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Maybe Dalejem just needed to get laid.

If so, Revik would foot the fucking bill personally, as soon as they got out of this mess. Anything, if it would get Dalejem to cut it out, and help Allie to start trusting him again. He didn’t need this shit now. He didn’t need one more thing to freak his wife out, not after everything they’d been through in the past weeks.

Not after the year before, when he’d thought she was dead.

He’d take Allie to a tropical fucking island if he had to?fix his marriage away from all of them. His shoulders tensed as he continued to think about it, and to stare at the other seer.

Dalejem wouldn’t look at him at all now.

“Why?” Revik said finally.

Dalejem turned slowly, giving him an incredulous look.

“Why?” he said. “Did you just say ‘why’? Are you really asking me that, brother?”

Revik frowned. “Of course I am. Why wouldn’t I? It’s been thirty fucking years, Jem.”

“Don’tcallme that, goddamn it!” Dalejem snapped.

Revik blinked at him in surprise.

He wondered briefly if he’d read the seer wrong before, if Dalejem meant Revik should be using his op alias, not his real name, even where there was no active surveillance nearby. Feeling another pulse off the older seer’s light, Revik realized he hadn’t, though.

He hadn’t misunderstood him.

Dalejem was offended Revik used the shortened version of his name for personal reasons.

As if they were still fuckingdatingor something.

“What do you want from me?” Revik said. “Seriously. You must know it’s pissing off my wife. It’s starting to piss me off, too, brother.”

“I don’t think you can blame me or anyone else for your wife not trusting you, brother…” Dalejem muttered. Seeing Revik’s cold look, Dalejem shook his head, clicking, his sculpted mouth turning in a frown. “You want to get into this now? Really?”

“No,” Revik said, cold. “I really don’t. But you’re not making it easy. So either talk to me about it, or fuck off with your light, brother.” He gave the seer a harder look, feeling the threat snake out of hisaleimibefore he could throttle it back. “…That includes staying the hell away from my wife’s light, in case that part wasn’tcrystal fuckingclear.”

There was a longer silence.

In it, Revik watched the other’s jaw harden.

Dalejem’s green eyes grew colder. He deliberately drew his light close to his body, so that Revik could barely feel it. Revik remembered he’d started off as Adhipan, once upon a time, before he ran off with Kali in South America and joined the Children of the Bridge. When Revik first met him, he could barely taste the older seer’s light at all, not unless Dalejem wanted him to.

Remembering that only made Revik’s frown deepen, though.

He wondered why he felt so much of Dalejem’s light lately, given that.

Clearly, the other seer wanted him to feel it. That, or something else was going on, something that made Dalejem less aware of his light than usual. Remembering the way he’d touched him that first night, at the guard station in Macau, Revik felt his face tighten more.

He was still staring at the other seer, frowning, when Dalejem spoke. His voice was low, barely audible over the sound of the approaching train.

“I’m still in love with you, brother,” he said.

Revik blinked.

Dalejem waited, as if to let his words sink in.

“You can yell at me all you want for that later,” he continued after a beat, still not looking at Revik. “But you might as well save your breath. I’m well aware of your situation.” Dalejem’s eyes shifted towards the incoming train. “In any case, I’d prefer if we didn’t discuss the details of thatnow,brother. When it might get both of us?or your wife?killed.”

Revik couldn’t stop staring. The words continued to reverberate, sending a jolt of shock through his light. Then, a flush of anger.