“The list of transgressions I am to beg pardon for grows, then,” he said without sounding sorry at all. “But it does become you.”

Fear shot through me at this response, driving my heart to speed up.

I shifted. “Erik. What is going on?”

He raised the pole, slid it back into the water, and pushed off.

“Eri—”

“Erik is dead,” he snapped.

I blinked, taken aback by this sudden show of temper. He’d been short with me before. But never unkind.

My sense of alarm growing, I swung toward one side of the boat and peered down into the waters, hoping to catch sight of the bottom that, as evident by Erik’s use of the gondolier pole, couldn’t be too far off.

The eyes of my own frightened reflection met with mine.

“Do take care,” he cautioned. “Should we capsize, you’ll wake, and my spell will be ruined.”

Spell?

“What’s happened to you?” My fear grew twofold. “You’re—”

“The boy,” he said, cutting me off. “You must forget him now.”

My mouth fell open. This wasn’t the first time he’d mentioned Lucas. I shut my mouth, my jaw flexing with the unwelcome thought that Erik might have witnessed the kiss in the attic. And that prospect summoned within me a snarl of complicated emotions. Because Erik himself had almost kissed me once. And in that moment, I had wanted him to. That kiss had never happened, though. And Lucas had kissed me. Besides that, Erik was . . . he was . . . God, what was he?

Whatever he was, he was not alive, which must have been why he’d stopped the kiss. Because he knew as well as I did that the two of us were separated by more than just time.

At least we had been . . . until last night.

“I . . . didn’t mean to hurt you,” I said in a whisper.

“I can assure you that is quite impossible for you to do,” he said without meeting my gaze.

“You saw us, didn’t you?”

His eyes narrowed on me. “I see everything that happens inside of my house.”

My heart clenched suddenly tight, heat rising to my cheeks along with an odd sense of guilt over my kiss with Lucas.

I couldn’t sit here, though, and let myself be surprised that Erik cared for me. After all, I came back into this nightmare house because I had grown to care for him.

“L-last night,” I said. “Erik—”

“I told you not to call me that.”

“No, you didn’t.” I gripped the sides of the boat. “You said that Erik was dead. But you’re not dead, are you?”

“It no longer matters what I am.”

“Last night,” I pressed, “I was really there with you on the other side of the house. It wasn’t a dream or a hallucination. And that’s why you wouldn’t take off the mask. You didn’t want me to see that you don’t look like this. That the stories about what happened to you are true. That’s what you were trying to tell me in the conservatory.”