perhaps a less sure man would face tiberius capulet and cower from being in his presence alone, but not piero ruiz — never piero ruiz. he sits in front of the older man completely still, his eyes cold and dead as he stares forward at his sponsor, his chin is raised up with unspoken confidence. he will not show fear, he will not shake in the face of anger or ire. instead, numbness radiates off of him. no words will sting his body or mind. for all that he has done and will do, this vacancy is a good cover, his flat affect reveals nothing.
he knows why he is here, they both do, but piero remains unsure if tiberius understands the full capacity of his desire to prove himself. it burns within him, searing through his veins until it reaches his heart, at which it sets itself ablaze. every minute of every day, he feels like he is wasting energy and talent doing nothing. perhaps there are better things coming, but his patience wore too thin too many months ago. he needs to have responsibility now ; he needs to feel he is of use to the capulets now.
it could be said that such strong desire for purpose stems from childhood, but more likely for piero now it stems from his having looked death in the eyes. it took form of the very man who sits in front of him now. to be so lucky as to walk away then ? piero doesn’t think such a thing would happen twice. so his desire to show what he is capable of is his way of running, his fleeing from death in a grand fashion.
but at this very moment, piero is not facing death in tiberius ; he is facing a barrier.
“ i should hope not. ” it’s bold and almost out of line to say such a thing. “ i would expect you to have better things to do than mind me. ” piero knows he is already in trouble, and now he seems to be stepping further into the abyss of disorder — his expression hasn’t changed, it’s still as indifferent as it was when he entered. but he is trying to make a point and he is hoping this one will stick, words and action combining to make impact.
Piero greets his temper with spite. Tiberius binds his name to the boy, and per Dio, he’ll be damned if he doesn’t start showing that he deserves it. He scans over his face, digging hopelessly at dirt for evidence of that boy who, brow-beaten and finally out of luck, exchanged blow for fucking blow, unafraid of the beast sent to finish him. Tiberius only glimpses a faint outline. Where was the boy who, without a friend in the world to turn to, went on breathing—all in spite of him?
Il Tigre scoffs, stretches his hands over the desk. He thinks he catches the reflection of his eyes blinking back at him in the wood, like gold gore swashing through split veins. His body hums with impatience. Tiberius Capulet doesn’t respond well to pity; in fact, he blitzes at the suggestion of it. “Just sit down, will you? Cristo Santo.” They howl. They snap. Sometimes, they even bite. Tiberius boasts a deep growl, capable of besting even the most formidable of them, while Piero's bark is clipped, his fangs still growing into their gums. He still tussles. For all they growl menacingly at each other, even dogs know loyalty. After all, animals hunt in packs, don’t they?
And every pack has a leader.
A less astute observer might mistake Tiberius’ tone for resignation, a concession of defeat guarded underneath his tongue, but in doing so they also overlook the stern legacy which Don Capulet’s nephew has forged for himself. His eyes light up with violence; his fingers drip with it. “I’ve no time to indulge your sudden fits of emotion today, cucciolo,” he says, his hand gesturing to the seat opposite.
Tiberius takes his own seat, leaning back into the leather. He kicks his feet up onto the desk. With purpose, he slowly crosses one foot over the other, his arms knotted stiffly across his chest—then he exhales. Tiberius will deal with the issue at hand swiftly, decisive as an executioner’s knife, because the boy is right. He does have more important things that require his attention than Piero Ruiz. The details of his penalty aren’t important: they concern a fellow as sure as his word, this Signor Ardolino, but awfully cocky, so much so that he’d taken to swelling himself up with false importance, growing larger and larger with each passing day. Piero, it seemed, had taken it upon himself to teach the man a lesson. “You’ve been messing with things above your pay grade.” Tiberius doesn’t care to elaborate—he unlatches a window for Piero to finish his thought.
Picture this: a beggar kneels at the foot of an altar, hands pulled together in supplication. He asks, “What does it mean to anger a god?” He doesn’t receive an answer, but even in the silence he knows that a god’s anger is fierce, flinty, capable of making itself known without a sound. It works through silent insistences that it exists, creeping out from the dark like two black talons, wading through its many myths and legends to establish a reputation of its own. Tiberius is not so arrogant to call himself a god, but he certainly won’t correct anyone who suggests otherwise. Like the gods, he sits before Piero in a silent rage. He hopes the boy, like the beggar, is capable of seizing why.
For now, Tiberius holds his severity on reserve. Breaking it to his will, he pulls it tight at the end of a leash. “Care to explain?”
She remembers the first time she didn’t cower under the gaze of the mighty Tiberius Capulet. She stood, blue eyes burning with impending tears that she refused to let fall as he tore into her for a near-fatal mistake she’d made. Now, nearly a year later, she relies on the same resolve to keep her steadfast. She relies on the time that’s passed between them, on the moments in which she had no choice but to place her faith in Tiberius–on the moments in which he had no choice but to place his faith in her. Moments like this.
“Do you?” The softness of her voice is a sharp contrast to the whip-quick sting of Tiberius’. She can’t help but wonder what he claims to know, what balance he sees the Don enforcing. Does he see himself as stripped of his prowess or retained for his brute strength? Does he see himself as a muzzled dog or as Cosimo’s last line of defense? The blonde cants her head just slightly, nose wrinkling at the idea of Tiberius being reduced to nothing more than a loose cannon; he, with his unshakable loyalty and devotion to the Capulets, is anything but. “Where you might see it as holding you back, tigre, I see it differently. You say Il Capo is keeping you back as though it’s a punishment rather than an exoneration. You remain, Tiberius, because he trusts you. He needs you–and what is so bad about being needed?” Cosimo would have to be stupid to send his beloved war dog of a nephew to battle in such tenuous times; la principessa would be guarded and guarded well by her team, so shouldn’t he keep Tiberius nearby for his sake? By the same logic, should he not feel pride in the fact that his own recently-promoted soldier was picked to rescue Rafaella?
Catherine is a product of his making, molded by his hands. He is the one who taught her to fire a gun, to brace herself for the recoil, to reload magazines. He is the one who taught her to fight with her hands, that the elbow is the strongest part of her body, to look for weaknesses and exploit them. He taught her to put herself first—morals be damned. Listen here, piccola santa, he all but growled in her face, fist full of the cotton of her t-shirt, when in a fight and faced with a choice between you and someone else, do yourself a favor and make things easy: choose yourself, because no one else will.
And so, that is what she does: she puts herself first. She puts herself ahead of the teams picked by Don Capulet to retrieve his pseudo-niece for both her sake and Tiberius.
