14. Paray Vellast #3
Vellast, seizing the distraction, was edging toward a side door. His earlier confidence had evaporated with the loss of his hostage and the death of his men, leaving behind naked terror .
Miles didn’t hesitate. The incantation came easily, power coursing through him from the stone he grasped in his pocket. He extended his other hand toward the fleeing lord.
Vellast’s body went rigid mid-step, arms locked at his sides, one foot still raised. Only his eyes moved, darting wildly in terror.
The spear-wielding guard, hearing Miles chant the words of a spell, made a fatal mistake: he glanced away from Gabriel. Gabriel seized his moment, driving one of his daggers deep into the man’s throat.
The two remaining guards, seeing their comrades fallen and their employer immobilized, abandoned their posts. They charged toward the main door where Miles stood.
They never made it. Genna appeared in the doorway behind Miles, her face gray and terrible. She flung a mixture of herbs and ground minerals with both hands, her spell sending each fistful at the faces of her targets.
Genna’s spell slammed into the fleeing guards, sending them sprawling across the polished floor. She left them unconscious but alive—a mercy they perhaps didn’t deserve.
“Took you long enough to rescue me.” Genna leaned against the doorframe. Despite her bravado, Miles could see she was still recovering from whatever Vellast’s men had done to her. “I was beginning to think you’d forgotten about me completely.”
Miles surveyed the wreckage of what had once been an opulent office.
Vellast’s desk had partially collapsed under the weight of a guard Gabriel had thrown across it.
Papers and ledgers covered the floor, some stained with spreading pools of blood.
His own staff lay atop the mess, miraculously intact despite its hard usage while its magic was inactive.
His gaze returned to Vellast, still frozen in mid-escape by his spell, eyes swiveling frantically in their sockets, the only part of him capable of movement. He reminded Miles of a particularly loathsome insect pinned to a collector’s board.
“What shall we do with our esteemed Lord?” Miles asked, bending to retrieve his staff from the debris. He wanted the familiar weight to calm him, to help temper the rage still coursing through his veins.
It didn’t .
Gabriel prowled across the room. Blood—not his own—spattered his armor and streaked across one pale cheek. He circled Vellast like a mountain lion considering its next meal.
“Perhaps you should release him, Miles,” Gabriel suggested with deceptive lightness. “I’d like to see if Lord Vellast can run as fast as he can talk.”
Miles nodded, releasing the spell with a subtle gesture. Vellast collapsed immediately, his previously frozen muscles giving way. He scrambled backward on his hands and knees toward his desk, putting as much distance between himself and Gabriel as possible.
“Please,” Vellast gasped, his aristocratic bearing gone. “I have wealth—connections—anything you want—”
“Anything?” Gabriel’s voice was soft, almost thoughtful. “I’m not sure if I’m significant enough to have such power at my disposal. After all, I was just a toy, wasn’t I? So insignificant you couldn’t even remember me.”
Vellast’s face twisted with desperate hope. “That was just talk—I didn’t mean—”
“As riveting as your groveling is,” Gabriel interrupted, “I thought you should know that those documents you’re so concerned about have already been turned over.
Your diamonds are beyond your reach in the Crown’s treasury.
Your little empire is being dismantled as we speak.
” His smile was sharp as a blade. “We’ll see who the insignificant one is when it’s done. ”
Something hardened in Vellast’s expression, a final surge of defiance as he rose to his knees. “Turned over? I have the City Watch in my pocket. Whatever evidence you think you have—”
“Oh dear,” Gabriel cut him off with theatrical concern.
“The Watch? Whatever shall we do?” He pressed a hand to his chest in mock distress before his expression turned coldly amused.
“We weren’t stupid enough to go to the Watch, Vellast. The Order of the Unwritten is considerably less corruptible and better connected than your average underpaid civil servant.
Their actions and ours will be covered by the ample evidence with which I have provided them.
You’re going to die tonight, and no one will care. ”
Vellast’s face crumpled. He slumped forward, his hands grasping uselessly at the rug, a high, keening sound escaping his throat.
Miles’s blood pounded in his ears, waiting for the strike. End him. He needed the finality of it. The logical conclusion to the equation. But the killing blow didn’t fall. Gabriel just stared down at the weeping lord, the adrenaline in his eyes fading into a dull, glazed boredom.
Gabriel turned away from Vellast, apparently satisfied with having delivered his message. The shift was jarring. His rage had transformed into dismissal. Vellast no longer mattered enough to warrant his attention.
“You’re not just leaving him, are you?” Genna asked, surprise evident in her voice. She leaned heavily against the doorframe, still recovering but alert enough to question their next move.
“He’s done.” Gabriel sounded disappointed. “Look at him. The fun’s gone out of it.”
