After the meeting with Edward finally wrapped up, Max and Eric made their way back home, the walk quieter than usual, both of them still carrying the weight of the evening in different ways. Eric had slipped the mask, Truth, into his pocket somewhere along the way, and it sat there now like a small, patient secret, waiting for whatever quiet hour of the night he could finally steal for himself to test it properly.
They reached the apartment building without much conversation passing between them, the silence comfortable in the way it only gets after a long day neither of them particularly wanted to relive out loud. Eric dug into his pocket and found Max's spare key, pressing it into his hand, and the two of them exchanged a small nod, an unspoken goodnight, before splitting off toward their respective doors.
Inside his own apartment, Eric found Ruby seated on the sofa, motionless, staring at the switched-off television as though it might eventually reveal something to her if she looked long enough. Her eyes had that particular glassy stillness that came from being somewhere else entirely, lost far enough inside her own head that the real world had stopped registering around her.
"I'm back," Eric called out, loud enough that it should have reached her easily. It didn't. She remained exactly as she was, unmoving, unaware.
He toed off his shoes by the door and crossed the room toward her, and only once he was close enough did he reach out and rest his hand gently on her shoulder. The contact seemed to detonate something in her all at once. She jerked upright with a startled shriek, spinning to find him standing there with concern already written plainly across his face.
For a moment she simply stared at him, chest rising and falling too quickly, before something like panic flickered behind her eyes and she scrambled to her feet. Her gaze skittered everywhere except toward his own. "Ah! Darling, you're back! Sorry, sorry, I didn't hear you come in; I was just... thinking about something. Let me get dinner sorted; I'm starving. Aren't you starving? Let's eat."
She was already turning away before she finished the sentence, disappearing into the kitchen with the particular urgency of someone fleeing a conversation she wasn't ready to have.
Eric watched her go for a moment, something quiet and thoughtful settling behind his eyes, before he made his way to the bedroom instead. He pulled a plain black shirt from the wardrobe and changed, taking his time about it, giving her whatever space she seemed to need before he returned to the dining table, where the food was already waiting.
Ruby sat across from him, and the smile she wore the moment he appeared looked like it had cost her something to hold in place, the corners stretched a fraction too wide, her cheeks visibly straining under the effort of maintaining it. It should have looked strange. Instead, it just looked endearing, a little absurd, the kind of expression that made him want to reach over and smooth the tension out of her face with his thumb.
He glanced down at what sat waiting on his plate and paused. The dish in front of him was, to put it generously, unusual. A golden omelette, glossy and rounded, releasing a warm, delicate aroma that had no business belonging to eggs, something closer to vanilla and honey than anything savory. His first instinct was that she'd somehow made a cake shaped like breakfast, the kind of trick recipe that circulated endlessly online under titles promising to fool your friends.
Eric picked up his fork and knife and cut a small piece free, bringing it to his mouth without much expectation beyond curiosity. The first bite caught him off guard. It was savory and creamy at once, layered in a way that shouldn't have made sense, somehow managing to taste like dessert and dinner in the same forkful. Buried inside were small roasted mushrooms, their earthiness cutting through the sweetness just enough to keep the whole thing from tipping over into something too rich. It was, genuinely, like eating three different dishes stitched together into one.
He glanced up at her, one eyebrow lifting. "Care to explain this?"
Ruby's head came up from her plate at that, some of the earlier tension in her shoulders easing slightly at the excuse to talk about something that wasn't whatever had her so distracted. "So, I was sitting around earlier with nothing to do, and I ended up watching this cooking video. 'Top Ten Dishes That Taste Different Than They Look,' or something like that. I sautéed the mushrooms in butter with just enough brown sugar to make them glossy, added a splash of balsamic for what the video called 'Parisian drama.'" She almost smiled at that part. "Then whisked the eggs with cream and salt, but the real trick was the vanilla cream. I heated real vanilla bean into it until the whole kitchen smelled like a patisserie. Folded the mushrooms into the omelette once it was done, drizzled the cream over the top, finished it with smoked sea salt."
"That's a lot of effort for a Tuesday," Eric said, a small, genuine smile pulling at his mouth. "Thank you."
She lowered her eyes back to her plate without quite meeting his, murmuring something too quiet to catch, and began eating in earnest.
