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“Have you ever seen anything like this before?” I asked.

He shook his head.

Tamsin hadn't either.

After that, Silas came to the tower most nights. Not every night, and we never discussed it as an arrangement. He never asked whether he could come, and I never had to invite him. I would hear his slow, heavy steps on the stairs and the pause as he stepped over the ninth one from the top, and more often than not I had the door open before he reached it.

Some nights we talked until one of us became too tired to finish a sentence. Other nights we barely spoke at all. He would sit beside the window and carve something small while I read, and eventually we would fall asleep on the narrow bed with his arm across me and the wren perched on the sill.

Other nights there was very little sleeping.

Sometimes Silas laid me back on the iron bed and used his mouth and hands until I had to bury my face in the pillow to keep anyone on the island from hearing me. Other nights, he fucked me slowly in the dark with his arms around me and his mouth pressed against my shoulder, refusing to hurry even when I begged him to. He never rushed me, and he never let me retreat into myself or turn away when the intensity became too much. Whatever happened between us, Silas stayed completely present, watching me closely and making sure I stayed with him.

Sooner or later, every night, he hummed.

No one seemed to know about us, or at least no one said anything.

Jax was the exception.

The first morning after Silas stayed with me, Jax dropped into the chair across from mine at breakfast, drew in a breath, and went very still. A grin spread across his face, though there was something more complicated behind it than simple amusement.

“Rain and pine, reina,” he said. “Better than wolf.”

Then he reached across the table and stole my toast.

“I’m not jealous,” he added. “I’m a very evolved person.”

He had healed quickly, the way shifters usually did. His ribs had knitted completely within two weeks, and before long he was back in the Pit, flirting with me every day as though nothing important had changed between us. Even so, I sometimes caught him looking toward the tower when he thought I wasn’t paying attention.

Ronan either knew nothing, knew everything, or had decided that whatever he knew belonged in a private part of his mind that I would never be allowed to enter. My tea still appeared, and books continued to arrive at my desk, always placed neatly with their edges aligned.

Once that week, instead of setting my cup down, he handed it to me.

Our fingers almost touched, but at the last possible second Ronan shifted his grip just enough to prevent it. After two months of watching him make small adjustments like that, I was beginning to understand that the distance between us was deliberate. His restraint was something he practiced constantly, with the same quiet discipline he applied to everything else.

I watched him while he kept his attention fixed on the cup.

“Coward,” I said.

His amber eyes lifted to mine and remained there for a moment longer than necessary. His gaze moved briefly to my mouth before returning to my eyes.

“Profoundly,” Ronan Ashgrave said.

Then he went back to his desk and did not look at me again for the rest of the afternoon.

The roses continued to arrive too, one every week, each of them delivered with every thorn left intact.

By the time the third full moon came, I had learned enough about Moonfever to know what was waiting for me. I spent all three nights behind my bolted door, pacing the tower room because sleep was impossible. My breasts ached with a deep, persistent tenderness, and the fever left me so swollen and restless between my legs that even the pressure of my panties against me could make me stop walking and close my eyes until the sensation passed.

Silas spent all three nights on the landing outside my door.

Oda had given him written permission to leave Bramblegate during lockdown because the healers had discovered that his proximity to me calmed the Red sickness more effectively than anything else they had tried. Being near me was one thing, however. Being inside the room while both of us were fevered was more than Silas trusted either of us to handle safely.

“Out here is safer for everyone,” he told me through the door on the first night.

Each morning, when I finally opened it, I found wood shavings scattered across the top three steps and Silas asleep against the wall. I never asked what those nights had cost him. I didn’t need to. Even in sleep, his hands remained tightly clenched in his lap.

The Council’s envoys arrived three weeks before the Solstice for the end-of-term Proving, and nearly the entire school crowded onto the walls to watch their boat enter the harbor.