“I’m looking for the bodies,” she murmured. “With or without you.”
“Just you and Bastian, huh?” It came out like he’d wanted it to be flippant; instead, it sounded half breathless. “Good luck with that.”
“Oh, I don’t think getting lucky will be a problem.”
Gabe made a low noise, then sat forward, wiping his hand over his face. A heartbeat, then he looked at her. “If the bodies are being hidden somewhere, what does that even prove?”
The tension of the previous moments dissipated; words no longer seemed to have double, heat-filled meanings. “Lots of things, probably, that we won’t really know until we see where the bodies are and what they’ve done to them. But for now, it just means we can’t trust August or Anton. It means everything they’ve told us about the bodies, about Kirythea—we can’t trust any of it.”
At the sound of Anton’s name, Gabe closed his eye, and she felt a pang of sympathy. It hurt, carving out trust from places it had lived so long. Even if it had been manipulated into you.
Gabe stared at the carpet between his boots. “What about what happened when you tried to call Mortem with Bastian in the room?” He glanced at her, morning light reflecting off his reddish-gold hair. “Are we going to talk about that, Lore?”
He said it almost like an accusation.
“We can. But I don’t know what it means.” She sighed, rubbed at her tired eyes. “I tried to call Mortem when he first pulled me away from the ring. It was impossible. When he was touching me, I could barely sense it at all.”
His brows drew low. “I couldn’t sense it in the vault, either. Maybe something about him being an Arceneaux repels it, somehow.”
“But I’ve never had that problem around August or Anton.” Just Bastian, who didn’t want to be an Arceneaux at all.
Gabe’s expression darkened. “He could be using some kind of stolen elemental power to—”
But Lore was already shaking her head. “No one has had that kind of power in generations. And if Bastian had any means of consciously repelling Mortem, he’d be using it to help Auverraine.”
Here was one more thing she just knew, one more place where she needed his trust but had no means to explain why she deserved it. Gabe angled his head so she couldn’t see his eye, just the patch over the empty socket, the harsh line of his jaw. His stubble had grown in.
“We can look in the Church library,” he said finally. “Anything about the Arceneaux line and their effect on Mortem should be in there. And if we find nothing, we’ll know it’s something Bastian is doing on his own.”
It seemed to comfort him, this idea that they might be able to find some blame to pin on the prince. A concrete plan that would tell him whether he could trust his childhood friend.
Lore nodded. “We’ll go look.”
“And we’ll look for the bodies, too.” Gabe said it like a concession. “But give it a couple of days. More than one person saw us leaving with Bastian last night; August will undoubtedly be summoning us soon.”
Lore nodded. She didn’t like the idea of waiting, but she couldn’t deny it was wise, especially if there was an audience with August in their immediate future.
Gabe stood, stretched. “I’m going to get some sleep.” When Lore looked pointedly to the morning-bright window, he shrugged. “Everyone else in this gods-damned court sleeps in. We might as well, too.”
He went to the threshold, stripped off his shirt, started making his pallet before the door. Lore stood in the doorway of her own room with its too-soft bed, shifting her weight from foot to foot. Then, decision a crackle of lightning, she marched across the room and flung herself down on the couch.
“Bed’s too soft,” she muttered, leaving out the part about wanting to trust him despite his words about manipulation, about feeling cast adrift, about not wanting to be alone and having only him to keep her from it. All that feeling was strained into those three words, though, and the quick look he gave her said he heard them.
Lore thought of that moment when he’d wanted her to kiss him. When she’d thought about it, when she’d decided not to. She thought about her decision to keep her true origins from him, and how nothing about the want coursing through her made her question that decision.
She thought of vows.
Gabriel sighed, then she heard the telltale signs of him bedding down against the door. Lore turned her face into the couch cushions, inhaled their scent of dust, and imagined her forest, grounding herself in her own mind so death couldn’t slip past.