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“Ready as I’m going to be.” Lore stepped out into the hall and closed the door softly. Beyond the sconce’s glow, the corridor swam back into shadow.
“Gabriel decided not to join us, I take it?” Bastian fell into step beside her.
“No.” Lore stared down the hallway; the dark was preferable to talking about Gabe. “I haven’t seen him since last night.”
“Hmm.” Bastian didn’t ask any further questions.
He overtook her as they reached the branch in the hall, weaving in front of her to lead. The route they’d taken to sneak out into the back compound and through the culvert to Dellaire would be too obvious tonight.
She thought of August earlier, drinking poison and looking half a corpse. The whelp will finally get what he deserves.
In abstract, she’d known that August hated Bastian. But actually seeing it—naked hatred, not disdain veiled behind false concern—made pity coil at the base of her throat, pity she knew Bastian wouldn’t want. Still, it stayed there. She’d taken it hard when Val turned her over to Anton; she couldn’t imagine how one lived with the knowledge that your true-born parent wanted you gone.
“Are you all right?” she murmured to Bastian’s back as they turned down an unfamiliar corridor. Thick tapestries lined the walls, muffling her voice. Sculpted suns and stars wheeled over the ceiling in three-dimensional gilt.
He glanced over his shoulder, brow arched high. “Yes, sneaking through the halls is not an act that engenders in me much turmoil.”
“I mean…” She waved her hand, pursed her lips. “With… everything.”
He would not want her pity, but she wanted to give him something. A place that offered softness, if he wanted it. Tenderness didn’t come easily to her, but she’d try.
A gleam in his eye; he understood despite her fumbling. Bastian shrugged, turning back around. “I,” he said decisively, “am coping.” He pulled something gleaming from his pocket—a flask, tipped quickly into his mouth, then passed back to her without looking.
Lore took it. Sniffed just enough to make sure there was no whiff of poison, then sipped. Whiskey, strong enough to make her nearly cough. “That’s quite the method of coping.”
“Better than it could be.” Bastian took the flask back. The corridor branched; he took the left one, gleaming marble. “Stay close to the wall. There’s a long pool in the middle of the floor all the way down this hall.”
“Who thought that was a good idea?”
“Some ancestor of mine with too much money and too little taste. So really, it could’ve been any of them.”
The questionable corridor ended, widening into an atrium filled with night-blooming flowers beneath a domed glass ceiling. It was beautiful, and Bastian slowed his pace. Lore allowed it. She was in no rush.
A few of the flowers she recognized—hellebore, the color of dried blood. Datura, climbing up a wooden trellis to open twisting blooms to the moon. Poisons she knew, poisons that anyone outside of the Citadel would be arrested for growing, and here they were just decoration.
“My father is a bad man.”
She turned away from the hellebore—Bastian wasn’t looking at her, instead standing with his hands in his pockets and his head tilted up to the moon, like he was some night-blooming poison himself. “That makes it easier,” he said quietly. “Easier to deal with the fact that he wants me dead. Maybe it makes me good, even.” A snort, his eyes closing as his head tipped back further. “The Law of Opposites, right? If a bad man wants me dead, that makes me good. In the most technical sense.”
It didn’t seem like a conversation that wanted another participant. Lore just watched him, smelling sweet poison and tracing the lines of his face with her eyes. Far too handsome, she’d thought before, but in the moonlight, Bastian was the kind of beautiful that rent hearts in half.
The air around him almost seemed to glimmer, gold dust in the dark. Moonlight made him more beautiful, yes, but in the same way that darkness emphasized a flame. He didn’t belong in it; Bastian Arceneaux was antithetical to night.
“My mother wasn’t good, either,” she murmured.
His eyes slid her way, a subtle invitation to continue, but Bastian kept his face toward the sky.
“After I was born—after all the Night Sisters realized what I could do—she stayed distant. I don’t remember her ever touching me with any kind of affection.” The razored lump in her throat that Alie’s embrace had risen tried to return. She swallowed, again, rubbed at her neck like she could physically force it away. “By that point, she was totally devoted to the Sisters. To their mission, to keeping the Buried Goddess from ever rising again.”
Go, she’d said, pushing Lore out into stabbing daylight while her palm still ached from her branding, a bird shoving a fledgling from a nest. Maybe not totally devoted, then. But enough.
“Something about me…” Here, Lore’s voice broke, and she paused until it mended itself. “Something about me was wrong. Something about me went against everything she’d dedicated her life to.”
She didn’t realize she was staring at her moon-scarred hand until it was covered by Bastian’s. He’d crossed to her, shadow-silent, and closed his fingers around hers. She could feel the lines of his scar against her own, the now-healed runnels of half a sun.
“I get it,” Lore murmured, staring at their hands. “People are different, and just because you’re related to someone doesn’t mean you’re good for each other. But she was all I had, and she looked at me like I was a monster.” Lore closed her eyes, briefly, took a breath. Looked up at him. “But even she didn’t want me dead. She saved me. Took me to the mouth of the catacombs when the rest of the Sisters wanted to send me into the Buried Goddess’s tomb.”
The corner of his mouth lifted, a shaky smile. “That’s something.”
