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The penthouse’s walls were not thin, but sound carried throughout it as if the structure was made of paper. Long halls and deep empty spaces, cemetery-wide. The ceiling of the dining room arced like the hull of a ship. The slightest whisper of fabric from across the penthouse, from Armand’s movements, could reach Louis’ ears all the way in the library.
He kept his eyes closed, breathing evenly and quietly, even as Armand’s slow footsteps came near. A minute passed, an hour, and Armand was behind him, silent and still as a mountain, the gust of his breath down Louis’ neck.
Louis opened his eyes, turned around. Realized it was not Armand’s exhales he was feeling but rather the feather-light touch of Armand’s nails scraping down the soft skin of his neck. Armand stood, looking down at where Louis sat. His mouth had a displeased twist.
“Need something from you,” Louis said.
The dismayed thinness of Armand’s mouth disappeared. He crouched in front of Louis, taking hold of his hand, eyes running over him slowly. He ran a nail down the line of the vein of his wrist, turned Louis’ forearm over in his loose grasp, looking for—something. Spread his fingers out over Louis’ palm like he was reading his future. “Yes?” he said, very quietly. It reverberated throughout the room.
Louis jerked his chin up. Armand looked behind him as if surprised to see the bookcase there, where Claudia's diaries sat. Something in the line of him shattered like it always did when Louis asked for this — everything gone sideways and disjointed. Offset jaw, offset shoulders, offset hands, thrown into a funhouse mirror.
“Ah.” He didn’t actually say it, rather the sound was choked out of him. Louis’ feet shifted in the grey stones under him. “Which one?”
“All of them.”
Armand’s eyes cut to Louis’ quickly, flashing a bit brighter. “Oh?”
“Yeah.” Louis’ answers were clipped and lacking in syllables. There was nothing stopping him from rising above Armand, floating to take the weighty little diaries in his own hands. But, the two of them had an agreement about how best to manage the uncountable number of ghosts between them. One wrong move and the entire groaning tower that made up their lives would collapse.
“Are you sure that’s… what you want?”
Louis let irritation flicker briefly through him and onto his face. Armand’s warped silhouette seemed to flinch. Really he had barely moved, but in this cavernous space everything he did seemed amplified, as if thrown in shadow ten times his size. “Alright,” Armand said, still whispering, hands passing over Louis’ shoulders in a stiff squeeze, standing back up. He started to move towards the bookshelves, paused. “You haven’t eaten in some time.”
It wasn’t a question. Armand kept track of this—the order of Louis’ meals, the alternate refrigerated blood in smooth glasses and the boys, the string of men. His own list of various criminals and lowlifes. In the dawn hours before they slept his fingers drifted over his tablet screen, clicking through his detailed spreadsheets. Louis would watch him type in names — boys who need the money, men who deserve death.
Louis shrugged. “Not hungry.”
“Perhaps,” Armand said slowly, turning back around. “It would be wise to handle her delicate material with a clear mind."
“You don’t think my mind is clear?” It came out sharper than intended.
“You know that’s not what I meant,” Armand said, just as biting. Louis receded. Of course that hadn’t been his intention. Even if it had been, would he be so far off? His mind had not felt unclouded since– “There’s a young boy waiting in the dining hall that I was about to hunt,” Armand continued, softly. “Perhaps you could drink from him at the table, spare his life.”
Louis’ eyes fell to the bookshelves framing Armand’s head of coldly illuminated curls. “Alright.”
Armand smiled, extended his hand. Louis took it.