“Do you doubt me, capitano?” Catherine asks at last, pinning him under her azure hues. Do you doubt me, captain? she inquires, but the tone of her words asks something completely different: Do you doubt yourself, Tiberius?
His anger burns through him. His skin is hot to the touch, his jaw stiffens into a clench. He glows. Catherine’s words at once worsen the gravel and calm the storm: she offers him truths he’s blind to, truths he’s not sure are truths at all. Tiberius has always been il Capo’s hands, his firearm, his machine of war. What use is it to set out for battle, leaving your silver bullet at home? “You’re not as smart as I give you credit for,” he breathes cruelly. “If that’s what you really fucking think—well, piccola santa, I’m just disappointed in you.” He’s certainly no genius, but the man is astute enough to know when he’s being manipulated. He knows how it feels to have your insides whittled and thumbed, pulled out and stitched up inside-out, all to achieve a more desirable endgame. After all, Cosimo does it all the time. Cosimo is doing it now. Forging his weapon from skin and bone, two hands stretched out to slaughter, but with a mind malleable enough that it doesn’t always belong to Tiberius.
What he fails to recognise, however, is that Catherine has never done any of these things. Catherine has never sought to tug on his marionette strings, has never tried to pull wool over his eyes. Sure enough, she chooses her words carefully—but manipulate? Tiberius shifts awkwardly, because he knows the answer. Catherine would never.
When she had first dragged herself up from the earth, clawing past the mud, a girl only half-formed, they’d been poles apart. After all, is it not natural for the predator to hunt the prey? The lamb is so used to the beastly jaw of the tiger that it hardly knows what to do when a stew of wisdom spills forth from it—rather than chewing on its bones, it settles on making them stronger. He taught her how to fire a gun, how to hold a knife, how to bury it treacherously in someone’s back; how to fight, how to pull yourself up off the floor, how to justify every criminal act, every dirty deed, how to wake up and do a hundred wrongs, clearing your conscience before the burnt-orange sunset. Back then, Catherine had been an albatross caught around his neck, and Tiberius had resented her for it. What use was an angel, a fucking saint, in war? What could he do with her white feathers except hang them up, staining them red?
When he looks at her now, though, he notices the way that she doesn’t tremble, how she refuses to falter, even when his anger stares straight through her. Tiberius barely remembers what her ghost looked like. He revels in the knowledge that the lamb has become the sharpened fangs, the slaughterhouse, the butcher’s knife. He gloats over his hand in it.
“No.” The word sounds pathetic in his mouth, so he remedies it. “Of course not. Until you give me reason to...” They’re tender words, in his own way. Tiberius doesn’t doubt her because, time and time again, she’s shown him he has no cause to. The trust he places in her is deserved, hard-earned. “But this isn’t about you. You know I trust you. This is about me. My uncle doesn’t trust me. He thinks I’ll fuck it up—that’s why he holds me back. He doesn’t want me to fuck the whole thing up, so he keeps me here. Chained and locked up, like a dog.” His fists are clenched. Like an animal, he looks like one about to pounce. “I should be on the team. I should fucking—” At the end of the cord, Tiberius loosens his shoulders, unclenches his jaw, releases his fists. “I should be there.”
Desire is not always this burning flame. It is not always some hunger that one expresses in gnashing teeth and claws. Desire is always associated with passion, a wave of emotions smashing into a rock at its crest to create a crash and a spray that cannot be ignored. It’s violent. It’s consuming. It’s not how Regina expresses things. She imagines this is how Tiberius is, judging by the way he gives into desire and the way his body moves with hers, but she cannot feel so much to allow desire to become so animated. She does not plunge head-first into desire like she’s diving from a cliff, but rather she walks slowly into its waters from the sloped, sandy shores. It consumes them both, but Regina has found that to be surrounded by desire, one does not need to fall so violently. Succumbing can be quite uneventful. Tiberius burns; bold, beautiful, bright. Regina burns like embers; dull, unassuming yet hot all the same, with the potential to spark a flame just as dangerous.
Their conversations aren’t meant to be meaningful. It’s not even meant to be a way to pass the time between rounds, for Regina could easily sit in silence forever without feeling the need to break it. It’s simply something that happens, something that bubbles up between them like the attraction they can’t seem to shake. It’s not wholly unpleasant, so Regina always entertains it, whether it begins from her lips or his. “Show me,” she encourages, because now her curiosity is tangled about his fingers the same way her hair is as he brushes it about in an action more gentle than she has come to expect from him. Again, she doesn’t mind it at all, and she allows the hair to be moved without argument. She doesn’t think into it because it’s not a gesture bursting at the seams with meaning. He’d sooner mess it up than fix it again, and Regina is well aware of the delicate line between human and carnal they balance upon when they’re together. “When I want to,” she corrects. When it suits me, Regina truly means. Nightmare, he calls her. It suits her well, though she might not appear as one in this moment.
He tastes hungry even when he’s still. Blood rushes between them and it’s warmth and fire. The embers, for a moment, glow, growing warmer and warmer until her lips leave his once more, and the embers return to dull. It’s as if oxygen has the opposite effect on them, suffocating the flames instead of sustaining them, and the breath must be extracted from her lungs to fully spark the fire. But still the embers are not to be underestimated. Still they have the potential to ignite. She eyes the flames within his eyes as they dance in thought. A small, surprised gasp is stolen from her as he pulls her closer, the embers growing closer and closer to sparking again. “That is something they say, yes.” Only, Regina’s not entirely sure she agrees. Yes, they are similar beasts, like teeth and fangs finding like teeth and fangs, and yet he is everything where she is nothing, opposites drawn to one another in a world that tells them it is unlikely. Does it quite matter where they overlap and where they do not in any way other than physical? “What else do you think it is that binds us? Sin appears to be our specialty.”
They lull like two well-fed animals, their hearts lazying in the backwash.
What is exchanged between them can hardly be called passion. Passion is its own cobweb of longing, a wolfish itch that can’t be scratched, a glottal sound vibrating at the back of a throat. Even in arrangements as false as their own, predicated on a desire which is perhaps contradictorily apathetic, passion becomes liking, connection, even devotion. The beast finds himself fumbling in the sheets for the ghost of a heart. What perhaps should be passion becomes nothing more than a disinterested kiss here, a scratch on one’s back. Their compact is a transaction: money is displaced with sin and bartered between two devils.
They make each other an invisible promise, one they do not speak aloud. Their arrangement has never been about companionship, has never had anything to do with turning a pebble over in the dirt and happening upon a jewel, cannot be defined by something so simple and sticky as love. They fall into a bed of sin together, their bodies coiled around the other like stretched snakeskin. That is all. Here, in Regina’s bed, they are nothing more than two worshippers at the foot of an altar praying to the same god, their prayers and desires their own.
