Chapter 4

4

GAbrIEL

I woke up feeling more rested than I had in days. It was as if something in me had finally allowed itself to settle. Evangeline was still sound asleep next to me, curled into a tight defensive ball, with her back pressed against my chest, and Pothos sprawled on top of her. I brushed her hair out of her face. Cleaning her up last night had revealed the tracery of cuts and bruises across her skin, and even thinking about them had my gut twisting with rage. I wanted to find the people who had left those marks and make them suffer for what they had dared to do.

It had taken her some time to collect herself enough to eat last night, and I hadn't been inclined to rush her. I held her as she cried, hardly able to believe that I had her back in my life, and murmured comforting nonsense to her until the sobs faded into hiccups. Slowly, between mouthfuls of broth, she'd apologized to me, barely coherent but painfully earnest. Then she'd explained what had happened to her. How the curse my father had struck her with had felt, how it had grown inside of her and strangled her common sense until everything seemed like an attack. About the trap she'd run into and the torture she'd been forced to endure, both at my father's hands and at those of others.

I had listened in silence, forcing down my growing rage and my anger at myself for not trying harder to find her. Now was not the time for my anger. Instead, I listened, letting her lay out all of the pieces on her own terms and trying to make sense of their scattered order. Finally, she had lapsed into an exhausted silence. It had taken me a while to realize she had fallen asleep still cradled in my arms. What a luxury to be allowed that. What a gift.

I wished I could recognize how I felt about finally seeing Evangeline again as simple, uncomplicated joy, but it wasn't that straightforward. Guilt bit at me. I should have realized something had happened to her sooner. If I had gone after her on that horrible night, maybe I could have prevented all of this. With the curse, she would have been furious, but at least she would have been safe. I sighed and rubbed a hand over my stinging eyes.

The dark, harsh lines of the magic-suppressing tattoo around her arm stood out starkly against her pale skin, even in the early morning gloom. The markings were ridged, and I wondered if they would flatten and fade with time, or if something in the magic would keep them looking this brutal years from now. The band of the tattoo was bisected by the colorful shapes of the bandages I'd found. On one of them, a bright orange brontosaurus smiled a vacant, toothy grin up at the ceiling. A bit of blood had seeped through and stained the area around the cartoon's mouth, making its grin more menacing than intended.

I wished desperately that I could stay in that bed, warm and secure with Evangeline pressed against me, but I had a responsibility. I hadn't protected her before, but at the very least I could care for her now. Regretfully, I eased out of the bed and crept into the kitchen.

Pothos stirred and hopped off the bed to trot after me, pausing every few steps to stretch his massive body. A slightly dusty dish of kibble stood by the kitchen island, and he began to stuff his face, purring to himself.

I glanced around the kitchen, trying to formulate a workable semblance of a plan. Evangeline would probably want coffee, but would that be acceptable for someone who had so recently been deprived of food? I should have read up on human dietary customs. I found a few cans of iced coffee in the fridge and a bit of sliced bread in the freezer. I wasn't exactly skilled in the kitchen, but I had seen movies, and I was fairly certain that sick people were fed toast and soup. The broth and congee had checked one off the list, so toast was the next step.

The toaster, although initially intimidating, turned out to be easier to use than I had feared. Luckily, Evangeline wasn't there to see how startled I was when the toast sprang up or I would never have heard the end of it. That Pothos had also jumped was some consolation, but given that he'd been in the middle of cleaning himself, I wasn't eager to group us together.

Soon, I returned to Evangeline's bedroom carrying toast, coffee, and water. Pothos wound around my legs as I walked, either out of affection, a desire to trip me, or some inscrutable feline combination of the two. As I set the drinks and toast on the side table, Pothos hopped up onto the bed and immediately claimed the spot I'd vacated. I gave him an unimpressed look, which he returned. I tried to fold myself around the cat to lie down in the sliver of space that remained and wound up halfway out of the bed, forced to brace myself with one leg on the floor.

"You're very difficult," I told Pothos. "I hope you know that."

"Aah," said Pothos.

"Yes." I nodded. "I suspected you might already be aware of the fact."

"Gnhr," Evangeline added. I wasn't sure if it was an actual attempt at human speech, but decided the reward of getting to talk to her wasn't worth the risk of waking her up. As I smoothed the blankets down where they'd ridden up at her shoulders, she rolled over and pressed her face into my chest, and we lay there together. I closed my eyes, trying to think of nothing except the feeling of having Evangeline back in my arms. It felt right in a way that terrified me. I felt more complete with her there with me, and I didn't know what I would do if I lost her again.

After an unknown time spent drifting comfortably in that soft, warm place between sleep and waking, I felt Evangeline stir and sit up. Her fingers brushed lightly over my face, tracing a path across my cheekbone, my jaw, the shape of my lips. I turned my head to the side just enough to press a kiss to her fingers, opening my eyes to look up at her.

