it doesn't— I'm beta, it doesn't work—"
Lestat went still.
Deep inside him, heavy and throbbing, entirely still. The room filled up with the sound of two men breathing heavily and the ceiling fan doing its slow, useless rotation.
Louis closed his eyes. Finally. His whole body was a bell that had been struck for too long; the quiet rang in him. He'd just gathered enough of himself to ease forward off the thickness splitting him open when something warm struck the back of his neck.
A drop. Then another.
It took Louis's blitzed, shorted-out brain a full three seconds to identify warm water, on his nape, sliding down his spine.
Behind him, pressed all along his back, buried in him to the root, Lestat de Lioncourt was crying.
Not decorously. Not the single glistening tear of a chansonnier on a farewell tour. Broken, awful, chest-heaving crying, the kind that shakes the whole ribcage—pressed silent against Louis's shoulder and failing at the silence, coming apart in small shattered sounds against his skin while his arms came around Louis's chest and locked, and locked, and locked.
Louis had been handled a great many ways in the past day. None of them had prepared him for this.
He sighed—as best he could—and stared at the wreckage of his own headboard. "I must say. I'm the one being fucked halfway to the grave, here, and somehow you're the one crying."
It earned him a wet, fractured sound that might have been a laugh and wasn't, and then the dam went entirely.
"—never—" fragments, hot against his shoulder blade, "—tout pour toi, I give you everything, and you—you use me, Louis, I am a divertissement, a—a fuck, you have never once said you—you never let me stay, after, you look at the door—"
"Lestat—"
"—and I cannot even—" a sound like something tearing, "—I cannot mark you. Two days. Three days if I'm lucky, and I am off your skin like I was never there, and anyone— anyone can look at you, want you, put their hands—that sommelier at Arnaud's who accidentally touches your wrist, that idiot tourist, ask if the hotelier is single while I am standing right there—"
"That's not—"
"—and that Armand." The name came out like a cough up blood. His hips snapped forward, hard, and Louis choked. "Comes sniffing around your bar every week—do not think I have not noticed. The little looks. The gentle little conversations in the corner—"
"Armand," Louis said, breathless, into the pillow, with the last shreds of his patience, "is my friend. For years. Will you stop—will you stop competing with every breathing thing in Orleans Parish—and Armand is beta, for God's sake, he certainly never broke into my bedroom and built a nest out of my clothes—"
"That is sexism—"
"That's burglary, practically—"
"He is a liar." Lestat's voice went low and flat and suddenly, terribly lucid—one of those heat-cycle moments when the fever drew back like a curtain. "Armand is a liar, Louis. And I will prove it to you. I swear it on—" another shudder, the curtain dropping back, the fever rolling in, "—on whatever I have left, after you have finished with me—"
Louis almost laughed. God help him, he did—a cracked little breath of it, because a heat-drunk alpha was the most sensitive creature on earth, and this one, this impossible, magnificent, weeping creature, had chosen him, of all the locked doors in Louisiana, to break his heart against.
He had perhaps half a second to feel the strange, treacherous warmth of that, before Lestat's hips began to move again, deep and deliberate, and the pleasure came crawling back up out of his bones like the tide coming back for a drowned man, and there was no more room in Louis de Pointe du Lac for anything but that: the stretch, the heat, the raw, overused ache of his own body rising to meet it again.
He turned his face into the pillow—his own pillow, his own bed, reeking of brandy and honey and ruin—and gave up on the sound of himself entirely.
The heat broke sometime in the afternoon. The fever-edge went out of the air first, then the heat fading out of Lestat's skin, that scent loosening its grip. The alpha went quiet, ran down like a music box, and was asleep between one breath and the next, wrapped around Louis all legs and arms.
Louis lay in the ruins of his bed and stared at the ceiling fan.
He did the inventory: one shirt, ruined, buttons scattered to the corners. The good cashmere: a write-off. The sheets: beyond the reach of any laundry, a total loss, God rest them. A full day's sleep, forfeit. His nape: swollen, tender, bitten into a shape that was going to be murder in a collar. Everything else: a comprehensive ache, front and back, the deep buzzing numbness of a body used well past its warranty.
Food was the urgent matter. He was parched and hollow—in ten hours he'd managed one escape for water somewhere in the dawn, and when he tried the second time, he'd gotten four swallows down before a hot, half-conscious body materialized against his back, rutting into him from behind, murmuring something apologetic and entirely unrepentant against his ear. He'd finished the water anyway. A man had to draw some line, and his had turned out to be hydration.
Lestat had not knotted. Louis was devoutly grateful for this. Conventional wisdom had it that alphas only knotted when marking an omega—and what happened when an alpha spent a heat on a beta, nobody had ever bothered to write down, since nobody was supposed to be doing it in the first place. Either way: a mercy. Everything he'd ever heard about the knot suggested an experience he was content to admire from a distance.
He called Azalea. Odette picked up—his deputy, a splendid beta woman of terrifying competence. He asked her to send up some food. Leave it outside the door. Don't knock.
She asked nothing. Bless her.
Though Louis was under no illusions. Whatever Lestat had left on his skin—and by his dull beta reckoning he was currently wearing the man's signature like a new coat of paint—would carry the news through the Quarter faster than the phone lines. By Sunday, everyone would know. He found he couldn't muster the energy to care, which was itself alarming.
He drank the water. The food would be a while, so he lit a cigarette.
The smoke found a way through his exhaustion to someplace quiet. He thought about Azalea, about the sign he'd never had made. He thought about Grace, that he should call her before the news did the calling for him. About Paul, who should never hear about this. He thought about the piano piece that was quiet, raw and genuine in a way that made his chest tight.
He thought about the hot weight of tears against his shoulder blade and the wrecked sound of a man's chest trying to hold itself together. Somewhere in the blurred hours, Lestat had said—je t'aime, ma flamme, ma muse, mon ange terrible—and Louis still didn't know what to do with it.
When his cigarette burned down to the filter, he heard the soft clink of a tray being set down outside. He waited a moment and opened the door. Sandwiches. Two plates. He carried both inside. He sat down and ate his. And left the other at the opposite side of the table, as if someone might sit down to claim it.