11

I can only hope that the slaves of Hemlock House scrub the table in the kitchens every phase—and that they made extra thorough work of it this particular Warmth.

It wasn’t something I gave much thought to as Daxeel fucked me into this very table. But now that we have all found our way down to the kitchens this Breeze, having missed our breakfasts and lunches from all the drink-illness going around, I watch with too-wide eyes as Rune drops a chunk of fresh bread on the surface.

My throat is tight, gaze wide.

He picks it up—and tosses it into his mouth.

A breath grunts out of me, as though I have been struck, hard, in the chest.

Rune throws a frown my way, then rips off another warm chunk of bread.

Heat flames my face.

If anyone looks closely at me tucked up in my chair, nursing a mug of coca tea, then I fear they will know exactly what sort of deeds happened here just last Quiet.

It is written all over.

A pair of frosted green eyes lure in my gaze.

That heat burns hotter on my face as Samick considers me from across the table. Silent, he reclines in his chair, his fingers threaded through the handle of a copper mug, toying with the string of a tea strainer. He watches me closely.

He knows, he knows, he knows.

But if he does, when he flicks his chilly stare to Daxeel at my side, he says nothing of it.

The pair only share a glance for a pulsed moment, then Daxeel leans back in his chair. It creaks under the shift of his muscled weight.

Without so much as a look my way, Daxeel throws back an entire mug of cinnamon tea like it is saltwater and he’s a dehydrating selkie. He pours another.

No slaves in the kitchens at this hour to tend to us, so we manage ourselves.

Aleana struggles.

Opposite me, she tips a glass jar over her soggy oats and, with her bloodshot eyes straining to stay open, pours a hefty stream of cold goat’s milk.

Through a stifled yawn, she asks, “Where is Alasdare?”

“He wasn’t in his bedchamber.” Rune’s voice is rougher than sandpaper, and I wonder how late he and Samick hit the Gloaming last Quiet. “I checked on my way down.”

So Dare still hasn’t made it back from the human lands.

Of course, Aleana wouldn’t know that because she was passed out by the time we left, and she had to be carried out of the club, so she hasn’t the faintest idea that Dare split off from us before we made it back to the Midhouse.

I’m all too pleased to tell her. The litalf love of gossip is what tugs me to life, some.

“He went home with the kinta,” I tell her—and the fright I get from my own ragged voice is enough to have me reaching for a refill on my water.

Must have been the volume of the music at the club. We all had to practically shout at each other, and so our throats are on the overworn side.

Eamon slumps in his chair. His elbows press into the table; he buries his face in his hands. In silence, he rubs his temples with the pads of his thumbs.

Ridge wasn’t with him when he came down into the kitchens, so I assume he headed back to Comlar to suffer his drink-illness in peace.

Rune arches his brows over his fierce canary yellow eyes. “Dare did what ?”

Aleana would laugh if she had the energy, that much is clear by the weak smile on her pale lips and the scoff that catches in her throat. “There was a kinta he took a fancy to.”

Samick is an ice statue in his chair. One on the verge of shattering with a sudden explosion of glacier rage.

It takes me a few moments to piece it together.

Kintas are… not beloved.

In Licht, in Dorcha, in the Midlands, it doesn’t matter. A kinta is an abomination everywhere. A mockery to lineage, and a diseased threat to future bloodlines.

Samick runs his hand through his dishevelled milky locks. “I’m surprised… and yet I’m not.”

Rune’s upper lip curls. He aims the look of disgust at his plate of peppered and buttered bread. “I lost my appetite.”

My mouth flattens into a thin line as Rune fingers aside his meal.

Perhaps I sort like Bee now. But I understand their disgust isn’t so much for her, rather for what she is.

Bedding a kinta isn’t something that happens a lot, or if it does, it’s kept in shadows.

“What about that male with the mismatched eyes down the coast?” Aleana thinks aloud and taps her spoon on the rim of her bowl. “Near Dare’s little village, and the male kinta was kept by his family… One eye is white, the other blue… What is his name again?”

Rune frowns on it a moment, then clicks his tongue before he says, “Milak, wasn’t it?”

Samick hums something curt.

“He married last solstice, didn’t he?” Aleana abandons her over-soaked oats, something that has become more like a wheat soup than a filling breakfast. We might need slaves in here to feed us something half edible. “Dare received an invite. I think he went.”