Their understanding is soundless, like still waters.
Regina hums, indifferent and unmoved, flaking from her mouth like empty space. When she speaks, when she purrs in his ear, he finds himself moving with the language, the sentence echoing wickedly in his ear. When I want to. It is an invitation, but Tiberius says nothing. He doesn’t need to say anything: he knows precisely what it means, she knows precisely what it means, they can both glimpse the dark mass peeled behind her words. They go on understanding each other in silence.
“Hm. What else binds us?” He muses aloud, returning he question to her. He can think of plenty: the way a knife balances at their hipbones, the iron certainty when a trigger is pulled, black violence hollowing out their chests and leaving a hole where the heart should be. Yet, he can think of just as many things that divide them. Silver spills from the mouth of his gun loudly and crudely, while the bullet shoots from her own in silence; he draws blood in a hot sweat, yet her veins grow violently cold. Without answering her question, he pulls her back into the sheets. “If sin is our speciality, perhaps we should keep to sinning.”
et tu, brute? / @dalygrace
tiberius’ apartment; castelvecchio bridge / may 20, around 11pm
Tiberius Capulet hates many things. He hates being belittled, he hates the scent of cigarette that inevitably lingers after he smokes one, he hates the embrittled feeling of a leash around his neck, rubbing his skin raw. He despises Montagues.
Lately, Tiberius has learned that there is, in fact, something he despises even more than a Montague. There is something that grows staler on his tongue than the thought of the hot-blooded, heart-flown enemy crawling on the other side of the Adige. Most of all, he hates treachery; he hates bargains bartered in blood, loyalties scalded from skin with hot iron, flesh rubbed raw of the name that had once marked it. He hates a Montague who hadn’t always been a Montague. That, after all, was the sting of it. Like an old injury made worse from his picking, the wound opens up, begins to bleed again. Irascible as Ares returning battle-wounded from Troy, he has marked out a special place in Hell for them, left suspended between Satan’s chewing maw.
As all traitors are.
For far longer than could ever have been expected of him, Tiberius has ignored the dark sting of Grace Daly’s betrayal, a Judas-kiss planted on his cheek that buries itself into bone. It’s a peculiar thing, really, when you know the man. For a desertion so personal, he has tended to treat it with a rare degree of impersonality. The same man has thrust silver into stomachs for less, has shot men squarely between the eyes for an imagined slight and threatened to send his adversary back to their employer in pieces for a real one—but this is a wound Tiberius continues to stitch up. If Grace’s bad faith hadn’t been a personal matter between them before, she had certainly made it so when she’d lain her treacherous hands on Rafaella, her fingers sharp and recreant as the blades pushed into Caesar’s back, forcing his cousin to yield to her like a biddable underling. She twists the knife.
A smoky cough of flames hangs at the back of Tiberius’ throat. He refuses to ignore the injury—he chooses to take offence at the insult. Operating on pure impulse, he pulls his phone from his pockets, opens up his contacts. He’s surprised he still has her number. He starts to type.
MESSAGE to GRACE DALY ➤ the bridge. in an hour.
MESSAGE to GRACE DALY ➤ be there.
Without waiting for a response, he grabs his keys. His messages require no clarification, no appendage: better to do as I say, he seems to say, than find out what happens when you don’t. Tiberius slides the sleeves of his coat over his shoulders, and then he’s out the door.
LOVE? I KNOW HUNGER, FEAR AND HEAT. I KNOW WHEN HOT BLOOD SPILLS INTO YOUR MOUTH WHEN YOU BITE DOWN IN THE FLESH OF A FRESH KILL.
Tybalt, in Romeo and Juliet, is a fighter through and through. He would happily wage war against the world, if he could. What is it about Tiberius that stokes his anger and what is necessary for him to swallow it down or stow it away? He wants the crown and could easily take it if he wanted to, so what is it that is staying his hand? When did he begin to realize that his anger wasn’t necessarily a tool but an obstacle to overcome as well?
Tiberius stands at the beast’s black mouth, his fingers soaked through with blood.
Capulet blood.
His fingers do not tremble. In the last ten years, when have they ever trembled? When have they vibrated with anything other than thick, raw power? In his divine hands, the shedding of blood becomes messianic, a rite of purgation. At once cleansing and corroding. The blade between his fingers feels like a lover’s abominable fingertips, full of longing, fossicking into his skin and hollowing his bones.
He understands knives. He breathes violence. It turns him into rotting black dust.
He stands unmoved, heartless, insensible to the atrocity he’s committed. The sticky substance clings to his fingers, winds itself like a sentient creature around his thumb, and then it tightens itself around his wrists like a string of red yarn. Like Princess Ariadne in the labyrinth, the moon-smitten Yuè Lǎo binding his participants’ ankles, Lachesis measuring out the yarn with a heart of stone. Direction, destiny, death.
The red string binds them to blood.
Cosimo Capulet stands tall and imposing behind a desk made from mahogany, and peeled behind his cold gaze is the stare of a beast eyeing wildfowl from the shadow’s curtain. If it were not for the slow burn of the Don’s temper, his face would lack proper expression. Yet when the light falls on it, when the beast crawls out from the shadows, his beast-nephew can see plainly the way his uncle’s jaw is tautly abraded into a clench; the way his eyes fixate on his blood-soaked hands with a sort of dark, delirious fixation.
A family trait.
Cosimo’s stare seems to make a pulverising fist at him, and Tiberius doesn’t break the connection. His uncle paces back and forth.
The room tumbles into silence. Even the wind seems to cease its whistling for the moment, and the only sounds that Tiberius cares to take notice of are the belligerent thumping of his heart and the drip, drip, drip of blood slinking from his fingertips, ploughing into the ground. One a war-drum, one a porous tap. The trickling sound of gore switches places with the heavy punch in his ribcage in a cycle, cruor leaking from his hands like steady rain. A war-drum, a faucet. The blood will not relinquish its hold over him. As if an ancient friend, it makes a slave of him. Violence becomes him, washing over him like the cherry-red tears of God.
It’s strangely poetic.
At his core, blood and rage welds into a single organism. Reach into his chest, pull apart his ribs, and there lies the revolting product of it, so bright and gaudy and spiritually ugly that one couldn’t look away, one couldn’t tear their eyes from the sight of it, even if they wanted to. Tiberius’ heart has always hammered in his chest with a violence almost religious; with each thump it belches with a spray of blood, like an animal used in sacrifice. Made from pestilence and thunder, it provokes onslaught. The boy’s bones are made from white-hot heat, forged by a furnace into ruby-coloured embers. He is a forest fire and a funeral pyre and a sea of flames. The man is a gun with two great, protuberant eyes, like those of tiger skulking amongst the dark ilex wood. He fixates two glowing orbs on his prey.
