My fingers curled into fists as I wondered if he had discovered my true identity. He hadn’t mentioned Clementine Madigan since the day I’d conveyed Blythe’s message, but I sensed he was still searching for me.

“You would tell me to leave two days before the new moon?” I asked, incredulous. “Why?”

Phelan turned away, surveying the damage he had wrought. “I can’t tell you why. But I want to give you the opportunity to leave while you still can.”

I stared at him, stunned, as he began to pick up books and set them back on the shelves.

The volume of nightmares was sprawled in the middle of the floor; I retrieved it, smoothing the pages that had bent. Phelan paused, watching as I walked the tome to his desk and set it down.

“Remember that night you told me that you weren’t kind?” I asked. “Well, in case you failed to notice, neither am I.”

“Anna,” he began, desperate. “You sh—”

“No, listen to me! I have invested too much time, sweat, and blood in you and your streets for you to dismiss me over some family matter you refuse to divulge. I’m not going anywhere, Phelan Vesper.”

I left him to clean the library on his own, but I sat in bed by candlelight, too anxious and angry at him to sleep. I reached for my journal and reread my exposé, eventually turning the page to write what Phelan had said to me earlier: Get far away from me, my family. I stared at those words, and I wondered what had inspired them. I needed to know—his mother must have done something awful—and I shut the journal.

My door was open, as it had been every night, and yet I was still surprised to see him appear, standing on my threshold long past midnight. He had never come to me in the dark as I sometimes did to him, to lie close enough to feel his heat but far enough that we never touched.

We stared at each other for a long, fragile moment. A moment when I wondered if he was about to ask if he could sleep in my bed, and I felt terrible warmth course through me.

“You’re right,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?” I would never be above making him grovel.

“That you had to see my fit, downstairs. That I told you to leave.” He paused, but his eyes shone like gemstones in the firelight. “I need you. And if you had departed as I first wanted, I would have soon come after you.”

I shivered, but I refused to dwell on how his words made me feel, like I was sugar melting in tea. I needed to know what his mother had done to upset him. “You can talk to me, Phelan.”