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"You had me fucking followed?!"
The accusation cut through the hideout with enough force that the room seemed to contract around it.
Ashur had been in the middle of explaining something to Dorian—a discrepancy in the grain shipments out of the lower docks, something that should have mattered and now didn't at all—one hand resting against the edge of the table while Maevaris sifted through a stack of reports beside him, her quill moving in short, economical strokes. The candlelight caught the gold leaf on the ledger spines. Somewhere further back in the hideout, two of the younger Dragons were arguing good-naturedly over a hand of cards, and the ordinary noise of the place, the smell of tallow and old parchment and the river damp that never quite left the stone, had made the room feel, for one unremarkable hour, like somewhere safe.
Now he found himself staring at Tarquin from across the room, the gold of his mask hiding the first flicker of surprise that had gone through his face.
He breathed in.
Not into his chest. Lower.
He had learned, years ago, under circumstances he did not care to revisit even in the privacy of his own head, that anger announced itself in the body before it ever reached the mouth. The shoulders rose first. Then the breath shortened, climbing up out of the belly and into the throat where it made the voice thin and unreliable. The hands tightened, the jaw set, and by the time any of it reached speech the damage was usually already done. He had watched his father lose control of a room exactly that way more times than he could count, had watched men flinch at the change in Corimer's breathing before he'd said a single cruel word, and had promised himself, very young, in a house that did not reward promises like that, that he would never let his body announce him before his mind had chosen what to say.
So he drew the breath down into his diaphragm and held it there until his ribs expanded beneath his coat. His shoulders remained square. His hands stayed loose, open at his sides, the posture of a man who had nothing to hide and nothing to fear, which was, he thought distantly, possibly the single greatest lie his body had ever told.
"And if I did?"
Tarquin's expression changed.
Not surprise. He had already known the answer. Tarquin didn't ask questions if he didn't know the answer already—that was one of the first things Ashur had learned about him, long before any of this, back when it had still been safe to find the trait admirable rather than devastating.
It was the confirmation he had come for.
"You had me followed."
Ashur's voice remained even. "I had you investigated."
A humorless laugh escaped Tarquin.
"That is not the distinction you think it is."
Dorian's gaze moved between them, quick and assessing, the particular stillness he got when he was deciding whether a situation called for wit or silence and was, for once, choosing silence. Maevaris had stopped turning pages entirely, her quill resting against the paper, a single drop of ink spreading slowly into a small black bloom she did not move to blot. The room was otherwise silent as the card game behind them died off mid-hand, as the other Shadow Dragons stopped whatever they were doing and became, without quite meaning to, an audience.
Ashur could feel all of them watching, could feel the weight of what Tarquin was saying beginning to settle over the room like something with mass, and still he kept his voice measured.
"I had reason to believe there was a connection between you and Lenos."
"Reason." Tarquin repeated the word as though it tasted foul. "Just say it: you thought I was fucking working for him."
"I thought it was possible."
"And you decided the best way to find out was to put people on me."
Ashur's jaw tightened behind the mask. His eyes narrowed under the brim of the hat.
"I needed to know if Lenos knew about you."
"No. You needed to know what I knew about Lenos."
Ashur did not answer quickly enough despite the flicker of insight in his eyes.
Tarquin's mouth twisted. "That's what I thought."
"Quin—"
"How long?"
Ashur's fingers pressed more firmly against the table, feeling the grain of the wood under the pads of his fingers, counting it, an old trick from an old life. He was silent too long again. Tarquin's voice raised.
"How fucking long, Ashur?"
"A little over a week."
For a moment Tarquin simply looked at him, dumbfounded, the fight going out of his posture for just a heartbeat before it came roaring back twice as hard.
"A week."
His voice had gone strangely quiet.
"A week, and you were still coming to my flat."
Ashur's stomach tightened. He barely caught the flicker of a look between Dorian and Mae.
"You were still sleeping beside me."
Ashur only stared at him, eyes narrowing to dare him to continue, though some distant part of him—the part still counting the wood grain—already knew he wouldn't stop, had never once stopped once he'd started down a road, and loved him for it even now.
"You were still letting me believe that whatever this was between us was built on something other than suspicion."
"I never said I didn't trust you," Ashur finally managed.
