6. The Invitation #2
“Someone dares write to me as Goldmar!” Gabriel spun away, the envelope crushed in his manicured fist. He began to pace the small room, his boots clacking against the wood floor.
“Twenty-five years. My whole life! A misery under a Lord Goldmar. I finally claw my way out, and the first thing this city does is slap his name back on me like a brand. And someone thinks to address a fucking letter to me using it?”
“It is thoughtless,” Miles said, leaning back against the dresser. He crossed his arms, anchoring himself. Attempting to interrupt Gabriel during a spiral was like trying to catch a falling knife—pointless and likely to result in injury. “Thoughtless and callous.”
“It’s beyond callous. Why would anyone with even half an ounce of common sense or courtesy call me that?” Gabriel waved the crumpled vellum in the air. He stopped, chest heaving .
“Shall I open it?” Miles asked, holding out his hand. “Or would you prefer to burn it unopened?”
Gabriel looked at the fireplace, then back at the letter. His eyes narrowed, the blue-gray darkening to the color of a bruised sky. “No.”
“No?”
“If I burn it, I won’t know.” Gabriel stalked back to Miles and shoved the mangled envelope into his chest. “I won’t know which one of these vultures has the audacity to address me by that monster’s title. Open it.”
Miles took the letter. He carefully smoothed the wrinkles Gabriel’s grip had inflicted, sliding a finger under the wax seal. He unfolded the single sheet of parchment inside.
The handwriting matched the envelope. Ornate. Sweeping.
My Dearest Lord Goldmar, it began.
Miles read the signature at the bottom first. Lord Paray Vellast of Halebourne.
A cold, greasy sensation settled in his stomach. He knew the name as one of Madaze’s cronies.
It is with greatest pleasure that I welcome you to your rightful place in our society.
I have taken the liberty of arranging a small gathering at Halebourne Hall in three days to introduce you to your peers and, naturally, to discuss the continuation of the mutually beneficial business arrangements I enjoyed with the late Lord Madaze Goldmar.
“Well?” Gabriel demanded. He had picked up a silver-backed hairbrush and was gripping it like a weapon. “Who is it? One of the creditors? The shipping Guild?”
“It’s from Lord Paray Vellast,” Miles said, keeping his voice carefully neutral. “He’s inviting us to a gathering at Halebourne Hall.”
Gabriel went still. “Vellast.”
“He wants to introduce you to your peers,” Miles continued, reading the rest despite his better judgment. “And to discuss continuing business arrangements.”
The hairbrush hit the far wall with a crack. It didn’t just hit the wall; it shattered the plaster, leaving a dent before clattering to the floor.
“He wants to ‘continue business arrangements’?” Gabriel grabbed one of his freshly polished spare boots and hurled it. It slammed into the doorframe. “Does he have any idea what those ‘arrangements’ entailed? What am I saying? Of course he does. But the gall!”
Miles didn’t move from the dresser. He trusted Gabriel’s aim, and he understood Gabriel’s need to break something that wasn’t himself. “I take it you know him.”
“ Know him ?” Gabriel laughed, a jagged, terrible sound. Gabriel grabbed the second boot and threw it after the first. “Madaze used to gift me to him. Like a bottle of nice wine or a choice cut of meat. Usually for his birthday.”
The air in Miles’s lungs solidified, turning brittle with frost. Miles wanted to find Lord Vellast. He wanted to find him, and he wanted to take the man apart, bone by bone.
But that was his anger. This moment belonged to Gabriel.
“That bloated, sweating leech would sip his brandy while I—” Gabriel cut himself off, choking on the memory.
He scanned the room for something else to destroy.
He seized a decorative porcelain vase from the bedside table.
“And now he wants to arrange a meeting ? At a party ? He wants to sip punch and discuss business ?”
The vase flew across the room and exploded against the hearth. Shards of blue and white painted china rained down onto the rug.
“He thinks I’m just the heir,” Gabriel shouted as he grabbed small objects off the vanity and flung them about. “He thinks I’m Madaze’s little replacement. He thinks nothing has changed! Does he even remember me? Or does he think me a distant relation he’s never met?”
Miles watched, cataloging the destruction. The vase: likely five gold. The plaster repair: two gold. Repainting the room: perhaps ten. He would pay it gladly. He would buy this entire inn and let Gabriel reduce it to matchsticks if it flushed the poison out of his system.
There was something viciously satisfying about it.
Part of him—a part he generally kept tightly controlled—wanted to add his own fury to the mix.
But he let Gabriel do the anger for him.
Gabriel had far more right to it than Miles in this instance and was, in general, better at anger.
Miles did, however, indulge in vicariously experiencing Gabriel’s outburst.
Gabriel picked up a jar of boot polish. He held it for a moment, chest heaving, hair falling over his furious eyes. Then he dropped it.
The thud was dull and final .
Gabriel stood in the wreckage of their morning, shoulders slumped, his chest rising and falling in erratic hitches. The violence bled out of the air, leaving only the mess and the man in the middle of it.
“You enjoyed that,” Gabriel accused, his voice raspy. He flicked his eyes at Miles.
“Watching you demolish an innocent room while imagining Vellast’s face? More than I probably should.” Miles pushed off the dresser, stepping to close the distance between them. “Though I suspect the inn will include a substantial surcharge on our final bill.”
Gabriel laughed, though the sound broke down in the middle. He looked up, his eyes bright with unshed tears and a fragile sharpness. “A surcharge. Of course.”
Miles reached out, brushing a stray lock of hair from Gabriel’s forehead. “Just so we’re clear,” he said, his tone dry as dust, “I take it we will be RSVPing ‘no’?”
