As it turned out, of course, Rook couldn’t drink.

  Something about his Class meant that alcohol interfered with his mana regeneration. And considering how important mana was in keeping him… well, Lowe didn’t want to say ‘alive’—but he didn’t exactly have a better term right now.

  "But that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy watching you," Rook said, leaning back against the bar, arms folded like a man who had all the time in the world. Which, Lowe supposed, wasn’t an entirely fanciful simile.

  Lowe didn’t need much convincing. The file arriving through the window had shaken him up. Standing over the graves of his friends, even more so. And now? Now, finding out that Rook was still about, still existing by some grim technicality, bound to the threshold between life and death like a bad debt that refused to clear.

  Yeah. He was amazed he wasn’t utterly paralytic yet.

  He lifted his second glass of bourbon and drained it in one go, wincing at the burn. The bartender, wisely, was already pouring the next.

  "I nearly came to see you plenty of times," Rook said. “You know, after your… thing."

  Lowe stared into his drink, watching the amber liquid catch the light. His thing. That was one way to put it. He turned the glass in his hand, feeling the condensation bead against his fingers. "So why didn’t you?" he asked. “I’d have liked to have known at least one person had survived that colossal fuck-up.”

  "Too angry, I guess."

  Lowe glanced up at that. "At what?"

  "At everything. The job. The way it all played out." He shrugged. "Me."

  “Why were you angry at you?”

  “For not putting my foot down more strongly that you were fucking everything up.”

  Neither of them spoke for a while after that. The bar - more of a dive - really - was quiet, everyone just a little too far into their drinks to keep up the pretence of cheer. The hum of conversation drifted from the far corner, punctuated by the occasional clink of glass on wood. Behind the counter, the barkeep shuffled bottles, the sound crisp in the stillness.

  It had been the only place that Lowe knew of that was seedy enough that Rook wouldn’t be barred entry but not so seedy he’d be shanked just for walking in. It was funny, he thought, how often we all sit on those lines of ‘threshold’ . . .

  Rook broke the silence first. "Before we get into this, may I?" He gestured toward the now-full glass in front of Lowe, his fingers hovering just above it.

  "Be my guest."

  Rook bent his head over the glass and inhaled deeply, eyes slipping shut like he was savouring the scent alone. "Yeah. That’s the stuff." Then he straightened. "Sorry, where was I?"

  "You were being angry at me."

  "Actually, I think I said I was angry at me. I knew what you were like. I knew the way you’d been operating since Cenorth pretty much gave you free rein. If anyone was going to avoid the whole thing turning into a shitshow, it was going to be me. And I fumbled it.”

  “Mate . . .”

  “It was just that you kept saying it," Rook continued. There was a coiled tension beneath his words, more than a year of anger compressed into something controlled but not yet gone. "Over and over again. You had it covered."

  "I thought I did, Rooky."

  "Yeah. I bet you did." He looked down at the bar, rubbing his fingers together like he could scrub away the memory. "You thought your Skills meant you could handle anything. That no matter what happened, you’d be fast enough, smart enough, strong enough to keep the whole damn house from caving in on us."

  "I’m not going to argue with you. That’s exactly what I thought."

  "And I told you we were too exposed," Rook said, his voice rising, just a fraction. His fingers clenched into a fist before he forced them to relax. "I told you again and again. You didn’t listen."

  "I listened, Rook." Lowe said quietly.

  "The fuck you did! You heard me, maybe. But listening? Actually considering that maybe you weren’t some invincible Golden Boy who could solve every problem with a Skill and a cocky grin? No. You didn’t listen. And everyone died because of it."

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  Lowe closed his eyes briefly. "You told me we needed a different plan," he said eventually.

  "I begged you for one," Rook corrected. "I told you a half-dozen different ways that we were sitting ducks out there. That we were walking into a situation we didn’t understand and didn’t have anything like enough control over. That none of it smelled right. That Highberg was involved in things we didn’t fully appreciate."

  Lowe didn’t argue. He didn’t have the right. Not with Rook.

  "And then," Rook went on, voice suddenly quiet, "I had a hand coming out the front of my chest, Faulks' head came off like a fucking cork. Coda got cooked. And Arman went down next. And the rest—"

  Lowe wasn’t sure which memory hit harder—the way the blood had looked as it sprayed across the grass, or the second between the first kill and the next when he’d known - known - that he had made a mistake, and there wasn’t a single fucking thing he could do to fix it.

  "And you know the best part?" Rook said, leaning back in his chair. "The real kicker to the whole shitshow? You weren’t wrong."

  Lowe frowned. "What?"