They finished in a silence that wasn't uncomfortable so much as waiting for something, though Eric couldn't yet place what. Once the plates were empty, Ruby gathered them without being asked and carried them off toward the kitchen, and Eric let his eyes trail after her for a moment before turning his thoughts elsewhere.
He'd planned, on the walk home, to wait until she'd gone to sleep before finally testing Truth in private. That plan was already dissolving. Something had clearly been sitting wrong with her since before he'd even walked through the door, and whatever it was, it hadn't gone anywhere just because dinner was pleasant. The mask could wait. This couldn't, apparently.
He rose and crossed to the couch instead, settling in front of the dark television, and waited.
The sound of running water carried faintly from the kitchen, rhythmic and ordinary, and then stopped. A beat of silence followed, longer than it needed to be. Then footsteps, slow, deliberate, not the light, quick steps she usually took when moving through their apartment.
Ruby appeared in the doorway a moment later, pausing there instead of coming further in right away. Her eyes found him first, then flicked briefly to the blank screen he'd been staring at, then back to him again, as if reading something into the fact that he was sitting there waiting rather than doing anything else.
She crossed the room slowly, her steps small and unhurried in a way that felt more like reluctance than calm. When she stopped in front of him, her right hand had already found the hem of her dress, fingers twisting into the fabric and holding on.
She didn't sit. She didn't look at him either, not fully, her gaze settling somewhere near his collar instead.
"Umm," she started, and stopped. Her grip on the dress tightened. When she tried again, her voice had dropped low enough that he had to lean in slightly just to catch it.
"Eric... I want to talk."
I understand exactly what you're going for. Here's the pass.
Eric's brows drew together, confusion settling over his features as he studied her. He said nothing at first, only patted the cushion beside him, an invitation rather than a command.
Ruby crossed to him slowly, and when she sat, she left a small gap between them, her hands immediately finding her hair, twisting a strand around one finger, unwinding it, twisting it again. Her eyes stayed fixed somewhere on the floor near his feet.
Eric let out a quiet breath and closed the distance himself, sliding his arm around her shoulder and drawing her in against his side. She made a small sound at the contact, barely audible, and he felt the warmth rush into her cheeks even before he glanced down and saw it.
"Just tell me," he said, quieter now. "It hurts, watching you act like this."
She didn't answer right away. Her hand had stopped moving in her hair, fingers going still, curled loosely against a strand she wasn't playing with anymore, just holding. Her breathing changed, slow and deliberate, the kind of breath someone takes when they're trying to steady something inside themselves before it slips.
She straightened slightly, leaning further into him rather than away, as though she needed the contact to say what came next. When she finally lifted her head to look at him, her eyes were already glassy, though nothing had fallen yet. Her brows pinched together, and her lower lip pressed into a thin line, cheeks puffed out in a way that might have looked childish if her eyes hadn't looked so tired underneath it.
"Promise me," she said, voice small, "that you'll only tell me the truth."
Something in the way she said it, careful, deliberate, as she'd rehearsed it, made his chest tighten. He nodded anyway, and the small, easy laugh he let out didn't quite reach his eyes.
She pulled back from him then, just slightly, enough to put a few inches of space between their bodies, and dropped her gaze to the floor again. Her hands settled in her lap, fingers laced together too tightly.
"I've never asked you a lot of questions," she said. "Since we got married, I mean. I never wanted to be the kind of wife who pries, who makes her husband feel like he can't have a single thought to himself." A short, humorless breath left her, almost a laugh, except it wasn't one. "But ever since we came here, to Paris, I keep thinking something's wrong. Something's really wrong, and I don't know what it is, and I hate not knowing."
Her hands tightened further, knuckles whitening slightly.
"And it's you," she said, so quietly it was almost lost. "You're the wrong thing. I can feel it. I can feel how worried you are, even when you're smiling at me, especially when you're smiling at me, because it doesn't look real anymore. It hasn't looked real in weeks, in fact." Her voice cracked slightly on the last word, and she pressed her lips together, forcing it back down before it could break further. "Your eyes don't look like your eyes. They look so tired, so far away, like you're carrying something so heavy and you'd rather break your back under it than let me help carry even a little."
She finally looked up at him, and her eyes were shining now, threatening to spill, though she blinked hard, fighting it.
"What is it, Eric?"
For a moment she just sat there, lips parted around the question, waiting for an answer that didn't come, and something in her seemed to crack under the weight of that silence.