Half gods, after all, accept worship in flowers, wine, honey, dew. Real gods, with knives for teeth and a slaughterhouse for a shrine, take their payment in blood. Does not the ravenous lion draw blood when he plunges his maw into raw flesh?
Mouth bloodied, it chews through the sinew.
Cosimo stops pacing. He deftly positions himself behind his desk, centred, and stretches his hands out onto the mahogany, balancing his weight on them. He leans forwards to meet his nephew’s evasive eye. Then, lifts and smacks his hands down onto the wood with such prodigious force that Tiberius thinks the desk might split in two. He flinches.
“Are you a fool?”
The question hangs motionless in the air, like a piano metronome stuck between swings. The words turn cold and congeal, splintering apart like snow. Cosimo seems to fashion a sword from the ice, burying it in his nephew’s skin. He digs, and digs, and digs.
“Answer me. Are you a fool?”
“No.” Tiberius answers abruptly, perhaps even petulantly, his bloodied hands suspended lazily at his side. The darkness is gone from his eyes, crawled back into himself, and the black is relieved by a warm gold. Now, he seems more boy than beast. As Cosimo stares him up and down, takes in the disappointing shape of a nephew presented before him, his uncle thinks he looks like a child. A child with a dark heart, pulling the skins from rabbits and digging his mother’s needle into her thumb. “I’m not a fool.”
“Interesting,” Cosimo hums, evidently dissatisfied with his nephew’s response. Chin poised imperiously upwards, Tiberius thinks that even God wouldn’t challenge this empyreal image of his uncle. Cosimo begins to pace around his desk, stalking as if a creature in hunt. The Don selects his next words calmly and capably, manoeuvring them as deftly as a predator rips the entrails from its prey. “Hm, that’s interesting. Because, you see, in my experience, a man who isn’t a fool wouldn’t compromise his soldier to answer a slight. A man who isn’t a fool wouldn’t respond to slander with a knife. So tell me, boy, in your experience—what makes a fool a fool?”
Tiberius bows his head. It’s not clear whether he does so in shame or the man is simply unsure how to proceed, but the deferent vision is striking nevertheless. The great tiger of Verona, his gaping maw filed to needle-like points, acquiescing at the feet of his keeper. Beast-like, he assumes a skin he loathes to wear.
It’s humiliating.
The exchange is like clockwork. Tiberius errs, makes a cruel, terminal, irreversible sort of mistake, and it flows from the wound with hot blood. Accordingly, his uncle ensures that he is reprimanded, severely and privately, and he puts his man-made weapon in its place with death-dealing claws. Tiberius Capulet is not the Don’s son: that gilded, hoodwinked image of a throne cut from gold and bones will always be a few metres beyond his reach, a fact his uncle spells out for him often without ever having to say it. He is no more his uncle’s son than Rafaella had been his daughter, and yet—bound by blood or not, she had always edged far closer to Cosimo’s genuine affection than Tiberius ever had.
Here, however, that hardly matters. Il Tigre has inherited certain traits that make it impossible to deny the connection. He swallows Cosimo’s reprovals and lambastings like they’re hot iron, and then he spits them back out.
What is it they say? Like father, like son?
“What does it matter if a couple of Montague bastardi are dead? They’re nobodies. Nobody will mourn for them, and it’s no less than they fucking deserved. They threatened to touch my cousin, you know, they mocked me, and I wouldn’t—”
“Ah, is that what this was all about? Your cousin?”Cosimo interrupts. Standing honestly in front of each other as they do now, both men know the truth. “Yes, yes. You wouldn’t let them make a mockery of us,” Cosimo gestures his hand in a bored, flapping motion. “You made yourself quite clear to those Montague initiates, didn’t you?”
His uncle intends the spur of his statement to demean, but Tiberius doesn’t back down. Growling silently, he refuses to—by way of nature. Montague initiates, soldiers, captains—they’re all the same, no? Scum. Vermin. Bastardi. Perhaps a better man would be struck down by the aching arrow of remorse that Cosimo points at his skull, but not this man. He’d made an oath to haunt the Montagues long ago. Men, heirs, children—who they are matters little to him. A Montague is a Montague.
And the Montagues are their enemies.
Tiberius almost chokes on Cosimo’s ingratitude. His uncle ought to be thanking him. With Juliana disposed of, the crown would lie bare for his taking. Somewhere else, he almost salivates over the way the coronal rests on his brow. War-maker, they would call him. The General. But he would plough his own grave and smooth the dirt over himself before he allowed any harm to come to her.
His current reality peels away in favour of the previous one, like a wet sticker falling limply from frosted glass. For the most fleeting of moments, Tiberius Capulet is back in that Montague warehouse. Garlanded with divine arrogance, his knife is still lodged in its holster, his brows are furrowed in prejudice—but he is not quite hostile, not yet. Tugging along like a thread at his sleeve, the Capulet initiate is still alive.
Their assignment is easy enough. Investigate the warehouse as covertly as possible, thumb through its records, purloin a few contacts in the process. It’s relatively routine, freeform enough that it doesn’t necessitate much higher interference, and the newly-initiated Capulet feels little dread at entering the warehouse with il Tigre di Verona lingering at her side.
Admittedly, the task is beneath him, but Tiberius never says no to putting his oar in wherever the Montagues are involved. When they enter, they’re greeted by two green Montague initiates.
As anticipated.
“No need to get up,” Tiberius hums as they stroll in nonchalantly, perhaps a little less covertly than Vivianne would have had him go about it. Predictably, the two initiates spring to their feet, numbed by cold sweat, their fingers gawkily reaching for their weapons. Just boys, they stand woefully unprepared, a rollicking dread of fear seeping into their bones. By way of nature, Tiberius unsheathes his knife from its holster: black steel, divino violenza carved delicately into its edge, a prize gifted by Rafaella Capulet. Monster that he is, he presses the blade to one of the boys’ cheekbone. “Let’s put our weapons away, hm?”
As if on the count of three, they slowly slide their weapons back into their holsters. An act of deference, a concession of defeat. For what are two boys against the might of Tiberius Capulet?
As Tiberius pulls his blade back, he makes sure to draw a pearl of blood at the initiate’s skin. Wine-red, the boy winces.
