I wanted to be grateful.
I settled for breathing.
Erratically.
Hale stepped back.
“Go to breakfast,”he said.
“Is that an order?”
“Yes. You’re too skinny as it is.”
“At least that was honest.”
I walked to the door because staying would make me say or do something reckless, and I feared I had already surpassed my limit of useful recklessness before seven in the morning.
“Astra.”
I stopped.
His sleeve had fallen back into place over his wrist.
“Do not let Verraine’s notebook make you think knowledge is the same thing as safety.”
“What is it, then?”
“Leverage.”
His eyes dropped to the place where the notebook pressed beneath my coat.
“Use it before they use you.”
I didn’t have anything witty to say to that.
So I left with Jonah’s yes under my skin.
21
By the time I finished Cosima’s notebook, Hale had become irritating for yet another reason.
He was right.
Knowing didn’t make me safer.
It only made me more aware of how much danger I was in.
Every page led back to the same room: basin, witnesses, a girl with her hand on stone while men decided what happened to her.
In the middle of the notebook, in a hand less steady than the pages before it, Cosima had written that a Star-Marked bond didn’t close the other lines.
It woke them.
One answer made the others louder.
A forced answer made them dangerous.
I closed the notebook at two in the afternoon and sat on my bed until my legs went numb.