Tarquin's eyes sharpened.
"You had me followed. You had people digging into my movements. You thought I was a fucking Venatori."
Ashur's breath caught.
"I was trying to find out whether you were compromised."
"While you were in my bed."
There was no way to answer that without making it worse.
Ashur knew it. Tarquin knew it.
And perhaps that was why Tarquin's next words landed with such particular cruelty.
"You didn't even think I deserved to know. You couldn't even tell me the truth."
Ashur finally moved away from the table, needing the motion, needing something for his body to do besides stand there and absorb each accusation like blows he had already agreed he deserved.
"I was trying to determine whether you were a risk. Information was getting leaked. I had to find where it was coming from."
The words were not angry.
That was what made Tarquin stare at him.
Ashur regretted them almost immediately.
But they were true.
He had lain awake beside Tarquin with that possibility turning over and over in his mind, night after night for a week that had felt immeasurably longer, had watched the slow rise and fall of the man's chest in the dark and the particular looseness that came into his face only in sleep, the only hours in which Tarquin ever looked entirely unguarded, and had wondered—hated himself for wondering, and wondered anyway—whether a connection to Lenos was coincidence, whether the things that did not quite fit the shape of the man he knew were pieces of some larger picture he had simply refused to let himself see. He had traced, in his mind, the handful of times Tarquin had been late to things he shouldn't have been late to. He had thought about the scar on his forearm that Tarquin had given two different explanations for on two different nights, months apart, and had told himself it meant nothing, and had not been able to make himself believe it.
He had hated himself for wondering.
He had investigated anyway.
"You know what I think?" Tarquin asked.
Ashur said nothing.
"I think you decided that because you were frightened, you were entitled to make the decision for both of us."
"That is not what happened."
"Sure seems like it."
"No—"
"Then tell me what happened."
Ashur's composure was beginning to feel like something he was physically holding in place, the way a man holds a door shut against a wind that wants it open. Every muscle in his body seemed to have become conscious of itself. He could feel his pulse beating in his throat, could hear the faintest edge of his own breathing inside the mask, amplified and strange the way his own voice had always sounded strange to him when he was a child with his ear pressed to a wall, listening for his father's footsteps.
"I could not afford to confront you without knowing what I was dealing with."
"Why?"
"Because if you were working with Lenos, asking you would have warned him that I knew."
"And if I wasn't?"
Ashur hesitated.
Tarquin saw that too.
"If you weren't," Ashur said quietly, "I still needed to know before I put anyone else at risk."
Tarquin's eyes were hard now.
"That's always the answer with you, isn't it? Everyone else."
Ashur frowned under the mask. "You don't understand—"
"Of course I fucking don't because you keep everything to yourself."
Tarquin stepped closer, nearly to Ashur's chest, having to look up at him, and Ashur had the sudden, vivid memory of the first time Tarquin had stood this close to him—not in anger, that first time, but in something that had felt, impossibly, like the opposite of it—and hated that the memory had chosen now, of all moments, to surface.
"You had no problem deciding that I could be followed. That someone could discover me coming here. That someone could discover you leaving my flat. You know what would happen if the wrong person saw us together."
Ashur's shoulders stiffened.
"I was careful," Ashur defended fruitlessly.
Tarquin's laugh was bitter. "You were fucking sleeping with me."
If the room was silent before, the air was sucked out of it entirely now, Dorian and Mae still present going motionless at once, the way a room does when it realizes it is witnessing something it was never meant to see. The words struck somewhere deep enough that Ashur's composure slipped for the first time—not dramatically, not visibly to anyone who hadn't spent two years learning the exact architecture of his restraint, but Mae saw it, and Dorian saw it, and above all Tarquin saw it, because Tarquin had spent far longer than two years learning him.
"I know what I was doing."
"Do you?"
Tarquin came another step closer.
"You were willing to risk both of us being exposed while you were investigating whether I was betraying you. You made that choice for me. You decided the danger was acceptable and never bothered to tell me I was the one accepting it. What if you were seen? What then?"
Ashur stared at him.
There was truth in that.
He could feel it, and he hated it.
