Ethan was unmoved. “Fuck your place. Navarre is in financial shambles. Merit was stalked. My House was threatened. All because it took time for us to prove that connection.”
Gabriel linked his hands over the table, leaned his chest over it, toward Ethan. “You think you’re the only sup in this city allowed to take care of his own? You think your House is more important than any other family in this city? Then you’ve got it wrong. You got the information you needed. You didn’t need me to volunteer it.”
“You didn’t want the Circle’s eyes on you,” I put in.
Gabriel slid his gaze to me. “Like I said, I protect my own.”
“Your place or not, Keene, you are a son of a bitch.” Ethan rose, chair scraping across the floor.
I heard similar movements from the bar, wished I’d brought my sword inside. I hadn’t expected things to turn in this particular direction.
“That’s rich coming from you, Sullivan. Every war creates victims. You know it as well as I do. We stayed here, in Chicago, instead of going back to Aurora. That doesn’t mean I’m going to let a human piece of shit like Adrien Reed use my people against each other.”
I could see the war in Ethan’s eyes—his desire to slap Gabriel back for putting us in danger, for holding back crucial information, matched against his need to preserve whatever alliance remained between Cadogan and the NAC.
“We are allies,” Ethan said, the words slashing the air like the sharpened blade of a katana. “Or so I was led to believe.”
“My brother is dead,” Gabriel gritted out, rising to stand over the table, his fingers still splayed across it. “Which proves this asshole is as dangerous as I imagined him to be. And he was killed by a vampire. You want contrition? Think again.”
“What I want is to be able to trust someone in this goddamn town. What I want is for my vampires to have some peace and goddamn quiet. What I want is to not be stabbed in the goddamn back every time I turn around.” Ethan reached out and, with a seemingly effortless flick of his hand, tossed a chair across the room.
The door shoved open, and a very large man filled the doorway. A shifter, with thick silver hair and a scar across his left cheek. He ignored me and Ethan, looked immediately to Gabriel—to his Apex.
Gabriel’s gaze was on Ethan, and it didn’t waver.
For a full minute, they stared at each other.
“Stop! You are stopping!” The words punched through the silence, followed by a rush of Ukrainian as Berna squeezed beneath the tree-trunk arm the shifter had stretched across the doorway.
She had a white bar towel in the hand she used to point at Ethan, then Gabriel. “No fighting here. No fighting. Is rule.”
Gabriel’s gaze snapped to her. Obviously angry, he muttered something low in Ukrainian. I hadn’t heard him speak it before, and it sounded vaguely menacing in his growly and gravelly voice.
If Berna was intimidated, she hid it well. She pitched her head to the left and right, made a spitting sound that I was pretty sure was an insult. And then she leveled that gaze at Ethan.
“You make trouble in our house. Get out now before you make worse.” And then she looked at me, flipped her fingers back and forth to shoo us out of the back room. “Both of you. Out. Now.”
Ethan took a step toward the door, but glanced back at Gabriel. “We aren’t done with this conversation.”
Gabriel spread his hands, smiled toothily. “Anytime, Sullivan.”
We walked out of the bar, leaving Gabriel Keene in Little Red, and our alliance on a knife’s edge.
CHAPTER TEN
THE DECIDER
Ethan fumed in silence as we walked back to the car and drove back to Hyde Park.
His hands were white-knuckled on the steering wheel, and he pushed the car to the absolute limit. He’d taken surface streets, tested the length of every yellow light between Ukrainian Village and Hyde Park, and had nearly raced a small car with a spoiler off the line at a stoplight. The car’s driver looked at the Audi the way a man might look at a beautiful woman—with lust and wanting.
Ethan was still fuming when we pulled into the House’s parking garage. He slid the car into its slot, slammed out of the car.
“Would you like to talk before you take that enormous magical chip on your shoulder into the House?”
He turned on me. “Would I like to talk about it? Talk about what, precisely, Sentinel? The fact that our ‘ally’ knew about Reed, knew about his connection to supernaturals, and ignored it?”
“He wasn’t an ally at the time—not when Caleb joined Reed.”
“He’s a goddamn ally now,” Ethan said, “and he’s been one for months.”
“You didn’t tell him what we found at Caleb Franklin’s house. You didn’t tell him about the key.”
“And why should I? Caleb Franklin defected, and there’s no evidence the key belonged to him or, even if it did, that it has any bearing here.”
“So it’s all right if you withhold information strategically, but not if he does it?”