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“You could have led with that.”

“I was attempting subtlety.”

Jess’s coffee shop at ten in the morning smells like dark roast and cinnamon. Mara is already at a table by the window. She sees Nina through the glass and is out of her chair before we reach the door.

What follows is a noise I have not heard since a wedding in Naples in 1911. Both women shriek. They grab each other and jump. Mara pulls back to look at Nina’s face, gasps, hugs her again, and starts asking questions at a speed that makes no allowance for answers.

Cage is at the counter. I walk over and stand beside him. Neither of us speaks.

He inhales once, slowly. His eyes slide sideways to me.

“Fourteen seconds,” I say, before he can.

“Yours?”

“Twenty-two hours and twenty-three minutes.”

He considers this. “Hm.”

It is the most eloquent thing I have ever heard him say, and I find I resent it enormously.

Across the room, Mara has spotted the comb. “Is that gold? Nina. Is that a GOLD COMB?”

“It replaced a plastic hair clip.”

Mara turns and points at Cage. “You owe me twenty dollars.”

Cage pulls out his wallet without a word and holds a twenty out at arm’s length until Mara comes over and takes it. I decide not to ask what the wager was. I already know, and I would rather not hear it phrased.

Jess slides Nina’s coffee across the counter. Nina is mid-sentence at the table and doesn’t notice, so I pick it up and carry it to her. I set it in front of her. I run my thumb once along the handle, so the cup smells like me before her hands touch it.

Then I realize what I have done.

I look up. Cage is watching me. Without a word or a smile, he lifts his own coffee and drinks it, slowly, holding my gaze, and it is far worse than anything he could have said.

I return to the counter with my dignity in roughly the condition of Nina’s old hair clip.

Mara lowers her voice, which in a room this size means I hear every word. “Okay. Cage told me to tell you something, and he wouldn’t explain it, so I’m just passing it along.”

“What?”

“Don’t run.”

“Why would I run?”

Mara grins. Whatever she has learned in the last three months, she is not sharing it in a coffee shop. “Just… if you ever do, make sure you want to get caught.”

My dragon goes very still.

We would chase.

My hand closes on the edge of the counter hard enough that Jess glances at it. Beside me, Cage takes another sip of coffee. I can feel his satisfaction radiating like heat off a woodstove.

The door opens on a gust of cold air and Beck ducks inside, bringing the smell of fir pitch, chainsaw oil, and wet earth with him. He is in a flannel with sawdust on the shoulders and a knit cap pulled over his hair, and he stops on the threshold and inhales.

He looks at Nina. He looks at me. His grin starts slowly and then takes over his entire face.

“Silas. Oh, you have got to be kidding me.”