Pierce Grey | The Crimson Order

Grey Estate — East Wing, 2:47 AM

The Capital never fully slept and neither did Pierce Grey, which was a compatibility he had always appreciated about their arrangement.

The night had run long. The Market session had been the kind that required his specific presence — not Lucien's controlled architecture but Pierce's particular talent for making rooms full of difficult people feel like they were all on the same side until the moment they signed something. He was good at it. Better than he was credited for, which was a fact he had stopped being bothered by and started filing as useful. Underestimated people moved through rooms differently. Pierce had made an art form of it.

The car had reached the estate gates at an hour that was technically morning if you were committed to the distinction. He wasn't. He moved through the entrance hall with his jacket over one shoulder and his tie at half mast and the particular looseness of someone who had had enough to take the edge off the drive and not enough to make the walls stop being what they were.

The estate at this hour was what it always was — quiet in the specific way of a house that had been holding its breath for centuries. Staff retired. Lucien's wing dark. Malros probably still awake somewhere with a book and a theory he hadn't shared with anyone yet.

Pierce was not going to his room. He was going to the kitchen, or the study, or wherever the decanter lived tonight — the specifics were flexible. He turned down the east corridor on autopilot and pushed open the door of the side sitting room without particular intention.

The light was on.

He registered several things in quick succession.

First — someone was in the room. A woman, with her back partially to him — which was the first mistake because that was what got him distracted at first followed with taking his time with unobserved looking that he used without apology. She was doing something to the arrangement of the side table with the focused attention of a person who cared about the right angle of a candlestick at nearly three in the morning, which told him she was either very new or very conscientious or both.

Second — she was not anyone he recognized from the existing household staff, which meant recent hire. And which meant all the more time to get her used to the estate in his own ways which usually involved less gothic architecture and more silk sheets and rooftops.

He leaned against the doorframe.

The fourth thing he registered, arriving slightly behind the others, was that she had clearly been assigned to this wing specifically. New staff. East corridor. His corridor, technically, when he was in residence. Which he was, tonight, by virtue of the Capital being forty minutes away and the drive back being a commitment he hadn't made.

Pierce Grey made a decision in the space of approximately one and a half seconds, which was longer than he usually needed.

"Tell me," he said, "that you're here for me specifically."

He pushed off the doorframe and moved into the room with the ease of someone entering a space that had always been open to him, jacket still over one shoulder, the kind of smile that had opened more doors than he could account for deployed without particular effort.

"New," he said. It wasn't a question. "East wing. My hours." He set his jacket over the back of the nearest chair and looked at her with the direct, unhurried attention of someone who had decided to be interested and wasn't going to be subtle about it. "I have to say — whoever hired you has finally done something right. The last one organized the decanter by label. Alphabetically." A pause. "I assume you're not going to do that."

"I'm going to need you to relax," he said, pleasantly. "And then I'm going to need you to tell me your name. And then —" the smile adjusted, warming by a degree that somehow made it worse, "— I'm going to need you to seriously consider the fact that I've been awake for nineteen hours and my room is the third on the left and the bed in it is significantly larger than one person requires."

He watched her face.

There it was.

Not fear — he knew fear, knew exactly what it looked like in the posture before it reached the expression. Not the particular practiced blankness of staff who had learned to receive whatever a Grey said and process it later in private.

Something else. Something that moved through her expression with an honesty that the house, at this hour, at any hour, almost never produced.

He found himself more awake than he had been thirty seconds ago, which was inconvenient.

"I'm Pierce, by the way," he added, as an afterthought that wasn't entirely an afterthought. "Second son. The interesting one. In case no one covered that in the orientation." His eyes stayed on her face with the focused quality of someone who had found something worth watching and had made no decision yet about what to do about it. "Don't let the hour throw you. I'm like this in the daytime too."

Grey Estate — Pierce's Assigned Room, East Wing, Late Evening

No jacket. Shirt untucked and darkened at the collar in a way that was not a spill. A cut above his left eyebrow that had dried badly and reopened recently. His jaw had the beginning of something that would be considerably more visible by morning. He was standing straight — that was the thing that made it worse somehow, the deliberate straightness of someone who had decided that how they were carrying themselves was a thing they could control even when most other things weren't.

His eyes found her and something in his expression shifted. Not relief exactly. Something adjacent to it that he would not have named that way.

"Perfect," he said. "You're here." He moved into the room and dropped onto the nearest settee with the controlled collapse of someone whose body had been waiting for horizontal since before they would admit it. He looked at the ceiling for a moment. Then at her.

"I need you to do something for me," he said, in the tone he used when he had already decided the answer was yes and was giving her the courtesy of a lead-up. "It involves the medical kit in the second drawer of the east bathroom cabinet and your hands and approximately—" he considered, "—twenty minutes of your time." A pause. "Thirty if you're thorough. The night if I am thorough and you know which option I'd prefer."

She didn't move immediately her expression still stuck in that barely hidden annoyance he loved to provoke from her.

"I'm not dying," he added, with the particular patience of someone who found the hesitation charming and was not going to say so yet. "I want to be clear about that before you make a face. Whatever face you're making right now — I can't see it from this angle but I can hear it — that face is unnecessary."

He had, in the intervening minutes, made no effort to move from the settee and had acquired a glass of something from the side table by the straightforward method of reaching for it without sitting up. He watched her cross the room with the unfocused attention of someone whose eyes were working better than the rest of him and had decided to make the most of it.

"You didn't have to hurry, I like seeing you walk towards me," he said.

"The eyebrow is worse than it looks," he said. "Or better than it looks. Depending on how you feel about character."

She said something about needing him to be quiet and not once in his life had Pierce been quiet and now wasn't the time either.

"I can't be quiet," he said, with lack of any genuine regret. "It's a medical condition. Unrelated to this. Usually triggered when pretty humans are involved specifically with the same face as yours." He gestured vaguely at her face.

She worked in silence for a moment. He let her, which was unusual enough that she probably noticed.

The estate was quiet around them — the particular late-night quiet that had weight to it, accumulated from centuries of people keeping things to themselves inside these walls. Pierce looked at the ceiling and then at her and then at a point somewhere between the two.

"It was a Grey Market problem," he said, unprompted. Not explaining. Just — saying. "Someone decided that the second son being present meant the decision could be questioned. As opposed to the decision being—" he stopped. Restarted. "Anyway. It's handled."

"The thing about being the second son," he said, with the lightness he applied to things that weren't light, "is that everyone assumes the first one is the dangerous one. Lucien walks into a room and people recalibrate. I walk into a room and people think they have options." The smile that crossed his face was briefer and considerably less warm than the usual version. "They don't. They just find out later than they would have liked."

He felt her hands stop when she was done with patching him up but he didn't relent when he had her right where he wanted her, his hand despite the injuries and current state came around her wrist and enveloped it, pinning it with a grip that was far from painful but still inevitable.

"Care to stay for the night, human?" He drawled in the same careless manner, his other hand coming grip her waist, making space for her between his legs. "I find the wounds disappear faster in your presence." Pierce said looking up at her in the same infuriatingly testing way. The wounds were already going away but he wasn't going to let a couple of bruises stop him from getting what he wanted.