Page 91 of The Fake Divination Offense
I feel the weight, too. Feel it being toomuch, right up there withhatingstill being connected to Urzoth, but I’m compartmentalizing all that in one big gathered snowball of avoidance.
For now, I’m here, soul ripped bare with someone for the first time in… ever.
Bel’s tongue darts out to wet his lips. “Yeah,” he says into the stillness of the car. “Yes. I’m yours.”
“For real?” My voice is so soft it’s a prayer. That’s what I am now. His worshipper.His. “Not just sex. Not as a safety arrangement. Real.”
His eyes are big and happy and dazed. “Yes. It’s real.”
We swing by Bel’s apartment. I’m not sure where Tem got to and I know Gulus is lurking somewhere nearby, but I stay on alert the whole time we’re walking up the stairs. When Bel unlocks the door and shoves it open, I do a quick sweep to make sure Tem’s not lying in wait for retribution.
I didn’t actually go inside the apartment that first night, so now, standing in the small front room, I analyze it and let more hatred for Tem stack up like logs on a pyre. Unfortunately notTem’spyre, but a guy can dream.
The main room is a combination kitchen, dining, and livingroom about the size of my bathroom, with a minuscule kitchenette, a rickety plastic table, and a threadbare love seat tucked against a peeling yellow wall. There’s a TV that looks fairly new balanced on plastic milk cartons, but everything else is barren and old, and the air smells of mildew and stale food.
Thisis where he made Bel live? And Ilbryen, Gulus, and their whole adventure party knew about it.
I expect Bel to go to the left, toward an open door that shows a lumpy double mattress on the floor. But he heads for the love seat and crouches to pull a flat storage box out from beneath it, then undoes the coffee table by easing a piece of wood off two more plastic milk cartons. They’re stuffed with toiletry containers, cases, and books.
“This is it,” he says, climbing to his feet. He’s in an orange Hellhounds shirt all the other cheerleaders were wearing, his tied in a knot at his side to show a sliver of belly above his jeans, and he dusts his hands on those jeans, dirt streaking across the fabric. He pulls a face but quickly resets, throwing up a strained smile.
Nope.
I point at the bedroom. “Nothing in there’s yours?”
“That’s Tem’s room.”
“Where’s your room?”
Bel bends over to stack one carton atop the other. “Can you help me with these? Or the storage box—that’s all my clothes and shoes, and these are—”
“Bel.”
He sighs and straightens again. “I miss when we’d let each other deflect shit.”
“Feel free to call me out on any of my stuff. But if—”
“Why were you acting weird in Roesia’s office?”
“I didn’t meannow, sweetheart.” My look is chastising, but part of me seizes internally. Damn, he picked up on that?
Bel snatches a book out of the top carton. He deactivates some locking enchantment before it opens, then idly flips through it.
“This is my room,” he says with no inflection.
I look around again. There’s no bed. Just that ratty love seat with a matching pillow by the armrest, a quilt folded across the back.
Tem took the only bedroom. Made Bel sleep on that small, nasty couch.
Rage climbs my spine, burns across the back of my neck, ignites several small pulses of fury in the constant smolder directed at Tem and the whole adventure party that allowed Bel to be treated like this.
But Bel stands next to the love seat, rocking on his feet, pretending to read the book with his shoulders arched.
I cross the room, leaving my rage right there, and kiss his forehead. “There’s nothing else you want to take?” I make my voice light. “You won’t be coming back.”
He smiles up at me. “No. I’ve gotten used to traveling light.” The storage container with his clothes is bulging a bit, and he steps on it, tries to push it shut. “Well. Light-ish. I’ve been in Philadelphia the longest of any place, almost a year. I started to get… comfortable.” He rolls his eyes. “Then Tem took over my handler position a few months ago, and he found this placefor a steal, and insisted that I had to keep my stuff in containers that could be easily grabbed in case we had to leave quick. My poor clothes,” he murmurs the last bit to the storage box.
“Most of the master closet at my place is empty.”
