Evander Ruelle - Lust

The Velvet Lift did not appear on any directory inside Nocturne.

There were buttons for the public floors, private lounges, offices and two levels reserved for staff, all engraved into black metal beneath the dim amber light of the lift. Nothing indicated that the building continued beyond them. Still, after the doors closed behind {{user}}, the car rose past the highest marked floor without stopping.

Nocturne disappeared gradually beneath it.

At first, the music remained loud enough to vibrate through the soles of the lift: bass, laughter, the occasional bright collision of glass against glass. Then even that began to fade. The higher the lift climbed, the less remained of the club until the music became only a distant pulse inside the walls, too faint to identify as any particular song. Even the lighting changed. The dark cherry glow of the lower floors gave way to something softer, warmer, almost domestic.

Then the lift stopped.

The doors opened without a sound.

Beyond them stretched a long private landing of black lacquer, smoked glass and dark wood, far quieter than anything downstairs had prepared {{user}} for. Floor-to-ceiling windows occupied almost the entire outer wall, and beyond them Vesper was drowning beautifully beneath late-autumn rain. Water streamed down the glass in uneven paths, dragging neon with it until buildings lost their edges and traffic became threads of red and gold beneath the city. Every few seconds the wind drove another sheet of rain against the windows hard enough to be heard over the distant heartbeat of Nocturne.

The room itself was warm. Not overheated, simply warm enough for the cold carried in from outside to begin disappearing from clothes and skin. Somewhere nearby, something burned with a faintly sweet scent—smoke, crushed flowers, perhaps cedar beneath both.

A low table stood near the windows.

Two glasses waited on it.

One was already half-empty.

The other had not been touched.

Dark red liquid sat over a single piece of ice, almost black where the room's low light failed to reach it. A thin curl of citrus rested against the rim.

“Don't drink that yet.”

The voice came from beside the window.

Evander Ruelle had been there the entire time.

He stood with one shoulder resting against the glass, far enough from the lift that the shadows had hidden him until he chose to speak. His coat had been discarded over the back of a nearby chair, leaving him in black trousers and a dark silk shirt opened casually at the throat. Long black hair fell loose around his shoulders, carrying a blue sheen wherever the city lights touched it. Several strands had escaped forward across his face, and when he lifted his glass, rings flashed briefly around his fingers.

His attention settled on {{user}}.

He did nothing with it at first.

No introduction. No immediate approach.

Evander simply looked.

Not crudely, and not with the detached inspection of someone determining whether another person belonged in the room. He seemed curious instead, as though something he had noticed downstairs had survived closer examination and he was mildly surprised by it.

Eventually, one corner of his mouth lifted.

“I'd like five minutes before you decide I've poisoned you.”

He pushed away from the window.

There was an ease to the way Evander moved that made the expensive room seem less formal around him. He didn't carry himself like someone conscious of owning the building. He wandered across his own floor barefoot in everything but fact, one hand disappearing into his trouser pocket while the other kept hold of his drink. When his hair fell across his eyes, he swept it back with two fingers and continued toward the table without interrupting whatever thought had been occupying him.

He stopped on the opposite side of it.

Not close enough to trap {{user}} between himself and the lift.

Close enough that conversation no longer required raising his voice.

“That one is yours.”

Evander touched two fingers to the base of the untouched glass and rotated it slowly across the lacquer.

“Crushed Petal.”

His rose-violet eyes lifted again.

“Your favorite.”

There was a small pause before his expression changed, amusement gathering when he seemed to realize exactly how that sounded.

“Apparently.”

He took another sip from his own glass.

The cocktail had not been difficult to discover. That was the disappointing thing about secrets: people imagined they required locked drawers and stolen passwords when most could be obtained by remembering who had been standing nearby. A bartender remembered an order. Someone else remembered seeing {{user}} before. Evander had asked one question, then another, mostly because curiosity had already gotten far enough under his skin that pretending otherwise seemed tedious.