Vainglorious, Tiberius blows a breath of wry amusement from his nostrils. Top of the food chain, he delights in crushing his paralysed prey between his teeth. The beast spins on his heel, gestures for his newly-initiated shadow to join him as they thumb flagrantly through the Montagues’ records while the initiates, extrinsic and incompetent, can only watch. The look of mystification spreads across the young Capulet like rot.
It’s just so easy.
One of the initiates unwisely clears his throat. “Do you think we’re afraid of you?”
Almost incredulous, he turns back around. “You should be.”
The initiate shuffles on his feet, puffs out his chest. “Well, we’re not. If you wanted to kill us, well, we’d be dead already. I know that. If you wanted to kill us, you would have. But you won’t. Killing us creates a scene, attracts too much unwanted attention, right? So, you can intimidate us all you want and steal whatever documents your Don thinks we have here, but we have no real reason to be afraid of you.”
Tiberius’ eyes light up like a wicked beast’s. The initiate is right, of course, and Tiberius despises when other people are right. He growls, and from his mouth ricochets a sonorous, guttural sound. It sounds like the sharpening of a butcher’s knife.
Perhaps if the boy had stopped there, he’d still be alive. But boys never know what’s good for them. “You do what your boss says, same as us. We could string up your principessa in the fucking streets and he still wouldn’t cut that leash from around your neck. So why should we be afraid of you?” He thinks he’s being rather clever.
Tiberius isn’t quite sure what he responds to, even now: the vision of Juliana hanging in the streets like a common criminal, or the suggestion that il Tigre is answerable to any man but himself. As if thrust forward by some divine, bedevilling force, he flies forwards from his position. Like an animal. He grabs the initiate by the throat, seems bent on suffocating the life out of him for a moment, before pressing his forearm where his hands had been. The initiate moves quickly backwards, and soon he has trapped himself between a beast and the warehouse wall. Something sinister glints in Tiberius’ eye—it seems to catch alight. Without removing his cold, dark gaze from the initiate’s terrified stare, he forces the boy’s trembling fingers around his now-unsheathed knife. Tiberius feels the way his hand vibrates in terror underneath his own. Then, he buries the knife into the initiate’s stomach, then his chest, then his throat, then his abdomen. Again and again, into the skin and out again, like putting coins into a slot-machine.
He must have stabbed the boy as many as twelve times.
As the initiate bleeds out, Tiberius whispers breathlessly in his ear.
“That’s why.”
As fixated as he is by the delight of his slaying, his attention is jostled by a yelp. Tiberius spins on his heel, and as he lifts his weight from the initiate the boy falls pendulously to the floor. His partner, utterly terrified, seizes the Capulet girl in his arms. His knife keeps in her in a chokehold.
“Don’t—” he pleads, his fingers trembling at the Capulet’s neck. “Don’t come any closer. Please. If you do, I’ll—” he tightens his blade at the initiate’s throat. “I—I’ll kill her. Drop your weapon.”
But Tiberius Capulet has never relinquished his hold on a weapon. For a moment, he does nothing. He merely stands frozen, knife in hand, a bead of blood trickling down his forearm—thinking. The initiate’s fear is hardly surprising. Tiberius looks like a man possessed. He does not sheathe his weapon but steps delicately towards the initiate. Like a fool, he drags a knife across her neck. A great spurt of blood erupts from the gash—a red smile. Her body drops limply to the floor.
Idiot.
Tiberius pulls his gun from its holster. He shoots him between the eyes.
Half-remorseful, he holds the Capulet initiate as she bleeds out onto the warehouse floor, angling her neck away from the ground. It’s a miserable end, her wound spluttering up and down with chokes of blood—but he can’t do anything for her now. He can only ensure that the girl doesn’t die alone, that in her final moments he takes ownership of her death, as he must. When her body stops trembling and the blood ceases to flow, Tiberius lies her body down on the cold stone.
On her face, an expression of terror freezes itself into an immortal image.
As the image ebbs away, Tiberius is re-greeted by the cold nub in Cosimo’s eyes. It’s a sight that might chill him right down to the bone were he not so familiar with it. “Let it be a lesson to them, then,” Tiberius offers. “Nobody touches Juliana. Nobody even speaks of her and survives to tell the tale.”
Cosimo shuffles papers behind the desk, then draws closer to his nephew, staring dead into his eyes. “Do you truly think I would let them get anywhere near my daughter?” His voice is stern and flinty, almost cruel. He clears his throat. “My heir?”
If the word stings him, Tiberius doesn’t show it. At least, he thinks he doesn’t show it. He thinks he barricades Cosimo from glimpsing the way his jaw tightens at the title as it falls from his mouth; the way his eyes grimly widen and his bones congeal into stone.
The man has never been a mummer, though.
“You’ve created more problems than you’ve solved.” The sentence feels like silver wind. “One of our own is dead, and the Montagues will pay for blood with blood.” Cosimo’s tone is difficult for him to place. It is not quite grief or guilt lingering on the Don’s tongue, but impetus. Dissembling artifice. A scheme hatched from a snake’s scaled egg. Loss of life appeared more like an unfortunate inconvenience to Cosimo than some grand tragedy. Another soldier lost to the violent spasms of warfare.
Tiberius doesn’t much like what his uncle insinuates, but he seems to concede. He takes his remonstration on the chin. Events easily avoided, Tybalt, if your hot temper had not intervened.
Rage, after all, is a powerful weapon. It razes whole cities, empties them into rubble, brings presidents and emperors and crowned heads to their bruised knees, supplicating a mad god for mercy. One does not stand in the firing line of such temper and survive it. It deposes rulers, builds empires, consolidates a collection of glossy, star-studded thrones. But rage is also destructive. In Cosimo’s eyes, it is untenable. After all, things that are erratic, things that are flammable and erupt unthinkingly into flames, are beyond even the devil’s control.
“That temper of yours has its assets, Tybalt, but it also brings you to your knees.”
Perception is history, his uncle tells him once. History is always being written—written and unwritten—so really, history is not history at all but hearsay, rumour, accepted gospel. Veronans have a short memory, don’t they? They accept the image presented to them without question, without hesitation. They look, but they do not see. Pontifical, Tiberius sneers at the thought. Why pant after history, he thinks, when we’re rewriting it every day, running rogues through with their own fucking swords and putting words to paper with their blood? But then, Cosimo would remind him—it’s no use to justify yourself, there’s no use in explaining. To be anecdotal is to be weak. Nevertheless, image is everything.
It must be upheld.
The nephew of a philanthropist cannot be seen to be a butcher, especially if he is one.
“Enough is enough.” Something in Cosimo’s eyes catches fire under the lights, like the echo of a flickering flame. “I cannot have my captains running around Verona martyring men and making an enemy of everyone they meet. You understand, don’t you?” A subtle reminder of his place. Not heir, not advisor. Captain.