“Lost your nerve?” Genna scoffed, wincing as she pushed off the doorframe. “If you won’t finish this, I will.” She reached into her apron, eyes hard.
“It’s not nerve.” Gabriel holstered his dagger. “It’s... honestly, it’s unsanitary. Look at him. He’s a snot-slicked ruin. I came here to kill a monster, not put down a weeping geriatric. Let the Regent deal with the paperwork. I’m tired.”
Miles looked. Gabriel was right; Vellast was a pathetic puddle. The terrifying predator of the last week had dissolved. Miles thought Genna might be right. Gabriel had no stomach for killing the helpless. He’d lost the momentum of his rage.
That was the way of Gabriel’s storms. They broke the sky, drowned the world, and then vanished into bright, startling sunshine the moment the wind changed. He had said his piece. He had drawn blood. He was empty.
But Miles was not empty.
Miles was full. He was full of every threat Vellast had made, every bruise on Genna’s face, every year of torment Gabriel had carried in silence. Miles didn’t have a storm’s mercy. He had a glacier’s inevitable, crushing weight.
His rage hadn’t cooled at all. Vellast’s words about Gabriel—about what he had done to him—echoed in his mind. Vellast’s contemptuous dismissal of Gabriel as insignificant, as forgettable.
His beloved, reduced to a thing to be used and hurt and forgotten.
Vellast wasn’t his to kill, but the rage demanded a tithe. Before he fully realized what he was doing, Miles strode forward, his staff still clutched in his hand. He had to do something, had to give some of the pain this man had inflicted back to him .
He reached Vellast in three quick steps. Vellast looked up at him, confusion mixing with lingering fear. “What are you—”
Miles’s palm connected with Vellast’s shoulder, shoving him backward hard. Vellast lost his balance and fell back, his head connecting with the sharp corner of his collapsed desk with a wet crack.
The room went silent. Vellast slumped sideways, his eyes open but vacant, a dark stain spreading beneath his head.
Miles stared at his hand as if it belonged to someone else.
“Shit.”
Genna’s eyes had widened to an almost comical degree. Even Gabriel looked momentarily taken aback, before a slow smile spread across his face.
“This is really getting to be a nasty habit of yours,” Gabriel said, stepping closer to examine Vellast’s now-still form. He nudged him with the toe of his boot, confirming what they all already knew. “But I must say... I like it.”
Miles exhaled slowly, the magnitude of what he had just done beginning to sink in. “I didn’t exactly plan that.”
“Clearly,” Genna muttered, pushing away from the doorframe to join them. “But you should have.”
Genna limped forward and drove her heavy boot into Vellast’s ribs with a vicious, solid thud. She didn’t look the least bit sorry.
“Better late than never,” she rasped.
Miles stared at the spreading pool of crimson.
It was remarkably bright against the dark wood of the floor, shimmering in the light of the unbroken chandelier.
He felt a strange detachment, like he was viewing the scene through the wrong end of a spyglass.
He hadn’t incinerated the man with a fireball or flung him across the room with a kinetic burst. He’d just… shoved.
“Well,” Gabriel said, breaking the heavy silence with a tone that suggested he was critiquing a mildly disappointing appetizer. “I suppose we won’t be getting a trial after all. Back to Plan A, then. Much tidier.”
Genna blinked, wiping a smear of blood from her forehead. “Oh, don’t be ridiculous. Trial. Where do you think we are?”
Miles finally found his voice. It sounded rusty, foreign to his own ears. “He deserved it.”
He believed it. But he didn’t believe that was why he had done it.
The rage had been a physical thing, a coiled spring in his chest that had snapped.
He looked at his hand again. No magic burned there.
Just skin and bone and a sudden, terrifying capacity for clumsy violence.
He was a scholar. A caster. He wasn’t supposed to be the one cracking skulls on desk corners. Or with wine bottles.
What was this city doing to him?
Genna looked around at the unconscious guards and the corpse with the weary eye of someone who’d recently spent a day hauling bodies. “What do we do with the refuse?”
Gabriel sheathed his daggers with a decisive snap. “I’m done being the janitor. Not my house, not my trash. Viz wanted him dead, and he’s dead. The cover-up is his problem.”
“We just... leave him?” Miles asked, looking from his partner to the dead lord. It felt sloppy. It felt wrong. But they’d been given no orders to the contrary.
“We leave him,” Gabriel said, offering Miles a hand that was steady and warm. “We’ve done our part. Come on. Let’s go pay our sellswords and get Genna home before Bria puts a hit out on us.”
Miles hesitated, then took the offered hand. The warmth anchored him, pulling him back from the ledge of his own guilt. They walked out of the ruined office, leaving Lord Vellast staring vacantly at the ceiling.