A gleam in his eye; he understood despite her fumbling. Bastian shrugged, turning back around. “I,” he said decisively, “am coping.” He pulled something gleaming from his pocket—a flask, tipped quickly into his mouth, then passed back to her without looking.
Lore took it. Sniffed just enough to make sure there was no whiff of poison, then sipped. Whiskey, strong enough to make her nearly cough. “That’s quite the method of coping.”
“Better than it could be.” Bastian took the flask back. The corridor branched; he took the left one, gleaming marble. “Stay close to the wall. There’s a long pool in the middle of the floor all the way down this hall.”
“Who thought that was a good idea?”
“Some ancestor of mine with too much money and too little taste. So really, it could’ve been any of them.”
The questionable corridor ended, widening into an atrium filled with night-blooming flowers beneath a domed glass ceiling. It was beautiful, and Bastian slowed his pace. Lore allowed it. She was in no rush.
A few of the flowers she recognized—hellebore, the color of dried blood. Datura, climbing up a wooden trellis to open twisting blooms to the moon. Poisons she knew, poisons that anyone outside of the Citadel would be arrested for growing, and here they were just decoration.
“My father is a bad man.”
She turned away from the hellebore—Bastian wasn’t looking at her, instead standing with his hands in his pockets and his head tilted up to the moon, like he was some night-blooming poison himself. “That makes it easier,” he said quietly. “Easier to deal with the fact that he wants me dead. Maybe it makes me good, even.” A snort, his eyes closing as his head tipped back further. “The Law of Opposites, right? If a bad man wants me dead, that makes me good. In the most technical sense.”
It didn’t seem like a conversation that wanted another participant. Lore just watched him, smelling sweet poison and tracing the lines of his face with her eyes. Far too handsome, she’d thought before, but in the moonlight, Bastian was the kind of beautiful that rent hearts in half.
The air around him almost seemed to glimmer, gold dust in the dark. Moonlight made him more beautiful, yes, but in the same way that darkness emphasized a flame. He didn’t belong in it; Bastian Arceneaux was antithetical to night.
“My mother wasn’t good, either,” she murmured.
His eyes slid her way, a subtle invitation to continue, but Bastian kept his face toward the sky.
“After I was born—after all the Night Sisters realized what I could do—she stayed distant. I don’t remember her ever touching me with any kind of affection.” The razored lump in her throat that Alie’s embrace had risen tried to return. She swallowed, again, rubbed at her neck like she could physically force it away. “By that point, she was totally devoted to the Sisters. To their mission, to keeping the Buried Goddess from ever rising again.”
Go, she’d said, pushing Lore out into stabbing daylight while her palm still ached from her branding, a bird shoving a fledgling from a nest. Maybe not totally devoted, then. But enough.
“Something about me…” Here, Lore’s voice broke, and she paused until it mended itself. “Something about me was wrong. Something about me went against everything she’d dedicated her life to.”
She didn’t realize she was staring at her moon-scarred hand until it was covered by Bastian’s. He’d crossed to her, shadow-silent, and closed his fingers around hers. She could feel the lines of his scar against her own, the now-healed runnels of half a sun.
“I get it,” Lore murmured, staring at their hands. “People are different, and just because you’re related to someone doesn’t mean you’re good for each other. But she was all I had, and she looked at me like I was a monster.” Lore closed her eyes, briefly, took a breath. Looked up at him. “But even she didn’t want me dead. She saved me. Took me to the mouth of the catacombs when the rest of the Sisters wanted to send me into the Buried Goddess’s tomb.”
The corner of his mouth lifted, a shaky smile. “That’s something.”
They stood in the atrium for a handful of heartbeats, hands entwined, her scar against his. In the corner of Lore’s eye, something like fog twisted around them, a dance of darkness and gold, glitter blown into smoke. But maybe it was just lurking tears she wouldn’t let fall; when she tried to focus on the strange shimmering, it disappeared.
“Well,” Bastian said finally. “We aren’t dead yet.” He dropped her hand and started forward, toward the door of the atrium.
Wordlessly, Lore followed.
Past the atrium, Bastian led her down a flight of narrow stairs, and after that, the corridors slowly became more familiar. They’d wound their way to the main floor, headed toward the front of the Citadel rather than the back. Lore heard courtiers, giggles and soft voices and lovers’ moans, but they didn’t see anyone.
Not until the bloodcoat appeared at the end of the hallway.
Bastian was quick; he grabbed her arm and pulled her toward a recessed alcove framing a window. There wasn’t a curtain to draw over it, nor were there any on the other alcoves close by.
“Shit,” Lore hissed. “Shit shit shit.”
“Hold your smuggler’s tongue.” Bastian’s back pressed against the alcove’s arch; he looked around, measuring the distance between them and the guard. His eyes swung back to her, dark and serious. “We will get by him, but you have to follow my lead.”
“Fine, lead on.”
“Kiss me.”
Her eyes widened. The booted steps of the guard drew closer.
“Oh, come on,” Bastian muttered, rolling his eyes even as he grabbed her arm, tugged her forward, and sealed his lips to hers.
Lore made a small noise in her throat before she realized Bastian wasn’t really kissing her. Sure, their mouths were pressed together, but he didn’t move, didn’t try to deepen this light and technical embrace. His hand curled around her hip, the other bracketing her wrist, still held in the air from where he’d pulled her.
Slowly, Lore let her hand settle on his shoulder, realizing what this was, what he was doing. Two courtiers trysting in the hall at midnight would be a common sight, nothing to raise hackles. The guard would walk right by them.
Bastian angled his head so their faces were hidden from the hall, the curls of his dark hair falling against her cheek. His lips broke from hers, though they were still close enough to brush when he spoke. “There’s our poison runner,” he said softly. “Thinking on her feet.”
His breath tasted like mint leaves. His every exhale became her inhale. He was too much, too close, inescapable, and the damn guard was walking so slow.
Boots approached. Passed. Not even a pause. Lore and Bastian waited in the alcove, pressed together edge-to-hollow, breathing the same air until she felt light-headed. Their faces were too close for her to see his expression in anything but pieces, but she could see the bend of his grin, and it was near-feral.
When the boots didn’t echo anymore, Bastian leaned away, head lolling against the wall. His hands stayed on her hips. “Ready?”