“He married last solstice,” I start, “or he got married on the solstice?”

“He married the second solstice,” Aleana says with a nod. “What else could he do with his life here? It’s not like anyone would actually marry him.”

My mind flashes with images of an ordinary human looking male, a kinta, dressed in the dull brown robes of the priests, the most ordinary and mundane servers of the gods.

Priests have no power, no magick, no gold, only faith.

Suppose it’s one way to spend a kinta existence in the Midlands. Become a priest, because no one will breed with a kinta for fear that the disease will spring up again in the offspring, or in future generations.

Some courts in Licht even believe that the kintas are cursed by the gods, that they are punishment for previous generations and their misdeeds; other courts see them as signs from the gods to swap out their babes for changelings, which renews the bloodlines and booms births throughout the lands.

I never paid them much mind.

Eamon sighs with obvious tedium, “Her name is Bee.” He drops his hands to the table. “And yes, Dare went to her home for the rest of the night. And no, she isn’t covered in puss and boils and warts. She’s a brilliant person, and a favourite of mine.”

Silence whips through the kitchens.

I doubt Eamon could stand against any of these males in a fight, even on their worst days, but the respect is there, because he’s just silenced three brutal warriors.

Still, Samick’s ice-cold aura creeps through the already chilly kitchens, and—beside him—Rune’s eyes sear into Daxeel’s schooled face, schooled like he only cares about the cinnamon powder he tosses into his copper mug.

Moments pass in quiet before the solid thuds of bootfalls rain down the stairs.

I look over my shoulder to see the beefiness of a shadow come up the corridor, then swallow the archway whole.

Caius’s diamond eyes narrow in on me, arrows notched. “You.” His harsh growl matches the tug of his upper lip. “Your father is at the door.”

Daxeel stiffens in his chair, muscles bolting to bone like lead.

Eamon has his hands cupped around his nose, the tips of his fingers pressed against the underside of his eyebrows, as though to release any of that tension is to allow a monstrous headache to return.

At the mention of my father, he slides his narrowed gaze to Caius. “Did he say why he’s come?”

Caius turns a blank look on his cousin. Less fuelled by pure hatred than when he looked at me. He shrugs then pulls away from the stone arch to head back up the stairs. “Said something about that lordson.”

Then Caius is gone.

Eamon looks between me and Daxeel. “Taroh.”

I don’t meet Daxeel’s gaze as I set my mug down on the table, right where his sentient shadows kept my wrists pinned last Quiet. Now, only one shadow reaches out for me. It flicks my forearm in something of a caress, then curls back into the fold.

Eamon pushes up from his chair with a grated sigh. The bloodshot of his eyes is made worse as he rubs at them with the heels of his palms.

He shadows me out the kitchens and down the corridor.

Once we’re out of earshot of the kitchens, I ask, “What’s the thorn in Caius’s backside?”

Eamon rolls his eyes. “He’s always been that way.”

The face I make at him is a dubious one. “I thought I was special.”

His strained smile is as quick to fade as it was to come. “Daxeel didn’t meet him until he turned twenty-four.”

I raise my brows at him.

“Caius chose to enlist young,” he tells me. “And he didn’t come back for visits when he should have.”

I wonder if he was avoiding his father. I’ve never met the warlord myself but he sounds more frightful than any father should ever be.

“So he left Daxeel to take the lashings on his own,” I decide with a curled lip.

We climb the stairs with such fatigue I think we must look like a pair of sagging puppets on strings.

“Caius never took the lashings,” Eamon grumbles, bitterly.

We fall silent as we reach the foyer.

The door is closed, but I know my father stands on the other side of it. Maybe pretence of coming to discuss Taroh, but really doing all he can to check on me, ensure I’m uninjured—or even alive at all.

Behind my shoulder, Eamon reaches around me for the door handle. He tugs it down and yanks—but nothing. The door stays stubbornly shut.

The look I run it over with is nothing less than curious.

Eamon curses under his breath before he points at the door, “I am not in the mood this phase. Open.”

And it does.

Slowly, reluctantly, but still, it creaks open.

The outside hits me with a gust of wind, and I can taste the wood of carriages, the leathers of boots, the waxy leaves that lush the street.

But I see only my father.

The fine creases around his eyes and mouth dig deeper into his skin than they did the last time I saw him. Even the dark tone of his complexion wears a pallor of exhaustion.

