Gabriel put his glass on the table again, and silence fell over the room. And even with the door closed, I’d have sworn every movement in the bar outside had stopped, too, that all eyes were on the closed door and the magic that was beginning to rise within it.

“Caleb wasn’t scared of me. He was scared of the people he’d been working for.” Gabriel lifted his gaze to Ethan’s. “They called themselves the Circle.”

Ethan went very still, and this time it was vampire magic that lifted into the air.

“He’d been running contraband for them—drugs, weapons, and occasionally people, from Texas to Chicago.” Gabe traced a finger across the table like the route on an invisible map. “I gave Caleb two options: Leave the Circle and accept my punishment, or defect and lose all claim to the Pack.”

“Adam was your brother, too,” I said. “He betrayed you, and he wasn’t allowed to live.”

“Adam was responsible for the deaths of shifters; Caleb wasn’t. Maybe I should have taken him out. But he had a hard run of it. Was in a shitty position. Had no claim to a throne he probably had some right to, even if a small one. Maybe that would have been enough to keep him on the straight and narrow. Or maybe he was just a bad seed. I don’t know.”

“He made his own choices,” I said.

“We all do that,” Gabriel said.

“So Franklin defected,” Ethan said. “He picked the Circle. Why?”

“Because soldiers didn’t leave the Circle unless they go out in a body bag. Because the man who controls the Circle is merciless.”

Ethan’s eyes had gone silver and cold and hard as steel, just like the words that punched through the air.

“You knew Reed controlled the Circle. You knew, and despite all the shit we’ve gone through in the last few weeks, the work we put in to proving that connection, you didn’t lift a finger to help.”

Gabriel’s jaw stiffened, as did his bulky shoulders. Very slowly, he slid a glance to Ethan. “You’ll want to watch your tone in my place.”

Ethan was unmoved. “Fuck your place. Navarre is in financial shambles. Merit was stalked. My House was threatened. All because it took time for us to prove that connection.”

Gabriel linked his hands over the table, leaned his chest over it, toward Ethan. “You think you’re the only sup in this city allowed to take care of his own? You think your House is more important than any other family in this city? Then you’ve got it wrong. You got the information you needed. You didn’t need me to volunteer it.”

“You didn’t want the Circle’s eyes on you,” I put in.

Gabriel slid his gaze to me. “Like I said, I protect my own.”

“Your place or not, Keene, you are a son of a bitch.” Ethan rose, chair scraping across the floor.

I heard similar movements from the bar, wished I’d brought my sword inside. I hadn’t expected things to turn in this particular direction.

“That’s rich coming from you, Sullivan. Every war creates victims. You know it as well as I do. We stayed here, in Chicago, instead of going back to Aurora. That doesn’t mean I’m going to let a human piece of shit like Adrien Reed use my people against each other.”

I could see the war in Ethan’s eyes—his desire to slap Gabriel back for putting us in danger, for holding back crucial information, matched against his need to preserve whatever alliance remained between Cadogan and the NAC.

“We are allies,” Ethan said, the words slashing the air like the sharpened blade of a katana. “Or so I was led to believe.”

“My brother is dead,” Gabriel gritted out, rising to stand over the table, his fingers still splayed across it. “Which proves this asshole is as dangerous as I imagined him to be. And he was killed by a vampire. You want contrition? Think again.”

“What I want is to be able to trust someone in this goddamn town. What I want is for my vampires to have some peace and goddamn quiet. What I want is to not be stabbed in the goddamn back every time I turn around.” Ethan reached out and, with a seemingly effortless flick of his hand, tossed a chair across the room.

The door shoved open, and a very large man filled the doorway. A shifter, with thick silver hair and a scar across his left cheek. He ignored me and Ethan, looked immediately to Gabriel—to his Apex.

Gabriel’s gaze was on Ethan, and it didn’t waver.

For a full minute, they stared at each other.

“Stop! You are stopping!” The words punched through the silence, followed by a rush of Ukrainian as Berna squeezed beneath the tree-trunk arm the shifter had stretched across the doorway.

She had a white bar towel in the hand she used to point at Ethan, then Gabriel. “No fighting here. No fighting. Is rule.”

Gabriel’s gaze snapped to her. Obviously angry, he muttered something low in Ukrainian. I hadn’t heard him speak it before, and it sounded vaguely menacing in his growly and gravelly voice.

If Berna was intimidated, she hid it well. She pitched her head to the left and right, made a spitting sound that I was pretty sure was an insult. And then she leveled that gaze at Ethan.

“You make trouble in our house. Get out now before you make worse.” And then she looked at me, flipped her fingers back and forth to shoo us out of the back room. “Both of you. Out. Now.”

Ethan took a step toward the door, but glanced back at Gabriel. “We aren’t done with this conversation.”