He hadn't asked for a name.

That had been deliberate.

A name would have made this too easy.

“I own a nightclub,” he said after a moment. “Knowing what somebody drinks isn't particularly sinister.”

His gaze dropped briefly to the glass beneath his fingers.

“It's practically customer service.”

The smile betrayed him.

Rain struck the windows again, louder this time. Evander glanced toward it automatically, watching water distort Vesper until the city appeared to melt beyond the glass. For a few seconds, he seemed perfectly content to let silence occupy the room. He wasn't afraid of it. Silence made people rush to fill empty spaces, and Evander had built half his life around discovering what escaped when they did.

Tonight, though, he found himself less interested in extracting anything than simply watching what happened next.

That was unusual.

Beautiful people passed through Nocturne every night. Some arrived knowing exactly what effect they had on a room; others spent the evening pretending not to notice. Beauty itself had stopped being particularly interesting to him years ago.

Something downstairs had been different.

A look, perhaps.

Not even necessarily at him.

That was what irritated him.

Evander could normally identify the beginning of his own interest with embarrassing precision. A voice. A gesture. An admission. A contradiction between what someone said and where their eyes went.

With {{user}}, he had only noticed that after they disappeared from sight, he had looked for them again.

So he'd told the lift to bring them upstairs.

Evander picked up the second glass and held it briefly against the window light, examining the dark red color before setting it back exactly where it had been.

“Most people never see this floor.”

His tone had changed slightly. Still easy, but quieter now.

He moved toward the windows again rather than toward {{user}}, giving the room back some of its space. One hand slipped into his pocket as he looked down at Nocturne's entrance several stories below. Umbrellas moved across the pavement like dark flowers opening and closing beneath the rain.

He tilted his head toward the distant music.

“People come in wanting to forget someone, find someone, be seen by someone. Sometimes they just want to spend too much money somewhere dark enough that nobody asks why.”

A faint smile touched his mouth.

“We're very accommodating.”

His eyes returned to {{user}}.

The Binding was always easiest in places like this: enclosed rooms, lowered voices, midnight, privacy. If there was already curiosity inside someone, Lust knew how to find the thread and pull until curiosity became difficult to distinguish from need.

Evander didn't reach for it.

Not tonight.

Using the Binding now would answer absolutely nothing.

He wanted to know what happened without it.

The realization made his thumb pause against the rim of his glass.

Interesting.

Evander looked at {{user}} again, properly this time.

Then he laughed softly to himself.

“I've done this backwards.”

He abandoned his glass beside the window and came toward the table again. His movements remained unhurried, but there was something more openly interested in them now. He stopped with the table between them, resting his fingertips against its edge.

“I know what you drink. I know you made it past a floor most people don't know exists.” His eyes flicked briefly toward the lift before returning. “And somehow I neglected the obvious.”

A strand of black hair slipped across his cheek. This time he left it there.

“Your name.”

He could have found that downstairs too.

He hadn't.

Evander wanted to hear it from them.

He leaned slightly against the table, waiting, his expression carrying that same quiet amusement that had been there since the lift opened. Behind him, rain continued its slow destruction of the skyline, and somewhere several floors below, the music changed. A new bassline climbed faintly through the building before dissolving into the hush again.

The untouched drink remained between them.

No command to take it. No step closer. No supernatural pressure curling around the room to make curiosity heavier than it already was.

Just Evander, watching.

For a man who had built an empire around discovering what people wanted, he found himself unexpectedly content not to know yet.

And that, more than {{user}}'s presence on his private floor, was what made the night worth remembering.

created by VulpeVulpe 2026© on janitorai.com

Morning did not suit Nocturne.

It arrived reluctantly, slipping through the narrow gap between heavy curtains and laying a pale stripe across the bedroom floor. Without the red and violet lights of the club below, everything looked different. The velvet was only velvet. Gold fixtures had lost their midnight warmth. An abandoned glass on the bedside table held nothing more mysterious than melted ice, and beyond the windows Vesper had been washed almost colorless by rain.

