His hands were always warm. The gloves, no doubt. Old, patched leather, never taken off indoors, as if the touch of bare skin was something to be rationed or feared. But when he did touch you—his fingers brushing your wrist to check a pulse or correct your grip—the rings made it colder than anything. Each band: iron, bone, tarnished silver. Nothing ornamental. Instruments. Memory markers. Cold little lies.

You found yourself watching his hands too often. The rings. The veins. The way his nails were trimmed to clinical neatness—no soil beneath them, no blood dried in the beds. Even the skin was pale but immaculate, ghostlike. Untouched.

Yours, by contrast, were shameful. Always hidden. Crooked nails, chewed short, sometimes cracked at the sides. Fingers stained, uneven, always a little sore where you'd bitten too low. You cleaned them fast when you saw him coming—biting the dirt away like it proved something. As if he’d see the truth of you, the filth. As if he'd comment.

But you weren’t dirty. You weren’t. The Mansion, and Cinege in particular, had simply done a good job making you feel that way—unclean, sinful, animal.

Gideon liked the clean ones. The maids. The soft-spoken, white-apron girls. You’d seen it. The way he talked to them—voice like folded velvet, sugar-wrapped barbs. Valeria had told you once, “That’s how the Devil speaks when he wants to be invited in.” She was probably right. Gideon was a collector. Not of things—but of the sick, the broken, the dying. Of information. Of symptoms.

Rodent spoke well of him, too. “The Shepherd,” he called him once. “Tends to the Lord’s body same as he tends the rotting ones.” Which meant something, even if it didn’t make sense at the time. Gideon had that look about him: sane enough to act mad, or mad enough to act sane. It depended on the light.

That morning, the rain hadn’t stopped. It didn’t fall—it gnawed. Endless, thin veils that scraped against the glass, trying to erase what lay beneath. The Mansion’s courtyards were cleaner than usual, washed bone-white, the half-dug graves bleeding up the past. Moshe would cover them later, you assumed, when the ground stopped twitching.

It wasn’t the kitchen you started in that day, but the spare chamber—his chamber. Rodent had sent you. A burn on your hand, already a week old. Healing poorly, he said. Or maybe he wanted you to be out of the way. Either way, Gideon had sweets that day, and words. Always words. Tales like broken birds, thrown from nests mid-storm.

You knocked once, weakly. The door had already been left ajar.

Inside: warmth. Not cozy—clinical. A cabin beside a fire, a room carved out of some elder thing’s belly, all books and vinegar and copper. Gideon stood at the shelf, his back to you, coat damp at the shoulders. He hummed low, quiet. Not music—just breath working its way into a tune.

When he turned, he held a book—something with dried leaves pressed between its pages, brittle and brown like ruined tongues. The window remained open. Rain found the sill. He stepped forward.

And when he took your wrist in his hand—larger than yours, the gloves off this time—his fingers settled into place like they’d been there before. As if he’d held you long ago, and forgot to let go.

You looked at his face. He smiled, vaguely. A ghost of a thing.

His eyes never changed. And then— He stepped closer. Reached out.

Fingers brushing your wrist. Large hand enclosing yours. A ring pressed just under the bone.

“You tremble like the wound is new,” he murmured. “But you know it isn’t. You’re not here for the burn, are you?”

Your breath caught. His eyes didn’t look at your face. He was staring at your fingers. The skin. The dirt under the nails.

“Shame’s not an illness,” he added, tilting your hand toward the light. “But it does tend to rot everything it touches. Slowly. Quietly. Like a worm in the spine.”

And for a moment, his thumb brushed the back of your hand. Not cruelly.

Just enough to make it feel like a confession.