10. Cleaning House #2
Now, it was just the three of them. Him, Miles, and Nikka, who was currently humming a tuneless song while supervising her magical scrub brush.
Gabriel turned his full attention back to Miles.
“Well?” Gabriel’s thumb still rested on Miles’s wrist, feeling the jumping pulse beneath the skin. “I’m here. I’m listening. Tell me why you’re looking at me like I’m an incorrectly balanced equation.”
Miles pulled his hand away. He adjusted his reading glasses, a defensive tic Gabriel knew too well.
“I am not looking at you like an equation,” Miles said, his voice clipped. “I am looking at a partner who agreed to a strategy and then silently abandoned the field. You didn’t send the RSVP.”
“I didn’t.”
“You let me believe you had.”
“I didn’t say I had. I just... didn’t say I hadn’t.”
“Semantics,” Miles snapped, finally looking up, his brown eyes storm-dark.
“It’s not about the note, Gabriel. It’s about the silence.
Again! I built a plan. I constructed a framework to get us through this—to get you through this—and now you start pulling out the supports without telling me.
If you had changed your mind about accepting the invitation, you should have said so.
We could have strategized. But to just..
. do nothing? It’s illogical. It’s risky. ”
“Risky,” Gabriel repeated. “You think I don’t know the risk?”
“If you know it, why sabotage the defense?” Miles gestured at the ledgers.
“I am trying to build a fortress around you, Gabriel. I am trying to use every law, every loophole, every scrap of bureaucratic nonsense to keep you safe. And you’re wandering outside the walls because you couldn’t be bothered to write three lines of ink. ”
“Not bothered?”
The heat flared up Gabriel’s neck, sudden and sharp. He stepped closer, forcing Miles to lean back against the heavy desk.
“You think I was lazy? You think I was being petulant?” Gabriel asked. “Miles, you navigate the world like it’s a series of spell components. A pinch of logic, a dram of action, stir until solved. You think because you filed the fear under ‘To Be Dealt With Later,’ I can do the same.”
“I do it so we can function!”
“I couldn’t function!” Gabriel’s voice rose, cracking the polite veneer.
In the corner, Nikka’s scrubbing brush stopped.
“It wasn’t rebellion, Miles. It was paralysis.
Gods, I tried. But then I’d think, what am I supposed to do?
Find a street runner, pen a polite little note on scented stationery?
‘Dearest Lord Abuser, thank you ever so for the kind invitation to reminisce about the good old days when you treated me like a party favor. Can’t wait!
XOXO, Your Former Whore.’ And I knew in my head that that’s not what it was, that it was the plan, not a surrender, but that’s not how it felt. ”
He saw the flinch in Miles’s eyes, the sudden fracture in that intellectual armor.
“I didn’t freeze you out,” Gabriel whispered, the anger draining away to leave him hollow. “I froze up . And I didn’t tell you because I thought eventually I’d get past the resistance and get it done.”
Miles stared at him. The silence stretched, but this time it wasn’t a weapon; it was a wound.
“I...” Miles started, then stopped. He looked at his hands, then at the ledgers, and finally back at Gabriel. The rigidity left his shoulders, leaving him looking slumped and tired. “I didn’t know it was... that bad. I thought that you didn’t trust me to handle him. ”
“I trust you with my life,” Gabriel said softly. “Just not always with my feelings. You have a habit of trying to fix them before I’ve finished feeling them.”
Miles let out a long, shaky breath. He reached out, his fingers finding the lapel of Gabriel’s coat, twisting into the fabric.
“I itemize,” he admitted, his voice rough.
“I know I do. Because if I stop to feel how terrified I am that I’m going to lose you to this place, or to Vellast, or to the Crown.
.. I won’t be able to cast a single spell.
” He looked up, and the raw vulnerability in his face made Gabriel’s chest ache.
“I only wish you had just talked to me rather than let it keep building. I know I make that hard sometimes, but I had hoped by now… Well. I suppose it’s unfair to chide you for not talking to me while I’m doing the same.
I’m sorry I reacted how I did. That we went to bed mad. ”
Gabriel covered Miles’s hand with his own, pressing it against his chest. “And I’m sorry I let you think you were fighting alone. I should have told you I couldn’t do it. I just... didn’t want to disappoint you.”
“You couldn’t,” Miles said fiercely. He pulled Gabriel in, burying his face in the crook of Gabriel’s neck. “Never. But I need to know. Are we still on the same page, with the plan?”
