"I haven't said anything."
"You were about to."
Gael said nothing. Which was somehow worse.
"It's a problem."
"Clearly."
"I was with him tonight. At the work event. I'd had too much and I was standing too close and I…" He stopped. Pressed his mouth into a line. "I almost did something stupid."
"But you didn't."
"No." A pause. "We were interrupted."
The fury was back, quiet and specific.
"How did you know?" His voice came out rougher than he intended.
Gael blinked. "Know what?"
"With Samuel." Landen kept his eyes on the room below. "How did you know it was different?"
Gael was quiet for a long moment. The scene below was winding down, the submissive now curled against his Dominant's side, her arm around him, his face pressed into her shoulder.
"I just knew," Gael said finally. "Even before I was willing to admit it." A faint, humorless curve of his mouth. "I spent a long time explaining it away. Telling myself it was inconvenient. Inappropriate. That it would pass." He exhaled. "But he was the only thing I could think about. All the time. In every room. In the middle of scenes. No matter what I was doing."
Landen said nothing.
He didn't need to.
Because that was it. That was the damning truth of it, sitting in Gael's words like a mirror. The office, his home, the Knot, theplay room; it didn't matter where he was or what he was doing. Adriel was always there.
He picked up the bourbon. Drank. Put it down.
"You made it work," Landen said. "With Samuel."
"Barely." Quieter now. "But yes."
Landen nodded once. Below, the woman was helping the submissive to his feet, guiding him toward the quiet rooms. The marks on his back were vivid, beautiful, a work of art.
He thought about Adriel's skin. About what it would look like marked. About the sounds he might make, the way his body would move, the trust it would require.
He put the thought down.
"Right," he said.
Gael looked at him.
"Right," Landen said again, quieter. To himself, mostly.
Chapter 11
Adriel
The floor had emptied out hours ago.
Adriel had been so deep in the manuscript that he hadn't noticed when the last voices faded, when the keyboards went silent one by one, when the motion sensors in the far corners blinked off and left those sections in shadow. Now there was only the low hum of the building's systems and the warm circle of light around his desk and the story still spread across it like a living thing.