“Your companions will stay put. All of them, even the girl.”
Lys’s lip curls. “I don’t want you filling her head with your inane ideas.”
The man sniffs. “They tell me you call yourself a king, up there in New Hampshire. TheGravewood Devil. It does have a certain ring to it. To me, you’re the same feckless little boy you’ve always been, and this isn’t the Gravewood, it’s my home. Under this roof,myword is law. Now, you’ve asked for my help. Either you trust me completely, or you get out.”
Behind the curtains, the sun grows bolder. It turns the hall a funny olive hue. Not quite light. Not quite dark. Lys looks tense as bowstring, his knuckles white.
“Sunshine,” he says.
“I’ve got it under control,” answers Asher.
When Lys is gone, the rest of them are ushered into the living room. The space is timeworn but neat, every available surface covered in a potted plant. Fiddle-leaf and spider plants, sweet-smelling jade and a wide golden pothos. A towering monstera sits in the empty hearth, the wide fans of its leaves gone fenestrated.
“I suppose I’ll go put on the kettle,” says the man, when they’ve sat. “Please, make yourselves comfortable.”
In his absence, Poppy pulls out her knitting. The coffee table before them is clad in a doily, a scalloped candy dish left out beside a planter of striped haworthia. The dish is filled with the same red-foil candies Lys offered Shea the night they left. She unwraps one and tucks it in her cheek.
Wedged on the lumpy velour cushion to her right, Asher sits as if carved from granite, his hands laced between his knees. He hasn’t said a word to her. Not since he stumbled, bleary-eyed, out onto the porch and found her out there with Lys.
“Are you mad at me?” she asks.
He doesn’t lift his eyes from the haworthia. “No.”
“It feels like you’re mad,” she presses. “You haven’t looked at me once today.”
He turns to face her. His eyes are stone, hard and unyielding. “There. I’m looking right at you.”
She should let it drop. Sheknowsit. She doesn’t. “Why aren’t you angry?”
“Do youwantme to be angry?”
“It’s just that it feels like a giant elephant in the room. You’ve made your position about Lys and me perfectly clear, and I don’t understand why you’re suddenly okay with it.”
“Because you can’t help yourself.” It pops out of him like he’s been bottling it. “You can’t help yourself, ” he repeats, gentler this time. “And I’m starting to think he can’t help himself, either.”
His anger is one thing. His pity, another. It lodges like a knife between her ribs, makes this thing with Lys feel uglier than ever.Out in the kitchen, a kettle begins to whistle.
“It’s very quaint in here,” Poppy says, a little loudly. “Don’t you think it’s quaint in here, Shea?”
“You didn’t even blink,” says Asher. “He had claws, and you didn’t even flinch.”
The room goes quiet. She searches for something to say and finds nothing.
Needles clicking, Poppy says, “My dad always says we shouldn’t judge a person by the way they look, but by the content of their—”
“You saw him,” accuses Asher.
“—character,” finishes Poppy, scowling over at Asher.
He doesn’t notice. He’s looking right at Shea now, his eyes bright with an epiphany, and she wishes he’d look anywhere else. “The night Sullivan attacked you it was Lysander who killed him. That’s why you lied—you were covering for him.”
“So what if I was? I’d do the same for you.”
“Hekilledsomeone.”
“You’ve killed hundreds.”
He shakes his head. “Not like that. It’s not the same.”
