Page 70 of The Mask Falling

David reached for a teapot. “This doesn’t have anything nasty in it. They might drug you later, though, before you see Ménard,” he said. “Something to cut you off from the æther.”

“What kind of drug can do that?”

“You don’t want to know. But don’t worry,” he said. “Its effects aren’t permanent.”

He poured some black tea. I took it, if only to warm my hands. My stomach gave a rumble I hoped he couldn’t hear.

“I have a lot to explain,” he said. “I know I must have seemed a little shifty in the colony.”

“Yep.”

With a thin smile, he poured a cup of his own. His arms were freckled and corded with muscle.

“David Fitton was my alias. My real name is Cadoc Fitzours,” he said, “but call me Cade.”

“Cadoc.” To rhyme withhaddock. “Welsh?”

“Think so. I’m not,” he said. “I’m from Brittany. Little place called Île-d’Arz.” He cleared his throat. “Éire go brách.”

“Breizh da viken.” It was the only Breton I knew. “Are you fluent?”

Cade grimaced. “Rusty, at best. I stopped learning it when my family died.” He glanced at me. “House fire. I was the only survivor.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Long time ago.” A muscle flinched in his cheek. “I was on the streets for a while before I got a job at the Port of Lorient. Eventually, one of the other dockworkers guessed what I was and reported me. The Vigiles raided my flophouse, and I was sent to the Bastille.”

It was among the most notorious prisons in the Republic of Scion. A stone-built fortress without a single window.

“I was in there for almost three years before I won the blood lottery. The night before I was meant to die, the guards hauled me to a car. It brought me here.” He blew on his tea. “Ménard was visiting his mother in Athens. That meant it was Luce who greeted me.”

Ménard’s mother had moved to Greece not long after Mylène was born. He flew to see her several times a year, leaving Frère to run the country.

“Love at first sight?” I said.

Cade snorted into his teacup. “Not quite.” He drank. “Luce explained that the Grand Inquisitor needed an exceptionally rare voyant to work for him as a spy. If I took the job, I’d be pardoned for my unnaturalness.”

“And you were so enchanted by this offer that you . . . took a flying leap into bed with her?”

He cocked an eyebrow. “You want some fangs with that venom, Paige?”

“Trust me, I wouldn’t usually care who you or anyone else is riding. But Madelle Guillotine herself ?” I sipped my tea. “That’s a very special kind of masochism.”

“I have my reasons.”

“Did you have yourreasonsfor propositioning me in the colony?”

Cade had the decency to look contrite. “You remember that.” He rubbed his face with one hand. “Look, I know you won’t believe me, but I didn’t actually want to sleep with you.”

“Could have fooled me.”

“It was an act, Paige. When I saw you, I did feel drawn to you. You were a fellow jumper, and I wanted to help you survive, so I gave you some of the information I had been collecting for Ménard.” Cade breathed out. “And then you threatened to tell the Rephaim what I knew. And I thought you might mean it. That they’d find out why I was in the colony.”

He ran the same hand over his reddish curls. With pursed lips, I waited for him to finish.

“I covered my tracks by acting like it had all been a ruse to get you into bed,” he said, sounding tired. “Fucking stupid, I know, but I panicked. Better you thought I was a lowlife than a spy.” A mirthless huff. “And then I felt shit for doing it, so I tried to help you again.”

I wasn’t sure whether or not to believe him.

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