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“Eight hundred dollars an ounce.”

“Yes.”

I thought of my boss smoothing serum over her cheekbones every morning. The bottles lining her bathroom vanity. My stomach rolled.

“So women pay thousands of dollars to go there and have this thing feed on them.”

Damian said nothing.

“And then other women pay hundreds of dollars to buy whatever’s left.”

“Yes.”

I looked at him. “The serum my boss puts on her face is…”

I couldn’t finish it.

Damian did.

“A woman.”

My whole body had gone rigid.

“How many women have been through this?”

“Thousands, over the years. Twenty-eight I know about personally. Three are dead. One died with seven teeth left in her mouth.” He looked out the window, the heaviness in him as loud as ever.

“Sorry, what? You’ve watched this happen?”

“I’ve watched it happen. I’ve helped it happen. I’ve driven some of them home. I’ve been the boyfriend telling them their sigil worked. That’s who I’ve been, and that’s who I’m trying to stop being.”

I pushed the mug away from me. He nudged it back toward me.

“Why?” I said, sharper than I’d meant. “Why would you do any of that? You’re not a woman they drugged. You can drive. You can leave.”

He looked at me for a few long seconds, then pushed his shirt sleeve farther up his arm. A small flame had been branded into his skin.

I had to swallow a jagged lump in my throat. I wanted to run my finger over that scar, as if that might make it disappear.

“What the hell did they do?”

“My mother did it when I was thirteen, when I tried to run away.”

“That’s horrible.”

“Don’t think I haven’t tried to escape this.”

There was more he could have said. I could see it in the way he’d shown everything to me like evidence in court. But the sun was dropping, and I made myself return to the women.

“How do they get these women to keep coming back?”

“They explain everything away. The doubt, the missing time, feeling fuzzy afterward. That’s the plant medicine working. You’re purging. Shedding your old self. Making room for the love you asked for. And then I’m supposed to reinforce it. Tell you we could be happy if you’d just keep going back. That you’ve still got childhood trauma, abandonment issues, whatever wound I can find and press on. And I know because I’ve already ‘done the work.’”

He glanced out the window again, as though gauging how much daylight we had left. “That’s the carrot.”

“And the stick?”

“Convincing you that if you stop, you’re sabotaging us. That I can’t be with you if you don’t care enough about our relationship to heal.” He looked back at me. “It sounds like concern. That’s the point. But it’s still a threat.”