10. Cleaning House
Cleaning House
Gabriel
T he silence in the grand ballroom of Rookgate Manor had mass and teeth. It was the specific, heavy quiet of two people who knew each other’s bodies better than their own minds, currently pretending the other didn’t exist.
Gabriel leaned against the window ledge, ostensibly watching the gray, sludgy sky of an Averdon morning through an opening in the drapes, but his attention was fixed on the little discussion unfolding near the center of the room.
“It’s the grease that’s the problem, you see,” the newcomer was saying, squatting low to the floor.
She pushed her spectacles up the bridge of her nose with a gloved wrist, then reached out to smear the edge of the dark stain with her thumb.
“With this level of rot? You get that layer of waxy corpse-fat trapping the old blood. Sticky stuff. If I hit it with a standard scouring cantrip, I’ll just melt the sludge right into the wood grain.
” She brought her thumb close to her face, sniffing it critically.
“Yup. Rancid. I propose a flesh-eating enzyme foam followed by a localized suction scrub.”
Gabriel’s stomach did a slow, dangerous roll.
The girl casually wiping grave-muck on her glove was Nikka Brightly, the apprentice Miles had dredged up from the Guild.
She was short, sturdy, and possessed a bun of mouse-brown hair that was detonating in slow motion.
Her caster coat was standard-issue gray but stained with splotches of things Gabriel frankly didn’t want to identify. She smelled of carbolic and lemons.
She was also, apparently, fascinated by the waxy sludge on the parquet where one of Madaze’s goons had died. She wasn’t horrified; she was critiquing it .
“A sound assessment,” Miles said, his voice pitched in that low, serious register that usually made Gabriel want to climb him like a tree. Today, it just grated. “The suction scrub is advanced for an apprentice, isn’t it?”
“I moonlight at the abattoirs in the Cinderways, sir. Meat locker floors, drainage grates... you get a lot of texture variance down there. I’m very good at the dirty work, but I struggle with the wider range of skills that will be required for Guild certification.
I’m very much looking forward to your tutelage. ”
Gabriel turned back to the window, huffing a breath that fogged the glass.
Right. So. Miles was furious. Not the fire-flinging kind of furious.
That, Gabriel could parry with a witty barb and a spin of his wrist. This was the Silent Treatment of Intense Disappointment.
He was currently arranging the world into procedural submission, discussing magical hygiene with a girl who treated scrubbing gore like an exciting treat, all while pointedly not looking at Gabriel.
And why? Because Gabriel had procrastinated .
To Miles, the failure to send the RSVP to Vellast was a tactical error.
A breach of contract. A check-box left unchecked on the great clipboard of life.
He didn’t understand that for Gabriel, the prospect of writing that note had felt like kneeling.
It wasn’t laziness; it was paralysis. The mere thought of engaging with Vellast—of engaging in the polite fiction that they were peers and not predator and prey—had locked Gabriel’s joints every time he’d thought to just do the thing.
But try explaining that to a man who organized his neuroses alphabetically. Miles thought that because he could file his trauma under ‘T’, Gabriel should be able to do the same.
He thinks I betrayed the plan, Gabriel thought, watching Miles hand Nikka back a jar of paste she had invented, which Miles apparently found fascinating. He thinks I’m being difficult. That I’ve backslid, again. Well.
Gabriel had told himself he’d send the RSVP after they met Genna at the manor, after the invitation had arrived.
Then he’d told himself that would spoil their fancy dinner, and he’d do it after that.
Then he was tired and couldn’t deal with one more thing that night and told himself he’d do it in the morning.
Then he’d told himself he’d do it after they dealt with the Bureau of Noble Appellations and the bodies.
Then, well… by then all the thens had caught up with him.
Across the room, Genna was doing… whatever Genna did. She wasn’t looking at the stains or the cleaning supplies. She was circling the perimeter of the room, staring up at the moldings with a look of intense suspicion.
“Genna,” Gabriel called out, his voice sounding too loud in the cavernous room. “If you stare at the ceiling any harder, it might get the wrong idea.”
Genna didn’t look down. “There’s something up there,” she murmured. “The shadows are leaning the wrong way.”
“Charming,” Gabriel drawled. “Add it to the brochure.”
He pushed off the windowsill. As he did, the heavy velvet curtain, which had been partially blocking his view, swept back on its own. It didn’t flutter in a draft; it pulled back deliberately, pleating itself neatly against the wall to give him a better line of sight.
