My teeth knock together, this time, because of the snowflakes drifting through Adrien’s new skylight. Shivering, I scan the area next to where he’s standing with his father, but just like everything else, my coat’s disappeared in the fire.
“Cadence?” Slate’s breath pulses against my temple.
My gaze travels between Geoffrey’s fraught face and Adrien’s pinched shoulder blades. “What?”
“It isn’t true. What your father accused me of, it isn’t true.”
I narrow my eyes. “If you’re expecting me to believe—”
“I’m no good for you. I know it. Your dad knows it. But somehow, you don’t. Accepting what I was charged with felt like the honorable thing to do.” Slate’s lips twist. “At the time.” He circles around me until we’re face to face, until he’s obstructing my line of sight. Surely his plan. “All this near-death shit is making me reconsider my resolve to keep you away.”
“Keep me away?” I snort, which makes his eyebrows dip. “You make me sound like some desperate stalker.”
“That’s not—I didn’t mean—” A sigh, long, low, brimming with frustration, rumbles from him. “I like you, Cadence de Morel. A lot. Too much. Okay?” He growls his declaration.
My heart swerves into my lungs before managing to brake its crazed careening and righting itself. Slate’s a liar.
Li-ar.
Ineedto remember this.
Ineedto stop falling for him.
“Okay,” I finally say, injecting my reply with a strong dose of nonchalance, then sidestep him and start toward the front door.
“Okay?” This time, his voice isn’t low.
I can’t help the small smile that curls one corner of my lips. He can’t see it since I have my back to him. “Good evening, Mr. Keene.”
“Mademoiselle de Morel.” The mayor’s eyes travel over my face, then lower. He is so repulsively sleazy that I almost wish he’d fought off theguivrewith us. I might’ve just pushed him into its path.
“Cadence!” Papa’s snowmobile sits at the bottom of the steps. His features are tensed and his skin pale as fresh snow.
I clamber down the two steps, bend over, and sling an arm around his neck. “Oh, Papa.” I release a wobbly breath, then inhale his fragrance of home and safety. “Oh, Papa.” I repeat softly. “It was so awful.”
“Ma chérie.” He smooths back my hair over and over. “Did it—did you . . . touch it?”
“Only its ashes, never the flames or the piece.”
He releases the king of all sighs. “Dieu merci.”
God had little to do with it. Slate, though . . .
I push away from Papa, sighing also, but not for the same reasons. I sigh because Slate is so darn confusing.
In the snowmobile’s beam, I catch two figures hurrying over—one with springy curls, the other with big glasses. While Bastian, like me, looks as though he’s been dropped down a chimney flue that hasn’t been swept in over a decade, Alma’s all clean and neat, barely a smudge of ash on her tear-stained face.
She hurls herself at me, squeezing me so hard it makes a cloud of soot bloom off my black dress. “Ohmon Dieu,mon Dieu. You’re alive!” Her shrieked relief almost blows my eardrums.
I pat her rattling spine. “Did you think one little dragon would kill me?” I murmur so that the thin crowd of bundled-up rubberneckers circling us can’t overhear.
I’m imagining they’re racked with curiosity and concern even though their expressions are difficult to decipher between the surgical masks and the faint light dribbling off the quarter moon.
“Dragon?” Alma breathes.
I nod.
Her eyes grow wide. “Holy shit.”
