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“He stayed,” I whispered.

“He did.” Yves folded the paper along its original crease and put it in his pocket. “Though I suspect he intends to make us suffer for it.”

I gathered the charts from the bed before Adrien could crush them by accident in his sleep and pulled the blanket over his foot. Della lowered her head toward my fingers, permitting me to stroke along the soft feathers beneath her beak.

“You stay,” I told her.

She didn’t have to be told twice. My familiar nested beside the sleeping vampire, seeming quite pleased with herself.

Yves and I exited as quietly as we had entered. He leaned against the wall opposite Adrien’s door, and for a long time, he just stared at it.

“Is something wrong?” I asked.

He shook his head, and I noticed that there were tears in his eyes. It took him a while to get his next words out. “I have felt like a failure as a parent for so long. Every time I tried to do the right thing, he ended up hating me for it. The only thing we ever bonded over was astronomy, and that was because he wouldn’t leave my telescope alone, so I bought him his own.”

He broke away from the door to look at me. “But for the first time in a very long time, I feel as though I did something right. And I wouldn’t have trusted him if you hadn’t pushed me.”

“I push everyone. Just ask Della.” I nudged Yves in the ribs until he finally smiled. “You did this. You planned it all.”

Yves pulled the note out from his pocket.

“It’s the raven with fangs for me,” I said. “He’s such a creative kid. One of a kind.”

He ran his thumb over the pencil sketch. “He is, isn’t he?” Yves held my gaze, and warmth spread through my entire body. “I know it’s late and you probably want to go to bed, but what would you say to a glass of wine on the balcony?”

“I’m not tired at all. Too much happened to sleep.”

I pressed my lips together. A quiet evening with Yves sounded amazing, but I glanced down at my satchel, and thoughts of what happened in the mausoleum surfaced.

“There’s something I need to tell you first. About what happened in the mausoleum.”

He tucked Adrien’s note inside his coat pocket. “I’m listening.”

“The Demon of Dominion tried to feed me too much power through the relic,” I whispered. “She told me she’d stop if I summoned her.”

He took my hand in his and pressed a kiss against my knuckles.

I swallowed hard and forced myself to finish. “I was able to complete the ritual, but… I can still feel her at the back of my thoughts. It worries me. I don’t want to leave the relics unguarded anymore. I need to secure them in something besides a pocket.”

He withdrew the narrow case he’d kept the medallions in from his pocket. “This is lined with lead.”

I brightened. “Is it?”

“What kind of sorry excuse for a former witch would I be if it wasn’t?”

As soon as we were inside Yves’s room, I locked the relics inside the box and added a fresh binding ward. As soon as they were safe, the scratching at the back of my thoughts finally stopped. I waited a little longer, hardly daring to trust the silence.

“Better?” Yves asked.

“Much.”

I still had questions about Honora, and we still needed to find the members of The Devouring, but with the spell extinguished and my relics secured, I could breathe a little easier.

I turned my attention to Yves as he removed the wax on a bottle of red wine.

The Demon of Dominion had commandeered enough of my evening.

Chapter 42