Cain
Aven sits on the edge of Vera's library table with one knee pressed against my thigh and the hand he scraped open during the fight resting in mine. The scrape across his knuckles is shallow, but the blood keeps welling because he won't stay still long enough for it to clot.
He's been like this since Ezra left him at the shop door with too much church still clinging to his skin, all hard breathing and locked joints and eyes that keep cutting toward exits he doesn't truly want to take.
I have a damp cloth folded between my fingers, already stained pink, and I move it over the torn skin with the care of a man cleaning glass from a wound.
Aven watches my hand for a while, silent in a way that costs him, his dark curls falling forward as the lamp throws amber light across the sharp line of his cheek.
He hasn't made a joke in nearly seven minutes.
I know because I've been counting. Letting out a small sigh, I wrap the linen around Aven's knuckles and feel him let me.
That, more than the silence, is the thing that makes my chest ache.
Aven doesn't surrender care easily. He barters with it, insults it, pretends he's allowing it only because the alternative would be inconvenient.
Tonight, he simply sits there with his shoulders rounded and his mouth pressed flat, letting me bind his hand because whatever Ezra said to him has worn through the parts of him that usually make resistance look like wit.
"There," I murmur, tucking the end of the linen beneath itself. "That should hold, provided you don't punch any more seminary architecture before dawn."
Aven's mouth shifts, the ghost of a response moving through him and dying before it reaches sound.
His gaze drops to the bandage, then to the place where my fingers still circle his wrist. The pulse there is too fast, but it's been too fast since he came in.
I press my thumb lightly beneath the bone, grounding without restraining, and for a moment he leans into the contact by the smallest possible measure.
Then his pulse stops behaving like his own.
It stutters once beneath my thumb, hard enough that I feel the break in rhythm before I see the rest of him change.
Aven's breath catches, with the controlled violence of a man who's learned to hide fear from people who might use it.
His eyes lift over my shoulder toward the dark stretch of shelves near the cartography table, and the fragile trust of his posture vanishes without his body moving an inch.
He's still sitting in front of me. His wrist is still in my hand.
Yet his attention has gone somewhere I can't follow.
I don't turn immediately. I watch him because Aven's face tells the truth long before the dead do.
The color drains from his skin in a slow pull, leaving the smudge beneath his lashes darker and the amber of his eyes too bright.
His fingers flex once against the table, scraping over the polished edge, and the fresh bandage spots red where the wound opens again under the pressure.
"Aven." I keep my voice low, but the name still seems to move through the room too sharply.
His eyes flick to mine and fail to stay there.
Whatever stands behind me hasn't startled him like an ordinary haunting.
It's taken something from him before it's said a word, and that makes every old instinct in me rise.
His throat works. "I need a second."
"No," I say, because his pulse is shaking under my thumb and because a second is what men ask for when they intend to lie kindly. "You need to tell me what's just come into this room."
He almost laughs. The shape of it tugs at his mouth, then breaks apart. Aven uses humor as a lock, a blade, a curtain, and a shield. If he can't lift it, the thing on the other side of me has already reached too far inside him.
"Not what," he says.
The distinction enters me slowly.
Aven's eyes move past me again, and anger rises through his fear, sudden and bright enough to be felt through the bond.
It's not aimed at me. Not entirely. He looks at the empty space beyond my shoulder with the expression he wears when someone has decided his pain is a useful doorway.
"Slow down," he says, and the words aren't for me.
His injured hand curls against my palm until blood seeps through the linen. "I can't give him all of that at once."
The room seems to narrow around the sentence.
I hear the small hiss of the candle on the table, the settling of a book on a shelf, the faint scrape of Aven's heel against the table leg as his body braces for something he doesn't want to carry.
A cold thread slips through the scent of dried lavender and old ink, and beneath it is salt, old stone, and a familiar metallic bite I haven't allowed myself to name in centuries.
Aven's face twists toward the empty space I can't see clearly, and the old, fractured almost-presence I knew in the tower sharpens through him into a person. "Ellis, stop."