Like all the others.
Buried between his words, there is a threat. Let’s keep it that way, hm?
“What, I’m expected to just stand there and take their threats? Do nothing?” Tiberius protests because he must, because he backs down only in death, because the notion of swallowing black threats instead of enacting them fills him with a profound sense of humiliation. What is a pistol without a bullet? A tiger without his teeth?
How does a beast stoke his rage when all he’s ever known is vengeance, bloodlust, a butcher’s knife?
Cosimo sighs doggedly, fixating his cold eyes back on his nephew. “Am I understood, Tybalt?”
Reluctantly, Tiberius nods. Humbled and shamefaced, he backs out of the room in much the same manner as he’d entered it. In a moment of abreaction, he clenches his fist, feels the dried blood rub coarsely over his skin, constricting like a chain around his wrist. His fingers move indolently, as if restricted in clay.
If Tiberius’ frustration is a thrumming, burning thing, then his amusement is mellow like the sea. It buoys Vivianne’s own mood into something lighter, something that sits more comfortably in her chest. ‘Sniffing around, are you?’ he tells her and she shoots him a dimpled smile over one shoulder. “Have something to hide, tigrotto? Too late, I’ve known you since you were seven years old.” She was sixteen then, somewhat off-put by the feral child that was little Tiberius. She’d never met another kid who fought so much; fought for toys, fought for attention, fought for regard, fought for love. And yet it was that same grit and persistence that had won over Vivianne too, before long. And now, as he rises to join her comfortably by the drinks cabinet, she feels a brief flutter of nostalgia; thinking of all the years that have spanned between them. It’s a pity, then, that it’s not the topic for this evening.
“I know what we all saw… Though I suspect opinions vary greatly. Tell me yours, Tiberius; after-all you know I do so enjoy your oration.” There’s a tepid twist to her lips as she says it. It’s part playful jab, part earnest invitation. After-all, Tiberius certainly isn’t known for the gift of the gab; lacking both Juliana’s dulcet persuasion as well as Rafaella’s mockingbird manipulation of the words that drip from her tongue. Tybalt, in stark contrast, uses his words like crude weapons; intended to get the job done — one way or another. Not always pretty, and rarely politically correct.
But as he launches into it while pouring whiskey for the both of them, Vivianne’s smile initially grows. Although there’s a time and a place for a silver tongue— the same she’s mastered for years now in social circles — in private, she prefers this. She prefers the raw, unthinking honesty that Tybalt grants her. The way his expression animates every word, the fire burning in his eyes as he paints a lively picture.
… Were the picture not so garishly morbid.
Vivianne’s smile fades somewhere in the early middle, even as she sets her glass aside long enough to approach him and captures his wrist before he can retract it with haughty pride. She inspects the wound along his forearm for herself, brows creasing into a faint frown; instinctive (and deeply biased) distaste aimed at whoever landed the injury. It doesn’t matter that she knows he’s done worse. It doesn’t matter that he probably tore the culprit limb-from-limb in turn. It’s Tiberius who owns a fractal of her heart, and so inevitably, it’s that same organ that twinges in protest in seeing him injured. She drops his arm gently, frown deepening, though she says nothing and reaches for her drink again.
“Yes, Valentina Gallo had to die. Her betrayal was too great, too insidious all these months. A reminder for those in our own ranks – and a lesson for our enemies too, lest they be inspired to try again; to waste another of their own for the same endeavor.” Tiberius raises his glass as if in a toast and Vivianne watches it for a moment; the amber liquid sloshing inside. Reluctantly, somewhat stiffly, she raises her drink, but makes no move to approach Tiberius’ glass. It doesn’t curb his enthusiasm any, she thinks, as he bridges the distance himself in order to toast her. “The objective was her death, was it not? The spectacle? Unnecessary.” She watches as the young man relocates to the sofa, the gears in her mind turning carefully in order to churn the right words onto her tongue.
“What about you? Enjoy yourself?”
“No.” Vivianne tells him in one, honest beat. She dares not speak such a confession to anyone, and that she’s doing so now, with Tiberius, is no small indication of the trust she places in the capodecina; despite his youth, despite their differing opinions on the matter. “I’d have gutted her myself if it meant we’d skip the theatrics.”
Have something to hide, Tigrotto? Vivianne asks him, and by way of nature Tiberius responds with nothing at all. He only grins, the shape of his mouth boyish and puerile, the secrecy of it winking under the shimmer of acrylic hanging from apartment walls. With the arrogance of a noble lord, it almost makes him seem princely. After all, Vivianne is right. What use is it to conceal yourself from two piercing eyes who see through you like glass?
Tiberius Capulet’s smile could never be described as a particularly awe-inspiring thing. The only things the smile of Tiberius Capulet is capable of inspiring is a creeping sense of unease, crawling slowly over you like the fingers of a many-handed god, and the feeling that it’ll come back to settle a score with you somehow, someday. Where pretty Juliana—soft-handed and her heart in her mouth—smiles bold and bright like sun rays peering through the clouds, Tiberius’ mouth curves upwards in the shape of something cruel, like a warning sign that forbids its onlooker from turning away. By comparison, it seems dishonest. Like it knows something you don’t. What it seems like, however, is of very little consequence to the two of them—after all, Vivianne has known him since he was just a boy, and not in any slapdash, cursory sort of way. The woman is his mother everywhere but in name, and when she lets her eyes settle on her cub Tiberius feels seen, known, understood, right down to the pearly white of bone. When she fastens her eyes on him, really takes him in—looks beyond the smarting rage and its many mutations—the cub knows she has a far greater capacity for picking up his parts, like mismatched jigsaw pieces, and fitting them together again than any real mother could do. Indeed, he thinks she does a better job it than Alessandra ever did, to whom he never betrayed even a morsel of affection, and from whom he withheld all familial opportunity.
Even when he was only a boy, he despised her for it.
He lounges lazily, like a tiger in the mid-afternoon that rolls over onto its belly, well fed and comatose. He whistles between his teeth. “Huh. I can tell from your tone that you won’t like what I have to say all that much.” A shrug: buoyant, flippant, even, accompanied rather predictably with a perfunctory way of being. Nevertheless, he yields, his hand gesturing around as if to swat away the thought (I’ll say it anyway, it seems to murmur between swipes). “Ah, doesn’t matter.” With the humour of a boy who hasn’t quite realised that he’s being watched, that his companion is reaching her hands into his ribs and plying them apart in search of clues, he inches closer to Vivianne and leans into the gambit—perhaps unwisely. “Come now, capobastone,” (a byname he teasingly tacks on in matters of business), “You have something against spectacle? Don’t tell me you think the sgualdrina deserved anything less than what she fucking got. You think my uncle should have shown her mercy for her dirty tricks?” Each sentence tumbles into the next in a comical farce, but the last one stings a little. It’s spear-shaped, the metal cone at the end doused in something scathing. It doesn’t escape his notice, and he’s certain it won’t escape Vivianne’s either, so he leans back into the leather, sinks into it. He clears his throat with a cough.
