He’d finally gone too far. There was no coming back from this.
They were leaving.
He forgot how to breathe. He was suffocating.
Dirt in his mouth.
He woke, blinking. Grass tickled his nose. He snorted then rolled to his back, staring at the predawn sky. A few feet away the door to the forge yawned open, willing to take him back.
At least something was.
Climbing to his feet, he tried to retrace his night. He’d come home from Rodrigo’s all fucked up. Surly. Unable to sleep. He’d come down and done some welds. Gotten drunk. The worktable held a wadded up shirt he remembered laying his head on briefly. He must have fallen asleep. Finally. It had been days.
He couldn’t sleep in the stupid house with them gone. He didn’t even like going in to get food.
He had to get Loïc the fuck out of his house before he ruined everything.
*
Taking Loïc to the lake felt strange. He and Church had spent most of their summers in the wild quiet of the secluded area, getting eaten alive by mosquitoes that had probably been the great, great, great, et cetera, grandmothers of the ones eating him and Loïc today.
“Why don’t you just use the pool, you crazy fuck?”
“Pools are boring.”
“Pools are civilized.”
Severin grimaced at his idiot brother.
“Oh. Right.” The kid laughed. “Civilized is your worst nightmare.”
No, he’d had his worst nightmare hours before. Well, one of the worst. At least Minnow and Rodrigo leaving him would be preferable to them dying.
He stripped off his clothes and dove in, evading the worst of the bugs.
The lake welcomed him like it always did, its blue-green depths cool and remote. When he was under he regretted having to breathe. The weird silence of it soothed something deep in his chest. Watching the outside world through the shining liquid mirror of lake water gave him a similar peace to what he found after hard sex or a lot of beer.
He rose to the surface after what felt like an hour, his lungs screaming for the air he resented needing.
His brother was still standing on the beach, swatting at bugs.
“If you come in, they’ll stop chewing you. Mostly.”
Loïc grimaced in disgust. “Swimming in a lake? Next you’ll be challenging me to eat fast food.”
“I’m sure we’ve both had worse things in our mouths.”
“Oui, c’est vrai.” Loïc laughed. He stripped too then stepped into the water, frowning as he looked around his feet, as if he might get devoured by piranhas. A moment later he was slapping bugs off him, then made a dash into deeper water and dove in.
“See, it’s not so bad,” Severin said as his brother bobbed to the surface.
“I just never swam in a lake. Lakes are for fishing, and pools are for swimming. For that matter, I’ve only ever gone swimming to work out or tan, because being pretty was part of my job.”
“While we entertained men, Martine was selling them what?”
Loïc cocked his head to the side, his expression saying he was considering a lie.
“Mostly teen boys. She rescued them from workhouses in other countries, where they’d been trained in obedience. She found them benefactors. Her argument was that many of them would end up doing the work anyway, and in worse conditions. She prided herself on being a good judge of character when it came to her clientele and said she wouldn’t send a boy somewhere to be beaten or murdered.”