Page 68

“Well, that’s what you should tell me, if you want me to help you. Isn’t that what you threatened before?”

“N—no,” Gwen sputtered. “I said I’d help keep your secret if you taught me, not out you to Atticus if you didn’t.”

“Don’t pull the teeth of your own power. You have leverage, use it.”

“You want me to blackmail you?”

“Consider this your first lesson. People won’t help you unless they have a good reason, or it serves them in some way.”

Gwen’s face contorted. “Wow, who hurt you?”

Orpheus swallowed and thought, Everyone. “It’s a fundamental fact of life. The sooner you learn it the less disappointed by people you will be.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“You should.”

“Life doesn’t have to be,” —Gwen’s mouth tightened while she searched for the word— “transactional. People can do things because they want to, or they think it’s right.”

“Ah, yes, spoken from a place of privilege only the rare few have known. Perhaps in a perfect, peaceful world that can be true, but Sanctuary is no longer that place. It has to survive, now, like the rest of us have been doing for hundreds of years.”

Gwen said nothing. She stared up at him, eyes searching his.

“Survive,” Gwen eventually repeated. “That’s all that matters to you?”

Once upon a time, yes. Then Fenrir had broken down his walls, and he’d thought…maybe he’d been wrong, and there was a different way. A way to live that had gotten Fenrir ki—

No. He shoved the thought away, burying his broken hands in his sleeves because he didn’t think his fingers could take the pressure of digging into his scar.

Quiet bloated, broken by the harsh rasp of his breaths. He could sense Gwen across from him, still in the silence, likely staring at him though he couldn’t open his eyes to confirm. He didn’t want her to see—his pain, yes, but also the doubt that he was wrong and she was right, and people could be good even in times of desperation. That the reason the world was still broken was because people like him would do anything for the sake of survival, all at the expense of people like Fenrir and Gwen—good people, who wouldn’t compromise their morals no matter what horrors they faced.

“Orpheus,” Gwen whispered, “are you okay?”

He jerked when she touched him, the hand on his knee the first kind human touch he’d felt in weeks. His eyes flew open, and in the quiet prison cell, he stared at Gwen’s hand like he could hold onto it—this—a kindness he hardly deserved but thirsted for anyway.

This is all your fault, Fenrir, he thought, because it was easier to be angry at Fenrir than admit he was completely broken without him.

“I’m fine,” he snapped, scooting away. The warmth receded, Gwen’s hand retreating to her lap.

“I get what you’re saying about survival,” Gwen eventually said, “but I don’t think you believe it. Not really.”

Orpheus froze. “Why not?”

“Because you haven’t hurt me. I’m right here, you know my secret, if you wanted to make me help you escape, it’d be pretty easy to threaten me into doing it, and you haven’t. I don’t think the thought has even crossed your mind.”

Orpheus balked because—all hells, she was right.

“See,” she said, the corner of her mouth quirking up. “Told you.”

“You’re a child.” As if they had stopped the hermits from hurting him.

“You don’t treat me like a kid.”

Another truth, one Orpheus hadn’t even considered. He’d gotten in trouble for that in the past, right? Astrid had been a kid, and he hadn’t treated her like one either. Was it another remnant of his broken childhood or something else, a mutual respect or—hells forbid—that he actually liked Gwen?

She reminds you of yourself at that age. A thirst for knowledge. A desperation for love and acceptance. As true as those things could be, however, that also meant he knew exactly what to do to make her bend to his will.

Cold threaded his veins, deep and vicious.