15. Mourning Rooms #2
“Then you’re human.” Gabriel slid from the couch to unsure footing on the plush carpet, kneeling between Miles’s spread knees. He reached up, framing Miles’s face with both hands, forcing his mage to look him in the eye. “Listen to me. You didn’t execute him for sport. You reacted.”
Air stalled in Miles’s lungs, scratching its way out in a ragged, stuttering exhale. Gabriel brushed his thumbs over the rough stubble, soothing the tension radiating from the skin beneath his touch.
“He was marked for death the moment we stepped through those doors. We all knew it.” Gabriel offered a small, crooked smile. “Look. Genna was right. I’d lost my nerve.”
Gabriel huffed a soft laugh, shaking his head before continuing. “I was monologuing , darling. Venting my bile, while the opportunity grew cold. I was practically twirling a mustache I don’t have. I know! The very thing I’d accused him of earlier! ”
Miles blinked, the glassy horror in his eyes fracturing just enough to let Gabriel in.
“If you hadn’t moved, Genna would have,” Gabriel said, trying to convey his certainty in his tone. “She would have ended him before I finished my next sentence. One of us had to do it.”
Miles pulled back, his jaw tight. “He was groveling on the floor, Gabriel. Defenseless.” He stared past Gabriel at the suffocating violet drapes. “You said it yourself. We could have pushed for a trial. Maybe you were right. Maybe I took the coward’s way out.”
Gabriel leaned in, pressing his forehead against the bridge of Miles’s nose. “No, darling. I was wrong and making excuses. He was a monster, Miles. He hurt me. He hurt Genna. And he would have gone on hurting people until someone made him stop. And that was never going to be Averdon.”
“I know. I know.”
They held there a moment, and Gabriel knew Miles hadn’t said the worst of it. What was really bothering him. He waited.
“It felt good,” Miles whispered, the confession torn out of him. “For a second. Watching him fall.”
“Good.” Gabriel looked up to meet Miles’s eyes and ran his thumbs over his cheekbones, feeling the tense clench in his jaw.
“Maybe your feelings ran away with you, but you were there, in that moment because of me. You took that burden for me, Miles. And I want the man who gets angry enough to shove a Lord into a desk because he insulted his future husband. I will never regret the things I do for you. I hope you don’t regret what you do for me. ”
Miles let out a shuddering breath, his forehead dropping to rest against Gabriel’s. The tension in his frame didn’t vanish, but it shifted, changing from brittle glass to something more pliable. His arms wound tight around Gabriel’s back, clinging to him.
“I’ve got you,” Gabriel whispered against his mouth. “You cleaned up my messes all week. Let me carry this one.”
He kissed him then, a press of lips that was a claiming and a forgiveness all at once.
Miles kissed back, holding on as if Gabriel were the only solid thing in a world of ghosts and murderers.
In the quiet of the dead room, surrounded by the scent of heavy flowers, they breathed each other in, alive and victorious .
The slam of the corridor door broke the heavy silence. Gabriel pulled back, regretting the loss of contact. They pulled themselves to their feet and stepped from the velvet gloom just as Viz Gardmore’s skeletal frame filled the inner doorway.
But Viz wasn’t alone. Behind him, the hallway was filling with a sea of huddled shapes.
Viz halted, his magnified eyes widening like a startled owl’s. The surprise curdled into a severe frown at the trespassing. Then Viz sighed and shrugged, his weariness showing for once.
“I assume you’re here to gloat or confess,” Viz rasped. He looked past Gabriel, scanning the room as if checking for corpses.
“Waiting for the score, actually.” Gabriel nodded toward the crowd shuffling in behind the undertaker: two dozen people at least, smelling of damp cellars and fear. Hands of the Order shepherded them, their faces weary. “Looks like you cleared the board.”
“This isn’t the half of it.” Viz ran a gloved hand over his bald pate. “Averdon has no place for people liberated from this sort of trade, and there were far more than anticipated. We’re bursting at the seams. What a mess.”
Gabriel watched a young woman staring blankly at the velvet drapes. Shit. He knew that look.
The hollow stares and flinching postures weren’t just strangers; they were a hall of mirrors reflecting the boy he used to be. The phantom scent of cheap cologne choked him, dragging him back to the dark.
No. Gabriel bit his cheek until the sharp tang of copper grounded him.
He forced the panic back into its box. Beside him, Miles was still trembling, haunted by his own violence just minutes ago.