Gabriel’s shoulders dropped. He sighed, a sound that was theatrically tragic yet underscored by genuine exhaustion. He leaned his forehead against Miles’s chest with a thump.
“Aren’t you supposed to be telling me we’ll have to deal with the corrupt nobles part of this lordship problem eventually?
” Gabriel whined, his voice muffled against the wool of Miles’s coat.
“I thought I’d at least get to rage dramatically for a solid twenty minutes while you were reasonable and logical and perhaps made tea.
Now I have to be the sensible one? It’s exhausting. I don’t like it.”
Miles blinked, his hands hovering for a fraction of a second in surprise before he wrapped his arms around Gabriel’s shoulders, pulling him in. He radiated a furious heat like a brick pulled from a fire.
“Why would we bother with the nobles at all?” Miles asked, resting his chin on the top of Gabriel’s head, mindful of the expertly disheveled waves.
“You’re going to get rid of the title anyway.
That is the plan, isn’t it? We change the name, find Madaze’s gold, deal with the tax issues, ensure the manor isn’t actively murderous, find some merchant with more coin than sense willing to take it over, and then we go back to Briarleigh.
We never have to see an Averlian noble again. We just have to avoid them until then.”
Gabriel pulled back just enough to stare at Miles. The look was a cocktail of pity and disbelief, the kind one might give a child who believed that Tenibria's three moons were made of cheese .
“Oh, my naive mage,” Gabriel murmured, reaching up to pat Miles’s cheek with a condescending tenderness. “For someone so clever, your political acumen is surprisingly lacking.”
“Enlighten me, then,” Miles said, raising an eyebrow, though a frisson of unease started to itch at the back of his neck.
“Not dealing with this,” Gabriel said, gesturing at the crumpled letter still in Miles’s hand, “is essentially the same as leaving the house haunted—or whatever it is—and trying to foist it on someone else without exorcising it first.”
Miles frowned, his mind racing through the legal codes Palthor had recited yesterday. “How so? The nobility and the bureaucratic administration of the estate are separate vectors of misery. Palthor cares about ledgers. Vellast cares about... whatever depravity he’s currently funding.”
“Are they separate?” Gabriel asked, his expression sobering.
The manic gleam was gone, replaced by a flat, hard look.
“That house wasn’t just a building, Miles.
It was Madaze’s power base for twenty years.
The high society of Averdon—the Vellasts, the council members, the people you call ‘nobles’ that the Order left behind when they took out Madaze—they didn’t just tolerate him.
They enabled him. They traded with him. They helped him hide his vampirism when he suddenly grew fangs and developed a sunlight allergy. They benefited from his... services.”
Gabriel stepped out of Miles’s embrace, pacing a small circle in the clear patch of floor, avoiding the shards of the vase.
“Madaze curated secrets and flesh. If I ignore them while trying to offload his estate, do you think they’ll just let me walk away?
They rely on Rookgate being a certain kind of place.
If I try to sell it to a stranger without managing expectations, they’ll intervene.
They’ll block the sale, or they’ll find another monster to install there.
Our harmless, social-climbing merchant will turn out to be one of their favored pawns. ”
Miles wanted to argue. He wanted to pull out a statute book and cite the laws of property transfer, to claim that a deed was a deed and a sale was a sale. But he realized, despite his desire to deny it, that Gabriel was right.
Miles had spent his life in academic libraries and Guild halls, ecosystems governed by rules, however arcane. Even war had orders and protocols. But Gabriel had survived the shark tank of Averdon’s elite underground. He understood the currency of influence better than Miles ever would.
“So, you’re saying we should... accept this invitation?” Miles asked. He looked at the wrinkled vellum in his hand as if it were a venomous spider.
“We have to,” Gabriel said. He didn’t look happy about it.
In fact, he looked slightly ill. “We have to walk into the lion’s den, smile at the lions, and convince them that we are not prey, but rather.
.. toxic. Or come up with some other way to deal with them.
They will not go away if we ignore them. It’s not in them to suffer a slight.”
“I believe the line ‘we have to go despite the danger because it’s the responsible thing to do’ is usually mine,” Miles said, trying for a weak joke to clear the air. “If you start quoting regulations next, I shall have an identity crisis.”
“Don’t worry, darling. You can handle the inevitable brawl.” Gabriel’s lips twitched with the ghost of a smirk. “I’ll stick to being decorative and cutting.”
Gabriel took the letter back from Miles, smoothing the wrinkles against his thigh with focused, aggressive strokes. “I’ll send a runner with a reply. We’ll accept. We’ll go. We’ll stare Vellast in his piggy little eyes and figure out exactly how bad this quagmire is, so we can plot a route out.”
“A sound tactical assessment,” Miles agreed, forcing his shoulders to relax. He scanned the room, the destruction registering again as something mundane rather than catastrophic. “Though I suppose we should address the current tactical failure.”
“Which is?”
“We remain significantly behind schedule. Genna has likely already composed three different scathing monologues about punctuality.”
Gabriel flinched, the reality of the morning rushing back in. He spun toward the mirror, panic warring with vanity. “My hair. I’ve ruined it in the fuss, haven’t I? Miles, do I look like a damp spaniel?”
“You look beautiful and not to be trifled with,” Miles assured him.
“Excellent.” Gabriel adjusted his burgundy coat, cleared his throat, and summoned the mask. The posture shifted, the chin lifted, and the frightened young man vanished. “Let’s go. If we walk fast enough, perhaps we can outpace the consequences of our life choices.”
“Unlikely.” Miles opened the door and stepped over the dented boot. “But we can certainly try.”