I’ve never heard Sel speak this way. So dazed, like he’s not really here in the room with me at all. I want to comfort him, but it feels like it’s not my place to offer comfort in the face of his family history. And yet I’m the reason he knows that history in the first place. I’m the reason he’s standing there, hollow and fractured.

The guilt is enough to choke me.

“ ‘So that she may bear an heir…,’ ” he whispers, his eyes turned inward. I flinch at the cold language. The hope and expectation that his mother would produce a child—a weapon—for the Order fills me with nauseous horror.

He shudders, and his eyelashes flutter, as if he’s just remembered that I’m standing in front of him. He inhales deeply through his nose and looks over my shoulder at the pile of paperwork behind me. When he exhales, the cold, calculating, distant Sel is back, his analysis curt. “It appears I was lied to, likely for my protection. Which means there was no uchel, no mission. They released her for a time and took her away when she relapsed. I suppose I was too young to see that she was losing herself, or too admiring of her abilities…”

Watching him Holmes his way through his own devastation is almost more than I can take. I open my mouth, but he cuts me off.

“At any rate, she’s alive.” His voice breaks on the revelation. Then he sucks in another breath. “But locked away, has been for years, so she’s not our culprit. And, it seems, I inherited her penchant for paranoia, so perhaps there is no mole at all and never was. As for your quest, your mother may be one of the witnesses.”

I’d already thought of that, of course, but… “Sel—”

He brushes past me. “We should find out what happened to your mother,” he says flatly. He crouches down and pushes the affidavit aside, flipping through the file’s other papers.

I kneel beside him and place a hand on his forearm, ignoring the small sizzle between our skin. He freezes without looking at me, muscles hard beneath my fingers. “Sel.”

His voice drops into a register meant to scare and intimidate. “Don’t.” But I hear the restrained desperation in his voice. A pause. Then, quietly: “Please.”

I recognize that sound. It’s the sound of holding on to a cliff by the edge of your nails. The sound of barely containing a pain so immense that to look at it, to raise your own flesh and examine what’s beneath, is to risk falling into a darkness you know you’ll never escape.