Gabriel flinched, his hand dropping to the dagger in his sleeve.
But nothing attacked. The curtain just hung there.
Whatever. He had too much of his own nonsense on his plate to deal with the manor’s nonsense, too.
Somewhere in the last forty-eight hours, the manor had shifted in his mind from a where to a who .
He couldn’t decide if that meant some invisible creature was wearing the architecture like a coat, or if the bricks themselves had developed a personality.
Honestly, the distinction felt academic when the result were doors that opened themselves.
Genna had promised that this Velma person would diagnose the patient.
But to him, it felt like the house itself was alive.
“I’m going to start on the splatter zone in the corner,” Nikka announced loudly, shaking a jar of something that looked like curdled milk.
She pulled a scrubbing brush from her satchel that looked like it could strip the scales off a wyrm.
“If I let the solvent sit, it should bubble the crust right off.”
“Excellent,” Miles said. He turned to the massive oak side table they’d dragged into the center of the room, which was now covered in Madaze’s ledgers. “I’ll begin the inventory. We can go room to room, cleaning and cataloging. Two birds, one stone.”
Gabriel watched the way the light caught the strands of gray in Miles’s chestnut hair, the slight furrow of his brow, that intense, nerdy focus that usually made Gabriel’s knees weak. Now, it just made him want to scream.
Miles was so noble in his disappointment. He stood there, shoulders set, radiating competence, dragging them toward the finish line because he didn’t trust Gabriel to walk there on his own. And maybe he was right. Gabriel had faltered. But punished with silence? Treated like an errant employee?
No.
Gabriel looked around at the house, which was doing its best impression of a good dog. He looked at Genna, who was communing with the shadows. He looked at Nikka, who was happily dissolving blood stains with blue foam.
And finally, he looked at Miles.
He could let him stew. He could stand here and nurture his own wounded pride. He could wait for Miles to finish his lists.
But the air in the room was too thin, and tomorrow they would be walking into the lion’s den, and Gabriel refused to do it while Miles was looking at him like a stranger.
Screw the lists, Gabriel thought.
He crossed the room. He didn’t rush; he flowed, moving with a slink that he knew Miles tracked even when he pretended not to. He walked right up to the table, encroaching on Miles’s personal fortress of ledgers.
Miles didn’t look up, but his hand paused over the page. “Is there an issue, Lord Fairfield?”
The formality stung worse than a slap.
Gabriel reached out and placed his hand over the page Miles was reading, his long fingers splayed over the columns of numbers. “Yes,” Gabriel said, pitching his voice low, a drop of honey laced with arsenic. “There is. You’re avoiding talking to me.”
Miles looked up then, his brown eyes hard behind the lenses. “I am trying to prepare your assets for transfer. Since one of us has to handle the logistics.”
“The logistics can rot for five minutes,” Gabriel said, leaning in until he was in Miles’s breathing space. He saw the conflict in Miles’s eyes, the anger skirmishing with the reflex to lean in. “You can be disappointed in me, darling. You can even be right. But we are going to talk about it.”
Miles’s jaw worked. He glanced at Nikka, who was focusing on her foam and pretending to be deaf, then back to Gabriel. The wall didn’t crumble, but a brick came loose.
“You,” Miles said, his voice tight, “are impossible.”
“I know,” Gabriel whispered, and he let his thumb brush the pulse point at Miles’s wrist. “Stop counting coins and look at me. ”
Genna rolled her eyes at the thick tension choking the air between Gabriel and Miles.
“This is fascinatingly domestic,” she deadpanned, eyeing the way Gabriel had invaded Miles’s personal space, “but I think I’ll be elsewhere for it.”
Gabriel didn’t look at her—his gaze locked on the pulse jumping in Miles’s throat—but he knew she was heading to Madaze’s—his, now, he supposed—offices, likely to try to get into the attics. She was obsessed with them.
Stupid . The house is behaving like a beaten dog right now, Genna, but dogs bite when you corner them.
He should stop her. He should peel himself away from Miles and herd the witch back to safety.
But Miles was stiff under his fingertips, a statue of righteous, logical indignation that Gabriel needed to dismantle before it hardened into permanence.
He couldn’t deal with whatever weirdness Genna was up to and his lover’s stubbornness at the same time.
“Don’t touch anything sharp,” Gabriel threw over his shoulder, abandoning her to her own curiosity.