It was Gabriel’s turn to be the steady one.
Gabriel straightened his spine. His breakdown would have to wait.
Why hadn’t he anticipated this problem? He’d been so focused on defeating Vellast that the people they’d free in the process had been vague, theoretical shapes that had rarely crossed his mind.
Oh, the hypocrisy.
“Speaking of messy,” Gabriel said, forcing a lighter tone. “You’ll need to send a crew to Halebourne. The master of the house had a nasty fall. He’s currently cluttering up the study. ”
Viz didn’t blink. “I have a team moving between the sites. They’ll divert to the Spires when they can. We’ll be sending a lot of bodies downriver over the next few nights.” He sighed, the sound rattling in his chest. “Go home, Gabriel. You’ve made quite enough work for me tonight.”
Miles stood, swaying slightly on his feet. He looked at the refugees with that specific I-must-fix-society look Gabriel knew too well.
“Viz, do you need—” Miles started.
“No,” Gabriel cut in, grabbing Miles’s arm.
The sheer scale of the misery in the hallway was a riptide, and they were barely treading water as it was.
Averdon had no systems for this—no shelters, no aid—outside the Order’s shadow network.
It was a disaster. But it was a disaster they couldn’t solve while leaning against each other to stay upright.
They’d started their day being attacked in their beds and ended it with a flat-out battle.
They had no more to give right now. “We’re leaving. Come on.”
He steered Miles past the dazed line of survivors, out into the cool, damp air of the street. The guilt nipped at his heels, but exhaustion bit harder. They trudged back toward the Bent and the promise of a bed at the Mourning Lark, leaving the wreckage of their victory for the morning.
A weary walk later, the darkness of their room felt heavier than the weighted blanket Miles had insisted on dragging from the wardrobe. Beside him, Miles lay in a stillness that wasn’t sleep, his breathing too shallow, his body a rigid line of heat against Gabriel’s side.
Gabriel stared up at the invisible ceiling, but all he saw was the terrified shuffle of the refugees in Viz’s hallway. And behind them, the rippling walls of Rookgate Manor, turning cream and blue because Gabriel had expressed a passing distaste for red.
Slaves upon slaves upon slaves. He’d been freed. He’d freed others like him, for whatever good that might do them. But Rookgate remained captive to his whims.
Gabriel wanted badly to let it go for now, to follow the advice he’d given Miles and take the win for the day, to leave it until morning. But a part of him couldn’t take his rest without confessing.
Damn him. Miles and his insistence on communication was going to be the death of them both.
“It was begging,” Gabriel whispered. “The house. ”
Miles shifted, the mattress groaning. “It’s traumatized, Gabriel. Like—” He cut himself off, but the silence filled in the blank. Like you.
“It’s not past trauma. It’s still enslaved,” Gabriel corrected, the distinction sharp in his chest. “It shifted the walls, moved the furniture, ate the assassins... it wasn’t loyalty.
It was fawning. It was the frantic, desperate scramble to be useful, so the master doesn’t get the whip.
” He rolled onto his side, facing Miles in the dark.
“I can’t do it, Miles. I can’t hand the deed to some climb-hungry merchant who’ll figure out he can scream at the floorboards to get what he wants. ”
Miles’s hand found Gabriel’s in the space between them, his fingers tangling tight. “If you keep it, you have to keep the title.”
“I have to keep it.” The realization sat on Gabriel’s chest, suffocating. “I have to find a way to be its Lord without accidentally compelling it, or I have to find a way to free it.”
They squeezed each other’s fingers tight.
They both knew the score. If Gabriel kept the house, he kept the title.
He remained Lord Fairfield. And Lord Fairfield, peer of the realm, was legally barred by the Separation Decrees from marrying a Guild-rated mage Miles Beauchamp, whatever name games Gabriel played.
Miles squeezed his hand again, a tight grip that betrayed the devastation behind his calm facade.
“We can’t just accept it,” Miles rasped, his voice cracking. “There has to be a way.”
“Velma,” Gabriel said, clutching at the name. “She saw its nature and its making. I know what she said before, but I’m going to ask again. If there’s a way, maybe she can see it too.”
“Tomorrow,” Miles agreed, pulling Gabriel’s knuckles to his lips, kissing them with a desperation that broke Gabriel’s heart. “When we take Genna to the attic. We ask Velma if a Lord can emancipate a house.”
Gabriel closed his eyes, praying the answer wasn’t no .