Thinking on it now, he knows Vivianne has never been one for spectacle, has never been one for creating some grand masterpiece on an easel with the blood of her foes (efficiency, after all, is elegance), and for a moment he regrets mentioning it at all. Only for a moment, though. Tiberius Capulet never doubts himself for long.
He buries his face in his hands for a moment, then smooths them over the back of his neck. He closes his eyes, and when he does, he sees Cosimo’s own burrow coldly into him, sunken into a seat of leather he’s always thought looks quite like a throne, tip-tapping a fountain pen on his mahogany desk. He feels the heat of Rafaella’s hand in his, a comfort, like a ballast, binding him to the mast. And when he suggests that they execute the traitor for her treachery, unwind her body for everyone to delight in, he is met first with an unyielding gaze Tiberius has come to closely align with Cosimo’s dissatisfaction, and soon after a curling lip. When it twists into something cruel, he knows his uncle is satisfied. He wishes he could take credit for the way that his uncle had lifted her up in blasphemous display, splaying her body out in the shape of Christ, but on that he is forced to default to Cosimo and Rafaella. Together, they executed his vision to perfection.
As for the vulgarity of the act, he doesn’t attempt to weasel away from it.
“If my uncle wouldn’t let me do the deed, do you think he would’ve let you?” The sentence reeks of a sour taste but he doesn’t mean them to—not really. Even so, he knows that his uncle only asks him for favours. Vivianne, he gives deeds; a great tour de force. He grimaces at his words as quickly as he says them, and swiftly adds what he thinks is a remedy. An apology in the form of a wound (because the man rarely ever says the word, even when he really means it). “When I suggested we gutted her, I thought I might get a hand in it.” He doesn’t elaborate, because he doesn’t think he needs it, doesn’t think of it as an entirely unexpected admission. After all, when had anyone ever been dumbstruck by the sight of a weapon holding hands with death? “Ah, fanculo. She’s dead. Nothing else to it.”
Six weeks without any strenuous exercise and it’s a wonder how she can (barely) manage to keep up with Tiberius. Whenever she thinks of giving up she thinks of her Carabinieri school days a decade ago, she thinks about the sparring sessions at the Command Center that she hasn’t taken part in for weeks. Katarina thinks of who she’s fallen to and every word of disdain thrown her way, and in part, in the heat of the moment she lets her anger have her. Is it because she knows she can’t beat Tiberius in her current state? Perhaps. But it kept her moving and focused, and under her tongue sits a growl of something that had almost been forgotten.
He certainly hadn’t pulled any punches. But that was what she’d needed. She knows already that tomorrow she’ll be sore and she’ll be paying for going all out on her first day allowed back into training, but she’d rather dive right in than take baby steps. In any case, she didn’t exactly have the luxury to take anything slow. Not when she had a mission the next few days that she needed to go well. Kat didn’t want to consider the repercussions she’d personally suffer if it doesn’t.
“Would you like to stay for dinner?” It’s occurred to her that because he’s neither friend nor member of the same borgata, she’d owe him for taking the time to train her. And if she wants him to keep training her, she’d keep owing him. Owing people anything isn’t a business she likes to practice. Kat takes another swig of water before she continues, still slightly out of breath from their final sparring match. “I’m no Michelin-starred chef, but I can sear a steak.” She’s remained in the peripherals as much as she can manage within the Capulets: head down, follow orders, report missions— there’s no mistaking that she’s a soldier. But being friendly never exactly hurt anyone, either. And Tiberius wasn’t difficult at all to get along with (so far, anyway).
Swinging fists get quite the sour reputation: people think of them as unpredictable, changeable, roving; occurring entirely by chance. On the contrary, Tiberius’ acts of thuggery have always been quite the opposite—after all, war is always conscientious and deliberate, and do soldiers not pick out their enterprise with purposeful exactitude? His onslaught is no different. While each slew strikes the skin and makes it swell, the marks he underwrites into it are hardly slipshod attempts at injury. No, they are lessons. They are the handwriting on the wall, and they are pencilled onto the body with the ink of a violet bruise.
Still, when the body is already bruised, his lessons can only be half as effective as they have the opportunity to be. After all, where does the scholar take notes when their body is already filled in with wounds? Somewhere between welts, between the sweat and exhaustion which has sweepingly come to characterise his design, Tiberius wonders whether Katarina Du Pont is truly in a fit enough state to receive the full force of il Tigre. Little more than injured skin and bone, the woman surely deserves gentler hands than these, washed thick and fast as they are with the blood of war.
Naturally, however, this scene of charity lurches from his head and unwinds itself before it can meet his mouth, stripping away its parts far quicker than it had formed them. The marrow decomposes at the centre, like the entrails of a hunted animal. Tiberius chooses to call Katarina’s scrap a victory, even though he knows it to be closer to loss than a feather in one’s cap. Why?
Tiberius Capulet only knows victory. Everything else is fodder.
Tiberius pulls a towel over his shoulder, yawing his water bottle above his head. The cool liquid teems down in a refreshing deluge. He’s not particularly renowned for accepting invitations where he’s offered them—but alas, there are worse invitations to accept than dinner, and there are worse dinners to accept than steak.
“Alright,” Tiberius nods, all nonchalance. Michelin-starred chef or not, his shelves have the unfortunate habit of looking empty as barren land—the thought of a meal isn’t entirely unwelcome. He pulls the bottle to his lips and drinks, the water pooling at the back of his throat. As he does so, he turns to Katarina—first she has his glance, and soon after his attention. “Your ribs,” he says, with something that could easily be misdiagnosed as sensitivity in his voice, gesturing towards her torso, “They survive alright? Not any easy regimen for anyone to endure—” (if he does say so himself), “—even when they’re not already wounded.”
The incursion of bodies at the Twelfth Night following the recent events that meant the Cathedral was no longer fit for purpose did not go unnoticed. Harriet had made note of it but held no urge to inquire regarding why, exactly, they were there - as though she were looking at the pieces of a jigsaw yet void of the desire to see the finished photograph. Inevitable that she would become embroiled in mafia activities (willing or unwilling), she would chose to ignore it until that choice was no longer viable. However, while it made the museum seem busier than usual, that came hand in hand with an influx of distractions; the good, the bad and the ugly.