"Is it your job?" The words came out fast now, tumbling over each other, her composure finally giving way all at once. "Money? Is that it? Please, just tell me, I can't keep guessing, I can't keep lying awake wondering what I did or didn't do to make you pull away from me like this."
Her hands had unclasped from her lap and were pressed to her chest now, fisted into the fabric of her dress, and her voice kept climbing even as she visibly fought to bring it back down. "I don't want to be one of those wives, the kind who corners her husband and demands to know everything, who can't let him have a single private thought. I've tried so hard not to be that. But I can't turn this feeling off anymore. Do you know what it's like? Every single time you leave that door, my chest goes tight, and I sit here, and I don't know what I'm even afraid of. I just know I'm afraid, and it doesn't stop until you walk back through it."
Her breath hitched, catching somewhere in her throat, and she had to stop for a second, chest rising unevenly.
"I'm so tired of being cold and alone in my own home while you're standing right in front of me." Her voice dropped, cracking properly this time, no longer trying to hold itself together. "You're carrying something, I know you are, and you won't let me anywhere near it. Why? Don't you love me?"
The question hung there, and she seemed to hate herself for asking it even as it left her mouth, her face crumpling further.
"Am I even part of your family anymore? In here." She pressed a fist briefly against her own chest. "Or was I ever? Tell me. Please. Just tell me the truth; you promised me the truth."
Her knuckles had gone bloodless where they gripped the fabric of her dress, and her tears were falling freely now, fat and quick, tracking down cheeks that had gone blotchy and red, her whole body trembling faintly with the effort of having finally let all of it out.
Eric sat frozen for a long moment, something hollow opening up in his chest as he watched her come apart in front of him. He hadn't seen it. Somehow, through everything, he hadn't seen how much of this she'd been carrying alone, how loud her fear had grown while he'd been too consumed with his own to notice hers sitting right beside him.
He couldn't tell her the truth. Not the real one. Paris wasn't safe, not for someone who couldn't fight back, not for someone who had no idea what was actually circling them, and the moment she understood any of it, that danger would only tighten around her further. It wasn't a decision he'd made lightly, and it had not ever felt fair, not to her, not to himself. But watching her now, watching what his silence had already cost her without his even realizing it, the guilt settled into him heavier than it ever had before, thick and aching, impossible to argue his way out of no matter how sound the reasoning behind it was.
Something in him gave way at the sound of her voice breaking, and before he'd fully decided to move, his arms were already around her, pulling her in against his chest, holding on like letting go might mean losing her entirely. She hit his back once with a closed fist, weak and half-hearted, more grief than anger, and then again, before her hands stopped fighting and simply gripped the fabric of his shirt instead. He felt the wet heat of her tears soaking through the cotton against his chest and didn't move away from it.
He didn't try to speak over her. He let her keep going, the words tumbling out messier now, less coherent, half-formed sentences about loneliness and fear and love that trailed off into sobs before they finished, and through all of it he only held her tighter, one hand moving slowly through her hair, the other pressed flat against her back as he could physically keep her from shaking apart.
Slowly, the storm in her began to thin. Her breathing hitched less. Her grip on his shirt loosened by degrees, then tightened again, differently now, less desperate and more simply needing to hold onto something solid. She turned her face further into his chest, breathing him in, and something in her shoulders finally dropped, the tension bleeding out of her like it had been waiting for permission to leave.
He didn't know exactly when his own eyes had started stinging. It crept up on him somewhere in the middle of her crying, watching the woman who had built her entire life quietly around trusting him fall apart because he'd given her nothing to hold onto in return. Guilt sat heavy and wordless in his chest, made heavier by the fact that he still couldn't give her what she actually needed, only this: his arms, his silence, whatever comfort a body could offer when the truth itself wasn't his to give.
She noticed before he could hide it. Her hand stilled against his back, and then lifted, fingers brushing lightly through his hair the way his had through hers moments before, gentle, almost disbelieving, as though she'd never once considered that he might cry too.
"Thank you," he murmured into her hair, voice rough and low. "Thank you for worrying about me. For caring this much. Thank you."
A tear slipped free and landed somewhere near her temple, and he didn't wipe it away fast enough to hide that there'd been more than one.
She pulled back just enough to look at him properly, her hands coming up to frame his face, thumbs resting lightly against his cheekbones. Their breath mixed in the small space between them, both of them still catching their own, both of them raw in a way that made the air feel thinner than it should have. Everything either of them had been carrying alone for weeks sat exposed now, spilling over with nowhere left to hide it.
