“Ordinarily, perhaps not,” Grace said. “But I think I know something that could persuade him to aid us.”

“My goodness, what?” Lucie looked intrigued, but before she could insist on more information, a voice down the hall called her name. “You’ll have to tell me later,” she said, and dashed off in the direction of the wedding preparations, her flowers waving like yellow banners.

Excellent, Grace thought. With any luck, she’d kill two birds with one stone on this little excursion. It was odd, this business with Lucie—odd to find herself so deep in a partnership with someone she could not influence or control. But it was for Jesse. She would do anything for him.

It was easy to find the drawing room. It was the room in which, four months ago, Grace had taken her silver bracelet back from James and told him she would not marry him. It had been summer then, and now white gusts ghosted past the windows. Otherwise, not much had changed: here was the same flowered wallpaper, the velveteen settee and wing chairs, the faint scent of ink and writing paper.

It brought back that day to her, too sharply. The stricken look on James’s face. The things he had said to her.

She knew there ought to have been pleasure in causing him pain. There would have been for her mother, but there was none for her. For years she had lived with the knowledge of James’s love like a weight on her shoulders. She thought of it as chains—iron chains that bound him to her. The Herondales are made to love, her mother had said. They give all they have and keep back nothing.

She did not love him. She knew he was beautiful—she had watched him grow into himself, every summer, as if she were watching a painting by Rossetti turn from a sketch into gorgeous, vivid art—but what did it matter? It seemed it had never occurred to her mother—and would not have mattered to her if it had—that just as it was a torment to love, it might be a torment to be loved. To be loved, and to know it was not real.

She had tried to release him from the chains once before, in this very room. She had seen the way he looked at Cordelia, and she had known: the chains would break, and he would hate her as a monster. Better to let him go, while her mother slept. Better to do a deed that could not be undone.

It is impossible between us, James.