He had thought of the possibility of being discovered. He had calculated it with the same cold thoroughness he brought to every other threat against the Dragons—had considered routes, precautions, timings, the particular hour of night when the street outside Tarquin's flat was least likely to hold a witness. He had convinced himself that the risk was manageable, had filed it alongside every other manageable risk he carried, and had not once, in all that calculation, stopped to ask whether Tarquin would have called it manageable too.
What he had not considered—what it had simply never occurred to him to consider, and that failure of imagination now felt like the ugliest part of the whole affair—was that Tarquin might object to being the one who carried that risk without knowing he was carrying it.
Because Ashur had decided for him.
He had done exactly what Tarquin was accusing him of doing.
"I was trying to keep you safe. To keep everyone safe."
"From Lenos?"
"Of course."
"Or from you?"
Ashur's eyes narrowed. "What did you say?"
"Am I getting too close?"
The question was almost gentle.
That was worse. Tarquin knew him too well.
"You don't trust me," he said. "That's what this is."
Ashur looked away.
"I didn't know if I could."
The admission was quiet. It cost him more than anything he had said all night, and he heard the cost land in the small, strangled sound Tarquin made in response.
Tarquin's face tightened as though Ashur had struck him.
"Fuck." He dragged a hand through his hair, pulling at the braids. "Andraste's tits, Ashur. I cannot fucking believe you."
Ashur could feel his own temper beginning to rise now, hot and humiliatingly fast, the discipline he'd been holding since the first accusation starting to fray at its edges. He had been patient. He had explained himself. He had acknowledged the parts he knew were indefensible, had not once raised his voice, had done everything a man in his position was supposed to do to de-escalate a confrontation he had, by his own admission, earned. But Tarquin was not interested in understanding the decision. He wanted Ashur to admit that the entire foundation of their relationship had been rotten, and Ashur, for the first time since the door had opened, felt the real temptation to simply let him win the argument and be done with it, to stop defending a position he was no longer certain he believed in.
"I had a reason, Tarquin."
"That doesn't make it right."
"I didn't say—"
"You keep saying you had a reason as though that absolves you of sin and—"
"I never said it did—"
"Then what does?"
Ashur's restraint snapped.
"I don't fucking know, Tarquin."
The shout echoed through the room, bouncing off the low stone ceiling, loud enough that somewhere in the next room over a chair scraped against the floor as someone stood without quite meaning to.
Dorian shifted. Maevaris looked at Ashur, but he was already turning toward them, the mask's calm reasserting itself across his face with visible effort, the way a man pulls a coat back on over a wound.
"Go."
"Ashur—"
"Mae. Now."
There was enough warning in his voice that she stopped. She looked at him for one more second—not at Tarquin, at him, the way she always looked at him when she was deciding whether to argue with a decision or trust that he had reasons she wasn't owed—and then gathered the papers from the table, careful even now, even in the middle of this, not to smear the still-wet ink blot. Dorian followed her, though not without giving Tarquin a wary, searching look on his way past, the kind of look that said I am leaving because he told me to, not because I think this is finished.
Ashur waited.
For several seconds, the only sound was the distant murmur of the hideout beyond the room—footsteps, a low exchange of voices quickly hushed, the particular quality of silence that comes from a dozen people trying very hard to listen without seeming to.
Then Tarquin spoke. "Remember what we said we always needed?"
Ashur closed his eyes. He already knew.
"Faith," Tarquin said. "Loyalty. Honesty."
Ashur's hand tightened.
"Don't, Quin."
"Three simple things."
"I said don't."
"And you couldn't give me any of them."
Ashur turned toward him.
"That is not fair."
"Then tell me what part is wrong."
Ashur stared at him. He could not.
Tarquin stepped closer.
"You didn't have faith in me."
"Because I had reason to doubt—"
"You didn't show me loyalty."
"I was trying to protect the people who depend on me, and—"
"And honesty?"
Ashur's mouth tightened, snapped shut.
Tarquin shook his head.
"You couldn't even give me that."
"I had no choice."
"You always have a choice, Ashur."
The words struck something in him.
Ashur's expression hardened.
"Sometimes I don't."
"No. Sometimes you simply don't like the choices you have."
"That's not—"
"You know what this sounds like?"
