I suppose I may as well put this here. It’s unfinished, just a written sort of sketch of an idea, but this way I can find it.
***
“I understand you have my son.”
Chappell looked up from the letter he’d been writing at his desk. “There you are.”
Zion looked just like himself: handsome, elegantly tailored, and self-possessed. He stepped forward from Chappell’s office doorway, and he still had his old way of moving, that drew your attention to the long legs and lean build. Springy and graceful, like if you shucked his fancy clothes off there’d be a runner’s body underneath.
There was, Chappell happened to know. Or at least there had been 20 years ago, but no reason to expect that’d changed. Nothing else about him had. He hadn’t aged a day from the sophisticated mid-40s he’d worn the last time they’d met: the first lines starting to embed themselves in his features around his mouth and eyes, wings of grey just beginning to grow in at his temples.
“It’s been quite a long time, Richard. You look well.”
“And you look tired.” Chappell took a cigar out of the humidor on the corner of his desk, snipped the end and lit it. When Zion came close, he held the box out to him. Zion picked one out, humming in approval over the quality. “Everybody thought you were dead.”
“That was the goal,” Zion agreed, lighting his own cigar. He tipped his head toward Chappell, an oddly gentle, almost apologetic tone entering his voice. “It wasn’t aimed at you.”
Chappell ignored that tone and the strange little roll in his stomach from it. It was just a tiny feeling, not worth his attention anyway.
He watched that long jaw loosen, the purse of the full lips around the cigar, the rise and fall of his chest as he drew a breath in and the soft, contemplative expression on his face as he blew it out again, lost for a moment in nothing but the sensual pleasure of top-notch tobacco.
“Why do you have my son, Richard?” Zion asked as the smoke cleared from around his face.
“Well.” Chappell rested his cheek against his knuckles, elbow on the arm of his chair, and smirked. “Funny story, actually. This guy came sniffing around a while back, and I knew who he was at the first look, of course. He’s got too much of you in him to miss it. So I asked myself, ‘Now what’re the odds that the son of Zion Carpenter would trip and fall into my lap as a coincidence?’”
He scoffed a laugh around the cigar, smoke puffing out around the edges. “Turned out it was a coincidence,” he added. “That was the funny thing. But.”
Through lidded eyes, he watched Zion circle around the desk, coming to within a couple of feet. Leaned back in his chair to admire the view as the man hooked a hip on the corner of his desk, perching himself on the corner of it.
“Something about him struck me,” he continued. “He was so…” He worked his jaw, looking for the right word. “Well-crafted. And that anomaly of his…” He whistled. “Makes a man wonder what kind of scheme you’d make someone like that for. Makes a man wonder real hard. And he was so damn sure you were still alive.”
He let his satisfaction creep across his face in a spreading cold smile, lashes falling over his eyes. “With him in my hands, I knew if you were alive, sooner or later you’d come to me.”
He stared back calmly under Zion’s assessing gaze, those dark green eyes roaming up and down him.
“You’re as handsome as ever,” Zion said finally, voice warm. “And even more rotten.”
“And you haven’t changed a whit.”