"So tell me the truth now," she whispered, her green eyes fixed on his, searching.
Eric's gaze flicked away for half a second, just barely, before catching hers again. His mind was moving fast, weighing something he didn't have time to weigh properly, and in the end he chose the only door he could see. "Ever since we got married," he said slowly, "I've thought about what our kid might look like someday. More than I've ever told you. Being here, in Paris, seeing families with their kids everywhere we go, it's been sitting heavier on me than I expected."
Her face flushed dark red almost instantly. "That's why you were staring at that couple outside the airport."
"You noticed that." A small, tired smile pulled at his mouth. "Yeah. That was why. And then Max saved a kid a few days back; a mother wasn't paying attention and nearly ran him over. Watching that happen, I found myself thinking about you as a mother. Today, seeing those kids reunited with their families, it just made the feeling stronger. I know you've said you're not ready yet, and I didn't want to push you, so I didn't know how to bring it up. That's what's been sitting with me. That's the weird behavior."
Something shifted behind her eyes, pieces falling into place one after another. "So that's why you asked me if I thought you were a bad person," she said, quieter now, almost to herself.
He nodded.
Her gaze drifted sideways, her breathing quickening, color deepening further across her cheeks. "It's not that I don't want one," she said, voice gone soft and unsteady. "It's not that. We could... we could try."
She leaned in until her forehead rested against his, both of them breathing unevenly now, and her hand found his, guiding it down until it rested against her. "We've never actually done this," she whispered, barely audible. "Not once, since the wedding. We're both still... so, do you want to change that?"
Before he could answer, before he could even fully process the question, her lips found his, warm and trembling and insistent, and something electric spread instantly across his mouth, unfamiliar and overwhelming all at once.
It was, somewhere in the back of his mind, he was still capable of noticing things: his first kiss. Not a stage peck, not a childhood dare, an actual first kiss, lips against lips, and it left something warm and unfamiliar humming across his mouth even as she kept going.
She didn't pull back. If anything, she leaned harder into it, her hands framing his jaw, holding him in place like she thought he might vanish if she loosened her grip even slightly. He could have stepped back. He was fairly certain, somewhere underneath everything else happening in his head right now, that he was strong enough to have ended this the moment he wanted to. He didn't want to. He let her have this, let her kiss him for as long as she needed to, and found that some quiet, long-buried part of himself was grateful for it.
She broke away only to breathe, her forehead still pressed to his, chest rising fast against him.
"Take me to bed," she whispered, and before he could respond in any way at all, she was kissing him again, deeper this time, clumsy and eager and entirely without technique, all instinct and no restraint.
He laughed softly against her mouth, just once, more breath than sound, something almost boyish slipping into it despite everything else weighing on him tonight. "Careful," he murmured between kisses, "you're going to bruise something."
"Don't care," she mumbled back, not stopping.
He slid his hands beneath her and lifted her without breaking the kiss, carrying her the short distance to the bedroom while she stayed wrapped around him the entire way, and it took a small, deliberate effort not to trip over the doorway doing it. He set her down onto the bed and followed after her, bracing himself above her on both arms, and for a moment he simply looked at her like that, flushed and breathless and entirely unguarded in a way he'd never seen from her before.
"You're staring," she said, a small, shy laugh escaping her despite everything.
"I'm allowed to," he said. "You're my wife."
He kissed her again after that, slower now, deliberate, moving from her lips to her forehead, her cheeks, the corner of her eye, the tip of her nose, before returning to her mouth again and again, giving her something closer to reverence than urgency. Her hands had found the hem of his shirt, tugging gently, and his own had begun working at whatever stood between them, both of them slower now, savoring the moment rather than rushing toward it.
Then, without warning, everything in him locked.
"Stop!"
The voice tore through his skull like something physical, and his entire body seized in response, every muscle going rigid at once. Beneath him, Ruby was still lost in the moment, still breathing unevenly, still humming something soft and pleased against his collarbone, entirely unaware that anything had changed. When she finally noticed his sudden stillness, she looked up at him through half-lidded eyes, dazed and warm, opening her mouth to ask what was wrong.
