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"I have a bell," William says.

He takes his shirt off first. I've seen him without one on the roof, in the dark, with his wings out. In here, under the skylight and the one low lamp, it's different. His skin is gray all over, the faint texture of weathered stone. His wings shift behind him when he moves, and he keeps them folded tight, mindful of the lamp, the shelf, me.

"Arms up," he says.

I lift them, and he pulls my shirt over my head, slow, and folds it and puts it on the armchair. My bra after. He looks at me the whole time, very still. The way he watches the Club from the roof. Like there's nothing else to see.

"You're staring," I tell him.

"I'm allowed. You said yes in the bar." He picks up a coil of the red rope. "Give me your wrists."

I hold them out.

I can't tell you how he does it, because I don't know rope, and I'm watching his hands instead of the knots. That's the thing. Those hands tore a steel door off its hinges last night. His claws are long enough to open a can. And they move over my wrists like he's threading a needle, quick and sure and so careful that the rope never pinches once. He lays it flat. He tucks it. He slides two fingers under each wrap to check, every time.

"How's that?"

I pull a little. It holds. It doesn't hurt. It feels like being held.

"Good," I say. "That's good."

"Fingers."

"What?"

"Wiggle them."

I wiggle them. He touches the tips of each one with a claw, very lightly. "Warm. Good."

Then he lays me back on the bed and lifts my bound wrists over my head, and loops the tail of the rope up through the steel ring and down again, and ties it off. Not tight. I can bend my elbows. I can turn on my side if I want. But my hands stay where he put them.

Before he lets go, he picks the brass bell up off the sheet and closes my right hand around it.

"Hold on to that," he says. "If you can't talk, shake it. Your wrist has room. I'll hear it."

I squeeze it. The little clapper stays quiet against my palm.

He stands at the end of the bed and looks at me.

He doesn't move. He goes so still that the shadow of his wings on the brick wall stops moving too, and the only thing alive in his whole body is his eyes, going over me, slow, from my bound wrists down.

"You know what I thought," he says, conversationally, "the first night I watched you behind that bar?"

"What?"

"You were bent over the ice well with your braid hanging over your shoulder," he says, in the same voice he used to tell Pell to bag the evidence. "And I thought, someday I'm going to wrap that around my hand and hold you still and find out what sound you make."

I stare at him.

"Then I thought about the brass rail," he goes on. "You'd have to hold on to it with both hands. I'd be behind you. You'd be very loud, and I wouldn't care who heard." He tips his head. "Then my hands went to stone, so I put them in my pockets and went and checked the fire exits."

"You checked the fire exits."

"Twice," William says. "It didn't help."

My whole face is on fire.

"William."