2. The Separation Decrees #5
Gabriel scowled, his grand Lyonnorian escape fantasy deflating.
“Fine. Forget Lyonnor. What about the southern archipelagos? One of those little islands where they dive for rare magical components. Anywhere with a beach and a distinct lack of people who know my face. We could be those component divers. Or pirates. I think I’d make a devastatingly fashionable pirate. ”
“And how would we get there?” Miles countered, his voice taking on the patient tone he used to explain why you couldn’t mix certain alchemical reagents without causing a small explosion.
“A sanctioned Aethership logs its passengers. The Crown would know where we were before we even cleared the docks. Any captain willing to take us off-ledger is just as likely to sell us to the first bounty agent he sees. ”
“I don’t know, darling,” he said, turning from the window to face Miles, a bitter twist to his mouth. “I feel like you’re not giving enough thought to the piracy option.”
“This isn’t a joke, Gabe.” Miles stood up and pulled on his robe.
He walked over, his presence looming large and serious.
“We can’t run to an enemy nation. We can’t flee across monster-infested seas without an Aethership.
And we can’t just hide in the Averlian countryside.
This is a Crown summons. If you vanish, they don’t just shrug and file it away.
They send finders. Magical tracking. Bounty notices.
We’d spend the rest of our lives looking over our shoulders, waiting for a team of auditors to kick down our door. ”
“Better auditors than...” Gabriel trailed off, the name Madaze sticking in his throat like a fishbone.
“Than who?” Miles stepped closer, resting his hands on Gabriel’s shoulders. The weight was meant to be comforting, an anchor, but his shoulders bunched with the need to shrug it off. “Madaze is dead.”
“His friends aren’t,” Gabriel said. He looked away, staring at a knot in the wooden doorframe. “The clients. The ones who came to the parties. The ones who paid for... privileged access.”
“They won’t touch us.”
“You don’t know that,” Gabriel snapped, the fear flashing into irritation.
He pulled away, pacing toward the window.
“They accepted the cover story because it was convenient, and they were left to roam free. But if I walk back into Averdon? If I stand up and announce, ‘Hello, I’m the new Lord Goldmar’?
They’ll remember. They’ll remember I have eyes and ears and a memory full of their dirty little secrets. ”
“No, all that was handled,” Miles insisted, his voice firm. He followed Gabriel, invading his space again, relentless in his optimism. “No one is coming for us because the Order ensured the narrative held. The Unwritten balanced those scales, Gabriel. You know that.”
Gabriel looked out the window at the peaceful, sun-drenched garden. A bee buzzed lazily around a patch of lavender. It seemed a million miles away from the grime and soot of Averdon.
The Order of the Unwritten.
Miles spoke of them with the reverence of a paladin. To Miles, they were a noble fellowship of shadows, correcting the injustices the law ignored. And yes, they had helped. They had provided fighters for the raid. They had pulled the strings to ensure no legal repercussions came after the killing.
But Gabriel knew what they really were: a loose collection of disillusioned scribes, exhausted guards, and bitter idealists held together by duct tape and moral outrage.
They were effective vigilantes in the shadows, yes, but they weren’t gods.
And while they might flex their connections to get rid of a man who was a slaver, a vampire, and an illegal magic user, they were hardly going to line up to help Gabriel refuse to become a connection they could use in the future, nor to babysit him endlessly under the vague threat that a noble maybe, might, at some point take a run at him.
“You’re putting a lot of faith in a group of people whose primary method of communication is chalk on brick walls,” Gabriel said, turning back to face him. “You think they can protect us from the entire weight of the Averlian nobility?”
“I think staying here and ignoring the law puts a target on our backs that no one can protect us from,” Miles countered.
He crossed his arms, the muscles in his forearms flexing.
He looked solid, immovable. “We have allies in Averdon. Genna and Bria are in the Steppes. Who do we have in Lyonnor or on your theoretical pirate ship? No one.”
“We have us . We have this life. If we go back...”
“We aren’t going back to live,” Miles interrupted, stepping forward to take Gabriel’s hands again.
This time, he held them tight, trapping Gabriel’s fluttering fingers.
“We go back to end it. We walk into that office, we present the rejection of title, we sign the papers, and we leave. Clean break. Legal, final, and done.”
Gabriel studied him. He saw the determination in Miles’s jaw, the absolute certainty that the system could be navigated if one just applied enough logic and paperwork. It was so painfully Miles . He wanted the world to make sense. He wanted to fix Gabriel’s trauma with a notarized document.
“You’re steamrolling me,” Gabriel said. The words came out softer than he intended, but they hung heavy in the air between them.
Miles blinked, recoiling as if slapped. “I—what? No. I’m not. This is a discussion. I’m just presenting the facts.”