Ashur felt the warning before Tarquin spoke the words. He knew. Some part of him knew, had known from the moment Tarquin's voice had first dropped into that low, deliberate register, the one he used only when he meant for a thing to land exactly where he aimed it. But he could not stop him.
"Like father, like son, yeah?"
Everything inside Ashur went cold.
For a heartbeat he could not hear anything except the blood rushing in his ears.
Tarquin knew. Of course he knew.
He knew exactly what Corimer had been. He knew what Ashur's father had done. He knew about the Venatori, knew about the blood magic and the manipulation and the years of Ashur being treated as a possession rather than a son—knew it not as rumor or history but as the thing Ashur had told him in pieces, over months, in the dark, in the only voice he'd ever used for it, the one with no Viper in it at all. He knew it because Ashur had trusted him with it. Had handed it to him like something fragile and watched him hold it carefully, and had thought, at the time, that there was no greater proof of faith than that.
And Tarquin knew, perhaps better than anyone alive, that there was no wound Ashur carried deeper than the fear that some part of Corimer had survived inside him regardless—that the blood could not be entirely escaped, only managed, the way a man manages a disease he will carry until he dies.
Ashur's palm struck the table.
The sound cracked through the room.
"Don't you fucking compare me to him."
Tarquin did not move except a slight shrug.
"You just did exactly what he taught you."
"I am nothing like him."
"You decided you knew what was best for me."
"I was trying to keep you alive—"
"You decided what I was allowed to know."
"I was trying to keep everyone alive!"
"You had me watched without telling me—"
"Because I thought you might be working for the fucking Venatori and it would have killed me to find out my suspicions were true!"
The words tore out of Ashur. His magic surged with the anger, prickling hot beneath his skin before he forced it back down, the candle flames along the wall guttering sideways for a single unnatural second before going still again.
Tarquin stared at him.
Ashur was breathing hard now, each breath fighting its way up past a throat gone tight. The mask suddenly felt suffocating against his face, heavier than it had ever felt in all the years he had worn it, as though it had finally begun to weigh what it actually cost him instead of what it was supposed to protect.
"I thought you might be working for Lenos," he said again, but the fury had cracked open something underneath it. "Do you understand what that meant?"
Tarquin's expression remained guarded.
"It meant I thought you might betray me. It meant I thought you might betray all of us."
"And?"
"I had to know."
"And you decided that made it acceptable."
"No, Quin." Ashur's voice broke. "It made it necessary."
Tarquin looked at him.
Ashur reached up and tore the mask from his face.
He threw it onto the table.
"I spent my entire fucking life making sure I would never become him."
His voice shook now, not with anger alone.
"I know what he did to people. I know what he did to me. I know what it looks like when someone decides that love gives them the right to control another person's life." He looked at Tarquin, his eyes bright, and for the first time all night there was nothing between his face and the room—no mask, no carefully measured breath, nothing but a man who had run out of ways to armor himself. "I know."
Tarquin's anger faltered, just slightly.
Ashur shook his head.
"And do you think I don't know how fucking close that feels right now?" The admission seemed to cost him everything he had left. "I knew it was wrong to have you followed. I knew it was wrong to dig through your life. I knew that if you found out, you would feel exactly the way you feel now."
His voice dropped.
"And I did it anyway."
Tarquin said nothing.
"Because I was afraid." Ashur laughed once, bitterly, a sound with no humor anywhere in it. "Maker, I was so fucking afraid." He looked down at the mask on the table, gold and empty and strange, like a face that belonged to someone else. "Not that you were working for Lenos."
Tarquin's eyes narrowed.
Ashur swallowed.
"I was afraid that I had let myself trust someone who could destroy everything I had built." A pause, long enough that the silence itself became a kind of confession. "And I was afraid that if I stopped to ask you, I might believe whatever you told me."
Tarquin's expression changed.
Ashur looked back at him.
"That was the part I couldn't risk."
"Why?"
"Because I love you." The words came out with no grandeur to them. No declaration. They sounded exhausted, scraped up from somewhere underneath everything else he'd said tonight. "Because if you had looked me in the eye and told me you were innocent, I would have believed you."
Tarquin went still.
"And if you were lying," Ashur whispered, "I would have handed you every fucking key I had. The Dragons, the Chantry—all of me.” His eyes dropped. "So yes, I needed to know."
