The Sin of Sloth roved the dark halls of his home in solitude, moving through the passages and corridors that had long been abandoned by the Aos Sí, or had simply been forgotten in the recesses of time. He drifted through those tired areas, more ghost than man, and felt the disquiet settle in his bones.

Tehgrair's shade stirred below his flesh. Talons raked their length across his mind, and its limbs shifted beneath the Sin's flesh.

Danger, the vestige murmured, its voice rippling through the still waters of Peroth's thoughts.

Danger, Peroth agreed as he push open the portrait and dropped from the secret passage into the foyer. Danger. I sense its presence, and yet I cannot pinpoint its source. I only understand its approach.

A growl from the dining room's doorway caught Peroth's attention. Gavin, caught between his two forms, waited at the shadowed threshold with his animal eyes reflecting what light could be found in the desolate foyer. No voices met their ears. The manor held its breath.

"Gavin," Peroth spoke as he crossed the floor. "Any trouble?"

The beast's muzzle—level with the Sin's head—swung from side to side. "Nothing."

Sloth hummed under his breath. Nothing...?

"The Vytians are gone."

The Sin blinked as the eerie prickling of unease tightened the skin between his shoulder blades and brought his head up. "I sent the servant home days ago."

"The boy is gone, too."

Boy. How casually they threw that moniker in the Vytian's face, though Peroth knew he wasn't a boy. He was a man—a man driven by need and desperation. A dangerous man. For how long had the Sin known he was taunting a viper and not a sniveling child?

Danger, Tehgrair warned. Every time he'd met the princeling's gaze in recent years, the same jolt of unrest had gone through him. Danger.

The Sin shrugged. "He'll return. The poor fool hasn't anywhere else to go." His gaze lingered on the banister and the stairs wending upward.

He's not unlike myself. Trapped in this manor, even when we walk beyond its borders. With such desperation, we seek only to shed ourselves of its burden—but that burden is all we have. It's all I have left.

"Gavin...." Peroth ran a hand along the smooth edge of his jaw as he tried to divest himself of such useless thoughts. His mind needed to be clear. Sharp. "Have your boys evacuate the manor."

The barghest's ears perked. "Sir?"

His surprise was understandable. Peroth hadn't given a similar order is many, many years.

"It may be nothing, but I feel...unsettled. My mind wanders." The Sin passed a hand over his brow to illustrate his point. "It would be safer for you and the Aos Sí to leave, at least for a time."

"What of the elves?"

Peroth snorted as he started toward the stairs. His footsteps resounded in the quiet. "If they haven't the sense to leave on their own, let them do what they wish. King above knows we can't tell them what to do."

Gavin bowed as his mien shifted to something more akin to human and Peroth continued upstairs. The Sin listened to the engrossing silence and the unheard, malignant undertone. Tehgrair bristled and writhed as he fought to surface and Peroth suppressed him.

He paused at his office door. It was ajar, left open enough to reveal the stark blue light inside. The whir of a computer's fan could be heard, and the distant ring of a call trying to go through to no avail.

Peroth eased into the room without a sound. The Sin of Lust sat in the dark, illuminated only by the dim glow of the computer's screen forgotten on the couch at her side. She leaned upon her knees with a cell phone at her ear. The call continued to go unheeded and the woman muttered a quiet oath.

Leaning over the couch's back, Peroth whispered, "Frustrated, my Amor?" into Amoroth's ear.

She didn't startle. Her head tipped half a fraction in his direction while the majority of her attention remained on the phone at her ear. "As ever."

Put out, Sloth straightened and wandered to the other side of the room. He paced by the wall of his past hosts and the myriad of eyeless stares gave him pause. Each skull had been a person, and now served as a reminder of what he was. Sloth was a murderer. A killer. There wasn't a kind way to paint that image, no way to soften its meaning. The Sins killed to survive.

He touched a skull with just one finger, prodding it back into place with the others. Miriam, his memory supplied. Next to her was John. Beside him was Reginald. Peroth knew all of their names. He carried them with him wherever he went.

Amoroth let out an aggravated sigh and tossed the phone away in disgust. It landed somewhere in the dark with a small thud. Peroth studied the smooth arch of her back and the riotous nature of her curls highlighted by the computer's light as she rubbed at her eyes.

"I still can't get ahold of Dorian," she snapped. "I can't get ahold of anyone. The whole goddamn city could be in flames and I wouldn't have a clue."

Peroth stiffened, though Amoroth couldn't see. "Foolish boy," he grumbled, averting his gaze to the balcony above. W'arg was absent from his favored perch, as was Lionel. The former was surveying the lands beyond the manor, and the Sin wasn't sure where the latter was. Lionel hadn't answered to him in years.

"Are you jealous?" Amoroth's voice was tinged with unguarded amusement.

Peroth had met Dorian Ezra once in one of his few, brief foyers beyond the manor's ward. As the shadowy owner of DPC Innovations, Sloth intermittently needed to make the occasional appearance at certain meetings organized by Amoroth. He'd met Dorian Ezra from across a boardroom. He'd seen the lost, infatuated look upon the young man's face and had felt a corresponding darkness swell within himself.

Jealousy? Yes, perhaps it was jealousy that reared its ugly head whenever Peroth heard that man's name fall from her mouth.

