Divested of her drenched shoes, Cordelia wandered into the drawing room. It was much nicer than the vase. She wanted to collapse immediately onto the soft pile of the Turkish rug but decided that was a little louche even for Matthew’s flat. But there was a warm, low fire crackling in the hearth, its tile surround glimmering like shards of gold, and a sofa with a velvet cover. She sank onto it as Matthew wrapped a blanket about her shoulders and arranged the throw pillows around her as a sort of protective fortress, like a child might.

Cordelia could only nod at the suggestion of tea. She had come here to unburden herself to Matthew, to someone, but now that she had arrived, she found she could not speak. Matthew cast a worried glance at her and vanished through a set of pocket doors, presumably on his way to the kitchen.

Chin up. Tell him the truth, Cordelia thought, gazing around at what she could see of the flat. What was most surprising was how well-kept it was. She might have expected something more like Anna’s place, with its mismatched patterns and clothes thrown about. Matthew, on the other hand, had furniture that looked like it had been ordered new when he took the flat, massive heavy oak pieces that must have been murder to get up to the third floor. In a stylish touch, he had hung his many colorful jackets on a row of hooks in the hallway. A steamer trunk bearing various stamps on its canvas surface was propped near the door. Oscar, wearing a bejeweled collar, was asleep by the fire, just beneath a framed drawing of several young men in a garden of plane trees—the Merry Thieves, Cordelia realized. She wondered who’d done the sketch.

She marveled again at the sheer freedom Matthew seemed to possess. Anna was her only other friend with the same kind of liberty, and she would always think of Anna as from an older set, more mature simply because she would always be years ahead of Cordelia. But Matthew was her own age and lived as he pleased. His family was wealthy, of course, much wealthier than hers or her other close friends here—he was the son of the Consul, after all—and surely that bought a certain level of freedom, but most of it was Matthew himself. Shadowhunters were a people bound to duty, but somehow he seemed unbound—to duty or anything else of earthly weight.

Matthew—who had found a shirt and thrown it on hastily—appeared with a silver tea tray and put it down on the side table. He poured and passed her a cup. “Have you thawed yet?” he asked, dragging a dark green velvet armchair close to the sofa. “If not, the tea should help.”