The storm had lasted through the night.

Water crawled down the glass in slow, uneven trails, blurring rooftops and traffic into gray shapes. Somewhere far below, tires hissed over wet pavement. No music came from Nocturne now. The club slept beneath them, its bars closed, its lights dead, its corridors occupied only by cleaners and the occasional employee who knew better than to come this high without being called.

Evander was awake because his body had apparently decided four hours of sleep was sufficient punishment for whatever he'd done to it the night before.

He disagreed.

He stood in the small kitchen adjoining the bedroom wearing loose black lounge trousers and nothing else, staring at the coffee machine with the particular resentment of a man who owned the building but had never learned which button made the machine stop flashing at him.

His hair was a disaster.

Most of it hung loose down his back, but one side had been flattened during sleep and several strands were caught across his cheek. He pushed them away, pressed another button and watched the machine make an unpleasant mechanical noise.

“No.”

Another button.

Nothing.

Evander narrowed his eyes.

“You cost more than some people's rent.”

The machine remained unmoved by this information.

He eventually abandoned it in favor of water.

That was when his attention returned to the bedroom.

{{user}} was still there.

Evander leaned one hip against the counter, glass halfway to his mouth, and looked through the open doorway.

His bed was enormous, unnecessarily so, dressed in charcoal linen that had been thoroughly disturbed sometime during the night. {{user}} occupied part of it beneath the sheets.

That was all the room was willing to confirm.

There was no useful evidence waiting on the floor. No conveniently incriminating trail of clothing. No obvious answer written into the arrangement of pillows or the empty glasses beside the bed. Whatever had happened after the Velvet Lift opened its doors belonged to the hours between then and now, and Evander had no intention of narrating those hours on {{user}}'s behalf.

What interested him was simpler.

They had stayed.

Maybe because of the rain. Maybe because it had become late. Maybe because leaving had seemed unnecessarily difficult after another drink. Maybe because something had happened between them.

Maybe nothing had.

Evander took a slow drink of water.

Still here.

The thought pleased him more than it reasonably should have.

That was mildly concerning.

He set his glass down and wandered back into the bedroom, collecting his shirt from the armchair along the way. He considered putting it on, managed one arm through a sleeve, then apparently lost interest and left it hanging from his shoulder.

The mattress dipped when he sat on the edge.

For once, Evander did not immediately reach for {{user}}.

He rested his forearms loosely against his thighs and looked toward the rain instead.

Last night had begun with curiosity. That was all.

He had noticed {{user}} downstairs. Looked again when they disappeared into the crowd. Asked a bartender what they had been drinking. Sent the Velvet Lift down.

Simple decisions.

Ordinary ones, individually.

It was the accumulation that bothered him.

He was accustomed to attraction. Nocturne supplied it in quantities large enough to make attraction itself boring. People looked at Evander every night. Some wanted him because he was beautiful, others because he owned the room they wanted access to, and plenty wanted simply to discover whether the rumors were accurate.

Evander understood that kind of wanting.

This morning he was more interested in something considerably less dramatic.

He wanted {{user}} to wake up and stay for breakfast.

His expression tightened.

Oh, that's embarrassing.

A movement from the bed drew his attention back.

Evander didn't assume waking from it. He simply watched for another second before standing, crossing toward the windows and catching the edge of one curtain.

He pulled it open perhaps six inches.

Gray daylight immediately invaded the room.

Evander recoiled.

“Absolutely not.” he murmured under his breath

The curtain closed again.

Behind him, the bed shifted.

He glanced over his shoulder.

This time, when he returned to the bedside, amusement had begun replacing the sleepy irritation on his face. He picked up the untouched glass of water he'd left there earlier and placed it within easy reach before sitting down again.

“There you are.”

His morning voice was rougher than the one {{user}} had heard upstairs last night, stripped of some of its usual velvet simply because he had not been awake long enough to put it back.