But ever the social climber, his boots are polished with a shine his eyes don’t hold, and his hair is threaded into a braid that spirals out of sight, down his spine.

He stills at the sight of me.

One blink, two, and I almost think he didn’t expect to see me.

Then he breaths my name with a rush of relief, “Narcissa.”

He pulls me into his arms.

I’m rigid for a heartbeat until, slowly, I bring my hands up to his back and pat. It’s an awkward embrace, since father was never the type to hug me or Pandora. At least not since I was a youngling.

After a few moments, he releases his hold on me. His hands reach for my limp arms as he lures in my gaze.

And I have to remind myself that he is my father, not some stranger who owns me.

He raised me, he only ever showed me love.

But looking up at him now, at those eyes swirling with such familiar warmth, the pinch of his mouth that betrays the tension stringing his muscles to his bones, I should only see the fear that a father has for his daughter.

Then I think of Taroh—the reason he’s given to be here.

I went to father and told him all about the wrongs Taroh committed against me, the threats of a painful marriage.

Father called me spoilt.

All this warmth he looks down at me with, it’s practiced.

I step back, and with the retreat, his hands slip from my arms. “What are you doing here, father?”

He looks down his nose at the dusty gleam of the greystone porch. The defeat weathers those crinkles around his eyes, darkening the circles, and I’m sure he hasn’t been getting much sleep at all.

“Taroh has gone missing.” Father finds his strength to lift his stare back up to mine. The angles of his jaw tighten. “He hasn’t been seen in two Quiets now.”

Lifting my arms, I hug myself as though I can shield myself from any conversations with father about that wicked, vile male.

‘I hope he got what was coming to him.’

Of course I don’t say that. I don’t want to fight. I am too tired, too drink-ill, and too saddened by father’s perpetual support of the male who tried to rape me.

Still, even now with our engagement strained by the Sacrament, he aids in the search for Taroh.

If I am made to have children one day, I will do better by them than this.

I shrug and the sweater I wear—Daxeel’s sweater—glides like silk over my body. “Taroh is not my concern.”

Not until the Sacrament ends, at least.

Father forces a tight smile.

I see in that gesture that he tries to find the right words.

In the doorway behind me, Eamon moves an inch or so closer to my back. I feel the warmth of his chest through the thin gauzy material of his blouse, the warmth of his support as he reminds me of his presence.

Father’s eyes darken into lumps of coal.

A thread of dark hair whips around his ear as the Breeze starts to pick up and we draw closer to the First Wind.

I watch the strand tickle the sharp point of his ear for a moment, escaped from the bronzed ribbon, the same dull shade of his doublet and polished boots.

“Do you know anything about Taroh’s disappearance, Nari?” He might be speaking to me, but he looks at Eamon—and now I understand his gaze to be one of suspicion.

My mind whirls.

It trips over itself in a hurry to find the exact Quiet that Taroh went missing.

Two Quiets , father said.

I was alone in my bedchamber, reading. Before that, I saw Aleana and we had dinner in her room.

I didn’t see anyone else that Quiet. Not Eamon, not Daxeel, not his mother or Morticia, no sign of Caius or Rune or Samick or Dare.

I don’t know where they were, whether they were here in Hemlock House, maybe in their bedchamber or in the dining hall I didn’t visit, or if they were at Comlar, or even at the Gloaming.

What I do know is that, behind me, Eamon has tensed.

“I don’t.” My answer is as firm as my gaze. I lift my chin against father’s returning stare. “I only know that he is missing. I find I don’t care.”

“And you?” father’s hardened voice aims over my head at my beloved Eamon. It’s no secret that he’s never liked my hybrid friend. More accurately, never liked his dark blood.

I snare father’s attention back to me. “What about him?”

Still, my mind whirls to everything Eamon said at the dining table, when he told me about Taroh’s disappearance—and we all thought it was just a drunken, temporary thing, that Taroh was waist-deep in brothels by the seaside or buried in a deep grimroot haze.

Eamon never told me what he was doing that Quiet before, but since he’s not speaking up now, I think he might not be too excited to share those details.

I do remember that his shirt was ruffled and he wore the stench of plumwine, wore the stains of it on his purpled lips.

“I am here to ask questions,” father tells me, his stern gaze turned down his nose at me. “Particularly of the whereabouts of the hybrid who—as I hear it—attacked Taroh in the halls of Comlar.”