Evangeline stared down at me. Her hair was tangled and filthy, and there was a smear of dried blood at her hairline I'd missed when I'd cleaned her up. She looked exhausted but not pained. The morning light cast a golden glow over her, and she looked like a painting of an angel or perhaps a martyred saint. Radiant, tormented, and deserving of the utmost adoration.

"Good morning," I murmured, instead of the damning, cloying sentiments that tried to force themselves from my throat. "How do you feel?"

"About as rough as I probably look," she said. I refrained from commenting. "Did you make me toast?"

"I did. I thought you would need sustenance."

"Sustenance," she echoed, lips twitching upward at the corners. "You're such a dork."

I shrugged, unrepentant, and Evangeline smiled.

"Pretty cute dork, though." She leaned down to kiss me before freezing.

"What's wrong?" Did she have some injury I'd missed? Did she simply no longer wish to kiss me?

"Nothing's wrong," she said. "I just realized that it's been, like, way too long since I brushed my teeth. I… I gotta get cleaned up. I feel super gross."

"Of course," I said, pathetically relieved that was the issue. "You should bathe."

"I bet you say that to all the girls," Evangeline grumbled.

"Not to say that you're—I mean, you, of course—it's…" I added quickly, and she snorted out a laugh. I squinted up at her. "Well. I'm glad you're feeling well enough to mess with me," I said faux-snippily, taking her hand in mine and squeezing it gently. She tangled our fingers together briefly before pulling away.

"I'm gonna shower."

"Will you—" I started, then hesitated. "May I take care of you? Not like that," I said, when she waggled her eyebrows. "Unless you'd like me to, of course. Just… bringing you food. Perhaps running you a bath after your shower."

Evangeline's expression softened. "I'd like that. But I do want to shower alone. I feel like I've got grime in places I didn't even know existed, and I wanna deal with that solo. It'd be nice to keep a little of the mystery alive, you know?"

"As you wish. But I'd find you just as enticing with no mystery at all."

She rolled her eyes at that, but her cheeks went pink.

While she washed, I stripped the sheets and remade the bed, tracked down the container of kibble, and gave Pothos fresh food, then located a slightly bruised apple and a half-full jar of peanut butter. Once the shower was completed to Evangeline's satisfaction, I heard the bath begin to fill. Apparently, I wouldn't be running it for her. Although, to be fair, when I'd offered that, I forgot baths no longer required lugging buckets of steaming water to the tub. Turning on the tap was much easier. I took the sound of the bath running as my signal to join her.

Evangeline was sitting in the tub, letting the water lap up her body. Her skin was damp and flushed a temptingly rosy pink, both from her scrubbing and the heat of the shower. I set the tray I'd assembled on the bathroom sink, and Chanel flicked open the doors of one of the cabinets, revealing a large bag of Epsom salts.

Evangeline watched me with curious, bright eyes as I moved around the small, steamed-up room, the water thundering into the tub the only sound in the room—in the world, it seemed. I held up the bag of salts, and she nodded. I dumped salts into the water, watching the distorted pink shape of Evangeline's legs against the porcelain.

Once the bath was full, I settled on the floor with the tray, cutting slices of apple and dipping them in peanut butter before handing them to Evangeline. She took each bite slowly, and I couldn't tell if she was trying to savor it or if she was holding herself back so she wouldn't overindulge and make herself sick. I let myself take scant glances at her body—the curve of her breasts, the slope of her knees where they rose out of the water—and thought perhaps I was in a similar situation myself.

Once she'd finished the apple, Evangeline drank the can of iced coffee in small sips, tracing idle patterns through the condensation on the side of the can, gathering up the droplets of water on a fingertip. I leaned back against the wall, and she reached for my hand. I stared at our fingers where they rested, tangled together on the edge of the tub.

"Thank you," she said quietly.

I didn't know what to say. It didn't feel like I'd done enough to deserve thanks. I squeezed her hand and gave her a wan smile.

"It's good to see you again," I said. It came out sounding so much bigger and rawer than the words should have been. "I?—"

There was a knock at the front door, and Evangeline tensed, her hand clenching around mine.

"I take it you aren't expecting someone," I said grimly.

She shook her head. "Haven't had much of a social calendar lately. But if Chanel let them past the front door…"

The knock sounded again, louder this time, and Evangeline and I exchanged a glance. I sprang to my feet and went to investigate.

I opened the door a crack and blinked slowly. The man standing out in the hallway was so profoundly removed from the context I usually saw him in that it took me a moment to place him, despite us being acquainted for years. I was so used to seeing him at my father's side that he seemed incomplete standing in Evangeline's hallway by himself. He was in his customary cheap suit, but it was more rumpled, and there were dead leaves caught in his hair.