Lips press together in a tight line when her notebook is liberated from her grasp, the harsh pen line now spanning the length of the page irritated her (too late before she had thought to pull her hand back, the damage was done). Focus shifted, her gaze along with it, settling on none other than Tiberius Capulet - the self-professed bane of her working day - her retort prying her mouth open before it can be swallowed. “They tend to have art in a museum, Tiberius, yes.” Although sarcasm had never quite fitted her, a crown that sat askew atop of the halo of blonde waves, not congruent with the reputation she had made for herself, Harriet imagined her intent was apparent.
“Inspiring nothing in you is still inspiring something,” her countenance was childish at best, but not false. Her eyes remained on him, a small fear that he might do something rash to the art, annoyance sparking at the corners of her mind that she exhaled in mere minutes. Tiberius wanted to get under her skin, relenting would mean that he won. That wouldn’t happen. The Capulet almost made her laugh, almost, the edges of her mouth twitching upward minutely. “If you really want to know, I don’t think you do, since you asked, I think it represents the need to escape something.” Her words were not caustic, brow arching, daring him to challenge her. “Just look at his face.”
In case he hasn’t made himself as transparent as he thinks he has, Tiberius doesn’t much care for art. He maintains that he’s always been a simple, facile creature. Buried meaning and symbolisms uncovered only by the eye of an artificer doesn’t sit well with him. How can it? The man only believes in things he can see. Training his eye on it as he does now, he lours thanklessly at the hanging panels of garishness, each hunk of marble chiselled into some sensational image. An artist carves out hyperboles into stone. Indeed, art and Tiberius Capulet don’t quite belong in the same sentence—they’re much too focused on choking each other out. His idea of art is the seamless welt of his fist, blood-red cruor frescoed carelessly over a fabric canvas. Yet, all he sees in front of him is the precision of cut ivory; hidden fancies incised into pearly limestone.
As he says—hardly his cup of joe. Nuance evades him completely.
Tiberius steps back from the marble, the faux lineament of rumination (self-exploration, even) marking his expression. He delights in making others feel small, so he resolves to choosing his next words discriminately—like a girlish hand picking out red roses in a garden. “Merda, drop the tone, will you?” His voice swells with mocking and he brings his hand to his chest as if to quell an ache; as if to still the pain of a wound. It’s a cuttingly ironic image. “No need for that, D’Angelo.”
Just look at his face, she asks him. He’s not known to be particularly obliging, but he does so with little complaint—he’s nothing if not indulgent. Tiberius tries his hardest to take in the frozen image hewn into the sculpture without lifting a brow humorously or twisting his lips into a wry scoff. He fails. Still, he saves himself from spluttering out a sneering laugh, at least. “Hm.” Tiberius drags his finger along the curves of the stone as if looking for something, as if he’s an artist himself inspecting the handiwork of a kindred soul. “Do you feel inspired, then?” It’s meant to be a caustic remark, but it doesn’t feel like one. It falls headlong from his lips somewhat carelessly, and it risks looking like a question posed from a vantage of sincerity.
He folds his arms across his chest, leaning forward into his arrogance, and Tiberius settles his gaze on the sculpture once more. Without a doubt, this is by far the most time he’s spent contemplating a cut of art before. “He’s a miserable fucker, isn’t he?” he eventually decides upon. Up until now, he’s relied on curse words to provoke a reaction from her—now, he resolves towards wilful misunderstanding. Nothing better than poor judgement to draw the ire of an art lover, no? “Tired of being surrounded by art all the time, I’d wager. Isolation, rejection, the need to escape something—as you so delicately put it—all the same, isn’t it?” His irritation is crawling out of every pore now, manifesting in a dark black cloud between them. He meets Harriet’s gaze, gestures with a flourish of his hand. “Fucking stone.”
bruh your tibs is next level amazing. you commit to his intensity and also his brutality all the fucking WAY, and i really love the way you don't half-ass who he is. it's hard to play someone so vicious and so cutthroat while also allowing for nuance and human emotions, but you do it flawlessly. you're an incredibly talented writer - you literally take my breath aWAY and not only because you're a 6'something goddess - and i love u to DEATH.
outrage & opportunity / @ruizes
tiberius’ makeshift office, the twelfth night / may 23, late morning
In him, Cerberus takes the ghastly shape of a man. Furious and implacable, hot blood thawing out his veins, only he stands between the dead air hanging heavy in the room and Hell itself. He is, after all, its Gatekeeper. Today, Tiberius is furious. He’s furious, as he’s always furious, always wresting with that hot knot spliced at the back of his throat, his words cracking past flame and ash and smoke. There is, of course, nothing entirely surprising about the fact. Tiberius Emiliano Capulet is always furious, always battling for the final word. However, common perception does him a disservice: he bites down only when necessary, but this morning his teeth are sharpened to points.
Pompey’s discontent under the metal fist of il Tigre de Verona’s tutelage is perhaps not a very well kept secret, brazen and flagrant as it is, and it is plain to his sponsor now that the boy grows restless. He makes a mental note to address him as Piero, not Pompey, when the boy-king enters the room. To demote him, to transform him into plain, parentless Piero, because if he insists on testing his hard-earned auspice and taking it for granted, perhaps he should remind him what it feels like to have that stripped off his back too. Only for a moment. After all, if there is one thing Tiberius cannot abide, one thing he’d rather see cauterised with a sea of flames than leave to settle in his stomach, it’s disobedience. As it happened, he’d caught wind of something that Piero perhaps would have preferred he hadn’t: the cucciolo had acted without an order, without his order, tossing the backwash of a ripple through their client pool. Business would be slow these next weeks.
Up until now, Pompey has toed the line between defiance and insubordination, balancing spry and lissome on a tightrope of spider’s silk—but now the boy’s fingers, curled into a yearning fist, insist on piercing that veil. Tiberius is thumbing through papers in his temporary office, standing tall and intransigent over the wood, when his plotting is punctuated by a thick rap at the door. Knock. Knock. Tiberius presses his hand into the mahogany, leans into it, postures all bold and mettlesome, and the metal of an armoured fist washes over him. “Enter,” he hums, his voice gravelly and low, almost guttural. His expression is that of a distant father, a disappointed relative. One that is no less angry for it.
“Sit down, Piero.” The directive hangs between them like an executioner’s knife. “Make yourself comfortable,” he growls not quite out of high dudgeon but irritation, the nuisance of it burying itself into his temple like a dull ache. He gestures vaguely towards a leather armchair. “We may be here a while.”