I scoff.

Attacked.

It was one punch, and Taroh had it coming.

My smile is smug. “His whereabouts?” I cock my hip to the side. “Eamon was with me.”

Slowly, father raises his chin as he considers me.

The disappointment in his pursed mouth is obvious.

“All phase,” I add and step back into Eamon. He doesn’t move behind me, he just rests his chin on the crown of my head. “So no, father, we do not know anything about Taroh’s disappearance. Neither of us left Hemlock House that Quiet. Thank you for your visit.”

With that, Eamon pulls back into the lobby and, hand on my waist, guides me with him.

I smack the door shut on father’s face.

It slams harder than I meant it to.

I do sometimes wonder about that door, and after Eamon ordered it around, I’m of the strong suspicion that it is more than enchanted, but is sentient.

In the shadows of the lobby, no ears around to listen in on us, Eamon loosens a sigh. “I was with a male,” he tells me. “One who isn’t Ridge, and who also isn’t a known same lover.”

My face is blank as I nod, like I’m digesting his words.

It’s not a terrible shock, really.

Eamon was never a one-male type of lover. And I know nothing about any faithful arrangements between him and Ridge, so I don’t judge him.

He never judges me, no matter the wrong I commit.

“No, you weren’t.” I shake my head. “You were with me, here. Father believes that to be the absolute truth—and so it’s your story from now on.”

Eamon’s hand comes around the back of my head. He draws me into him and lowers his chin to press a firm, chaste kiss to my crown. He knows how much I risk with this lie I throw over him, a blanket of protection.

But the kiss is as brief as father’s visit because I’m almost thrown off my feet.

The door swings open so suddenly that one could convince me of its excitement. I have only a moment to stagger out of its way and avoid being knocked to the floor.

The glare I throw at the door is fleeting, because—out from the darkness of the street, those thickened shadows that the lanterns and glowjars and streetlamps work extra hard to penetrate—a familiar male saunters up the faintly gleaming path.

Dare’s glamour has slipped away completely, and I have the distant question in my mind, did you walk through the human lands looking like that?

Any questions I might ask are dismissed by the fierce look Dare throws at both Eamon and me.

He lifts his ivory hand as if to silence us.

A wide grin sweeps my face. I aim it at Dare as he stalks past us for the short stairs that descend to the kitchens.

“Good morning,” I call out after him. “Or should I say, good phase? How are you?”

He throws a dark glower over his shoulder at me, but then he’s gone down the stairs, and the front door gently shuts itself.

I frown at it.

That decides the mystery for me.

That door is sentient from expensive magick, or it’s plain alive like those crooked trees out in the Black Forest of Dorcha, maybe cut from that very wood, now it lives here at Hemlock House and lords over all the other doors.

Eamon ruffles my hair. “Come on.”

He leads the way back to the kitchens.

We find it as occupied and sleepy as we left it.

Only now, Aleana is guzzling stimulating teas and springwater; Daxeel reclines in his sturdy chair with his hands folded at the back of his neck like a pillow; and Dare has a coffee jug all to himself, perched on the edge of the bench. The drink-illness haunts him, too. His dark waves are messier than my own, his grey sweater looks tugged and stretched in some spots, and his dark golden eyes are locked onto Rune’s unflinching stare.

Eamon wanders his way to the stove tops, where Samick has set out eggs and strips of freshly cut meats.

My stomach growls.

But I must wait for them to cook, and I’m no help, so I fall into the seat beside Daxeel and bring my knees to my chest.

Daxeel reaches out for the spine of my chair. His hand rests there, the brush of his thumb disturbing my loose waves. It’s a gesture that lures in a glance from Aleana.

Her smirk lingers before she pushes her empty chalice aside.

Dare tips the jug’s pourer to his mug. The slosh of the refill is interrupted by Aleana as she asks, “How was your adventure?”

The dark glimmer in her pale eyes brings a smug look to my own face.

Dare slams the copper jug down on the edge of the bench. He keeps it close to him, close enough that I wonder if anyone reached for it, how many fingers they would be left with.

Just as Daxeel’s fingertips burrow deeper into my hair, his cheek turned to me, I add, “Get any sleep?”

Hunched over, Dare lifts the gold flakes he has for eyes. They glitter with unspoken grouchy threats from behind the tips of his tousled locks, inky tendrils that are somewhere between waves like my own and curls like Daxeel’s.