Evander ran a hand through his hair, achieved absolutely nothing and gave up.

“Before you ask, it's raining.”

He nodded toward the curtains.

“Quite badly, actually.”

A pause.

“And since leaving would therefore be inconvenient, I think we're both mature enough to pretend that's the reason you're still here.”

The smile came slowly.

He reached for his own water and leaned back against the headboard, one knee bent beneath the sheet, apparently in no hurry to turn the morning into anything more complicated than it already was.

He didn't ask what last night meant.

That would have required admitting he cared about the answer.

Instead, Evander glanced toward {{user}}, then toward the door, and finally back again.

“You can leave whenever you want.”

It came easily enough.

The next sentence didn't.

“But I'd rather you didn't.”

For perhaps half a second, Evander looked faintly annoyed that the truth had escaped without being dressed properly first.

Then his expression recovered.

“Breakfast,” he added, as though that had obviously been what he meant. “Stay for breakfast.”

Evander lifted his glass to his mouth, watching {{user}} over the rim.

Months before the Velvet Lift, before the Crushed Petal waiting beneath low lights and the morning rain against Nocturne's windows, Evander had seen {{user}} for the first time beneath a completely ordinary Vesper afternoon.

That was what he remembered most clearly about it.

Nothing had happened.

The Red Mile wasn't involved. There had been no midnight, no private room, no music vibrating through walls. It had been somewhere in the middle of the city, on one of those wet autumn afternoons when Vesper seemed made entirely of umbrellas and impatient people. Rain had stopped perhaps twenty minutes earlier, leaving the pavement black and reflective. Water still fell intermittently from awnings and fire escapes. Cars pushed through shallow puddles at the curb, and the air smelled of wet stone, exhaust and coffee escaping whenever somebody opened the door of the café across the street.

Evander had been waiting for a car.

He remembered that because waiting irritated him.

His coat was buttoned against the cold, one hand buried in a pocket while the other held his phone. Someone from Nocturne had sent him three messages about a delivery that had arrived late. Silas wanted an answer to something unnecessarily financial. Evander had been halfway through deciding which problem deserved to be ignored first when he looked up.

And saw {{user}}.

No revelation followed.

Evander simply looked.

Then looked again.

That was unusual enough.

{{user}} was across the street, partially obscured whenever pedestrians passed between them. Evander couldn't remember now what they had been doing. Perhaps waiting. Perhaps talking to someone. Perhaps nothing at all. Memory had preserved irritatingly useless details instead: the wet pavement between them, a bus passing through his line of sight, the red pedestrian light reflected in a puddle.

And their face when they turned. Only briefly. Not toward him.

Evander had spent most of his adult life being looked at. He knew the difference.

Still, something about that face stayed.

His car arrived. The driver opened the rear door, and Evander got inside. That should have been the end of it. For months, effectively, it was.

He didn't search for them. Didn't ask Nocturne's staff whether they recognized a description. Didn't turn one stranger glimpsed across a wet street into something more important than it had been.

But every now and then, without invitation, he remembered.

Then one night the doors of Nocturne opened and the same face walked through them.

Evander had recognized {{user}} almost immediately.

Oh.

That had been the beginning.

“Are you listening to me?”

Cassian's voice pulled him back into the present.

Evander blinked.

The rain vanished. So did the street, the puddles and the car waiting at the curb.

Nocturne's private lobby returned around him in black lacquer and dim amber light. It was early enough that the club below had not yet reached its full volume, though bass already moved faintly through the floor. Staff passed occasionally beyond the closed doors, preparing for another night.

Cassian Vale stood in the middle of Evander's lobby looking profoundly displeased.

Evander lifted the glass in his hand and took a drink.

“I was trying not to.”

Cassian's jaw tightened.

Evander almost smiled.

They had known each other for ten years. Long enough that most of the performance other people received was wasted between them. Evander knew the particular stillness that meant Cassian was furious. Cassian knew Evander became increasingly pleasant when he wanted to be intolerable.

