The door closes behind me, and Sel leans against it, annoyed glare restored. “Nicholas will be home in a couple of hours, and if he knows you’re here, he’ll either punch me again or take my title, or both, so if you have something to share, do it now and quickly.” He wipes a hand down his face. To my dismay, it does extremely distracting things to his stomach muscles. Things I don’t want to notice.

I look away, a spike of guilt making my throat tight. “Can you please put a shirt on so we can have a serious conversation?”

He looks at me between his fingers. “Don’t tell me you’re prudish?” He laughs self-deprecatingly. “How did I ever think you were Shadowborn? Now I’m truly embarrassed. Mortified, really. Perhaps I should resign from my post.”

“I’m trying to help you.” I grit my teeth.

“Poorly, I imagine.” He strolls to a chest of drawers, and I get a glimpse of charcoal-and-obsidian feathers—another, larger tattoo that I can’t see in its entirety. Whatever it is, it stretches across his ribs and spans his back and sends heat from my chest to my toes. When he pulls a black T-shirt out, I breathe a slight sigh of relief. Clothes are good, I think. In general. On people. On Sel, especially. But then he shrugs the tee on, and it fits him like a second skin—a marginal improvement at best.

He snatches a towel off a hook on his door and scrubs at his hair as he steps around me to drop into his desk chair. “All right, I am curious, I admit. Tell me what you think you know.”

“Are you going to listen?”

Head bent under his towel, he lifts a shoulder in a half shrug. All the answer I’ll get.

“It might take a while to explain.” His tawny eyes flick to the bed, the only other sitting surface in the room. I sit down begrudgingly and take a deep breath.

“You weren’t the first Merlin I’ve met, and your mesmer wasn’t the first one I’ve resisted.”

That gets his attention. He tosses his towel, shoves his hair back from his face, and fixes me with a stare. “Talk.”