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Their room was locked. Lore had the key half fitted in the door before Gabe stepped up beside her. “It won’t work.” His voice was low. “Anton had the lock changed.”
She looked at him and said nothing. There was nothing to say.
Gabe swallowed. He unlocked the door with a key he produced from his pocket, then stepped aside to let her in first.
The apartments felt strange now—foreign and ill fitting, where before they’d been as close to comfortable as she could find here. Especially knowing Anton had changed the lock sometime after she left last night. Myriad hells, he’d probably had someone waiting in the halls, watching for her to leave so they could immediately set to work.
Because Gabe told him. Gabe told him everything.
Her wrists felt raw. The iron had made them itch. Lore rubbed and rubbed at them, trying to force the feeling out of her skin, trying to make it stop—
Gentle pressure, Gabe’s fingers interposed where hers had been. “Lore, you’re going to hurt yourself—”
It’d been the truth when she told Gabe and Bastian that she was no good at brawling, but instinct made do. Lore snatched her wrist from Gabe’s hand and struck out with the heel of her opposite palm, smacking him in the shoulder, pushing him off balance and away.
“Don’t touch me,” she snarled. “Don’t fucking touch me.”
He stared at her, one blue eye wide. His jaw clenched beneath the reddish stubble on his chin. “I was trying to keep you safe.”
“By going to the very person we knew was lying?”
“He’s on our side! You heard everything I just did, you know that Anton is working against August!”
“But you didn’t.” Her fingers went back to her wrist again, itching, itching. “You had no idea what Anton was involved in, and it’s pure stupid luck you didn’t get all three of us murdered!”
“It was either that or watch you go to a far more likely murder in the damn catacombs!” Gabe ran his hands over his close-shorn hair, turned away. “I wanted him to stop you from going down there at all. Both of you. That seemed like a much more pressing matter than playing politics—”
“It’s more than playing politics! If we’d been right, if Anton and August were still on the same side, Bastian might’ve—”
“Forgive me,” Gabe cut in, nearly a snarl. “I forgot that one must always be thinking of Bastian first.”
“Save it,” Lore hissed. “We both know what happened here. You got overwhelmed with the thought that maybe, just once, you were wrong about something. You got scared.”
Gabe’s hands twitched back and forth to almost-fists. Instinct had ahold of him, too, and it told him to defend the man who’d stepped in when his father bled out. “Whatever side Anton was on,” he said, “I knew that would be the right one.”
She laughed, high and harsh. “Gods, Gabe, you’re like a kicked dog going back to the damn boot. Anton took you in because he hallucinated that a vanished god told him to. He doesn’t love you. He never has. He’s not your father, no matter what the Church wants you to call him.”
The Presque Mort took a step toward her, and she was reminded, against her will, of that night in her room, his mouth on her neck, his roaming hands. She wondered if he’d kiss her like that again now. It seemed to be what they defaulted to, the only way they could communicate when everything else piled up in jagged mountains, unable to be climbed.
“I wanted to keep you safe.” It rumbled from him, low and dark, but he stopped paces away and held himself there, not allowing his body one inch closer to hers. “And if that meant Bastian got hurt, so be it.”
Lore bared her teeth. “I am gods-damned tired of being the rope in your and Bastian’s tug-of-war.”
“Especially since you’ve already chosen the winner of the match, right?” He laughed just like she had: no joy in it, none at all. “You did the moment you told him where you came from.”
There it was.
“You didn’t know that until an hour ago,” Lore said. “Don’t act like it’s an excuse.”
“How long?” Gabe growled. “How long has he known? I asked you, that first day. I asked you how you came to channel Mortem, and you lied to me. Did you ever lie to him, or was he worthy of the truth from the beginning?”
He stood straight and unbowed as ever, but there was a crookedness to the line of his shoulders. Gabe worked so hard not to show hurt on his face; it came out in other places.
“I told him the night he took us to the boxing ring,” Lore answered. “The first time.”
His eye fluttered closed, then open. “That long, huh?”
She said nothing.
