Neal winces, glad Malcolm can’t see his face. He wants to assure the man that Reid isn’t like that, isn’t like that at all, but now is hardly the time. Malcolm’s been emotionally stripped naked and whipped more than enough.

“Eiffel is wrong,” Neal says bluntly. “What he said, how he said it, he’s wrong. Entirely.”

A pause, and he realizes he left out one very important apology. He bites his lip for a second. “I’m sorry I said Will shouldn’t be there. If I’d known Lestat wasn’t coming I wouldn’t have been so insistent, but I also didn’t… it didn’t make sense to me.”