“Fine.” I let the Grace crawl farther up my hand, to my arm, where it gets caught in the hair and rears back in confusion like a startled inchworm. “We’d been planning it ever since we realized Mom was serious about putting me in the Seraph program. We wanted to get out before Sister Kipling actually injected me, but…” My back twinges with the memory of the needle slipping into my spine. “That didn’t work out.” Theo makes a sad sound. He knows damn well it didn’t work. “We eventually smuggled ourselves onto a caravan headed to the D.C. compound. Ended up having to ditch halfway into the city when they caught us.”

I don’t mention how I whispered to the Grace escorting us and slaughtered every Angel who laid eyes on me that day. That the Watch and I are the reasons New Nazareth has lost so many people in just the past few days.

“We got stuck in the city after that,” I say. Another tendril of meat comes up to wind between my fingers. “We were about to make it across the bridge when a death squad found us. So.”

“They killed him,” he says.

“They did.”

“And that group you were with a few days ago?”

“Saved me.”

His jaw works under his mask. I know what he’s going to say. “No. You know it won’t work.” He looks away. “They don’t know who I am. If they did, they’d kill me.” But Nick knows who I am, Erin knows, and for some reason I don’t say that. “They kill Angels. It’s what they do. You can’t come back with me, if they see your scars you’re dead, and—” I say this instead. “I can’t lose you again.”

He takes my hand, the one not twined with the Grace-meat.

“Thank you,” he says. To fear and to keep. Mark 10:9—What therefore God has joined together, let no one separate. Not even ourselves. “Not going to lie; I’m impressed you got so far. How did you get past the gate?”

I snort. “Carefully and with our heads down.”

We give that time to settle. For everything in our chests and stomachs to calm.

This time, Theo starts.

“Did word ever make it back about Squad Calvary?”

It takes me a while. I don’t know the squads by name. But it does sound familiar, and when it clicks, my stomach sinks. “That was your squad, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah. Was.” To my surprise, he reaches out for the meat curled around my hand. Behind the altar, hundreds of eyes watch carefully as it grasps for him. “One of the members went rogue. Killed everyone but me and asked if I wanted to leave with him.” A breath. “And the thing is? I thought about it.”

I swallow, hard. “You didn’t.”