In the end, he would save her, even if she couldn’t save him.

Wren finally allowed herself to crumble.

When she finished storing the evidence and composing herself, Wren stepped out into Lowry’s macabre study. As soon as the door clicked shut behind her, Hal rose to his feet. A question burned in his eyes, and Wren drew in a deep breath before shaking her head. Not yet.

Not until they were out of this place. Not until they were safe.

Books lay scattered on the desk, some so old and worn their pages spilled out like entrails. They were all the same kinds of tomes as in the library: philosophy, anatomy, biology.

“I see you rearranged the place,” Wren said weakly.

“I was looking for something.”

“And did you find anything useful?”

“Perhaps you should take a look.”

Slowly, Wren approached him and took a seat behind the writing desk. A notebook lay open to a spread of pages filled by long columns of numbers. Her eyes, still burning with tears, ached as she read. Dates long before the first of the soldiers was taken. Ratios of kilograms and milliliters, all but one marked fatal.

Wren knew exactly what this was. Documentation of Lowry’s early experiments with goddessblood. It explained Hal’s survival—and why Lowry had targeted mages only after he’d finished killing off his servants. Before he started abducting soldiers and drilling holes in them, he’d needed to determine what a nonlethal dose of poison was. Just enough to keep someone subdued. And what better lab rats than the people living in his house? They’d been powerless against him.

Disgusted, Wren flipped through the notebook until she came across a detailed illustration of the humerus, shimmering fola threading through the spongy tissue within. On the next adjacent side, a simplified drawing marked incision points along the length of the bone, a cross-section of a cylindrical core of marrow labeled with the word hemopoietic. Page after page was filled with frantically scrawled clinical notes, each one in Lowry’s familiar looping handwriting.

Day 8: Today, the side effects worsen. Nausea, fatigue, sores. And despair, the worst of them all. I fear the marrow transplant has not taken, although briefly, as I lay half-dreaming this morning, I swore I felt something like magic burning cold within me.

Day 12: Nothing, nothing, nothing. Again, it is nothing but failure. I allowed myself to truly hope with this one—to believe this marrow could breathe new life within these inert cells of mine. There is still, however, one thing yet to try.

The log ended there.

“What was there left to try?” Hal asked, jolting her from his thoughts.