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"I'm an ancient weapon of war," I snap, shoving a plate of warm skillet biscuits toward her. "Eat your carbs and shut your mouth."

She just laughs—that quiet, raspy morning laugh—and drops the honeycomb straight into the dark mug.

By day eleven, the house has completely stopped respecting my authority.

I find Kirk sitting in the middle of my bed twice in the same afternoon. The wooden cat doesn't even move when I come in; he just lies on his side, his jointed tail giving lazy thwacks against my wool blanket, staring at me with his yellow glass eyes like he knows damn well I haven't slept in that bed in a week.

Upstairs in the gallery, the carved wooden owl has taken to roosting on the iron chandelier directly above the hall between our bedrooms.

Every time I walk past her door after midnight—just checking the perimeter, just making sure the ward lines haven't warped—the damn bird rotates its head one hundred and eighty degrees and gives a hollow, judging click of its beak.

"Mind your own business, feather duster," I mutter up at the rafters.

The bird just blinks, unimpressed.

Down in the library, Vivienne is standing on the brass rolling ladder, stretching her arm toward a massive volume on the seventh shelf.

"Get down from there," I say, stepping into the aisle.

"I can reach it," she grunts, her fingertips brushing the cracked leather spine. "It's the complete lineage of Sanguine's founding coven. If I can just see who Julian's sire was—woah!"

The ladder wheel catches on a stray bit of grit in the runner.

She slips.

She doesn't even have time to curse. She drops through the air, her hands flailing for a brass rung that isn't there.

I don't think. The beast takes the wheel before my human brain can even fire.

I surge forward, my boots skidding across the polished parquet, and catch her clean out of the air.

The impact knocks the breath right out of both of us. Her hips slam into my chest, her arms flying around my neck, her face burying into the crook of my shoulder as I stumble back half a step, absorbing her weight against my frame.

She’s shaking, her heart hammering against my collarbone like a trapped sparrow.

"I've got you," I rumble, my voice dropping into that raw, guttural octave that smells of panic. "I've got you, lass. You're whole."

"Holy shit," she gasps into my neck, her fingers clutching the wool of my sweater like she’s drowning. "Holy shit. The ladder⁠—"

"I told you to get down."

"I was reaching for the founding coven⁠—"

"You could have cracked your skull!" The roar tears out of me before I can stop it, rough and furious, vibrating through the space between our chests.

I look down at her.

Her face is tilted up, her brown eyes huge and dark, her lips parted as she pants for air. She’s flush against me—her chest pressed tight to mine, her thighs straddling my hip where I caught her, her hands tangled in the hair at the nape of my neck.

The handfasting brand on my wrist blazes, a searing line of crimson-gold heat that matches the sudden, bright blue light spilling from beneath her sleeve.

Her scent fills my throat, fear scent turning to pure need.

The air vanishes from the room.

My hands, clamped around her waist, tighten until my knuckles ache. I should set her down. The floor is right there. Two feet down, solid and safe.

I don't move an inch.