Tarquin was quiet for a long time, long enough that Ashur began to wonder if he would say anything at all, if this was simply where the two of them would stand now, forever, on opposite sides of a table with a mask lying between them like a body.
Then he said, "And you don't see what that means?"
Ashur looked up.
"It means you decided I wasn't worthy of choosing honesty with you. You decided for me whether I was worth trusting. Whether what we had was worth risking. Whether I deserved the truth."
Ashur swallowed.
"And you wonder why I hear Corimer in it."
Ashur closed his eyes.
That was the one thing he could not fight.
Because Tarquin had not said he was Corimer.
He had said he could hear him.
And Ashur could hear him too.
"I am not him," he said, very quietly. There was no anger behind it now, only the desperate need for Tarquin to believe it.
Tarquin didn't look at him on his way to the door. That was somehow worse than if he had.
"Quin."
He stopped, hand on the frame, but didn't turn.
"I don't want an apology that only exists because I caught you." Tarquin’s voice had gone flat, stripped of the heat it had carried all night, and the flatness was its own kind of verdict, harder to argue with than the shouting had ever been. "I want to know you'd have told me. Someday. On your own."
Ashur opened his mouth. Nothing came. He searched, in the silence, for some version of yes that would be true, and found that he did not have one—that the honest answer was a different, smaller question entirely: whether he would ever have trusted himself enough to risk it.
"Yeah." Tarquin nodded once, like the silence had confirmed something he'd already suspected and hoped it wouldn't. "That's what I thought."
The door didn't slam. It closed the way careful men closed doors, quiet, deliberate, and the quiet of it did more damage than any sound could have. Ashur stood listening to his footsteps recede down the passage, counting them without meaning to, the way he counted everything, until even that was gone.
He stood there for a long moment with his hands still braced against the table, listening to the hideout settle back into itself around him—the distant murmur of the Dragons, someone's boots on the stair, low voices that dropped lower still when they passed near enough to sense what had happened, a draft moving through the lower passage and guttering one of the candles near the door until it drowned in its own wax. Ordinary sounds. The kind of sounds that didn't care what had just happened under them, that would go on being ordinary whether or not he ever got up from this table again.
He looked down at the mask.
Gold, serpent-toothed, catching what little light the room still held. He had worn it through worse than this, he told himself, and found the thought did nothing to help—through his father's study, through interrogations he didn't like to remember, through the hour he'd learned what the word Venatori meant in his own house before he'd learned what it meant anywhere else, through his mother's funeral, through three different attempts on his life, through every single occasion on which the world had required him to be the Viper instead of a man who was frightened or grieving or simply tired. He had never once, in all those years, left it off the table for longer than it took to pick it back up.
His hand hovered over it now and didn't move.
He thought of Tarquin's voice saying someday, on your own, and understood, with the kind of clarity that only ever seemed to arrive after it was too late to use it, that the mask had never been the problem tonight. He could have just talked to him. He could have sat across from him in that narrow bed, in the dark, with Tarquin's arm slung heavy and trusting over his waist, and said I don't know if I can trust you, and I hate that, and I'm doing it anyway—and it would have cost him something, would have meant sitting inside that particular fear instead of handling it from a safe distance the way he handled everything else. Tarquin might have been angry. Tarquin might have made him leave that very night. But he would have left knowing the truth instead of discovering, a week later, that the man he was sleeping beside had decided, unilaterally, what he was and was not owed.
Instead Ashur had chosen the version where no one got to be angry with him because no one got to know.
That was the part Corimer would have understood. Not the fear—his father had never, as far as Ashur knew, been afraid of anything. But the instinct underneath it, the quiet, reasonable-sounding logic that said I know better than you what you can bear, so I will decide for both of us—that instinct Ashur recognized the way a man recognizes his own handwriting on a page he doesn't remember writing.
Ashur picked up the mask. His fingers found the familiar cold of it, the worn place along the left temple where his thumb always rested, smoothed soft by years of exactly this gesture. He didn't put it on.
He set it down again, face-up, so that its painted teeth glistened in the candlelight back at the ceiling instead of at him, and sat with his back to the table and his head in his hands, and let himself, for exactly as long as it took the candle to gutter out, be only afraid.