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“Take him somewhere nice,” the Queen had said, with that viciously cheerful air of hers that made Nyx feel keenly like he was prey cornered by a coeurl that wasn’t so much hungry, as merely bored.
The or else had hung on the air, unsaid and terrible all the same.
It wasn’t his fault, Nyx thought darkly, that the deadpan idiot with the nice laugh he happened to shelter in his office two times a week turned out to be the Queen’s brother. At the time, when Nyx had first found him napping blissfully in the old couch in what he’d just been told was his new office, he’d looked cranky and tired and really not very remarkable otherwise. Nyx reckoned it was no skin off his back to let him stick around and sleep in the couch whenever he wanted to, considering Nyx was still trying to figure out what the hell he was supposed to do with an office in the first place.
He was still trying to figure out a lot of things, really, chiefly among them if coming to Insomnia had been a mistake at all. He didn’t want to believe it, mostly because it would have meant Selena would have come on her own, and Nyx’s teeth rattled in his mouth at the thought. On the other hand, his sister hardly needed protection – he liked to say, only half-jokingly that his real job was to protect the court from her, because she was sharp and smart and every bit as vicious as the land she’d come to represent, in the King’s Council – and he didn’t really know how to go about protecting her from the things that would do her harm, in Insomnia. This wasn’t about hunting coeurls or securing routes from one settlement to the next. It was rumors and ploys and all sorts of things Nyx wasn’t really built to deal with, because it wasn’t the kind of thing you stabbed until it stopped moving.
It was one of the things he liked best about Cor, to be honest. And also primarily the reason he’d never considered Cor would be someone politically significant or anywhere near as important as the Queen’s brother. Cor was blunt and scathing and delightfully snarky. He seemed to share Nyx’s feelings regarding protocol and formality, but now Nyx knew he also had rank to let him ignore them entirely.
Cor was something approximating a friend, the sort that had enough of an edge to him to make him not miss Libertus entirely too much – grouchy little shit would come once the goddamn winter was over, because he was smart enough to avoid snow, the great git – and Nyx had been fine with that. He’d been okay with sharing his cavernously large office – as befitting a Councilwoman’s head of staff, the King’s Shield had told him with a proud tone that would have made Nyx punch him, if he were not certain that was treason – with Cor and his silence and his snark. Sometimes, Cor ordered food for them, and it was the right note of greasy and delicious to scratch the itch of homesickness in Nyx’s soul. It was fine!
And then the Queen had to corner him after a banquet and smile at him and tell him to take her brother somewhere nice, if he was serious about dating him.
Which he wasn’t.
Hadn’t been.
“You look like shit,” Cor said, laid as long as he was on the soft, well-worn couch that he’d pushed up against the wide windows of Nyx’s office, just so he could nap while basking in the late afternoon sun.
Nyx stared and stared and then snorted.
“I’ve been talking with your sister.”
Cor frowned, sitting up with a slight twitch to his mouth as he narrowed his eyes. Nyx wondered if he’d said the wrong thing entirely, but then Cor sighed loudly and shook his head.
“That’d do it,” he muttered, wrinkling his nose the same way Nyx did whenever this or that village elder came to him and told him exactly what Selena had done now, as if he were expected to explain it. “Out with it, then.”
“She told me to take you somewhere nice,” Nyx said, head tilted to the side. Very slowly, very pointedly, Cor arched an eyebrow at him. Nyx shrugged. “Except, I don’t know anywhere that I’d call nice, here in Insomnia.”
Cor stood up then, frown still in place, and came to stand in front of Nyx, purposely close enough Nyx needed to tilt his head back to meet his eyes.
“Do you actually want to take me somewhere nice?”
Nyx licked his lips.
“I don’t actually know the protocol to tell you exactly what I want,” he said, “and I’m afraid my sister will gut me like a fish, if I fuck up her new appointment less than two months into it, because I failed at propositioning a member of the royal family.”
“Oh no,” Cor deadpanned, lips twitching when Nyx’s breathing hitched the moment he reached up to grab his face in his hands. “The horror.”
Nyx let him tilt his head sideways enough for Cor to kiss him. Then took two seconds to process it before he wrapped his arms around Cor’s waist, tugging him closer. Cor kissed with the same languid, lazy quality he did everything else, and Nyx was of course surprised because it wasn’t like he’d been pondering such a thing or anything. That’d be dumb. So dumb.
“C’mon,” Cor said, as the kiss wound down, with the air of someone who’d reached a decision after a long, careful deliberation.
“Where are we going?” Nyx asked as he followed him down the maze of corridors that was the Citadel, because the alternative was to point out Cor was holding his hand.
Cor looked over his shoulder with that same little smirk he used, whenever he snarked at some dumb idiot from the court.
“Somewhere nice, of course.”
Nyx wasn’t entirely sure hunting bandersnatches out in Leide counted as nice, precisely, but it was the most fun he’d ever had in weeks. And when they were done, Cor drove them back to Insomnia and delivered him to the gaudy estate his sister had been given as a home along with her seat in the council, none the worse for wear, besides the fact his clothes were ruined and there was dried bandersnatch blood smeared all over his ankles.
Nyx was glad he’d resisted the urge to invite Cor inside, because his sister was waiting for him the moment he walked in.
“I’m going to kill you,” she said, “but first, tell me everything .”
And, because he loved her more than life itself, he did.