“I got some hours.” The gravelly undertone of his voice surprises me.

Dare always speaks so smoothly, even his growled words are somehow drawled at the same time. But now, it’s like someone took a fistful of sandpaper to his throat and scrubbed, hard.

“I feel like you,” and he jerks his chin at Aleana, “after a phase at the Gloaming.”

In answer, she scoffs a rude sound and runs him over with her icy gaze. He only tips the refill down his throat, emptying his mug.

A frown tugs at my brow. “How much drink did you have?”

Dare doesn’t look at me as he adds his third and final pour of coffee until the jug is empty. “It wasn’t the drink. Bee had some white powder at her abode. We indulged.”

“I have never stepped between you and your conquests,” Rune growls out the words with a twitch of his upper lip. “But a kinta? A kinta who chooses to live as a human in their world?”

Daxeel’s snort catches in his throat.

I throw him a withering look.

Aleana stretches her arms above her head. “Did you have the sex?”

An eager grin steals my face. I aim it at the hybrid.

“Didn’t get the chance,” he says and with the sigh he exhales, his shoulders slump. He presses one hand into his knee, as if to keep himself sitting upright, however slouched, and he tosses aside the mug he’s drained clean of all droplets of coffee. “The white powder knocked us out, then she had some meeting to attend come morning. We didn’t quite get to the bedding.”

A clatter draws in our gazes.

Across the kitchens, on the other side of the bench, Samick looks up from the stack of frying pans he’s neatly arranged. “She booted you?”

Maybe it’s that we are so familiar, or merely that I’m already looking in that direction, but I home in like a predator on the glint in Eamon’s eyes; the one that turns them amber.

I suspect the tightly set line of his mouth is to fight off a smile.

For a beat, I watch my brother of the soul, I watch him lay out strips of fresh meat over the frying pans. He doesn’t speak the words I’m certain he chews on.

Dare has his back to Eamon, so he sees no such secrets dancing over his face. He just threads his pale, slender fingers through his messy hair. “Suppose you could say that.”

Then Eamon asks, and he keeps his tone light, “Lose anything?”

A flicker of silence tenses the kitchens.

Dare’s inhale is a slow, steady one that expands the muscles of his chest enough that they push against the thin, costly material of his grey sweater. The hand that presses down on his knee tightens into a grip I’m sure will bruise his porcelain complexion —but it’s the sudden shift of his eyes that gives him away, how those pots of liquid gold harden to gilded blades.

His tongue rolls out the answer between his bared teeth, “Yes.”

No one speaks.

Silence has us in an ice-grip.

I fight the urge to scoot closer to Daxeel and his warm presence, how he brushes his fingers through my loose hair, strokes down the nape of my neck.

On the other side of the bench, Samick keeps his movements slow and quiet as he starts stacking the frying pans on the small flames atop the stove. But his gaze shifts around the kitchens, waiting, anticipating.

Eamon thins his lips to bite down on a smirk. He meets my gaze for a moment before he delicately asks, “What did you lose? A few gold pieces, maybe?”

Amazement steals me as Dare’s eyes flash. Then they darken from gold-crafted daggers into lumps of pure coal. The black of his pupils spreads over his irises like spilled ink, until black is all that’s left.

His lips twitch around a silent snarl. “A whole pouch.”

The creak of a chair comes as Rune braces his forearms on the edge of the table. His yellow paint-stroked eyes are hooked on Eamon across the kitchens, like Eamon has suddenly become a mouthpiece of Mother herself and holds all the secrets to life and death.

But the secret he reveals is much more to my liking.

Eamon runs his teeth over his bottom lip before he lets the coy smile slip. “She tricked you.”

Dare slowly turns his chin to his shoulder. His lashes lower over pitch-black eyes, but the gesture is a command for Eamon to explain.

And so he does.

“Bee is something of a trickster ,” he decides on the word, carefully. “She played you—took you home, didn’t bed you, but gave you enough of herself to keep you in a daze with her. Then she fed you some powder, you passed out, she robbed you, woke you up, got you out of her home, and you left, thinking you had a great night, so crazy a night that of course you lost an entire pouch of gold pieces. That,” and his grin flashes like a light source, “is Bee.”

Dare’s blink casts shadows down his marble-toned cheeks. He is entirely unflinching, and his stony face gives nothing away.

