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I counted it in hours and the minutes between times I checked my phone. Seven days. One hundred and sixty-eight hours. Zero calls from Tristan Bane. It had been the craziest night of my life. I'd learned about a group of people who lived forever but paid for immortality with their souls. He'd answered my questions over coffee, exchanged phone numbers with me, and driven me home.

I expected to hear from him the next day, but he didn't call. And I had so many more questions! I knew about his sigil and why it was on the monastery wall. I even understood the writing on the back of the photograph now. But I'd been too dazed to ask him why his sigil was on the silver piece. Or what the reliquary had been used for. Or how he'd known it was in my lab. Why hadn't I thought to ask those?

When I was working, I kept looking up, expecting to find him standing outside the lab. It never happened. I texted him twice. Both went unanswered. On the fourth night, bolstered by wine, I called hi,. It rang four times and went to voicemail, but I was too scared to leave a message. We'd only had three interactions, not counting the time he stood outside the lab and stared at the reliquary. It wasn't like I was his girlfriend. And yet, he'd trusted me enough to tell me who and what he was. Why?

Frustration made me twitchy. But underneath it, quieter and harder to ignore, was a suspicion that kept surfacing no matter how many times I pushed it back down—Tristan wasn't rejecting me; he was protecting me. Nobody hands a stranger their entire cursed history, walks them through a house of mourning, and then vanishes out of indifference. You don't share a secret that could get you locked up in a government facility unless some reckless, hopeful part of you wants the person hearing it to stay.

Meanwhile, the museum turned into a soap opera with better lighting. Margaret, who hadn't spoken to her estranged sister in six years over some inheritance dispute, called her out of the blue and cried on the phone for forty minutes in the break room, the two of them reconciling long distance. Two junior researchers, who had been engaged since spring, broke it off publicly. And Lucas, a fellow conservator, stood in the hallway outside the Paper Lab and told our boss he had been miserable in his marriage for fourteen years and didn't know how to say it until now, and could he have the rest of the day off to speak to his wife?

I'd gone from enjoying a calm work environment to shielding myself every morning before I left for work. And I knew why. It was Tristan's Curse. Heartbreak had come to the museum in the body of a sad, stunning man and done its job well. Apparently, absence didn't turn off whatever he'd started. Heartbreak lingered.

Finally, I couldn't take it any longer. After work on the eighth day, I went to Tristan's house, uninvited. Seven days of silence had exhausted my respect for boundaries. Thankfully, the gate was open. I'd forgotten there was one until the moment I turned into his driveway.

I stormed up to Tristan's door and glared at his beautiful home. How dare he hide from me in such luxury? Drawing my shoulders back, I knocked instead of ringing the bell, because knocking felt more like the more appropriate start to the confrontation I wanted.

Tristan opened the door in a gray henley with the sleeves pushed up, his hair disheveled, and his aquamarine eyes catching the porch light. My anger faltered for a second before I remembered why I'd come.

“You've been avoiding me.”

He stepped back to let me in without arguing, which told me everything.

“Seven days, Tristan.” I swept past him into his elegant foyer. “This isn't Twilight. You can't drop an entire paranormal world on someone's head and just vanish.”

Tristan shut the door and leaned against it, arms crossed, jaw tight. “We both had revelations that night. You learned about my world, and I learned why I've been acting so erratically.”

“Erratically?”

“Yes, such as driving to a woman's house in the middle of the night and bringing her into my home to show her all my secrets.” A muscle worked in his jaw. “Having you here, just the two of us, made it clear. Heartbreak's drawing me to you, and I don't know why.”

Again, this wasn't what I'd been expecting. “You're being drawn to me?”

“Yes.”

“You mean the Pull? You sense a heartbreak coming for me?”

“No, that's not it, and that's what makes it so terrifying.”

“I don't understand.”

“Let's sit down.” He took me back to his kitchen, and to his round oak dining table.

Beyond the French doors to my right, lay his patio and garden, with a small, rectangular swimming pool. Back there, the walls were covered in ivy, giving the garden the feeling of a sanctuary.

“Coffee?” Tristan asked.

“Just tell me what's going on, Tristan.”

Sighing, he sat down. “I'm sorry, I've never had this happen to me.”

“Never in seventeen hundred years?”

“Never.” He held my gaze. “The day you saw me outside your lab, the Pull felt different. Usually, it's a clawing anxiousness inside my chest.” He dug his fingers into his chest. “But that day, it was softer, without pain, not even an ache. I was curious and followed it to your lab. As soon as I stepped in the building, Heartbreak went wild. Its power surged through me and broke through my control. It spread through the museum for several minutes before I could wrest it back in. It led me to the reliquary and went still.”

“You looked so strange that day. As if you were ready to attack, but also on the verge of running.”

Tristan raised his eyebrows. “That's a very astute observation.”

“I study faces.” I shrugged. “What happened next?”