Amoroth had approached while his mind had wandered. She stood before him, close enough for the heat of her skin to be felt, peering upward through the screen of her dark lashes as her lips quirked with a smile. "I would've thought you'd be wiser by now, Cuxiel. Wise enough to not be jealous of a human man. You are the only one I've ever loved."

Hearing her say the words did nothing to assuage the knot of emotions tightening about his heart. "I'll never understand why."

The woman harrumphed as she straightened his lapels and his unbuttoned collar. "Your thoughts are in disarray because you're anxious. I know you're worried about Darius and Gaspard. There's nothing you can do at this point. Give him a measure of faith. They're both far too stubborn to die now."

He was worried. He was also angry. He'd wanted to follow, but he couldn't. The Sin of Sloth was tied to this place, trapped inside his own bloody cage, and couldn't follow the man he called his friend and brother. Every nuance of his being rejected the sense of confinement. The manor wasn't a safe-haven. It was a prison of his own making.

"You love a monster," he murmured as his nails devolved into talons and skirted the soft skin of her throat visible above the neckline of her blouse. With minimal effort, he could slice that flesh and end her. "I am a monster."

Amoroth gripped him by the wrist and jerked his hand away with unnatural strength. Startled, Peroth looked into her lavender eyes as the Sin of Lust rose to push her face towards his. She spoke in a voice of authority as her patience frayed. "So am I."

"And that's my fault," he retorted. "My fault!"

"You weren't the one who killed me."

"But I was the one who did this." The fingers of Sloth's free hand skated upon the hard angle of her cheekbone and down her jaw. "I did this to you!"

Amoroth scoffed as she dropped his arm, spinning to face the couch and her computer. "Stop trying to shoulder the weight of the world. It's not endearing."

She was walking away. Peroth didn't want her to walk away. Not again. Not now.

He reached for the woman. He took her by the elbow and called her name. "Kyra!"

Amoroth froze.

That was her true name, of course. Kyra Sparrow. It was the name she'd answered to as a mortal, when she'd been a naïve—if not innocent—young woman bound to the Sin of Lust, Horus. It was the name Cuxiel had screamed when she died in arms, wounded mortally by Balthazar for loving a Sin.

It was the name Peroth had invoked like a war chant when he and Darius had almost killed themselves to bring her back.

Amoroth crossed her arms as she refused to look at him and kept the curtain of her chestnut hair between them. "You haven't called me that in a long time."

"It's your name, isn't it?"

"It was."

Peroth turned her in his arms, hands tangled in her hair as he swept it from her face. "Amor...."

Her name had been Kyra. It had been Kyra when she became the Sin of Lust—but the naïve mortal woman he'd loved so direly never rose from her premature grave. Balthazar may have taken her life, but Cuxiel had killed her innocence. He'd done so slowly, over many years, and had watched the woman he loved die an inevitable death by his own hand.

He'd taught her how to lie. How to cheat. How to hide emotion and how to twist others against each other. He'd taught Kyra how to kill. Peroth could recall all of it with perfect, exacting clarity. He remembered holding her as she sobbed with her bloodstained hands left limp at her sides. Her first host hadn't been a good man, but in Kyra's eyes, he'd been innocent.

And she'd killed him.

Peroth had known then that, in giving her the tools to survive, he'd destroyed what goodness and virtue was left in the woman's heart. He killed the woman he loved.

Oh, yes. He was a monster, and so was she. Everything that Grace Amoroth was, Cuxiel had created. The life of a Sin wasn't a life at all, but a cheap imitation of existence. Had he known then what he knew now, Peroth wouldn't have brought her back. He loved her too damn much to curse her with this state again.

Amoroth's hands reciprocated the motions of his own, the blunt edge of her nails trailing upon his scalp as she brought her fingers through his short hair. She raised herself up on tip-toe, her body flush against his own.

"That look of regret in your eyes is the reason I had to leave, you know," she murmured as her breath mingled with his. "The reason I had to follow the others to America and put an ocean between us. I can't stand the sadness I've given you."

Her lips brushed his in a phantom touch. Peroth's hands lowered from her hair to skim her shoulders, then down to encircle her middle. Every inch of her was precious and reviled, a triumph and a travesty. He regretted her creation yet prayed she never left him again.

I thought I was above such selfishness, Peroth thought with chagrin as he held the Sin of Lust as tightly as he could. It appears I am not.

Amoroth smirked as she shut her eyes and her arms tightened about his neck, the side of her nose touching his. Her skin was soft and smelt like lilacs. "We must own every decision we make. They are what define us. I could've remained stupid and witless like that mortal girl you loved so much, but I wouldn't have survived. I wanted to live. Every action thereafter was my own decision, and I won't let you take those choices from me. They're mine, not yours. You're such a fool, Cuxiel."

His brow rose and Peroth smiled. His unease was momentarily quelled. "Am I?"

"You are." The unattended computer dimmed, leaving both Sins in the shadows. "Whatever danger comes, you know I'll be here for you."

She pressed her lips to his, their touch more firm and insistent than it had been before. Cuxiel surrendered rational thought to their inviting warmth and treasured the taste of her as if he'd never be able to savor it again.

Somewhere in the manor, a clock began to chime the hour. The crows in the moor began to caw.