A house sat tucked away in the part of Seviel no one bothered to mend, though truthfully, most of Seviel appeared that way. Three stories of sagging timber and blistered plaster leaned into one another for support, its windows boarded, and its gutters rusted through. Inside, the air smelled of damp wool, tobacco, and old wine, while candlelight bled through the cracks in the boards, trembling against the walls.

Gabriel slipped through the corridor, treading carefully against warped boards that complained anyway. Low voices murmured somewhere ahead, as though a single wrong word might set the whole ruin aflame. 

He passed a room where two men sharpened knives over a basin, steel on stone in the rhythm of prayer. In another, a woman with braided hair bound papers with twine and sealed them with wax. Every face turned as he entered, and every face turned away just as quickly. He was used to that. 

Eli sat at the kitchen table, though nothing about him screamed domestic. The table had been dragged beneath a buckling beam and steadied with stacked bricks. Maps with curled edges were spread across its surface, weighed down by a bottle, a revolver and a candle guttering in its own fat. 

Eli didn’t look up at first. He let silence do what it did best: widen the room and thin the breath. 

“You’re late,” he said finally, as if commenting on the weather.

Gabriel drew off his gloves with two careful tugs and tucked them into his coat. “Mmn.”

Eli’s scar caught the candlelight as he leaned in. “Did you bring what I asked for?” he said mildly, “or did you bring what was left?”

Gabriel met his gaze. “The merchant talked,” he said. “Enough” 

“Enough,” Eli repeated, as if testing whether the word could hold. “And yet he was found with his chest open and appendages missing.” He glanced toward the others in the shadows. “Tell me, Gabriel, why did subtlety die in an alley that night?”

“He panicked,” Gabriel said. “Seviel runs on rumour. Panic is a rumour that bleeds.”

“Don’t recite philosophy to me.” Eli’s voice remained low. “You were meant to extract, not decorate the pavement.” 

Gabriel stared past Eli’s shoulder, down into the map’s crisscross of roads and inked rivers. He could still smell the incense if he breathed too sharply, and he could still hear the harrowing sounds of Father Issareth’s voice. 

The pounding in his skull threatened thunder. He blinked it back. 

“I handled it,” he said. 

“You lost control,” Eli replied softly. Then, after a beat that felt longer than it was: “Again.” 

The word stung with the precision of something once true and never forgiven. Gabriel didn’t flinch. He taught himself the stillness that angers men who want a visible wound. 

Eli stood up. 

Up close, his presence was a cultivated chill that was no louder than before, just closer. “Listen to me, Gabriel. I have kept you because you are useful and because you are a monster with clean hands. But if you expose us, if your little storm puts a noose ‘round this whole house, I will cut the rope at your end. Do you understand?”

“Good.” Eli sank back into the chair as if he had never moved. “Now. What did the dead man give you?”

Gabriel exhaled slowly. “He spoke of ledgers and charity work.”

A low sound rolled through the room.

Eli’s mouth curved faintly. “And you believe that?”

“No,” Gabriel said. “I believe he was too afraid to tell the truth.”

Eli’s scar caught the light again. “Go on.”

“He mentioned Enoch,” Gabriel continued carefully. “That he oversees certain… benefactors. Men who contribute heavily to the Church in exchange for blessings and protection. Some of the coin disappears before it ever reaches the altar. Some ends up elsewhere.”

“Elsewhere,” Eli echoed. “How poetic.”

The room fell quiet.

“Tell me, Gabriel, how does it feel to kill a man who may have already damned himself?”

Gabriel’s jaw tightened. “Necessary.”

“Necessary,” Eli repeated softly, rolling the word in his mouth like scripture. “Is that what you tell yourself when the nightmares start?”

Gabriel’s eyes flicked upward. “It’s what I tell myself so I can sleep.”

Eli smiled faintly, a cut of light in the dark. “If it works, I envy you.”

Gabriel felt the others’ attention tilt toward him. He kept his face composed.

Eli didn’t bother to look coy. “Tell me about the courtesan.”

“Pretty,” Gabriel said flatly.

“That’s a mercy on the eye, not a report.”

“Smart,” Gabriel conceded. The word tasted like admission. “Wary. Doesn’t talk when silence buys more.”

“Then why are you talking to him?” Eli toyed with the candle, watching the flame bow and right itself. “You’ve been seen. Several times now. You even went upstairs with him.”

Thane chuckled without warmth. “Congratulations,” he said to no one in particular. “He’s working both sides of the altar.”

Gabriel ignored him. 

“If the merchant was sent to him, it wasn’t for ornament. Either someone believes he knows something, or someone wants him fitted for a noose. I don’t think he’s directly involved.” 

