Page 56 of Their Will be Done

My eyes snap back into focus. I take a tiny sip of wine, and then another because I barely tasted the first. It’s not as brutally sour as the one the Brotherhood poured for me.

“I don’t know how much you can help,” I say hesitantly before taking another sip. “You weren’t there at the end.”

Gabriel looks down, and shadows darken his eyes. For a heart-wrenching moment, I think I’ve already blown my cover and pissed him off. I fully expect him to toss me out of his room. Instead, he lights himself another cigarette.

“You don’t smoke, do you?” he asks.

“No.”

“You’re right to sound disgusted,” he says through a faint laugh. “It’s a disgusting habit.” A thick plume of smoke jettisons from his lips. He sips from his glass, and then sits back in his seat, his eyes on the fire.

“I often wonder if they would still be alive if I’d stayed at Redmond,” Gabriel says.

The wine glass clicks against my teeth as I turn to face him. I hurriedly lower it into my lap. “Why would you say that?”

“The same reason you wonder if you’d be dead had you been in the car with them.” He drags hard at his cigarette, his voice tight as he speaks without expelling any more smoke. “One of Satan’s many games, keeping us fixated on the past.” Finally, he empties his lungs and then takes another sip of wine. “So easy for him to slip in without you noticing when you’re so busy replaying events over and over to see if there ever would have been a different outcome. Like a spider crawling in under the door.”

The longer he speaks, the tighter my chests grows. I’ve never heard him talk like this. His sermons are dry—all repetition and loosely connected anecdotes taken out of context—but this?

If this is how his conversations went with my parents, then no wonder they’d stay downstairs for hours after I’d been sent to bed. Our house had thick doors. Even with my ear pressed to the wood, all I heard was the murmur of low voices.

“Your parents are dead, Trinity. That’s not something you can change or control. What youcancontrol is how you feel about it.”

“I’m angry,” I say, without waiting for him to ask.

“At them, or yourself?”

I squirm in my seat. “Both.” Then I shake my head. “No. Just myself.”

“Because you didn’t go with them to church?”

I nod.

“And why is that? Whydidyou stay at home that night?”

I run my finger around the rim of my glass. It’s practically empty, but there wasn’t much of it to begin with. I don’t dare ask for more. I need Gabriel to see me as the same girl I was when he left Redmond—sweet and innocent and naive. Definitely not the undercover spy I turned into.

“We had a fight. They left without me.”

“What did you fight about?”

My cheeks warm-up, and I know it’s not from the heat of the fire, or the sip of wine.

“Something stupid. Something really,reallystupid.”

Silence settles between us. The fire pops, shooting a spark onto the hearth. It pulses like a dying heart before it fades to nothing.

There’s a distant rumble. Is it starting to rain?

“No one alive is a good person, Trinity.”

My eyes snap to him.

He smiles faintly, but without looking at me. “You asked if your parents were good people.”

Suddenly I don’t want to know the answer. Instead, I absently sip at my wine before remembering it’s empty.

Gabriel holds out his hand. I give him the glass. This time, he fills it. But when he passes it over, he doesn’t let it go straight away.

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