I do wait, which is embarrassing. Not long. Just long enough to prove some old, trained part of me still responds when he asks me to stop.
Ezra lowers his voice. "Please be careful with them. With him. I know you don't want to hear it from me, but quiet can feel like healing when you've been in pain long enough. That doesn't mean it isn't dependency."
The worst part is that he's not wrong in a way I can easily hate.
"I'll add that to the list of emotionally devastating observations I plan to ignore until they become inconvenient," I say, and this time the joke comes out flat. "Take care of yourself, Ezra."
I leave before he can answer. The crowd swallows the sound of his chair moving behind me, but I feel his attention on my back until the door closes. Cold air hits my face like a bucket of ice water, and I breathe it in too fast, trying to scrape the coffee shop out of my lungs. I don't look for Ira, though I know he's there. Somewhere within two blocks, a dark shape moves through the city with enough discipline to let me pretend I'm walking alone.
My hands stay shoved deep in my pockets all the way back to the shop. Cain's coat is warm around me, too warm, too heavy, too clearly not mine. I feel unsettled, irritated by the fact that nothing Ezra did was openly wrong enough to justify the jagged feeling under my ribs. He asked if I was safe. He worried about my sleep. He mentioned tools, structure, family history, all the same soft words people use when they're trying to keep you from bleeding out in public. Maybe he's scared. Maybe I'm unfair. Maybe I've traded one set of hands around my throat for three prettier ones and better interior design.
The spirit's whisper follows me anyway.
The quiet was bait.
y the time I reach the shop, I'm shaking. The bell above the door jangles with violent, mocking cheerfulness as I step inside. The warmth of the room hits first, followed by the thick, enchanted quiet of Soren’s wards, and I hate the relief so much I almost turn around out of spite.
The door catches behind me before it can close. Ira steps in after me, silent and large enough to make the whole room feel less hostile. He must have stayed half a block back the whole walk, close enough to follow and far enough to let me pretend I was alone. Now his green eyes take inventory with the precision of a man who knows how to find damage before anyone admits there’s blood.
"If you're going to loom every time I go outside," I say, because apparently self-preservation has abandoned me, "we should charge admission. Maybe offer refreshments. People love a brooding wall with tattoos."
Ira doesn't blink. "Did Ezra touch you?"
The question empties the joke out of me. I stop a few feet away from him, my breath catching in my throat. I want to lie. I want to say it was fine, that we had coffee and talked about old times and no one did anything worth turning into a report. But the memory of Ezra's fingers brushing the back of my hand still feels too present, familiar enough to hurt and wrong enough that I can't name why.
"Yes," I say, and I hate the way my voice sounds. Small. Uncertain. Like I'm confessing a sin. "He touched my hand."
Cain looks up from the couch, the book in his lap open to a page he clearly hasn't read. Soren stops pretending to polish a shelf of crystal jars, his hand going still around the cloth.
"He brought up the cross," I add, because apparently the truth is going to keep leaking out of me whether I approveor not. "Gently. Very reasonably. Like a concerned person who definitely didn't make me want to crawl out of my own skin."
Ira's jaw shifts once. Cain's eyes darken, but he says nothing. Soren's mouth opens like a joke is fighting for its life behind his teeth, then closes again, which is possibly the most alarming thing that's happened all day.
No one tells me Ezra was manipulating me. No one tells me I'm overreacting. No one tells me I'm safe now either, which is honestly rude because I would have accepted a convincing lie if someone offered one with enough confidence. They just stand there, three monsters with every reason to tell me what to think, and none of them do.
I look from Ira to Cain to Soren, waiting for the lecture, the diagnosis, the useful monster-shaped opinion. It doesn't come. They let the shape of what happened sit in the room with us, and somehow that makes it harder to breathe.
"I'm going upstairs," I say, because staying still feels like waiting to be translated.
Ira shifts aside without blocking me. Cain's gaze follows me, dark and quiet. Soren twists the polishing cloth between his fingers and looks like he might vibrate out of his skin from the effort of not saying anything. I take the stairs with Ezra's touch still ghosting over my hand and the taste of coffee gone sour on my tongue.
Nothing happened. That's the problem. Nothing happened loudly enough to explain why I feel like I walked out of that café with a hook under my ribs.
20
Soren
Vera’sringhasbeenin my pocket for an hour, and every minute makes it heavier.
It should not feel heavier. It is a tarnished silver band with an opal set into the center, small enough to disappear inside my fist and old enough to have absorbed every bad decision my grandmother ever dressed up as foresight. Still, it drags at the fabric of my coat like it knows I have been pretending this is research instead of grief with a sharper edge.
Aven stands on the other side of the mahogany table, eyeing the bookshelves like one of them might lunge. He is wearing one of my oversized black sweaters, the sleeves hanging past his knuckles, and he looks less like a willing participant than a man who has been tricked into attending a family séance with props.
“If that thing bites me,” he says, nodding toward my pocket, “I’m filing a complaint with whatever supernatural labor board handles cursed jewelry.”
“You’d have to have a job for that, darling.” I take the ring out before my nerve can abandon me completely. “Right now, you’re more like a very expensive, very dramatic houseguest who keeps breaking the spiritual furniture.”
Aven gives me a look that is pure defensive humor, his amber eyes narrowing beneath the messy fall of his dark curls. He's wearing one of my oversized black sweaters, the sleeves hanging past his knuckles, and he looks slight and bruised-pretty, like a tragic Victorian poem that learned how to drink cheap gin. It's an aesthetic that makes my skin feel two sizes too small, which is rude of him, frankly, because I'm already having an emotionally complex morning and didn't schedule lust until after lunch.
