A smile appears on her previously unmoving face. “Interesting,” she says to herself, and makes her way around the table toward me. I grab at my pocket, my motor control almost nonexistent, and on my third try I manage to get my hand in it. But to my great dismay, nothing is inside. I pull my hand out, examining my empty palm, and there on my wrist is a smear of something oily. When she brushed past me…she must have…how did I not notice? I rub clumsily at the oil, but the swimming feeling only worsens.

I turn toward the door, my balance off, and I stumble into another one of her tables, banging my knee into the leg. I right myself, my head bobbling into an upright position. Between me and the door is the apothecary.

“You’re either dim-witted to think you could come to my shop and use a private Family code, or you’re desperate. Which one are you? Dim-witted or desperate?” She looks at me like she might eat me.

I grip the table. Matteo told me she might be willing to help me if she thought I was some distant Bear cousin, but that’s clearly not the case. She knows I’m an outsider.

“Desperate,” I say, my mouth once again moving without my permission. Why would I tell her that? “I need your help to find my dad.” Oh god. Oh god. What am I saying? Did she give me some kind of a truth serum? I look again at the door, considering making a run for it, but I don’t know if my legs will carry me, much less if I can maneuver around her to reach the door.

She raises an eyebrow. “I would forget about leaving if I were you. You will be here as long as I so choose—if you leave at all, that is.”

My eyes widen, my heart racing. I’m trapped behind two heavy doors at the end of a long hallway, incapacitated and spouting secrets, with no phone. No one is coming to help me because no one knows where I am, and I doubt anyone would hear me if I screamed.

“Now tell me,” she says as I struggle to maintain my balance and my hold on the table. “Who is your father?”

I fight as hard as I can, resisting her and the awful drug she’s given me.

My dad laughs, which only makes me scowl harder at the ground where he knocked my wooden practice sword out of my hands.

“Want to go again?” he asks.

“Whatever,” I grumble under my breath, and pick up my sword with a huff.

My dad gives me a knowing look. “If you don’t like losing, then fencing isn’t for you. Because you’re never going to win all the time. And needing to win is only going to make you unhappy…like right now.”