And thus those daggers in Saber’s eyes. He could tell the champagne was no accident.
“Let’s get into my dressing room,” I mutter under my breath as the double doors to the Queen’s Apartments open for me. “Here,” I say, reaching for Saber’s messenger bag once we’re closed into my dressing room. “You go change, I’ll stock your bag.”
“You’re an angel,” Lord Aaron says, kissing me enthusiastically on both cheeks. “I’ll help Saber. Those jackets are quite fitted and deucedly difficult to get off by oneself.”
Saber starts to argue, but Lord Aaron cuts him off with a sharp wave of his hand. “Please, it’ll be faster this way. Dressing handsome young men is not only my area of expertise but my favorite activity as well.”
Saber shakes his head and strides off toward his small chamber.
I’ve just finished emptying my panniers into the now-bulging messenger bag when a door closes hard and Lord Aaron emerges from the hallway decidedly white-faced.
“Lord Aaron,” I say, rushing forward. “Are you ill?”
“Perhaps,” he says, no longer sounding high at all. “But it would put my mind greatly at ease if you would tell me why you’ve brought a slave into your rooms.”
“WHAT ON EARTH are you talking about?” I ask. For surely his words are a jest, if one in exceptionally poor taste. As a rule, Lord Aaron’s taste is impeccable and beyond reproach in every regard, but the Glitter on his cheeks gives me room to doubt.
“Saber is a slave, and it’s only my rather prolonged trust and intimacy with you that prevents me from believing that he’s your slave.”
It’s ridiculous! “I know he’s not in the staff quarters, but that’s not because he’s a slave. He’s being paid, just not by the government of Sonoman-Versailles.” I force myself to stop babbling and fix him with a hard stare. “Lord Aaron, it is the twenty-second century. No one in the world practices slavery anymore. Certainly not me.”
“Of course not you,” Lord Aaron says, then points at the narrow corridor he emerged from only moments before. “But that boy is a black-market slave—for many years, by the look of his mark. And at the moment, he appears to be in servitude to you. You can, I hope, understand how that looks.”
My stomach feels hollow. Mark. The tattoo—I’ve seen it many times. Asked about it, even. But Saber told me it was nothing, and I…well, I was easily distracted. I sink down onto the settee when my legs refuse to bear me up.
“You didn’t know.” Lord Aaron exhales with obvious relief. “Thank God you didn’t know. I would hate to have been forced to think ill of you for the rest of my life.” He gives me a grin at the end, but it looks more like a grimace.
“I asked him,” I say in a choked voice. “He said it was nothing.”
“Would you have told the truth?”
“Certainly not,” I whisper. The words Saber flung at me this afternoon echo in my skull. You don’t know the meaning of no choice. “Mon dieu, he must hate me.”
“He doesn’t hate you,” Lord Aaron says, joining me on the settee.
“No, no, you don’t understand. The things I said to him today. I told him my mother sold me to the King. Metaphorically.” I remember the way Saber flinched. “But someone actually did sell him once. I think I might faint.”
“You never faint.”
“I just might.” I sit for several long seconds before the buzzing in my head stops. “How can he be a slave?” I whisper. But what I’m really asking is, how could I have worked with a slave? I’m a slavery enabler, and that feels worse than anything else I’ve ever done. The fact that I didn’t know doesn’t make it any better, and suddenly the parallel to the hundreds of people I’ve tricked into unknowingly doing something illegal stabs like a thousand knives in my belly.
“Maybe you should ask him,” Lord Aaron says, his eyes darting to the still-empty hallway that Saber has yet to appear from. “I’ll make your excuses—the two of you can decide whether or not to return.” He takes the fingertips of both my hands in his and rubs them gently. “You have every reason not to.”
“Thank you,” I say, and attempt to muster a smile. Attempt and fail.
“Oh,” he says, reaching into a pocket. He removes a folded stack of bills and puts them on my dresser, then digs three pots of Glitter out of the messenger bag. “This is the reason I brought you here in the first place.” He bends down and kisses my temple. “It will work out. Maybe with this come to light, the two of you can understand each other at last. I’ve seen how you look at him.”