Page 89 of Terror at the Gates

“Why do you think Cassius and Hassenaah hate you?” he asked.

“Because they think I’m an ungrateful, spoiled brat,” I said. “And Hassenaah wants to fuck you, or maybe she hasfucked you and she can’t shake it. I don’t really know.”

“Cassius doesn’t hate you,” said Zahariev. “He thinks you distract me. He hates that.”

“Sounds like the same fucking thing,” I said.

Zahariev didn’t respond to that. Instead, he changed the subject.

“Would you like me to fire Hassenaah?”

I turned to look at him, surprised he would ask. “You can’t,” I said. “Coco loves her.”

“I can do whatever I want,” he said.

“Yeah, except they would both know you fired her because of me, and I don’t want that kind of reputation.”

Zahariev raised a brow. “What reputation is that?”

“If you swoop in to save me every time something goes wrong, I’m just going to look like a rat, and everything they say about me will be true.”

Running to Zahariev was the equivalent of running to my dad to get me out of trouble, and there were just some things that weren’t worth that kind of debt.

We fell into an uneasy silence, but most of that came from one unanswered question. He hadn’t denied sleeping with Hassenaah, and that just ate away at my insides. I couldn’t stop imagining them together, and the more I thought about it, the more my frustration grew.

I didn’t even know why I needed to know.

Maybe it was because I saw Hassenaah as my enemy.

My anger ebbed and flowed, rising higher and higher, and just when I was about to speak, there was a knock at the door.

I thought the cheerful nurse had returned to take us to see Liam, except it wasn’t her. It was an older doctor with a few wisps of hair on the top of his head. He wore scrubsand a white lab coat. I instantly disliked him. I’d rather see Dr. Mor, but he wasn’t for traditional medicine.

He didn’t follow the rules set by the church.

“Mr. Zareth,” the doctor said.

I looked from the doctor to Zahariev, who nodded in acknowledgment.

“I have some information I think you might be interested in concerning Esther Pomeroy,” he said. “We ran her labs upon arrival at the hospital. She had high concentrations of Commiphora myrrha in her system.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

The doctor glanced at me but then looked at Zahariev.

So he was one ofthosemen.

“She asked you a question,” Zahariev said.

The doctor’s eyes widened. “Apologies, madam—”

“Miss Leviathan,” Zahariev corrected. “You have the pleasure of being in the presence of Miss Lilith Leviathan, Dr. Marlow.”

His eyes widened further. “Apologies, Miss Leviathan. I…I didn’t know.”

The worst part was that if I were anyone else, he wouldn’t have cared.

“You were saying what you found in Esther’s system,” I reminded curtly.