Page 34 of Terror at the Gates

I am in so much fucking trouble.

I watched Lilith leave.

Once the door was shut, I reached across the bar where I’d left my cigarettes. I shook one out of the pack and lit it just as my brother returned.

“You wanna tell me what you were doing with Lucius’s daughter?”

He only called her that when he wanted to remind me who Lilith was. What he failed to understand was that I never forgot.

I blew a stream of thick smoke from my mouth before I answered.

“I wasn’t doing anything with her.”

“Bullshit,” said Cassius. “I saw how she looked.”

“How did she look, Cassius?”

He stared and then shook his head. “You know what? Never mind.”

I was glad he chose not to answer. Depending on the direction of the conversation, I might have knocked him out cold.

Cassius snatched a cigarette from my pack. I handed him a light.

“Mom would be so disappointed,” Cassius said.

“Can’t be disappointed if you’re dead,” I said.

My brother took a drag from his cigarette.

“You are a harsh motherfucker, Z.”

It wasn’t harsh. It was just true.

“You should have made more fuss about that fucking knife. We could have extracted something hefty from the church.”

“Something you need, Cass?” I asked.

“There’s always room for more,” my brother replied.

I wasn’t interested in filling space, especially if it attracted the attention of the church.

“Greed is the root of evil,” I said.

My brother scoffed. “Says the fucking seed.”

Chapter Five

Cassius was heading into Praise as I was leaving. He was four years older than me and essentially a younger version of Zahariev, though he favored his father more, with the same deep-set eyes that had always unsettled me.

“Hey, Lili-Billie,” he said.

“That’s not my name,” I said, instantly annoyed.

I’d never really gotten along with Cassius, even before I’d moved to Nineveh. Unlike Zahariev, Cassius wasn’t as willing to bend family rules. I thought he’d fallen prey to a desire to earn praise from his father. That wasn’t unusual, especially from family spares, but Zahari Zareth hadn’t applauded Cassius’s tendency to just repeat things he’d already said.

To me, it was a sign he couldn’t think for himself.

“It’s your nickname,” he said.