“Sure. Think all you want, Gwenna.” She spirals her fingertip into my forehead like it’s a little power drill. “Just make sure they’reyourthoughts. Don’t go getting all dogmatic about things.”
Her eyes flick to the corkboard again.
To another card.
WHITE BROTHERS OF ST. VINCENT (THE CONSISTORY)
“Because heavens know we have plenty of dogma,” she murmurs. Looks at me again. “What’stheirtake on all this, anyway?”
A slow shiver prickles down my spine. “I don’t know. It’s not like I talk to them directly. I think Kai’s been doing that.”
“Mm.” Morgan taps the pen to her lips again, eyes fixed on the card. “Well, if I were you, I’d find out.”
NINE
KAI
“Kai?”
The voice scares the shit out of me, and I drop my wrench. “Jesus.”
I guess that’s what happens when nobody else seems to want to come to the salle anymore. You get too used to the silence.
“Just me.” Gwenna, looking apologetic, steps out from the stairwell. She frowns. “Where are you?”
“Here.” I step out more definitively from the side alcove where I’ve been fitting and soldering and assembling since before sunrise, ducking to pick up the wrench as I do. I wave. “Hey.”
“Hey,” she echoes. She’s in a T-shirt, I notice. V-neck. Which is unusual not just because it’s this polar vortex of a spring day, but because it doesn’t cover her up. And yes, I probably just notice because I’m probablyalwaysgoing to notice an outfit that shows off Gwenna’s tits, but also notice whatelseit reveals.
The little white marks of that scar on her chest.
“Hey,” I say again, twirling the wrench just to give my hands something to do. “Can I help you? Need a weapon assembled or something?”
Gwenna shakes her head. “No. I actually wondered if I could to talk to you about, um, them. The White Brothers.”
“Talk tome?” I say. “Don’t you mean Kingston?”
“I thought you were in charge of that now.”
In charge. I don’t know about in charge. Of that, or of anything.
“You wrote to them, right?” Gwenna asks.
I nod.
“So you were the one who told them about me.”
I pause. Shake my head.
Something in her face shifts. “Okay. So…it was Kingston, then?”
I shake my head again.
Gwenna frowns. “What?”
“They haven’t been told,” I explain.
She folds her arms. “Why?”
