Lore took one last look around, gripping the smooth banister. She was about to continue down the stairs when a movement in Gil’s master bedroom caught her eye.

Van stood studying something on Gil’s dresser—an old silver figurine of a tortoise that Gil had cherished despite its objective hideousness.

Lore didn’t remember crossing the distance between them, only that she was suddenly there, pulling it from his fingers. “That’s not yours.”

With care, she returned it to its rightful spot beside an old wooden box and a photo of her, Gil, and Miles taken shortly after Gil had offered Miles the empty third-floor bedroom after striking up a conversation with him at a coffee shop. Gil and Miles had been cut from the same fun-loving, all-too-trusting cloth, and despite her early suspicions, their game nights and endless teasing over dinner had made the house feel warm and safe in a way Lore wasn’t sure she’d ever experienced.

Lore looked around the room. Before Gil had died, she’d come in here hundreds of times, whether to harass him to take his medicine, to help him get in and out of bed on the days when age robbed his body of strength, or just to bring up tea or a board game to distract herself from the shadows of her own mind. He called her “darling,” a word Lore was fairly certain no one else, not even her parents, would have used to describe her.

Though Lore had never met either of her grandfathers—they had both died years before she was born—she had loved the idea of them, the fantasy she had created using her parents’ stories. But she had loved the real Gil, as exasperating and obstinate as he could be. She had only meant to stay with him for a few months, until his broken leg and arm had healed and she’d saved enough money to start over, but like the city itself, she couldn’t bring herself to leave him. He had been gentle, brilliant, and had the unfailing ability to make her laugh. He had pierced through all her defenses.

And now, to her shame, the space felt dark and stale. His collection of canes, each with a different carved animal head, hadn’t even made it into the closet with the rest of his things, and his shelves of academic books were coated in a thick layer of dust. As much as she’d tried to keep the brownstone exactly as Gil had left it, she hadn’t been able to bring herself to step inside his room in months.

“This house isn’t what I would have imagined for you,” he said. “The style is very . . .”

“I would recommend not finishing that sentence,” Lore said.

“I was going to say grand,” he said, gesturing to the ornate dark oak furniture set around him, all inlaid with bone and finely carved flowers and vines. “How in the world did you end up working for him?”

Lore turned, her jaw set and her heart hammering. “Figure it out, if you want to know so badly.”

His voice caught her in the doorway. “I was always jealous of you, you know.”

Lore froze. “You were jealous of me?” she said, turning back toward Van. “Was it the poverty, the endless cycle of ostracism and humiliation, or the ongoing threat of extinction you coveted?”

Van clasped his prosthetic hand with his other, letting both rest in front of him. It would have been a relaxed posture if he hadn’t been gripping it so tightly. “You always knew exactly who you were and who you were meant to be. Everything seemed to come easily to you because you wanted it so badly,” he said. “I used to think that if I could find a way to want it as badly as you did, I could find something buried deep in me. Something that would make me run as fast, hit as hard. To want to pick up that sword.”

“I was a stupid kid,” Lore told him. “I thought I knew everything, but I knew nothing.”

Van gave a faint smile. “And you know what the truly ironic thing is? Even as I ran after you, trying to catch up, you did the one thing I wanted more than I wanted my next breath. The thing I told myself was impossible. You got out.”

Lore drew in a sharp breath, her stomach giving a painful clench. “I did it because I had to.”

“You did it because you’ve never known fear,” he said. “Because you wanted to live.”

“I know fear,” she told him. “I know it better than my own reflection.”

“I don’t know what happened to you,” he said. “I used to wonder about it all the time, but I never doubted that you were still alive.”

Van moved toward the room’s attached bathroom, likely to the waiting shower. It released her from the quiet pain of the moment before it suffocated her.

“You know, some people get so used to looking out at life from the edge of their cage that they stop seeing the bars,” he said. “I’ve never forgotten them, I’ve just learned how to live inside on my own terms. Don’t . . . don’t let your friend get trapped in here with the rest of us.”

Her throat tightened at his words. She reached up, smoothing a loose piece of hair away from her face, unsure of what to say.

Van had grown up with financial comforts, but he had never completely fit in as a hunter. She felt guilty for the way she had judged him for it, both in the past and even a little in the present. His attitude toward Miles made more sense to her now, and a part of Lore wondered if what she had sensed as a kid wasn’t a dislike for her, but his own frustrations—with himself, and with their world.

“It’s just one job,” Lore said finally. “After tonight, I’m going to figure out how to convince him to leave.”

“Good,” Van said.

But just before he closed the door to the bathroom, Lore heard herself say, “You can still get out. It’s never too late.”

“I chose to stay in,” he told her. “I’m not leaving before I get the ones who caged me.”

The words followed Lore back downstairs, all the more unsettling for the way they echoed her own circumstances. She thought about going back upstairs, about telling him what the last few years had taught her—that the cage was only as strong as your mind made it.

She had chosen to make the vow to Athena. She had chosen to step back inside the cage this one last time to get to the man who had taken everything from her.

Not lost, Lore told herself. Free.

Lore reached the bottom step and stopped.

Castor had taken the settee, stretching his long body out over it and letting his feet hang off its edge. He’d laced his fingers together and rested them on his chest. Now they rose and fell with each deep, even breath.

Athena stood over him, watching. Her hands rested open at her sides. Her face wasn’t cast in its usual mask of hatred. What Lore saw there now scared her more.

Curiosity.

“What are you doing?” Lore asked sharply.

As Castor opened his eyes, Athena made her way over to the line of makeshift weapons she’d neatly arranged on the wall. He sat up, looking between them.

“Making preparations,” Athena said smoothly. She held out one of them—Lore’s former curtain rod, she noted with a grimace. “Have you been trained to fight with such a weapon? I won’t let you dishonor it with incompetence.”

Castor snorted at the question, rubbing a hand over his face. “I’ve never known Lore to be incompetent at anything she’s tried.”

“Potential incompetence aside,” Lore said. “We are at least a thousand years past when it was socially acceptable to casually carry one of these around on the street.”