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He didn’t say anything. He just looked back at me.

“Octavia Halcyon. Halcyon Wellness Group. Stillwater Clinics.” My heart was going hard enough that I could hear it. “It took me forty minutes and a charity gala listing from four years ago.”

He didn’t ask why I’d gone looking.

“My mother,” he said.

“I know.”

He looked at me again, then at the table. “My mother was adopted as an infant by a coven member. She raised me inside it. I was nineteen when I understood what the family business actually was. I was twenty-three the first time I was assigned to a woman. I’ve been doing this for ten years.”

I struggled to breathe calmly. I had a strange urge to cover my throat. “Doing what?”

“They call us consorts. I’m supposed to spend the next year of your life seducing you. Taking you to dinners. Texting you. Convincing you that what we have is what you wished for. That I’m your twin flame. Persuading you to come back for follow-up retreats with Aurora, so you can grow spiritually.”

My biggest worry should have been that a coven of witches had deceived me. But what burned a hole in me was the word convincing. Seducing you, convincingly. Texting you, convincingly. In that moment, before I understood how bad things could become, I almost wished he hadn’t told me. That he would at least give me the luxury of living that lie, just for a while, before he broke my heart.

Just as his words burned a tender place inside me, his hand squeezed mine for two seconds, then released.

“And why aren’t you doing that now?” I said. “Why are you protecting me, if this is dangerous to you?”

“At this point, I don’t care if they kill me. And…” He let out a breath and looked right at me.

“And what?”

“I think you already know what. And I think you feel the same way.”

I had the sudden urge to cry. I also wanted to straddle him on that chair and kiss him, and keep kissing him until his restraint dissolved. And then there was the part of me that still wanted to run.

He watched all of that pass through me like a storm cloud. His jaw tightened, then released, and his gaze dropped once to my mouth, my neck. He looked down at the tattoo of the bird on his arm, like he was trying to anchor himself to something else, to anything but me, sitting inches from him, craving him.

“This is so fucked up,” I whispered, drained from feeling everything at once.

“I’m sorry, Marlowe. I’m sorry about all of this.”

“What do you mean they’ll kill you? Aurora and your mother? You’re twice Aurora’s size.”

“No, they don’t get their hands dirty. They’re the board, and the board has a staff. A staff of men who are happy to ruin your life if you step out of line.”

“What? Damian, this is insane. I mean, I want to believe you, but—”

“I don’t expect you to just accept all this. But there’s no version of it that’s easy to say, or easy to believe.”

“Tell me anyway. But start with what happened at the side of the road. Why you looked at me like that. Why you acted so weird. Then tell me the rest.”

“A woman told me to wait for you. She told me that I would know, without a doubt, that I could trust you and that I needed to protect you. She told me you would give me hope, and that I would recognize her prediction, unmistakably, when I met you.”

I felt the tea cool in my hand. I still hadn’t touched it. “And how do you know that person is me?”

“I don’t think you understand what you did by the side of the road. With that fox.”

“I buried it.”

“You did more than that,” he said. “Everything they ever did to me, they did in blood. That’s how their craft works. Blood is their signature. We’re marked in it before we can talk, and we never consent to any of it. It’s a kind of language, and when you grow up with it, you can’t stop reading it.” He turned his bandaged hand over on the table. “So yesterday we found a dying fox on the roadside. You told me you wanted to bury it. I helped you, freely, and spilled my blood over that animal, into plain dirt. Just simple ground, nobody’s altar. And you didn’t flinch from any of it. You cleaned it, bound it up with your own hands.” He looked at me. “In the language I was raised in, you know what that means? That’s a signature. Blood given instead of taken, over a fox, in free ground, sealed by a woman’s hand. If you’d set out to do the exact opposite of everything they ever did to me, you couldn’t have done it better.”

“But I didn’t mean any of it. I didn’t know any of that. It was a dead animal and a first-aid kit.”

“I know, and that’s what makes it—” He stopped, then, and when he spoke again, his voice was quieter: “Nothing they ever did was by accident. I’ve lived through thirty-three years of very deliberate, horrifying ritual. And a woman who doesn’t know a thing about that creates a perfect counter-working for all of it.” He shook his head slowly. “Nothing changed yesterday, Marlowe. There’s no spell. The coven can do everything today that they could do before. What changed is that I watched you do it, and for the first time in as long as I can remember I could imagine being free of them. I’d stopped being able to. That’s the part I can’t explain to someone who wasn’t raised in this. The signs themselves don’t have any power. How you read them does. And I read that one all the way down.”