  "You," Rook said, pointing at him. "Your Skills. The way you move, the way you should have been able to react. You weren’t wrong. You had it covered." His jaw clenched. "But we weren’t you, Jana. And you forgot that. You thought you could be everywhere at once. That if shit went sideways, you’d just… fix it. That if something went wrong, you’d catch it in time." He let out another one of those bitter laughs. "Turns out, you’re only one man. And one man wasn’t enough."

  The silence stretched between them, not awkward, not tense. Just heavy.

  "And then," Rook added after a while, "when it was all over, when Arkola had brought me back, when the Black Knight was gone and the kid was just meat in a chair—you know what the worst part was?"

  Lowe forced himself to meet his eyes. "Tell me."

  Rook’s fingers drummed once against the table before stilling. "I wasn’t angry at you anymore."

  "That’s the worst part?"

  Rook nodded. "Because by then, it wasn’t worth it. Because by the time I was enough of myself to do something about it, you’d been Classtrated and were already carrying every ounce of that guilt yourself. Nothing I was going to say would make it any heavier, would it? And that? That pissed me off even more. So, no, I haven’t felt like come around to reminisce about old times."

  "I guess there’s not a lot I can say to that, is there?"

  "No, Jana. There isn’t."

  Lowe tipped his head back and downed the rest of his drink in one go.

  "Figured you’ll need about another three of them," Rook said, gesturing to the barman. “Put it on the guy-who-got-me-killed’s tab. He’s good for it.

  "Fuck you, Rook. If we’re keeping score, I saved your arse more times than I didn’t."

  “True. But it’s a pretty high learning curve, isn’t it? One day you’re stopping me from submitting the wrong expenses form, and the next . . .” Rook enacted his heart exploding out of his ribcage, which made everyone in the dive go pretty quiet.

  Lowe shrugged at the other patrons. “What can I say? He wants to take things further and I’m not sure I’m ready. You know what they say, once you go Threshold Guardian, you never go back. And I’m not sure rough, primitive, undead bareback sex is for me. Apparently, that breaks his heart.”

  Three drinks appeared pretty quickly then. It was almost like the barkeep wanted rid of them . . .

  Once everyone went back to their drinks, Rook actually laughed. A real one this time. "I missed this, Jana."

  "Yeah," Lowe admitted, voice quiet. "Me too."

  Then, without any more ado, the Threshold Guardian reached into his overcoat pocket and withdrew a familiar, heavy file which he dropped on the bar. Lowe stared at it, feeling something tighten in his chest.

  He didn’t reach for it immediately. He didn’t need to. He already knew what it would say, what it would contain. Instead, he dragged his gaze up to Rook’s face, scanning it for any hint, any flicker of—hell, he didn’t even know what any more.

  Expectation? Resignation?

  But Rook just met his eyes, expression steady in the way only the dead—or something close enough to damn it—could be.

  “I got mine yesterday morning,” he said, tapping the cover with one finger. “Figured it wouldn’t be long before you showed up if you’d been given your own copy. I’d been hanging about those graves for about twenty four bells.”

  “Sorry to keep you waiting.”

  “Oh, don’t worry,” Rook said, tone dry. “I’ve had plenty of time to get used to disappointment.”

  Lowe finally reached for Rook’s file, flipping it open just enough to see the message inside. The handwriting was the same. That same infuriating flourish at the end and that same casual arrogance laced through every word.

  I feel our previous game ended a little early.

  He ran his thumb over the words, feeling the indentations in the parchment.

  What a fucking prick.

  “Any idea why you got one?” Lowe asked, closing the file again and pushing it away like it might burn him.

  Rook shrugged. “I assume for the same reason you did.”

  “Yeah? And what’s that?”

  Rook smiled, but it wasn’t a pleasant expression. His too tight skin looked like it might split. “Because the Black Knight doesn’t just like to kill people, Lowe. He likes to ruin them.”

  Lowe said nothing.

  “He took your team,” Rook continued, voice quiet. “Took that kid. Took your career, your rep, your fucking name for a while. And me?” He tapped his own chest. “He left me standing at the door. Now he’s calling us both back to the table.”

  “I should let Staffen know.”

  “Yeah. You go ahead and do that. I’m sure she’ll put a nice report together while the Black Knight slits his next victim’s throat.”

  Lowe didn’t rise to the bait. He just drummed his fingers against the file, staring at the cover.

  Unsolved.

  He’d seen that word before, stamped on a hundred different cases. But never like this. Never in a way that felt so fucking personal.

  After a long moment, he looked back at Rook. “You in?”

  Rook picked up his own glass—empty, because of course it was—and tilted it in a mock toast. “Oh, I was never out.”