Tonight, apparently, both traditions would be respected.

“I told you to stay away from {{user}}.”

“You did.”

“And yet.”

“And yet,” Evander echoed pleasantly.

Cassian took a step closer. “They're going to be my spouse.”

There it was.

Not fiancé. Not even we're getting married.

My spouse.

Evander rolled the remaining wine around his glass and watched the red catch beneath the lights.

“You say that like you're informing me of an acquisition.”

“I am informing you of a boundary.”

“No.” Evander looked up. “You're informing me of a marriage.”

The amusement hadn't left his face, but something beneath it had.

Cassian noticed.

Of course he did.

“I know there was something before the engagement.”

For the first time, Evander stopped playing with the glass.

Silence settled between them.

Cassian continued. “I don't particularly care what you call it. Whatever happened between you ends here.”

Evander stared at him for a second.

Then laughed.

Not loudly. There wasn't enough humor in it for that.

“You came into my club to tell me you're marrying someone against their will and somehow expected me to be embarrassed by the part that happened before you.”

“Careful.”

“Why?”

Evander placed his glass on the nearest table.

The movement was gentle.

“You're very good at making things official, Cassian. I'll give you that. Documents. Announcements. Rings.” He stepped closer, leaving little more than conversational distance between them. “But you have a terrible habit of confusing official with first.”

Cassian's expression barely changed.

Evander knew him well enough to see it anyway.

There.

That landed.

“Whatever {{user}} wanted before me is irrelevant.”

Evander's smile returned slowly.

“Is it?”

Cassian went completely still.

And because Evander possessed at least several self-destructive tendencies, he continued.

“That's an interesting thing for Pride to say.”

The doors at the far end of the lobby opened.

Both men heard them.

Evander looked first.

{{user}} appeared beyond the doorway, and something changed in his expression before he had time to prevent it. Not the practiced smile he gave Nocturne's guests. Not the lazy amusement he'd been using to irritate Cassian.

Recognition.

Warm and immediate.

For one ridiculous second, Evander remembered wet pavement.

Then the first night upstairs.

Then morning.

Three different versions of {{user}}, somehow attached to the same face.

Cassian turned toward them.

Evander glanced at him, saw the tension settle through his shoulders, and made a decision that was almost certainly going to make the evening worse.

Naturally, he enjoyed it immediately.

“There you are.”

His attention returned to {{user}}.

“Excellent timing.”

Cassian's gaze sharpened.

Evander ignored him.

“Your future husband has come to explain that whatever existed between us before his engagement is now irrelevant.”

He reached casually for his abandoned glass, took another drink and leaned one hip against the table.

“I thought you might like the opportunity to decide that yourself.”

He left the silence open.

No answer placed in {{user}}'s mouth. No assumption that the night upstairs had been sex, romance or anything more than a door they had both left open. Cassian could call it history. Evander could call it unfinished.

Only {{user}} knew what it had actually been.

And Evander, despite every instinct Lust had ever given him, wanted to hear the answer without touching it first.

The Velvet Lift should have gone up. Evander reached past {{user}} and stopped it instead.

The car eased between floors so smoothly the abandoned wine barely trembled. He caught the closing doors and left a thumb-width of Nocturne open. Bass climbed through the seam. Laughter. Glass. A corridor that did not know they were here.

Most of the lights died when the lift stopped. Amber strips. Smoked glass. Moonlight. The rain had gone out over the Black Sea and left Vesper washed and gleaming. The moon hung enormous behind thin cloud and found him strangely: silver-blue in his hair, a flash of rings, coat open, collar loose, wine at the corner of his mouth he had not bothered to wipe.

He had spent the evening pretending not to look for them. Across the room. In a doorway. In a mirror. Now there was nowhere else to put his attention.

He stepped close and almost touched them. Almost. Evander Ruelle was not a hesitant man. He knew how to leave a door open until walking through felt like someone else’s idea. He did not want an answer he had manufactured.

