But Michal didn’t notice, running a hand through his hair to tame it while he bent to pull clothes from the piles on the floor. The sheet dropped, and Lore allowed herself an ogle.

“I don’t get why she always gives you the most dangerous jobs,” he said, voice muffled by thin cotton as he pulled a shirt over his head. “Didn’t she and Mari raise you? They act like your mothers, and then they send you to be the lookout. It doesn’t make sense.”

Lore just shrugged. She’d only given Michal her history in broad strokes, an outline she had no intention of ever filling in. He knew it, too, though sometimes he prodded. “Yes, they raised me, but that just means I know my shit,” she said, turning to slip her feet in her well-worn boots. “And we need to get a move on. Val won’t tolerate lateness, even if the guilty party is my…

She didn’t finish the sentence. She wasn’t quite sure how.

The mischievous curve to Michal’s mouth said he noticed. Now dressed, he crossed the room, hooking his hands languidly on her hips as she turned away to hide an answering smirk. He leaned forward, chest against her back, brushing his lips over the shell of her ear. “Your what?”

Lore turned, flicking his collarbone, biting her lip to keep it from turning up. “Mine,” she finished decisively, and let him kiss her again.

Still, cold clawed into her chest. She could feel Mortem everywhere, now, like her realization that it was somewhere it shouldn’t be had sharpened her perception of all the places where it should—the cloth of Michal’s trousers beneath her hands, the stones in the street outside, the chipped ceramic of the mug on the windowsill. Here on the outskirts of Dellaire she didn’t feel it as intensely as she would near the catacombs, near the Citadel, but it was still enough to make her skin crawl.

The Harbor District, on the southern edge of Dellaire, was as far as Mortem would let her go. She could try to hop a ship, try to trek out on the winding roads that led into the rest of Auverraine, but it’d be pointless. She was tied into this damn city as surely as death was tied into life, as surely as the crescent moon carved into her palm.

All of it, reminders—she shouldn’t linger too long. She shouldn’t get too close. It wasn’t safe.