“But how would he do that?” She directed her question to the floor; her head felt too heavy to lift. “Steal our power?”
The Priest Exalted’s scarred face was nearly pitying. “Killing you at the moment of totality, when the moon fully covers the sun. When the powers of life and death can be wielded together.” His eye glinted. “When chosen vessels are made manifest.”
“No.” Bastian and Gabe said it at the same time, their voices harmonizing against the marble walls. Lore’s head came up; the two men looked at each other with naked hatred, all that complicated feeling finally alchemized into something blade-sharp.
“He won’t kill Lore.” Gabe tore his gaze away from Bastian to look at Anton instead. “You said—”
“Peace, son.” Calm words, but Anton’s voice snapped. Gabe flinched. “Lore will be perfectly safe.”
“It still seems like the best course of action would be to hide her until the eclipse is over.” Gabe stepped up, a determined tilt to his chin; he expected another reason to flinch, and wanted to keep it from happening this time. He said nothing about Bastian’s safety. “Keep her here, or send her to her mothers.”
Mari and Val. Calling them her mothers, even now that he knew her true origins, felt like some kind of absolution.
But Anton shook his head before Gabe finished speaking. “It won’t work. We need things to continue as if we have no idea what August is planning, to keep him from getting suspicious.”
“So we go to this damn ball as if nothing has happened,” Bastian said, looking at Lore, “and we trust that you’ll keep my father from killing us and starting a war.”
Skepticism ran deep furrows in the words.
“You,” Anton murmured, “have no idea of all the things I’ve stopped your father from doing, Bastian. All the things I’ve shielded you from.”
It was enough to break his gaze away from Lore’s. The Sun Prince looked, for the first time since she’d met him, completely at a loss.
“Now then.” Anton turned to Gabe, as if the matter was concluded. “The ball is in two days. I suggest you all get plenty of rest before then, as it’s bound to be a long night. Lore, you stay in your rooms. Gabriel will take you there and keep guard.”
Keep her prisoner. Make sure she didn’t escape. Lore wished she had the energy to attempt it anyway, but she didn’t. The last few days had reached inside her and clawed everything out.
“Bastian,” Anton said, turning back around. “I think it best if you stay here.”
A bark of harsh laughter. “There it is.” Bastian sat back in his chair, shook his wrists so his chains clanked. “So I’m a prisoner now?”
“Think of it as being a guest,” Anton said.
Bastian didn’t respond, but his eyes glittered a cold, violent promise.
“I will keep you safe, nephew,” Anton murmured, almost reverently. “Everything will be revealed in time.”
Lore didn’t know what that meant. It looked like Bastian didn’t, either. She let Gabe unlock her chains, let him lead her silently to the door.
When she looked back, day had fully broken in the window behind Bastian, casting his features in shadow, limning their edges gold. It illuminated him like rays around a sun, like a halo.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Sometimes, you can see love coming. And when it takes a different path, you should be thankful.
—Fragment from the work of Marya Addou, Malfouran poet
The walk back to their apartments was silent. Gabe stayed behind her, a one-eyed shadow dogging her steps and making sure she went where she was supposed to. She no longer wore chains, but it was the first time Lore had truly felt like a prisoner in the Citadel.
Their room was locked. Lore had the key half fitted in the door before Gabe stepped up beside her. “It won’t work.” His voice was low. “Anton had the lock changed.”
She looked at him and said nothing. There was nothing to say.
Gabe swallowed. He unlocked the door with a key he produced from his pocket, then stepped aside to let her in first.
The apartments felt strange now—foreign and ill fitting, where before they’d been as close to comfortable as she could find here. Especially knowing Anton had changed the lock sometime after she left last night. Myriad hells, he’d probably had someone waiting in the halls, watching for her to leave so they could immediately set to work.
Because Gabe told him. Gabe told him everything.
Her wrists felt raw. The iron had made them itch. Lore rubbed and rubbed at them, trying to force the feeling out of her skin, trying to make it stop—
Gentle pressure, Gabe’s fingers interposed where hers had been. “Lore, you’re going to hurt yourself—”
It’d been the truth when she told Gabe and Bastian that she was no good at brawling, but instinct made do. Lore snatched her wrist from Gabe’s hand and struck out with the heel of her opposite palm, smacking him in the shoulder, pushing him off balance and away.
“Don’t touch me,” she snarled. “Don’t fucking touch me.”
He stared at her, one blue eye wide. His jaw clenched beneath the reddish stubble on his chin. “I was trying to keep you safe.”
“By going to the very person we knew was lying?”
“He’s on our side! You heard everything I just did, you know that Anton is working against August!”
“But you didn’t.” Her fingers went back to her wrist again, itching, itching. “You had no idea what Anton was involved in, and it’s pure stupid luck you didn’t get all three of us murdered!”
“It was either that or watch you go to a far more likely murder in the damn catacombs!” Gabe ran his hands over his close-shorn hair, turned away. “I wanted him to stop you from going down there at all. Both of you. That seemed like a much more pressing matter than playing politics—”
“It’s more than playing politics! If we’d been right, if Anton and August were still on the same side, Bastian might’ve—”
“Forgive me,” Gabe cut in, nearly a snarl. “I forgot that one must always be thinking of Bastian first.”
“Save it,” Lore hissed. “We both know what happened here. You got overwhelmed with the thought that maybe, just once, you were wrong about something. You got scared.”
Gabe’s hands twitched back and forth to almost-fists. Instinct had ahold of him, too, and it told him to defend the man who’d stepped in when his father bled out. “Whatever side Anton was on,” he said, “I knew that would be the right one.”
She laughed, high and harsh. “Gods, Gabe, you’re like a kicked dog going back to the damn boot. Anton took you in because he hallucinated that a vanished god told him to. He doesn’t love you. He never has. He’s not your father, no matter what the Church wants you to call him.”