1. The Summons #2
Madaze was dead. He and Miles had severed the magical leash. They had run to Sunmere to drink wine and pretend Averdon was a nightmare they’d finally woken up from.
He thought he had killed the monster.
Instead, he had inherited the monster’s lair. And all the rot festering inside it.
Gabriel glared at the offensive stationery on the floor. Lord Gabriel Goldmar .
Going back to Averdon was out of the question.
The city was a gray, wet ulcer on the landscape, half filled with marks and half filled with people who knew exactly what Gabriel used to cost by the hour.
Averdon wasn’t a home; it was a hunting ground, and for twenty-five years, he had been the fox or the hen, at Madaze’s whim.
And Rookgate.
The summons demanded he catalog the assets . As if he would be calmly helping the spoon counters. Rookgate wasn’t a building; it was a hungry mouth. He had lived his entire life between its teeth until Miles had pried them open six months ago.
Six months. That was it. That was the sum of his life free from Madaze and his magic and his cronies. Six months of real life, with Miles.
Before Miles, he had been a ghost haunting his own body.
In Briarleigh, among the vines and the quiet, he had started to become solid.
He had learned the taste of wine drunk for pleasure, not for numbness.
He had learned that sex could be a conversation, a prayer, a riotous joy, rather than a transaction.
He had learned to sleep without a knife under his pillow. ..mostly.
Well, sometimes.
No.
He couldn’t go. He simply wouldn’t.
Surely, if he ignored this long enough, the vacuum of power would suck someone else in. Nature abhorred a vacuum, and Averdon abhorred an unclaimed fortune. Some distant cousin with a thin blood claim and a thick skull would step up. Let them have the damp walls and the screaming nightmares.
He paced the small length of the cottage’s main room.
Miles would be home soon.
The thought stopped him mid-stride. Miles .
Miles, with his gentle eyes and his sometimes-inconvenient moral compass.
If Miles saw that letter, he wouldn’t see a trap.
He would see a legal puzzle. He would put on his reading glasses, furrow his brow in that way that made Gabriel want to kiss the crease smooth, and say something horrific like, “Well, we legally have to address this to clear your name so we can move forward.”
Miles believed in systems. He believed in fixing things. He didn’t understand that some things were built to break you, and the only winning move was to be absent when the hammer fell.
If Gabriel showed him this, Miles would insist on going back. He would march right into the line of fire to defend Gabriel’s rights. And then the pitiless bureaucracy of Averly would get involved. The courts.
Panic, cold and white, seized his lungs. He couldn’t let Miles be an accessory to Gabriel’s refusal to play by the Crown’s rules. Plausible deniability. If Miles didn’t know about the inheritance, Miles couldn’t be blamed when Gabriel ignored it and the cost came calling.
Gabriel snatched the letter from the floor. His hands shook, a tremor he couldn’t repress. He moved to the fireplace, where the merry flames tempted him with their potential for destruction.
Burn it.
If he burned it, it never arrived. The messenger was a hallucination. The signature in the ledger...
Damn. The ledger.
He had signed it. There was a record.
And what if, when this panic had passed through him, he saw things differently? If he burned it, well…
He needed time. He needed to think. He needed to bury this deep enough that he could pretend, for a few more hours, that his life hadn’t just imploded.
He spun around, eyes darting to the sewing table. The notions box. It was a chaotic jumble of threads, buttons, whalebone stays, and sharp things. A fitting grave.
Gabriel shoved the letter to the bottom of the wooden box, burying it under a tangle of crimson embroidery floss and a pouch of pearl buttons. He piled unspooled ribbons on top, creating a barricade of silk and color.
He stared at the box .
His reflection was distorted in the polished wood of the sewing table.
He looked pale. Fragile. The silence in the cottage stretched, thinning out until it buzzed like a fly against a windowpane.
He stood there, one hand gripping the edge of the table, his breath shallow, waiting for the floor to open up, for Madaze to laugh from the shadows.
I am not there. I am here. I am free.
The mantra felt hollow. He repeated it anyway.
The sound of a gate latch clicking outside snapped him back into his body.
Miles.
Gabriel flinched, pulling air into his lungs with a ragged gasp.
The sun had shifted across the floorboards; the shadows were longer.
He had lost time. Again.
He couldn’t be standing here looking like he’d seen a ghost when Miles walked in. He had to be Gabriel: witty, composed, slightly dramatic about dinner.
The letter was buried, but another—admittedly far less disastrous—secret still lay on his sewing table. The midnight-blue silk—the surprise coat intended to save Miles from sartorial purgatory—lay splayed out.
“Shit.”
He snatched up the bolts of fabric. The silk was slippery, fighting him as he gathered it hastily. He pulled the coat off the dress form and added it to his bundle. He shoved the materials into the wardrobe, behind his winter cloaks, jamming the doors shut just as the front door handle jiggled.
He leaned back against the wardrobe, smoothing his hair and the panic from his brow. His pulse hammered a frantic rhythm against his ribs, but he painted a smile on his face.
Two secrets buried in under a minute. The letter festering in his notions box. The project stuffed in the wardrobe.
At this rate, he’d have contraband hidden in every drawer, cabinet, and loose floorboard by week’s end.
He exhaled a shaky breath and waited.