That silence hangs over us for a heartbeat, two heartbeats, then—

Rune throws his head back with a booming laugh.

The bass of it is fast accompanied by Samick who, doubled over, only supports himself by smacking a hand down on the edge of the bench.

My face is hot with a flush, torn between a laugh of my own and running to safety.

But Daxeel’s choked, chesty chuckle is enough to soothe my anxieties in the sudden dangerous turn of Dare’s presence.

Aleana bites out her words with just a grin, because I doubt her energy can support much more than that, “You might have met your match.”

I don’t think Dare heard her.

At least, he doesn’t acknowledge her tease as a dark storm steals him.

His growled voice matches the brewing wrath, “Is she a whore?”

Eamon shakes his head and runs his hands down his light expression. “Tricksters in the human lands, they call themselves conmen or hustlers. But they are all the same.” He leans his shoulder against a hutch and folds his arms over his chest. “She asked me about you in the club. I told her you were signed to the Sacrament. Guess she thought you will die in it, so she risked taking all she found in your pockets, rather than just a few pieces you wouldn’t have noticed.”

Rune’s laughs have turned wheezing.

Daxeel wipes away a stray tear from his eye.

“That’s why she booted you,” Aleana says. “She got what she wanted—and you wouldn’t have even figured it out without Eamon.”

Rune chokes on his words, “A kinta tricked you.”

Samick clears his throat. Rosy patches are smeared over his high cheekbones. “It’s the first time you’ve ever been booted, right?”

Dare’s eyes flash.

On instinct, I recoil into my chair.

Daxeel firms his grip on the back of my neck through the shudder that rattles me.

Sometimes forget how brutal Dare is, how fierce he can be behind the smiles and winks and flirtations.

The brutality that lurks beneath his marble skin, it growls out in the threat of his voice, “Then perhaps I should pay her a visit.”

Eamon slumps into the hutch. The glass door creaks under his weight. “You could do that. I would kindly ask you don’t harm her.” The crockery in the cabinet rattles as he pushes away from it. “She is a good friend of mine. And it isn’t her fault that you were bested by someone you saw as a nice ass and nothing more.”

“You could go back to her dwelling,” Rune manages through a mouthful of contained laughter. “Bet she’ll have you on your back in seconds, your gold in her hand.”

Aleana hides behind her hand, as though the creases of a smile don’t wrinkle around her eyes.

“You met your match,” Daxeel adds and runs his thumb over his mouth, “or at least the female edition of you.”

“That settles it,” Samick says over the sizzle of the stove. “We now know what Dare would have been if he was born female and kinta.”

Aleana snorts, but she’s quick to mask it with a false cough and she rubs her chest soothingly.

Dare’s glare lingers over her for a moment before he lifts it to the slim window that looks onto the street. I don’t think he sees anything through that window, but rather his mind is away on this torment that has his hands fisting.

Dare takes no humour in any of this. His face is as severe as his eyes are lethal. The violence of his thoughts is shown in his normally short greyish fingernails, as they start to shift into claws sharp enough to tear a spine clean out of a body.

It snaps in my mind like clicked fingers.

‘…someone you saw as a nice ass and nothing more.’

It isn’t true.

Dare wasn’t just tricked and bested.

Dare liked her.

Likes her still, maybe, beneath the betrayal.

Perhaps he feels just like any other male Bee has done this to.

What he might have thought special, what he thought might have meant something, was just another target to her as his targets are to him.

Maybe, on a less hopeful note, he just feels that empty longing for the sun in his dreams all over again.

“Why not ask her out?” I suggest with a small shrug. “On a date or something?”

Dare’s eyes flicker to mine, gleaming with a spark of outrage.

But before he can gut me where I sit, I add, “Play your own game with her. Isn’t the chase part of the fun for you? She’ll be a challenge.”

He grunts something of a hum, but a heckled one.

Across the kitchens, Eamon fixes his smile into his chalice of water. His eyes glitter at me. He winks once before he turns to help Samick crack open the griffin egg to fry it.

And, as I lean my side into the warmth of Daxeel, and I look around the varied moods of the kitchens, I find I very much like it here at Hemlock House.

I like the folk I am with.

And I adore that, as though he doesn’t notice at all what he’s doing, Daxeel still strokes his shadowy fingertips down the nape of my neck.