This was the really scary part. I had trusted Al to give me a night of peace, but this was entirely different. “Which is why you’re going to bring me through the lines so I can speak in your defense,” I said, fear clenching my heart. “Then you do what you have to for me to claim Trent as my familiar.”

“Trenton Aloysius Kalamack wears Minias’s mark,” he said quickly.

“But he’s wearing my smut of his own free will,” I offered, and Al pursed his lips, leaning back until he hit the bubble and jerked forward.

“I would need to buy your familiar’s mark from Minias,” he mused aloud. Eyebrows rising, he shifted a hand in a gesture of possibility. “But I can do it.”

“Then Trent and I come back here, and we all go back to normal.”

Al snorted. “Sweet innocence be damned. What about my name?” he asked, making a moot face. “I want that back.”

I met his gaze, refusing to give on this. “You won’t be in jail.”

His eyes narrowed. “I want my name. I need it.”

I remembered what Ceri had said about how he made his living. Would I be responsible for the people Al tricked into slavery if I gave it back to him? Logic said no, but emotion said I should stop him if I could. But what about me being summoned into Tom’s circle? I didn’t want that happening again. “Maybe,” I whispered.

His attention bore into mine as he took a slow breath. I didn’t know what he was going to come back with. “Rachel,” he said, and the simple sound of it made my blood turn cold. Something was there that hadn’t been before, and it scared the crap out of me. “I need to know something before I will bargain with you anymore.”

Hearing a trap, I edged back, my jeans scraping on the grit between me and the cement. “I’m not giving anything for free.”

His expression didn’t change. “Oh, not free,” he said in a dangerous monotone. “Insight into another’s thoughts is never free. You pay for it in the most…unexpected ways. I want to know why you didn’t call Minias the other night. I saw your decision to let me go, and I want to know why you did it. Minias would have jailed me. You would have had a night of freedom. Yet you…let me go. Why?”

“Because I wasn’t about to call a mouse of a demon when I could take care of it myself,” I said, then hesitated. That wasn’t why. “Because I thought if I gave you a night of peace, you might give me the same.” God, I had been stupid. To think that a demon would respect that had been dumb.