Cain is gone when I open the door.
I check the library before I return to my post. Soren is still asleep over Vera's notes, one cheek pressed to an open ledger, fingers curled around a pencil. The lamp throws warm light across the sharp angles of his face. He looks exhausted, not fragile. Fragile is the kind of word people use before they start deciding what someone else can carry. I take the knitted blanket from the armchair and lay it over his shoulders without waking him.
Cain's door is open enough for me to see Aven curled on his side with one hand fisted in the sheet. Cain sits beside him now, back against the headboard, eyes on the doorway before I reach it. Neither of us speaks. Aven's breathing stays even. The room smells faintly of old blood magic and sleep, the only quiet he trusts because it has a body attached to it.
I go back downstairs.
The shop is dark except for the streetlight bleeding through the front window and the faint glow of the repaired ward in the back hall. The frost from earlier is gone. The search pattern has faded from my teeth, but the absence doesn't comfort me. Predators go quiet after they flush something from cover. They wait for movement.
I sit near the counter where I can see the front door, the hallway, and the shadowed mouth of the back entrance. My side pulses with every heartbeat. My shoulder stiffens by the minute. By morning, the bandage will be hidden under a clean shirt. Soren will see the new ward and think I worked through the night. Aven will smell coffee and make some tired comment because fear gets too close if he doesn't put words between himself and it.
30
Soren
Ifeeltheliebefore I know what shape it has. Essren bonds don’t leave omissions alone. They give them weight. Texture. A place in the room. The one sitting between Ira and me like a fresh wall built in the dark is still wet with blood and fear and the kind of control he mistakes for mercy.
I sigh, turning my attention to the exorcist at the stove with his back to me, shoulders squared, one hand braced lightly against the counter whenever he thinks no one is looking. Both Cain and Ira seem suspicious.
Then Aven comes in wearing one of Cain’s shirts, sleep still caught in his hair and suspicion already sharpening his face. He stops in the doorway, looks at Ira, then Cain, then me, and the room gives itself away before anyone says a word. "Why does it feel like everyone got bad news before breakfast?" he asks, voice rough.
Ira sets a plate down too hard. The sound snaps through the kitchen, bright and wrong. "Breakfast is ready."
Aven blinks at him, then looks at me. I don't know what my face is doing, but whatever it is makes the last of his sleep vanish. His hand drifts to his sternum in that small, awful motion he makes when the dead press too close or fear leaves him without enough air.
Cain watches Ira. Ira watches the stove. I watch all of them and feel the wall in the bond thicken with every second no one speaks.
I pick up my coffee mug. My hand is steady, which feels like a miracle or a threat. "Are we going to pretend the wards didn't twist themselves inside out last night, or is that scheduled for after eggs?"
Ira's jaw tightens. "The wards are secure."
"That wasn't the question."
His hand moves to the pan, then stops before he can reach too far with the wrong arm. He adjusts so smoothly anyone else might call it nothing. My magic twitches under my skin. The overhead light flickers once, a small pulse of green-white irritation that I kill before it can spread into the rest of the house.
Aven's gaze drops to Ira's side. "Are you hurt?"
"No," Ira says.
The lie hits the bond like a slammed door.
My mug cracks in my hand. Coffee spills over my fingers, hot enough to sting, but I barely feel it. Cain's eyes close for one brief second, and that's when I know he already knew. The kitchen shrinks around me. The cabinets, the table, the plates, the four of us arranged around a lie like it's another place setting.
I set the broken mug in the sink piece by piece. "Try again."
Ira finally turns. His face is unreadable in the way it gets when he thinks unreadable is kinder than honest. There's bruising low on his throat, half hidden by the collar of his shirt. His left arm hangs too carefully at his side. The wall in the bond hums with his effort to keep everything behind it.
"It's handled," he says.
There it is. The word with the lock inside it.
The light over the sink flickers hard enough to buzz. "Handled," I repeat, because if I say anything else first, I may put my fist through the nearest cabinet. "That's what we're calling it."
"Soren," Cain says quietly.
I look at him, and he stops. Good. He should. Whatever softness Cain has earned from me doesn't extend to helping Ira hide blood under the floorboards.
Aven stands very still beside the table. "What's handled?"