"Damien," I said with a frigid flatness. I thought of the cuts and bruises marring Evangeline's skin, and a long-suppressed part of me yearned to tear the man's throat out with my teeth.

Damien raised his hands in surrender, but he didn't back away. "I'm not looking for a fight."

"What are you doing here," I bit out coldly. It wasn't a question. I kept the door to the apartment mostly closed; my foot propped firmly against it so Damien couldn't push it open.

"I need to speak to Evangeline," he said. His one golden fang caught the light in the hallway oddly, making his mouth look unbalanced. "It's urgent."

I resisted the urge to snarl at him. Evangeline's account of her time in captivity had swung between vague and hyper-specific, but she'd mentioned Damien a few times. He had helped her, but he'd also hurt her. There had been more of the former than the latter, but I wasn't inclined to forgive so easily.

"You should leave."

"Damien?" Evangeline said, coming up behind me. She was wrapped in a massive fluffy bathrobe that trailed nearly to her ankles, and she had the curly mass of her hair twisted up in a towel. She looked up at Damien searchingly, eyes flicking quickly over his face, then nodded. "Let him in."

"Evangeline, are you sure?" I asked softly. She met my eyes with level certainty, and when I saw that there was no way she was going to change her mind, I sighed and stepped away from the door. Listen , I reminded myself. Trust her instincts, but be prepared to offer backup if needed .

Damien stepped into the apartment and promptly tripped over the welcome mat that Chanel twisted around his feet. He barely managed to keep himself from falling, and I watched the display with more pleasure than I probably should have.

Evangeline folded herself into an armchair, looking regal despite the fluffy robe. "You can stand down," she said sternly to the apartment at large. "He helped me escape."

"I wish I could have done more," Damien said.

I narrowed my eyes.

"Me, too," Evangeline said bluntly. "But I escaped either way, didn't I?"

I went to stand beside Evangeline's chair, arms crossed like a bodyguard. It was cheap posturing, and I knew Damien, who had moved through court politics for the past decade, would recognize it as such, but I didn't care.

"You said you had something urgent to tell Evangeline," I prompted. I didn't like the curious, hungry way Damien studied her apartment, and I wanted him out of her space as quickly as possible.

Damien twitched slightly, as if he'd been caught doing something he shouldn't have been. "Yes," he said, gathering himself. "I would have come sooner, but I've been busy since you broke out. I laid a false trail through the woods that should distract Morgana's people, at least for a little while. There's also…" He sighed, shifting on his feet a little. "I figured out the location of the knife that Lord De Montclair used to curse you."

"That should be good news." Evangeline frowned. "Why doesn't it sound like good news?"

"It's in one of the vaults at the citadel. Lady De Montclair had—" I flinched, and his eyes flicked to me. " Has ," he corrected himself, "a pretty large collection of magical curiosities, including a few cursed knives. The one used on you is one of them. But Roland is planning on moving the artifacts out of town soon, so if we want to get the knife back, we need to act fast."

"‘We'?" Evangeline asked, quirking an eyebrow. "What about maintaining your cover?" It sounded like she was repeating something she'd been told.

Damien winced. Interesting. Damien was a political animal. If he was letting Evangeline see his reactions, then it could only be an intentional choice. "I'm not planning on breaking in with you, but I can do my best to keep attention away from you."

Evangeline rolled her eyes and scoffed.

"The vaults are heavily secured," I said, watching Damien's face smooth back into something neutral and calm when he took his eyes off Evangeline. I curled my hands into fists where he couldn't see them, feeling the sting of my nails pressing into my palms. "Surely it would be easier to wait until the items are in transit and more likely to be vulnerable?"

Damien grimaced and scratched at his chin. "Your father's not really… the most organized. He'll be moving stuff to a bunch of different locations, and when I asked him if he had plans for what would go where, he waved me off. I could try to track down inventories for each shipment, but honestly, I don't even know if he has inventories or if he's just going to have people shove things into crates at random. Chasing down each shipment individually would be a crapshoot, and a time-consuming one."

"And I don't have that sort of time," Evangeline said calmly. "I can already feel the curse starting to crawl back inside me. It's slower than it was last time, thank fuck for that, but it's coming. Everything is already starting to feel… sharper. Pricklier."

I dropped a hand to her shoulder and squeezed gently, and she shot me a brief smile, ghosting her fingers over my knuckles.

"So, we need to get into the citadel and break into my mother's vault," I said.

"I have a plan," Damien said. "It should be simple enough to get in and out of the building, but the vault presents more of an issue."

"My mother tends to be fairly assertive when it comes to protecting her things," I agreed. "Which vault is it?"

"She has more than one vault?" Evangeline muttered under her breath. "God. Vampires."