He found he was speaking more quickly than he meant to and reined himself in.

“He might not even know why he’s a target. I need time to get close and find out who put him on the list.”

“Time,” Eli said, as if pronouncing a sin. “You had time. You bought yourself drama.”

“I had an episode,” Gabriel said. The room dipped at the candour. “I haven’t had one in years.”

“And now you’ve had one.” Eli spread his hands. “How fragile our statistics are.”

Something in Gabriel’s jaw trembled and held. “It won’t happen again.”

Eli leaned back and let out a breath that might have been a laugh if one were charitable. 

“It will. But not here. Not where it takes us with it.” He glanced past Gabriel, past the ruin of the kitchen and camp, toward the boarded windows. 

“Seviel is a mouth. The Veil is a tongue. Whatever the Church is doing, it speaks through both. We are going to cut that tongue.” He returned his gaze to Gabriel. “You will keep going back. You will find out what the Praecia Veil has been told to hide. You will determine whether this courtesan is a blindfold or a blade. And if he’s the latter—”

“—I’ll use him,” Gabriel said.

“—you’ll remove him,” Eli corrected, gently.

The meeting dissolved not with a dismissal but with a shiver. Chairs were pushed back, maps folded, knives wrapped, and orders were distributed in the quiet grammar of people accustomed to disappearing. 

Gabriel stood there a moment longer, the candle’s thin smoke threading up and unspooling into the rafters. He could feel the weight of watchers between his shoulder blades; he had lived long enough among zealots to recognise the look that calculates whether a man is a tool or a future problem.

Outside, Seviel breathed in fog. The house’s front step was chipped at the corner; a puddle held three stars and a bruise of lamplight. Gabriel lit a cigarette with the last of a match and watched the sulphur’s flare gnaw the dark before it died.

Smoke curled, then vanished into the cold.

He leaned his shoulders against the damp brick and shut his eyes. The memory arrived like an unwilling guest: a hand soft against his jaw, a thumb ghosting his mouth; that voice whispering goodnight to him. 

He thought of Cain’s room: the lilies, the neatness that wasn’t neatness but control, the book with its spine worn to grace. He thought of the boy’s eyes when he said experience, how a man could mistake them for invitation and not armour.

Remove him, Eli had said.

Gabriel took the cigarette from his lips and examined a bead of red ember about to fall. The habit made him look pensive instead of unsteady. He had learned long ago the tricks a man could perform on himself.

He could do the work. He had always done the work. He could go back into the Praecia Veil and wear the face that got him what he needed, press a conversation into a confession and a confession into a death, stack the bodies into a staircase that pointed, inevitably, heavenward. He could pretend the trembling in his hands was cold and not the past waking up like a wolf.

He exhaled, slow enough to feel the pull in his ribs. “Orders,” he said to the night, as if it required convincing. The fog accepted the word and returned it without meaning.

A door scraped behind him and Mara stepped out with her cloak thrown over her shoulders, the hood casting her face in chapel shadow. She passed him without pause, then hesitated. “Eli likes you,” she said, not unkindly. “That’s why he bothers to threaten.”

Gabriel huffed something that might have been a laugh. “And here I thought I was his sword.”

“You’re that too,” she said. “Try not to cut us.” She vanished into the mist with the step of someone who had made peace with an early grave.

When she was gone, he let the last half-inch of cigarette burn down to heat and sting the web of his fingers. He didn’t drop it; he needed the bite. The ache pulled him back into his body, back into the alley, back into the choice of turning left toward the Veil or right toward the bed he wouldn’t sleep in.

He turned left. Duty was a road, and he knew how to walk it in the dark.

At the corner, the city opened its mouth again: music softened by walls, laughter poured over silk, the particular hush that precedes a door being unlocked. In another hour, the Praecia Veil would be in full bloom, all velvet and coin and well-rehearsed mercy. He pictured Cain at the mirror, powdering his face, his mouth softened into a weapon he wielded with more kindness than he owed anyone.

“You’re going to be the death of me,” Gabriel said, almost absently, to the fog, to the boarded windows, to the errant star still caught in the puddle like a pin through a moth.

The ember went out between his fingers. He didn’t shake the sting off. He pocketed it like a penance and walked on.

༻𐫱༺

The Judas Room: Inspired by the story of Judas Iscariot. Judas was one of the original twelve apostles of Jesus Christ. He betrayed Jesus to the Sanhedrin in the Garden of Gethsemane in exchange for thirty pieces of silver. After learning that Jesus was to be crucified, Judas attempted to return the money and hanged himself. The priests used the money to purchase a field for burying strangers, which was known as the “Field of Blood” because it had been acquired with blood money.