“You’re presenting the facts that support your plan,” Gabriel corrected, pulling his hands free. “My plan involves staying alive and un-traumatized in a cottage somewhere. Your plan involves marching directly toward the wyrm because you’re convinced you can file a form to glue its jaws shut. ”
“That is unfair,” Miles said, looking hurt.
“I am trying to keep us safe. If the Crown declares you a fugitive for failure to answer a summons, we lose everything. The cottage, the savings, the peace. You want to run? Fine. But we’ll be running forever.
Is that what you want? To be looking over your shoulder for the rest of your life? ”
Gabriel stared at him. He hated it when Miles used logic as a bludgeon. He hated it more because Miles wasn’t wrong. But the feeling of being managed, of being steered toward a destination he hadn’t chosen, made his skin itch. It felt like the phantom tug of a magical tether.
I am not a puppet, his mind hissed. Not anymore. I am not a thing to be moved.
But looking at Miles—disheveled, earnest, terrified of losing him to a heartless legal system—Gabriel saw the love beneath the control. Miles wasn’t trying to master him; he was trying to save him. He was terrified, too.
“It’s not a discussion if the outcome is already decided,” Gabriel murmured.
Miles softened. The martial rigidity left his shoulders. He reached out, cupping Gabriel’s face. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—I just want this gone. I want the shadow of that man off us completely. Don’t you?”
Gabriel leaned into the touch despite himself. “Of course I do.”
“Then let’s do it the right way,” Miles urged, his voice dropping to that soothing, deep register he used when Gabriel woke from a nightmare.
“It’ll be quick. In and out. A few days, a week at most. We can visit Genna.
I’ll send a Whisperstone message tonight, tell her we’re coming.
She’s in the Order, Gabe. If anything—anything at all—goes sideways, she’ll know. We’ll have backup.”
Gabriel closed his eyes to shut out the words all emanating from the slight furrow in Miles’s brow. Plan the transport. Contact the safe house. Secure the perimeter. Miles was managing the risk. He was turning a terrifying ordeal into a mission.
“Quick,” Gabriel repeated, testing the word.
“Very quick,” Miles promised. “We go to the Crown Offices, we shout ‘I abdicate’ at a clerk, and we run back to the Steppes for Bria’s pastries before the ink is dry. Then we return here. Home. Free and clear.”
Gabriel opened his eyes and looked at his partner. Miles was lying. Maybe not to Gabriel, but certainly to himself. The Averlian bureaucracy was a lumbering beast; with a war on and a baby Queen on the throne, it would be a creeping leviathan for the likes of them .
And going back meant walking back into the manor where he had been sold. It meant breathing the same air as the people who had bought him.
But looking at Miles, seeing the desperate need to fix this, to be the hero who slew the paperwork dragon.
.. Gabriel’s resolve unraveled under that look.
Not because he fully agreed, but because he couldn’t bear to be the reason Miles looked so defeated.
And there was no world in which he ran without Miles.
Fuck. And he didn’t have a better plan, did he?
Gabriel looked past Miles to the garden, where the lavender swayed, indifferent to his impending doom.
He wanted to grab the letter, toss it into the hearth, and watch the wax seal bubble into nothingness.
He wanted to grab Miles and run until the map ran out of ink, to vanish into a world where names like Goldmar held no currency.
He wanted to be anywhere but at this pivotal moment where responsible choices were made.
But seeing the terrified determination in Miles’s eyes—the look of a man trying to slay a ghost with a filing cabinet—Gabriel knew his running days were over.
For now. Perhaps it would all go pear-shaped, and they’d flee in the end, but they’d try things Miles’s way first and hope they had enough warning to run if they had to.
At least they’d see Genna. He missed Genna.
Miles had known her longer. They’d worked together for the Order half a dozen times before Gabriel entered the picture.
But Gabriel and Genna had clicked with an immediacy that had startled all three of them.
Fellow survivors recognized each other, even if Genna had never explained what, exactly, she’d survived.
They didn’t need to explain their masks or justify their sharp edges.
They just fit, like two halves of the same bitter joke.
If anyone could make a trip to hell tolerable, it was her caustic wit and Bria’s cinnamon rolls.
“Fine,” Gabriel sighed, the fight draining out of him. “We go to Averdon.”
Miles exhaled, a massive whoosh of breath, and pulled Gabriel into a hug that cracked his ribs. “It’s the right choice, Gabby. You’ll see. We’ll be back here drinking wine before the grapes are even harvested.”
“If we aren’t,” Gabriel mumbled into Miles’s chest, listening to the steady, reassuring thump of his heart, “I’m going to be exceptionally difficult about it.”
“I would expect nothing less,” Miles said, kissing him firmly.
Gabriel wrapped his arms around Miles’s waist, holding on.
He pushed down the cold, slithering unease in his gut, the instinct that screamed they were making a mistake, that walking back into the lion’s den was madness, that quick was a fantasy.
He squashed it flat under the weight of his trust in Miles.
They could face this. They had killed a vampire. Surely they could deal with a probate hearing.