He didn't let her finish forming the question. He forced a smile onto his face, leaned down to kiss her once more, gentle and lingering, and murmured an apology against her lips, something about not being able to continue tonight, soft enough and sincere enough that she didn't have time to feel the sting of it before his fingers found the pressure point along her neck and her whole body went slack beneath him, eyes fluttering shut, breathing evening out into sleep.
He sat there for one long second, staring down at her unconscious face, something complicated and unresolved twisting through his chest before he made himself move. He pulled the blanket up over her carefully, tucking it around her shoulders the way she liked, and then he was up and moving fast, his left arm already fighting against him with every step, refusing to obey the simplest commands as he half stumbled into the bathroom and shut the door behind him.
He barely made it to the sink before his own arm rose against his will and pressed hard against his throat, and the voice inside his skull erupted into something he'd never heard from it before, raw, furious, almost frantic.
"You absolute idiot! Do you have any idea what you almost did?! No, no, no, this cannot happen, you cannot do this, you need to remain untouched! Have you forgotten your vows?! Have you forgotten what you swore?!"
Eric's vision blurred at the edges, his own hand, not his own hand, tightening reflexively against his windpipe, and for one terrifying second he genuinely didn't know whether he'd be able to breathe again. He didn't understand a single word of what the voice was screaming at him. Vows. Cheating. None of it connected to anything he actually knew about himself.
Then, as abruptly as it had started, it stopped. The pressure vanished from his throat. Control returned to his arm all at once, like a puppet's strings suddenly reattached to the right hands. He collapsed against the sink, gasping, dragging in air as he'd nearly drowned, sweat soaking through his shirt, his whole body trembling with the aftershock of something he still couldn't fully explain.
He stayed like that for a long while, forehead resting against the cool edge of the sink, until his breathing finally evened out enough to let him think in something resembling a straight line.
"So," he muttered eventually, voice hoarse, dragging a hand down his face, "the voice in my head has strong opinions about my sex life. Wonderful. Genuinely wonderful. Of all the nights."
He let out a short, humorless laugh, more exhausted than amused, and scrubbed both hands over his face.
"Vows. Cheating. What vows? I took my vows with her, in front of a hundred people, cake and everything. Unless there's some fine print I somehow missed."
He let the frustration sit for a moment, unbothered by how petty it felt. Being interrupted mid-moment by a voice that lived rent-free in his own skull was, objectively, one of the stranger indignities he'd suffered lately, and he'd been ambushed by an assassin two days ago. That, at least, had made sense. This didn't.
He straightened up slowly, rolling his shoulders to shake off the last of the tension still clinging to his muscles, and let out a long breath through his nose. There was no use chasing answers he clearly wasn't going to get tonight. Whatever the voice actually was, wherever it had come from, it had never once explained itself before now, and screaming half-formed accusations at him in a moment of panic wasn't exactly the clarifying breakthrough he'd have hoped for. He'd have to shelve it, same as everything else the voice had ever thrown at him. Just another mystery to add to a growing pile he had no time to sort through properly.
At least it had stopped in time. That mattered more than his pride did right now. If it had gone on even a few seconds longer, if he'd actually lost control the way it had felt like he might, there was no telling what might have happened, what Max might have sensed through the walls, what questions he'd have had to answer afterward that he had no good answers for. As it stood, the apartment was quiet again. Nothing had bled through to alert anyone. Small mercies, one can say.
He scrubbed a hand down his face, dragging in one more breath before finally letting his shoulders drop from around his ears. His fingers found his own lower lip without quite meaning to, resting there for a second longer than necessary.
His first kiss, gone, and gone in the middle of getting interrupted by a voice in his own head that apparently had opinions about his marriage vows. If someone had described this exact scenario to him a year ago, he wouldn't have believed a word of it. And yet, oddly, he didn't feel the disappointment he might have expected. If anything, there was something faintly, stupidly warm sitting underneath all the confusion, something almost like happiness, however inconvenient the timing had been.
For the record, and strictly for the record, nothing like this had happened between them before tonight. Not once, not even a peck, in the entire span of their marriage. Make of that whatever anyone wanted to.
He stood there a moment longer, letting the quiet settle fully around him before finally pushing off the sink and heading for the door. The apartment beyond was still and dim, moonlight spilling in through the windows in pale silver bands, catching on the edges of furniture and turning the whole living room into something quieter and softer than it usually looked in daylight. He'd always liked the moon at night, the way it made even a cramped little Parisian apartment feel like it belonged somewhere gentler than the world he actually lived in.
