“What’s that say about you, if it’s true?”

“Whatever,” he said. “Why shouldn’t I benefit, if others do?”

It was easy to justify using him, when he talked like that. Maybe she should choose someone like him from now on. Snow was falling and the cold made Lovisa jumpy. When he grabbed her and pushed her against a stone wall, her heart began to hammer. The wall bruising her was the wall of the Devret estate, which meant they were getting close to her house. And he was grabbing her hard, manhandling her as he hadn’t before. She couldn’t push him off. It hurt.

“Let me go,” she said.

He shoved her harder, pressing down on her shoulders. “Get down,” he said.

“I won’t,” she said, beginning to panic, but making herself sound disgusted and brave. “Don’t think I won’t turn you in if you make me.”

“No one would believe you.”

“You think my mother and father won’t believe me when I show them bruises on my back from you shoving me against the Devrets’ wall?”

“No one even knows I’m here. You can’t prove it was me.”

“I told Mari I was bringing you here,” she lied. “You know he’d defend me before he ever defended you.”

Pari suddenly laughed. He released her. “Fine,” he said. “This had better be one good screw.”

—

Pari’s complaints struck a new tone, furious and mean, when they got to the Cavenda wall and he understood Lovisa’s plan for entering the house through a high window.

New criterion, Lovisa thought to herself. Someone less pushy, and scary, and whiny, and horrible. “Just get over the wall, Pari,” she said, beginning to wonder how she was going to hold him off once they were in the house. All this, just to figure out what her father was storing in that room? It had better be worth it. “Your screw is on the other side of the wall.”

The pokey rocks were slippery in a snowfall, especially for someone unused to them, like Pari. By the time he landed on the other side, he had mud streaks on his coat and scrapes on his hands. “We could just do it here,” he said, with a tone in his voice that said something else too. That he was done with patience, and they would do it here.

Electrified with a refusal to lose control over this situation, Lovisa set out quickly across the grounds and around the house, hoping he would follow, and then, when she heard his footsteps behind her, feeling chased. At the tree that led to the trellis, she reached one foot to a knot and, with all her speed, began to climb. She’d dressed for this, with her dark coat and with narrow skirts that were actually divided into pants.