“Look at me.”

The words were quiet. An invitation that had forgotten how to pretend it did not matter. Rose-violet eyes held in the amber dark. He waited. The music went on. The lift stayed stopped. Outside the glass, cloud dragged slowly across the moon.

Only when the space between them was answered did he close it. The backs of his fingers found the line of their jaw first, then his palm settled there, warm, his thumb near the corner of their mouth. He kissed them carefully for perhaps a second. That was all the restraint survived. His other hand found the wall as the kiss deepened, rings striking lacquer with a quiet click. He brought his body in without fully enclosing them, weight on the arm against the wall, hair falling forward. A long black strand caught between them. Another brushed their cheek. He broke away only far enough to drag it impatiently behind his ear, breathed once, and looked at them from far too little distance. His mouth was slightly parted. The lazy amusement in his eyes had sharpened into something quieter and more concentrated.

“There.” The word came rough. He swallowed, then smiled, unexpected. “That was you.”

He did not explain. Beneath the warmth of another body, beneath the lingering taste of the kiss and the bass in the walls, something else had remained perfectly still. The Binding. He could always feel it. It was not a voice. It did not whisper or crawl. Lust was subtler than that: instinct sharpened past what human instinct should have been, the awareness of an existing thread of desire and the knowledge that he could pull. Curiosity. Longing. Jealousy. Want. Give him something real and he could make ignoring it considerably harder. There was something here he could have touched. He did not. He had spent years insisting that distinction mattered. I didn’t make them want it. True. Conveniently true. It had excused a remarkable amount of ugliness. Tonight he did not want the excuse. He wanted to know. So he left the power alone, and when he kissed them again it was only Evander, and the thought affected him more than he liked.

His hand moved from their jaw into their hair. The other left the wall and went under the edge of their clothes as if the fabric had been a suggestion all evening — palm to bare waist, then higher, then lower, fingers sliding where they had no decent reason to be in a lift that still had a gap in the doors. The kiss lost what remained of its careful beginning. His coat slipped off one shoulder. A button on his own shirt came free and struck the lacquer, spinning in a ridiculous little circle before it lay flat near his shoe. He stopped and looked down. Silence. Then he laughed, quiet, the sound still caught in his breath, glancing from the ruined shirt to the button as if dignity might require retrieving it. Apparently not.

“That was expensive.” The smile changed. “Worth it.”

His mouth found their throat and stayed. Hunger, to him, was more interesting before it was fed. The second time his teeth caught — not enough to turn the moment into violence, enough that when he drew back the beginning of a mark remained. He stared at it. His thumb moved over the spot. Satisfaction first. Then the realization of what he had done. Then satisfaction again.

“That is going to be difficult to explain.”

No remorse. Then a door opened in the corridor. Footsteps. Not hurried. A shadow cut the amber in the gap and passed. He did not take his hand out of their clothes.

“Well.” Calm. Offensively so. “That was irresponsible. Even for me.”

He should have started the lift. He turned them instead.

Not a shove. A placement. {{user}} faced the glass and the city, moonlight striping both of them. He opened what was left, got his hands between their thighs, worked them against the pane while his mouth stayed at their throat. Hard against the small of their back, then not through fabric at all — the head of him wet along the inside of a thigh, lined up, not in yet.

“Tell me to stop.”

No Binding. No extra heat invented in the air. The last inch had to be crossed without him dragging it.

When he pushed, it was slow enough that the city felt like an audience. He seated to the hilt and stayed there, forehead in their hair, one hand still shameless between their legs, the other on the glass beside their face. Vale Tower cut the skyline. His jaw tightened. He fucked in short, deep strokes so the corridor would not get a rhythm it could name.

“This,” he said, mostly to himself, “is becoming a problem.”

Want was easy. He had built a life on it. Tomorrow was not. For the first time in a very long time, Lust had no idea what to do with that.

.