Jainan had loved Taam. Yes, he had dropped a hint or two that their marriage wasn’t perfect, but no marriage was, and the only times Jainan had spoken sharply to Kiem were when Kiem had sounded like he was disrespecting Taam’s memory. Would you do that for someone who had acted like that? Jainan hadn’t fought back in the vid. He could take out a charging bear with a tree branch, but he’d done nothing. His partner was an Imperial Prince.
Kiem compulsively started and stopped another sliver of the vid. The two figures hung frozen at the far end of the corridor, inexorably headed to their room. Jainan had loved Taam.
No, he realized. Jainan had never said that.
It hadn’t been grief that made Jainan gaunt and drawn when Kiem first met him. He had looked the same in the vid: pinched and strained and entirely focused on Taam. Like—fuck—like he’d been entirely focused on Kiem the first few days after the wedding. Those odd pauses. The messages linked to Taam’s account. The way Jainan had never said no.
If Kiem had known him as he did now, he would have noticed that. If he’d had the intelligence of a block of wood, he would have noticed it. He was the most unobservant, most world-shatteringly useless—
His wristband chimed with a reminder. His arm jerked as if it had burned him.
Tiny lettering projected itself over his wrist, reminding him he and Jainan were nearly late for the Advisory Council dinner. He stared at it for a long time. The stinging feeling under his skin made it a punishment to hold still.
He shoved his hands in his pockets and turned around. He needed to talk to Jainan.
CHAPTER 23
Jainan dressed for dinner and set off a few minutes early, hoping to catch Kiem beforehand; he must be told immediately about Jainan’s conversation with the Auditor and should also know about the refinery. Through the open doors of the station’s banqueting hall, Jainan could see there was already a crowd of people at dinner, none of whom he knew. He slipped into one of the empty, elegantly decorated anterooms off the corridor and checked the messages on his wristband while he waited. Nothing from the Emperor’s office yet.
When Kiem arrived, one look at his face made everything run out of Jainan’s mind like water.
“Kiem?” Jainan dropped his wrist and the screen disappeared. The chair he was in skidded back an inch as he scrambled to his feet, stumbling in the lower gravity. “Is something—what’s wrong?”
Kiem didn’t answer. He was standing in the doorway, so the door couldn’t close.
“Are you ill?” Jainan took a step forward. The lines on Kiem’s face were tight and strained. “I’ll—I’ll call someone.” Sit down, he wanted to say, but Kiem’s expression stopped him.
Kiem tried to speak, but had to clear his throat. “I—Jainan. We need to talk. About.” He stopped.
Jainan froze as his mind crowded with all the things he could have told Kiem but hadn’t. Some minor transgression—someone he had spoken to or some way he had embarrassed both of them—no, that couldn’t be it. He struggled to remember that Kiem wasn’t like that. “About what?”
Kiem stepped in so the door shut behind him. “You and Taam.”
Jainan had never heard Kiem’s voice sound like that before. It could still be anything, he told himself. The air around him felt sticky. It terrified him that he was falling back so often on his last line of defense—I don’t want to talk about it—but he started framing it anyway. “I—”
“I found out how things were between you.”
No. Jainan’s next words dried up on his tongue. Cloying shame filled his mouth, his throat; it bound his feet to the floor.
“Jainan?”
“It’s not true,” he managed.
“What’s not true?” Kiem said. There was a pause as if, in the natural flow of conversation, he expected Jainan to reply. “Jainan, I saw it!” He must have caught Jainan’s flash of panic, because he frowned and said, “You were—you were arguing. It was a security feed.” It was obvious he didn’t want to say the next bit, but Kiem had never learned to hold the slightest thing back. “He shoved you into the wall.”
It’s not what you think. It was less than a handful of times. That sounded so pathetic Jainan discarded it. He shook his head, fighting a wave of nausea.
“Jainan, come on!” Was Kiem raising his voice, or was Jainan imagining it? He couldn’t tell; his ears were buzzing. “I worked out Taam must have been the one who got your security clearance revoked. See, you’re not even surprised. You knew that—oh, for fuck’s sake, Aren knew, didn’t he? Taam’s friends knew how he treated you. It was staring me in the face. Fuck.”
Jainan stood like a statue, one hand resting on the back of the chair. His eyes compulsively followed Kiem as he paced from wall to wall: he was blurred, a moving shape that Jainan couldn’t focus on.
“Aren knew,” Kiem said, persevering. “Why did he act so friendly? To—make fun of us or something? To play with our heads? Why didn’t you say anything? I had to find this out from Audel stealing a vid from Kingfisher!”
Jainan barely understood his last sentence, but it didn’t matter. It blinded him, the sudden, awful image of Audel and Kiem dissecting Jainan’s list of private humiliations, Kiem like this—distressed and disgusted at the same time. You couldn’t love someone when you had trawled through their sordid problems like this. They were only an object of pity. He was an object of pity.
Kiem was still talking. Jainan couldn’t make sense of it anymore. He imagined the garbled noise as a river below him, and he himself balanced on a dam that was cracking under his feet. Everything he’d built was falling apart. Everything he had tried to do to save the treaty was rendered useless by his failure. He thought he’d been dignified, he thought he’d been brave—really, he had just been in denial about the fact that nothing could save his dignity when people found out. Nothing could make him more than a sob story.
“Jainan?” Kiem said. He had stopped; he was only a pace away from Jainan. “You look—Jainan!” The name was like a whip. Kiem reached out.
Jainan pulled away. His failure, his terror was coming to a point in his head like a storm building. He hadn’t even moved consciously. The pressure swelled unbearably, shot through with fury and panic, and what came out of his mouth was, “How dare you?”
Kiem’s mouth formed the start of what, but didn’t finish it.
“I asked you not to talk about it! You had no right!” Kiem actually flinched. But he had stopped talking, finally, and Jainan didn’t dare let him start again. Jainan was shaking. “This was my marriage, my past—did you think you were entitled to it just because I married you? How dare you!”
“I didn’t—I wouldn’t—” Jainan could barely see Kiem through the haze that blurred everything, but Kiem’s voice was agonized. Sweet God, it was so much easier to be angry than afraid.
“I have to go,” Jainan said. It sounded lame and faltering. “I have to go and get—I have to go.”
He struck out rapidly for the exit. Kiem moved as Jainan did, his arm outstretched to catch Jainan’s elbow. “Wait! Jainan!”