“Eventually.” Gunnar smiles at the memory, but his eyes are sad. “I thought I was in love with him. I mean, I did fall in love with him—but later. It took me decades to realize that half of what I felt for Jude was really just … loving myself for the first time.” He looks away from me again, as if embarrassed. “Being in love with loving. It was such a relief to finally not have to be afraid of my feelings anymore, and because he was the first one I was ever with as the real, complete me, all my emotions got tangled together. I’m sorry, I’m not putting this as clearly as I want to.”

He looks abashed, but I’m starting to get it. The thrill and the tension that went through me when the two of them kissed at the rave, that feeling like flying a kite on a stormy day … I’m beginning to understand what it meant. “And then you guys broke up.”

“It was a long time coming, and it wasn’t easy,” he says quietly. “But I needed time to tell my feelings apart. I needed to know what it was like to be me, by myself, without hiding. And no matter how much Jude loved being part of the Syndicate, I never fit in. I was always Jude’s pet to them, and I needed a clean break.”

“Is that when you went to Iceland?” I gesture at the necklace, his memory flashing across my mind, the dark sand of the beach and the cold wind.

“Yes.” He looks down at the stone in his fingers, and finally releases it. “It’s also when I met Viviane. She was after some carving from the Viking days, a fragment of a Corrupter prophecy, and our paths crossed. It was sort of inevitable, because it’s not a big country, and vampires can’t really stay out of each other’s way. All she needed was one look at me, and she knew my whole story.” He shakes his head. “She eventually offered to let me join the League, and I never looked back.”

“But you didn’t even believe in Azazel until you got here.” I’m still mystified by all of this. Viviane did the League’s bidding for a century before she decided Erasmus Kramer wasn’t just some crackpot, and it took Gunnar thirty years to reach the same conclusion about her. What the hell kind of cult are they? “It takes three good episodes to get me to commit to a TV show, but you just … jumped right into a random day-walker cult?”