Page 48 of Xerxes Ascendant
“Master?” Kyle’s voice called out, echoing through the open door.
“Are they here already?” Damn it, he’d barely begun.
“No, I just…missed you.”
Akira hid his smile. “I’m right here. Do you want to talk?”
“Yes.”
“Are you going to tell me about this new employee of ours?”
Kyle was silent for long enough that Akira wondered if he’d been ambushed on the steps. But just as he was about to go and save him, his boyfriend spoke again. “It’s Miles Mackenroth.”
Akira had encountered some fucked up things in his time. What clients had asked him for, the cruelty that could be inflicted on others, what people were willing to do to survive. But Kyle hiring the man who had almost raped him and started this whole fucking mess, left Akira speechless.
But then again, so had Kyle’s reckless actions in coming after him at Club Luxe alone, without a plan against what he thought had been Akira’s gruesome torture and dismemberment, and lacking so much as a smudge of self-preservation.
But by thestars.
Akira forced himself not to voice the stern chastisement that hovered on the tip of his tongue. It would bounce off Kyle without making a mark anyway, for the blonde wasperpetually incapable of putting himself first, and no amount of admonishments would make him see sense.
“Has Mileslearned the importance of safe words?” he said instead, grimacing at the uncooperative lock before him as though it was responsible for all of Akira’s headaches. “I will not have a man in my House who does not respect a called red.”
“Sanjay gave him a sixty-six-minute lecture on the subject,” Kyle called back. “I’d ordered an hour, but he apparently thought it warranted an additional ten percent.”
How verySanjayof him. The man was a strict Dominant who enforced that sense of fastidious particularness on everything else in his life as well.
“And where is the younger Mackenroth now?”
“After everything that happened with the box and the…uh, skin,” Kyle said, the distaste in his voice evident even with the distance between them, “I gave him my old room and told him to lock the doors.”
Akira went very still. “Ibegyour pardon?”
“Master?”
“You left Miles Mackenroth in my House,” he snarled, glaring at his reflection in the glass cabinet. It looked irate. “Alone?!”
“Uh yes, indeed I did. Is there-”
“Did it ever occur to you that the mayor might have sent him to infiltrate House Epsilon?”
“No,” Kyle said honestly. Because it really hadn’t, had it?
Stars, what if it had all been a ploy by the Mackenroths? To deal whatever damage or harm they pleased while the Master was away and oblivious, all because he hadn’t been there to see it? To stop it?
“I know what you’re thinking,” Kyle said, more quietly this time. “But Miles isn’t like that. He really has changed, Akira. He stood up to Benedict about how he was going to discard Lower Xerxes and kill all of us.”
Akira…was not convinced. But he channelled his anxiety into the stubborn cabinet before him, and using everything his wife had taught him about lockpicking, had it open within another few seconds.
Empty but for the gun Akira had brought here the night Theta had resurfaced – and hadn’t retrieved from security upon leaving in his haste to chase after his conniving ex-Master – the singular weapon lay innocently on the second shelf. He checked it was still loaded, and that nothing had jammed up from the days of neglect, and then shoved it into his belt.
He’d gotten what he came for. It was time to leave.
“Kyle?”
“Akira!” Kyle’s voice was far too close – impossible, of course, because there was no such thing as too close where Kyle Randall was concerned, but it should have been outthereand instead it was inherealong with the gorgeous, messy-haired man it belonged to.
Akira tensed, but nothing happened. In typical Kyle style, he’d tested the wards and confirmed they wouldn’t harm him…by putting himself directly in that same harm’s way. By the fucking stars, he could strangle him.