"The one in the east wing," Damien said.

I scowled. "Of course it's the east wing. Unfortunate." At Evangeline's questioning look, I elaborated. "The citadel houses all of the ruling families, with a section for each. Vampires, werewolves, etcetera. Each section has a public-facing area, primarily for governmental concerns, and a private area for the family and household staff."

"I did the tour when I first moved here," Evangeline said. "Kinda felt like when I got to visit the White House as a kid, but with a lot more goth paintings."

"A reasonable comparison," I agreed. "The east wing of the section my parents—my father—occupies is one of the private areas. Damien and I would be able to move around freely, but for anyone else it would be much more complicated."

Damien cleared his throat. "You would be able to move around freely as long as you're still on the approved list." He was using that careful, neutral voice he reserved for bringing up something my father wouldn't be happy about, and it rankled. I resented his need to manage me, and I resented that if I snapped at him I would prove him right.

"You think I've been removed?" I was surprised at how deeply the idea wounded me. It wasn't as though the citadel was my childhood home—we'd only moved to the city a few hundred years ago. I'd never even properly lived there, although there was a suite that was inexplicably designated as mine, hung with the paintings I'd taken a liking to in my early hundreds.

Still, it was the site of countless awkward family dinners. Countless quiet pieces of advice passed on by my mother, countless stilted talks with my father, all the meetings where I was expected to be a silent presence. I couldn't say that the citadel was part of a particularly happy side of my life, but it was a major part, nonetheless.

"I don't know," Damien admitted. "Your father hasn't been willing to talk about you. He's been… difficult, lately."

"Well, it's a good thing we have a man on the inside, or we'd never get useful tidbits of intelligence like that," I said snippily.

"I'm sorry that telling you about the cursed knife wasn't enough," Damien said mildly. "I should have been more focused on family gossip."

I ground my teeth. I dearly wished he wasn't the one in the right.

"So, like I said," Damien continued, "getting into the building is the easy part, even if we will have to go into the private wing. It's the vault that'll be tricky. If we're going to break through the wards quickly and quietly, we're going to need an incredibly powerful witch." He looked intently at Evangeline.

"Absolutely not," I said sharply. "Evangeline hasn't even had a full day to recover from her imprisonment. And her torture, I might add, which I believe you know plenty about. You want her to go straight into one of the most highly secured buildings in the city without so much as a chance to rest?"

"Gabriel." Evangeline's voice was tense, cold. "I don't need you to decide what I'm capable of."

I grimaced.

"The facts are pretty simple," she said. "I'm a time bomb. The only way to defuse me is to get into that vault as quickly as possible. We need to take the chance while we still have it."

"At least let me contact our people for help," I said, more pleadingly than I would have liked. "Someone who knows about magical injuries should take a look at you before we go charging head-first into danger."

"I'm—" Evangeline started, then bit off whatever she was going to say and sighed. Something in her face had gone a touch softer and more open at the words ‘our people.' "Fine. Fine."

"Thank you." Concern twisted in my mind. Evangeline had slid into cold frustration so quickly. How much of that was the curse? Was it rising back up faster than she was admitting? I got the sense that asking if she was mad at me because of the curse would go over about as well as asking if it was because of PMS. Out of self-preservation, I held my tongue.

"Is there…" Evangeline trailed off, chewing at the inside of her cheek. "When you said you'd get in touch with people, who were you thinking of?"

"I'll tell Lissa, Theo, and Vic, of course. I don't believe they have any particularly applicable skills for a heist of this nature, but they should be informed. I was also thinking I would reach out to Marcus and Isabella."

Evangeline squeezed her eyes shut. "How is Marcus?" she asked. "Is he… Do you think he'll, uh… Do you think he'll want to help?"

I glanced up at Damien, uneasy with exposing Evangeline's vulnerabilities in front of him. He was making a point of looking at the bookcase as though that gave us some semblance of privacy, and I could see his eyes flicking over the titles.

"Marcus adores you," I said. We all adore you , I thought but didn't say. "Of course he'll want to help. I've been told that an excellent healer tended to him, and I'm sure if he's made aware that you need him, he'll be there for you."

Evangeline's expression was shuttered. "If you say so." She didn't sound convinced.

"Trust me," I said. She looked away, and I tried another tactic. "If we're working on as tight a schedule as the one we're stuck with, we're going to need all the allies we can get. People we can trust."

Evangeline closed her eyes and sucked in a ragged breath, then nodded. She pulled herself up straight in the armchair and clapped her hands together loudly. "Okay!" she said, more like she was trying to bolster herself than to get our attention. "Okay, so we're planning a heist."

Damien looked back at her, grinning with a boyish enthusiasm I'd never seen from him.

"I've got a plan," he told us, although he only had eyes for Evangeline. "And I think you're gonna like it."