My hand loosens around Aven's wrist. The cloth slips from my fingers and falls soundlessly against the rug.
I stand between Aven's knees, still facing him, with the name of my brother sitting in the room like a blade laid carefully on a table.
For one breath, I don't turn because turning would accept that the name belongs to the space behind me.
It doesn't. Ellis belongs to a cracked booth in Gabriel's Bar, to the place near the door where he watched everything with bitter patience and a dead man's restlessness.
Ellis belongs to the edge of the city, to the bar, to whatever life I built for him in my mind because I needed one person from my bloodline to have remained outside the tower's appetite.
Aven says my name, and the pity in it is so raw that I finally turn.
There's nothing by the cartography shelves.
Only Vera's books, the old table, the candle bending toward a draft that shouldn't exist, and shadows lying where shadows should lie.
The emptiness is ordinary enough to be cruel.
I stare at it until the shelves blur at the edges, until the dark between two rows of journals begins to look like a figure because I'm willing it to. Nothing answers that willingness.
"No," I say.
Aven moves behind me. He slides down from the table, and I hear the soft impact of his feet on the rug. He doesn't come close enough to touch me. "Cain."
"No." The second refusal is colder. It has to be. Warmth would let the truth in too quickly. "Ellis isn't here."
"He says that's exactly what you'd say."
The words are Ellis in shape if not in sound.
I close my eyes, and the library is gone for half a second.
In its place is the tower room: moonlight on stone, synthetic blood cooling in a silver cup, Ellis sprawled in the chair across from me with his boots propped where our father would have hated them.
Preservation is just a fancy word for rotting, he'd told me.
You're not a secret. You're a corpse they forgot to bury.
I open my eyes. The corner remains empty.
"He was at the bar," I say, and I hate how close the words come to pleading. "I saw him there. He watched the door. He led me there."
Aven comes into my peripheral vision. His bandaged hand is pressed to his stomach now, the blood staining the linen in a slow bloom.
His attention keeps dragging to the corner, then back to me, splitting him between the brother I can't see and the man who can't bear to believe what the room is already telling him.
"He was at the bar because I was," Aven says.
The anger in him turns brittle. "That's what he's saying.
He couldn't reach most people clearly. Most mediums would only catch pieces of him.
Priests would feel gathered divinity and call it holy residue.
I saw him as a person before I knew what I was seeing, so he stayed. "
Gathered divinity should be a phrase from the Church's mouth, not Aven's.
It shouldn't be standing in this room with Ellis's name attached to it.
My mind tries to reject the combination and fails, because the tower has already begun rearranging itself behind my eyes.
Church delegates in the lower hall. Adaro's soft laugh.
Ellis going still beneath our father's hand for one fraction of a second before he covered it with an insult.
The smell of incense layered over bloodline magic and polished wood.
I'd thought they were discussing me that night. I'd been vain enough in my suffering to believe all hunger in that house pointed toward my throat.
"How long?" I ask.
Aven looks toward the corner, and something he hears makes his shoulders pull tight. He lifts one hand slightly as if asking a dead man for space, but his fingers shake too badly for the gesture to hold any authority. "He's not giving it in order. He keeps trying to show me too much."
"Then choose one thing." The command leaves me before I can soften it. It's unfair, and I know it the moment Aven flinches, but I have nothing gentle left to offer the bridge while the abyss opens beneath us.
His jaw sets. For one moment, all the pity leaves him, and only the anger remains. It steadies him more than mercy would have. "Adaro sold him."
The room doesn't change. The candle burns. The shelves hold. Aven stands beside me with blood on his hand, and Adaro’s name moves through the library like a door opening below water.
"To the Church," Aven says, because Ellis isn't done and neither of them will spare me.
"A private arrangement. Ellis says Adaro handed him over because once Adaro disowned him, he had enough bloodline power to be useful and no standing left to protect him.
They called it a transfer. He says they made it sound clean. "