The phone rang at midnight, the way bad news always did.Gabriel Thorne stared at the unknown number glowing on his cracked screen, his heart already sinking before he answered. He had learned to recognize the particular quality of silence that preceded disaster, the way the air seemed to thicken with unspoken grief before the words even formed."Gabriel." His mother's voice was barely a whisper, stretched thin with exhaustion and fear. "You need to come home. Your father is dying."He should have said no, and ended the call, or thrown the phone across his pathetic studio apartment, and pretended he had never heard those words. Five years ago, Patriarch Michael Thorne had stood in the grand hall of the family estate and declared his eldest son dead to the Holy Order, dead to God, and dead to the bloodline that stretched back twelve generations of exorcists. Gabriel had been seventeen, broken, and desperate for understanding that never came.Instead, he found himself standing outside t
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