I want to tell him that the tear that slides down my cheek and onto his finger is just a remnant leftover from earlier. It’s not from any emotion I feel now. Certainly nothing he has made me feel. I don’t, though. Instead, I study him as he looks at me, his expression strange and hard to read. He’s almost captivated. And it’s then I see it. Subtle but there. He’s struggling with something.

Probably his desire to kill me. To just get it over with warring with that sadistic devil inside him.

I snort, breaking the spell.

He blinks. I watch him. I sometimes catch glimpses of something akin to pain in his eyes, but those few times I’ve seen it, it’s been there one instant and gone the next. I guess I’m searching for it now.

I shake my head. Anything I imagine I’ve seen is probably my mind playing tricks on me. You’d have to be human to feel pain, and Santiago De La Rosa is not human.

He is the devil.

“My mother made it for me when I was little,” he says, confusing me with the admission. “For when I was agitated or upset. It won’t hurt you.”

I study his face. This is the closest we’ve been when he’s allowed it. And it’s the most he’s shared with me ever, even given his admission in the chapel when he’d punished me. That was fact. His father beat him. This is something else. Not a mere statement of fact.

This admission carries emotion.

I don’t know if it’s at the mention of his mother or at what happened, but he is unnerved and almost vulnerable. I remember what Antonia told me about her. That she’d gone back to Barcelona and died there. That her grief killed her.

Is that what I see here? Is he grieving?

I shift my gaze to the vial again, remember those stories of poisonings within The Society. I always thought they were just that, stories, but now I’m not so sure.

“I don’t want it,” I say even though I know he can make me drink it. He can make me do anything he wants.

As if he’s read my mind, he brings the strange little bottle to his lips and takes a sip, then puts it under my nose again.

He releases my jaw. “It’s not poison. It will help you. I promise.”

“No.”

“Drink it.”

“Or what? You’ll make me?”

“Yes.”