7. A Generous Winner
Silas had already poured the wine. He was, after all, a generous winner.
He didn’t look up when the elevator dinged.
Instead, Silas swirled his AB negative batch brew. Reclined on a plush velvet armchair, legs spread, pink silk robe loosely knotted over pale thighs and dangerously little else save a pair of tight-fitting green briefs.
One fluffy white alpaca-fur slipper dangled from his foot — freshly massaged by a nameless intern and still damp with lavender oil. He smiled sweetly — in a way usually reserved for funerals or foreplay. Ideally both, at the same time.
“So… how did it go with Lucien? Did he give you the big exit you always wanted?”
Rufus tossed his jacket toward a chair. Missed.
“Lucien was—kind. Charming. Genuinely interested.”
“Mmm...” Silas mused, brushing back a wet strand of curl. “That must’ve been… nice.”
A silence curled between them as the fireplace crackled and Rufus began to take off his shoes but somehow forgetting how fingers worked. He yanked at the laces like they were to blame.
“He asked about you.”
Silas took a sip. “They always do.”
“He brought up Vienna.”
One of Silas’s eyebrows lifted, “Ah. That winter.”
“He said it took him a decade to recover.”
Silas’s smile flickered — a flash of fang, gone too fast. “Only a decade? I must be losing my touch.”
“He kept going on about you,” Rufus snapped. “Four hundred years ago this, back when Silas did that, how good you were with your—” He cut himself off, furious. “He wouldn’t shut up about you. Twenty years worth of fucking nostalgia!”
Silas raised his glass in mock salute. “What can I say? I leave an impression.” He flashed a fang.
“You fucked him.”
“Repeatedly.” Silas took another sip, savouring it.
“You fucked him,” Rufus growled, pacing across the decadent rug like a caged tiger. “And you just let me walk in there like an idiot.”
Silas savoured the pause like a vintage champagne — sharp, bubbling, and just waiting to explode.
“Well you didn’t ask me, pet,” he grinned innocently. “I’d have told you if you had.”
Rufus turned sharply, his tie coming loose and hanging like a noose. “The hell you would.” His hair bristled with static as he bared his fangs.
Silas purred. “But I could have. That’s what’s bothering you, isn’t it?”
Rufus’s jaw clenched to the point of pain.
“He’s also married, you know,” Rufus muttered finally, like he was trying to win something — anything — back.
“Oh yes,” Silas said lightly. “How is Emmanuel these days?”
Rufus froze.
“You know his fucking name?” He snapped, eyes flashing as his hand jolted and the wine glass slipped from his fingers, shattering on the floor.
Somehow, Silas reclined even further into the armchair, silk shifting against skin and revealing more thigh. “Still running the restaurant in Marseille? I hear they just earned their second Michelin star. Saffron and ambition — divine combination.”
He smiled into his glass. “I sent them a florist and a string quartet. Maybe two. I forget. It was the least I could do, after what happened in Paris.”
“There was a fucking Paris?!”
”I didn’t say we fucked in Paris…” Silas drawled with amusement, a vicious twinkle in his eye.
The rage melted to resignation as Rufus dragged a hand through his disheveled hair.
“He would’ve bought,” Rufus hissed. “He was ready to buy. If I hadn’t been—” He flinched. “You ruined it.”
“No, pet. You ruined it. By trying to make me jealous. And failing, magnificently.” Silas stood, robe parting like a curtain call.
Rufus was storming toward him now, the tension between them snapping tight as a violin string playing a crescendo no-one asked for. “You knew what I was doing. You knew I was trying to make you jealous—”
Silas stepped in even closer, cheek to cheek — then reached up, and unbuttoned Rufus’s collar like it was the most natural thing in the world. His fingers brushed softly off Rufus’s throat. Then, softly, a kiss on the cheek.
Rufus flushed like skin after a slap — shocked and stinging.
“And you, pet” he murmured, voice low and silk-sharp, sandalwood and poison, “are never more beautiful than when you’re undone.”
He smiled with a wickedness that could cause bleeding.
Then with one graceful pivot, he sashayed away with his robe billowing behind him, leaving Rufus trembling in the wreckage.
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