Tonight, though, he had somewhere to be that wasn't idle stargazing.
He crossed to the stool by the counter and pulled it toward himself before settling onto it, the wood creaking faintly beneath him in the quiet. He reached into his pocket, fingers closing around cool metal, and drew the mask out into the moonlight.
It caught the light beautifully. The silver surface, plain and unassuming in his palm just moments ago, seemed to drink in the pale glow spilling through the window, throwing it back brighter, sharper, until the whole thing looked less like an object and more like something carved from the moon itself. Eric turned it slowly between his fingers, studying the smooth, featureless curve of it, the places where it would eventually settle against cheekbone and jaw.
He drew out a thread of his golden liquid and let it sink into the mask's surface.
The information came all at once, flooding into his mind in a way that felt less like reading and more like suddenly having always known.
Name: Truth
Pathway: Deceiver Pathway
Rank: Lysi Nova
Powers: Allows the user to alter their body's appearance entirely, facial structure, skin tone, eye and hair color, height, even the color of their liquid.
Passive ability: Increases the trust others place in the user the longer they speak with him. Enhances natural charm.
Negative effect: Repeated use gradually strips away the user's own skin, replacing it permanently with silver.
Eric sat with that last line for a moment, turning it over. A cost, then, same as everything worth having in this world seemed to demand. He filed it away and pushed a little more of his golden liquid into the mask, curious what else it might show him.
The kitchen slowly dissolved.
He found himself lying flat on cold ground, staring up at a sky he didn't recognize, his body heavy and unresponsive in a way that had nothing to do with exhaustion. Warmth was slowly leaving him. He could feel it going, draining out from somewhere he couldn't quite locate, and when he forced his neck to lift, if only barely, he saw why. A wooden katana jutted from his own chest, buried deep on the left side, exactly where it would matter most.
A figure stepped out of the dark. Someone young, a teenager by the look of him, though the darkness swallowed most of his features, leaving only a faint gleam where his eyes caught what little light there was, some pale, unnatural Egyptian blue. The boy reached down without hesitation and pulled the blade free.
Eric, or rather the man whose memory this belonged to, had no strength left to fight, no voice left to beg. The boy raised the katana a second time, and everything ended in a single motion.
For a moment, he watched his own severed head hit the ground from an angle that made no sense, his vision already darkening at the edges, and then there was nothing at all.
Eric pulled himself out of the memory with a slow exhale, blinking against the return of moonlight and kitchen tile.
"So. Whoever this mask had formed from hadn't died peacefully, and hadn't died old. A young man, murdered by someone younger still, in the dark, for reasons the memory hadn't bothered to explain. Whether the killer had acted alone or on someone's orders, the relic had eventually made its way into Blackknight hands regardless, which meant, one way or another, somebody with resources had wanted it badly enough to claim it."
He set that thought aside for later consideration and lifted the mask again.
This time he pressed it fully against his face and pushed a heavier stream of golden liquid through it. The mask seemed to soften on contact, losing its rigid shape, spreading thin and warm against his skin before sinking inward entirely, vanishing beneath the surface. A cold shiver traced across his face in its wake, brief and strange, gone as quickly as it came.
He reached for the small mirror propped against the window ledge and watched.
Squelch. Squelch.
His nose shifted first, flattening slightly, reshaping itself under skin that moved like something half-liquid. His eyes followed, widening a fraction, changing color in slow, shifting waves. His lips thinned, then filled again into a different shape entirely. He watched his own bone structure rearrange itself in real time, watched muscle bulk gradually across his shoulders and arms, watched himself grow an inch, then two, until the face staring back at him from the mirror belonged unmistakably to Max.
He took out his pink liquid, and it had unknowingly changed from the usual pink to the same purple as Max's purple liquid.
He then turned his head side to side, testing the illusion from different angles. It held. Even the small scar near Max's eyebrow was there, faint and precise. Nobody without specialized sight would ever question this face for a second.
He let it hold a moment longer before curiosity got the better of him, and his eyes drifted toward the small stack of magazines Ruby had left folded on the counter. A woman on the cover, effortlessly elegant, caught his attention. He focused on the image, willing the mask to follow.
His frame shifted again, narrowing, softening, until a strikingly beautiful woman stared back at him from the mirror, sharp cheekbones, long lashes, an expression he'd clearly borrowed wholesale from the magazine's cover model. Everything about the transformation held convincingly.
