“I meddled in that which I should not,” she said, twisting the bolt and shoving me out before the door was half open. “I will not make the same mistake twice.”

The door slammed in my face, and I stood staring at it like a fool, trying to think of what I should do.

“Well, that didn’t go well.”

I whirled around in time to see Chris stepping out from the narrow space between the two buildings. “You were listening.”

He had the decency to look embarrassed. “The back door was unlocked.”

“Well, I suppose that saves me having to explain our conversation.” I followed him over to where Fleur was tethered.

“Catherine’s not going to help you, Cécile. She’s afraid.”

“I know.” I squinted up at the sky, judging the time. “But she’s got answers, so I’m going to have to think of a way to get her to talk.”

“Maybe not.” He held out his hand, revealing a mat of hair pinched between his fingers. “You’d think she’d know better than to leave a hairbrush laying around.”

“Christophe Girard, you are brilliant,” I breathed, taking the hair from him and carefully tucking it away in my pocket, mentally flipping through Anushka’s grimoire as I thought of ways to use it.

Glancing up, I saw that Chris’s face was tight and he was studiously examining his boots. “What’s wrong?”

“I took something else.”

I raised one eyebrow. “What else could you possibly have taken? I was in there for only a few minutes.”

He grimaced. “I took it before. When we were hiding in the cellar, I saw those books sitting on the table and I took one.”

My other eyebrow rose to join its mate. “You stole it?”

“I was going to put it back – that was the reason I snuck in. But then I heard her talking and I knew she wasn’t going to help, so…”

“So you kept it?” I struggled and failed to keep the eagerness from my voice. Part of me was annoyed that he hadn’t told me he’d taken it in the first place, but a larger part knew he wouldn’t have kept it from me without good reason.

“Here.” He extracted a small, well-worn book from inside his coat. “I couldn’t read much of it, but I recognized enough to know that it’s a nasty bit of work.”

Glancing surreptitiously around, I flipped through the pages. It was full of spells, blood magic. And the instructions were both graphic and specific. I swallowed hard, remembering what Catherine had said about this sort of magic: Using blood for even one spell can put any woman on a slippery slope, and – it always catches up to you in the end. I’d heard her warning, but when my eyes landed on a spell on a particularly dog-eared page, I knew I was going to disregard it.

Chapter 20

Tristan

“So these are them?” Tips unfolded my plans across the scarred table, his face tightening as he noted the substantial differences between them and what my father had provided. I could see he was calculating the wasted months of work, and the effort that would be needed to pull down all the stone and begin anew. The emotional toll it would have on those who had already endured much loss.