“The Archivist’s assassins aren’t bound by the same laws as the London Garda or even my own soldiers. You should be afraid. He’s killed far better than you.”

“Stop, Nic. Jess is right.” Wolfe stopped pacing and looked at Santi. The two men faced each other, and Wolfe seemed quiet, clear-eyed, and steady. He didn’t look like the fragile, shaking man Jess had seen at the High Garda compound after the ambush. Nor did he look like the driven, angry man who’d taken on the role of teacher for Jess’s class. The man had too many secrets, buried too deep, for Jess’s comfort. Ironic, some sliver of Jess’s mind whispered, considering how much you keep from him. From everyone.

They were alike, Jess realized: both mistrustful, prone to hide emotions from others. Both with scars they hated to show. The difference was that Wolfe had Niccolo Santi. They’d braided their lives tightly together, and it would take a sharp sword to cut that tie.

He envied them that love. He might have hoped for it once.

But she was gone.

“Don’t do this,” Santi said. “I’m begging you, Chris, don’t. You’ll kill yourself.”

“Better I kill myself in a good cause than let the Library simply erase me. The Archivist has already destroyed my work. We both know he won’t allow me to live on much longer. If dying is my fate, at least I can try to change Thomas Schreiber’s before it comes.” He reached out for Santi’s hand. “I will happily remember every cut, every burn, every blow if it helps set that boy free. Please don’t stand in my way.”

Santi bowed his head for a moment, stepped forward, and rested his forehead against Wolfe’s. “You fool,” he said, and kissed him, sweet and slow. “Don’t ask me to watch you tear yourself to pieces.”

He let go of Wolfe, went into the bedroom, and closed the door behind him.

Wolfe said, “I can’t blame him for that; he remembers how I was after. But I’m stronger now. I will manage.”

“Sir—” Jess’s voice went cold in his throat, and he couldn’t finish for a long, struggling moment. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me.” The look in his dark eyes was chilling now, lightless, the same as when he’d been the unwilling proctor for their class of innocent postulants, knowing so many would fail or die. “I’m not your hero. It was my doing that made you all targets in the first place. If you’d never met me, your life would have been happier. It surely would be longer.” His smile was awful—full of bitterness and heartbreak. “Now go find me a suitable Mesmer, and let’s get this over with before Nic comes to his senses.”

Finding a Mesmer wasn’t hard; finding one who didn’t have ties to the Library was much more difficult, and, in the end, Jess had to settle for one, on the advice of smuggler friends, who was known for conducting under-the-table thefts from wealthy clients, some of whom he convinced to rob themselves and forget they’d done it. A gifted man, no doubt about it.