Everything, that was, except one particular detail that remained stubbornly, awkwardly unchanged beneath the waistband of his pants.
Eric stared at that fact for a solid three seconds before letting out a short, dry laugh under his breath. "Of course," he muttered. "Of course it's that."
He supposed that made sense, in hindsight. A Lysi Nova relic could rearrange a face convincingly enough to fool most eyes, but it clearly wasn't equipped to handle anything more fundamental than surface-level illusion. A full transformation, the kind that changed a person down to the anatomy, belonged to a different tier of power entirely. He recalled, vaguely, hearing that practitioners of the Beauty Pathway could shift gender entirely at will, even at ordinary Nova rank, no relic required at all. This mask, by comparison, was working with a much smaller budget.
He let his face and body settle back into their usual shape and returned to the stool, mask now fully absorbed beneath his skin, invisible unless summoned.
There was a lot to think through.
The relic's abilities were genuinely impressive for its rank, but the cost attached to it was steep. A full day's use, he estimated, roughly, before his reserves of golden liquid would run dry and need time to recover. That was a real limitation, one he'd have to plan carefully around rather than lean on carelessly.
And its usefulness had a ceiling built in from the start. Anyone stronger than a Lysi Nova would see through it in an instant, which meant most of the people actually worth deceiving- the ones who mattered, the enemies with real power- wouldn't be fooled by it for a second. Almost everyone who counted already knew his face regardless. Still, that didn't make the relic worthless. Quite the opposite, really. It matched his current rank exactly, which meant it would let him move through the world in ways his own identity currently couldn't.
His actual reason for requesting it hadn't been disguise for its own sake. It was the Imperator's Cross that mattered most, the strongest relic currently in his possession, and the one he was least equipped to use to its full potential given how low his rank still was. Every blessing it could offer scaled with the good deeds stored inside it, and right now, that reserve was embarrassingly thin.
He thought back over the day. Rescuing three kidnapped children, reuniting them with terrified parents, that had to count for something substantial. And yet even that, by his rough estimate, barely nudged the needle. Nowhere close to what he'd need if real danger ever came calling and he had nothing stored to draw from.
The problem, obviously, was time. Between the job, Max, the constant threat sitting just beneath the surface of every day in Paris, there was precious little room left over for the kind of consistent good behavior that actually built up a meaningful reserve. He needed a more efficient system. Something sustainable.
An idea began forming, slow at first, then clicking neatly into place.
A persona. A second identity entirely, built specifically to go out and accumulate good deeds under a different name, freeing his real self from needing to constantly perform kindness on top of everything else already demanding his attention. If he built that identity around the Goodness Pathway specifically, he could lean into Truth's passive ability at the same time, that quiet, creeping trust it built in anyone he spoke to for long enough. Genuine charm, dressed up as genuine virtue.
There was a second benefit tucked inside the first, one that hadn't occurred to him until just now. Playing a role convincingly, consistently, night after night, would sharpen instincts he badly needed sharpened anyway. It would force him to study people more closely, read reactions faster, adjust on the fly. Acting, essentially, disguised as charity work. And if he was being honest with himself, the practice might help elsewhere too. His control over his liquids had been slipping more than he'd admit to anyone but himself lately, and anything that bought him more stable footing, more time to work through the meditation techniques he'd been neglecting, was worth pursuing on its own merits.
He tipped his head back and let his eyes settle on the moon again, full and pale and hanging low over the rooftops, while he turned the shape of this new persona over in his mind.
Kind. Gentle. The sort of person strangers instinctively wanted to trust within the first minute of meeting him. Someone who noticed small things, who asked about people's days and actually seemed to mean it, who radiated the kind of warmth that made people lower their guard without quite realizing they'd done it. Ideally handsome since charm tended to land easier alongside a decent face. Empathetic to a fault. The exact opposite, in nearly every visible way, of the version of himself currently sitting alone in a moonlit kitchen with someone else's stolen face still humming faintly beneath his skin.
He had the shape of it now. All that remained was a name.
He sat with the question for a while, watching clouds drift slowly and thin across the moon, until something surfaced in his mind entirely unbidden, arriving with a strange, immediate certainty, as though it had been waiting there all along for him to finally ask.
A small, genuinely amused smile pulled at the corner of his mouth.
"Mike Jackson."