He let his eyes close, breathing in the scent of sandalwood and old paper that clung to Miles. “Yes. Of course we are.”
Probably. He had a feeling that the ultimate solution to Vellast was not going to be as neat as Miles would like. But they’d deal with that when the time came.
“We should—” Miles began, pulling back toward the ledgers, likely about to suggest a procedural transition back to inventory.
A sharp, high-pitched yelp tore through the quiet.
Miles exchanged a startled glance with Gabriel and then whipped off his glasses as they bolted toward the sound, boots skidding on the parquet floor, Nikka’s rapid footsteps echoing behind them.
They nearly collided with Genna as she stumbled out of Madaze’s office.
She clutched her left hand tight against her sternum, her face pale and pinched with pain.
“Genna?” Miles rushed to her side.
“The bookcase,” Genna hissed through gritted teeth. She shoved her hand toward them. The tips of her fingers were throbbing red, scraping toward purple, already swelling. “I found the catch for the passage. I barely touched it.”
“Let me see.” Miles reached for her hand .
“It didn’t just lock,” Genna accused, glaring at the ceiling with genuine venom. “It bit me. It slammed shut the second my fingers were in the way. It knew what I was doing.”
Gabriel looked through the door into the office. The curtains hung innocent and still. The house had let them be all morning. But the second Genna reached for that hidden catch to the attic stairs? It slammed shut on her fingers like a bear trap.
Genna fished with her uninjured hand in the deep pockets of her apron, which Gabriel knew wasn’t just a layer of protection against spills.
The pockets were structured, reinforced, and held vials and dried bundles in specific, reachable locations.
It was a caster’s coat disguised as domestic wear, a secretive little piece of practicality that suited her.
He approved and thought wistfully of the coat he longed to make for Miles.
One day. After all this nonsense was behind them.
Genna pulled out a small tin, its lid embossed with a botanical pattern.
“Give me that,” Miles said, reaching for it.
“I can manage,” Genna muttered, but she handed it over anyway, her free hand shaking too much to open the container.
Gabriel watched Miles fret over Genna’s hand, his irritation with the hedge-witch warring with his inherent need to fix things.
While Miles played nursemaid, applying the salve while Genna criticized his technique, Gabriel’s gaze drifted. The drama of Genna’s crushed fingers was compelling, sure, but Nikka Brightly had gone unnervingly still.
She was crouched near the ground, nose uncomfortably close to the dark, crusted outline where Madaze’s skeleton had been until Gabriel had kicked it to pieces when he and Miles had first returned to the house.
She wasn’t looking at the group. She was scratching at the stain with the wooden handle of her brush, frowning as flakes of black dust drifted up.
“It’s wrong,” Nikka said, her voice cutting through Miles’s murmurs of reassurance.
“The other spots—where the mercenaries fell—that’s your standard biological soup.
In this damp, after six months? You get corpse wax.
Grave soap. It’s nasty, greasy work to lift.
” She looked up, her magnified eyes blinking behind the thick lenses.
“But this? It’s too dry. No fat breakdown.
It’s like spilled ink, not a decomposing body. ”
Miles’s head snapped up, his internal academic overriding his bedside manner.
“Why hadn’t I questioned that? His body was different, skeletal when we found him.
He was a vampire, Nikka. The Guild literature on vampires remains essential nonexistent.
They’re killed on site and burned. No one studies the bodies. There’s no baseline—”
In his eagerness to examine the stain firsthand, he shifted, his elbow knocking sharply against Genna’s swelling knuckles.
Genna hissed, jerking back, face twisting. “Miles!”
“Sorry! But if Nikka is correct, the decomposition process must be different for—”
“Of course it’s different,” Genna snapped, the pain clearly eroding her usual iron-clad filter. “The quantity of Veil a vampire is attempting to balance consumes the—”
She stopped.
The silence that followed slammed into the room harder than the bookcase had slammed on her hand. Miles froze, his mouth half-open. Even Nikka looked up from her stain, eyes wide.
Genna looked around the circle of faces, her eyes widening as she realized what she’d let slip.
Well, well, well. What had Genna been up to that she knew so very much about vampires? Vampires balancing Veil ? Genna could sense the undead, identify them even, but she’d just spouted technical jargon from a discipline Miles had just said didn’t exist.
The color drained from her face, leaving the stark white streak in her hair looking even brighter against her pale skin. She shoved her injured hand back toward Miles, aggressive and obviously desperate to shatter the moment.