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“Because he was hoping to convince me to do this willingly. If you take that option from him, I think he'll try to capture you. He'll probably have traps waiting. Magical traps. Stop trying to be noble and think!”

“This is not about nobility!” he shouted, turning fully toward me on the bed. “This is about survival! Fabian wants to carve Heartbreak out of me and dump it into you! Do you understand what it would do to you? Far more than what Mirana foretold. I had Heartbreak when it was a newborn. We learned together. Grew together. But if got into you, you wouldn't be able to protect yourself from its mature power. It would tear your mind apart and use you like a puppet. You wouldn't be able to stop it. Without anyone holding it back, Heartbreak would run rampant, and you would be in constant pain.”

“And who gave you the right to decide how I face that risk?” I demanded, leaning toward him, refusing to yield an inch. “We are in this together. I am not a piece of porcelain you get to lock in a display case while you go fight the monsters!”

“I am trying to protect you!”

“You're terrified that if you let me stay beside you, if you let us fight this as equals, we might actually win, and then you wouldn't have your precious isolation to hide behind anymore! Fuck! I thought you'd gotten over this bullshit. You told me never to leave you, and now you're right back to where you were.”

Tristan recoiled as if I had struck him. He opened his mouth, shut it, and looked down at the floor, his broad shoulders collapsing and his chest heaving with silent breaths. When he finally spoke, his voice was barely a whisper. “I don't know how to love someone without trying to protect them from myself.”

The raw honesty of his confession hung in the air between us. The powerful Echo Curse had gone, leaving the man exposed. He'd survived by creating rules for himself, adding to those rules with every lesson learned. But his rules didn't apply to me, and he didn't know what it meant or how to proceed.

Anger drained out of me, replaced by an ache so deep it brought tears to my eyes. Shifting across the mattress, I closed the distance between us and took his face in my hands, forcing him to look at me. His eyes were wet, swimming with fear and uncertainty.

I lowered my hands. “You learn how to love when you fall in love. Every relationship is different. Ours is especially unique, with possibilities no other relationship has offered either of us before. So we can't bring past relationships into ours. Those lessons won't help us. Forget about the others and learn with me.”

Tristan looked at me for a long, agonizing heartbeat, searching my face. A shudder ran through him, and he pulled me against him, burying his face in the curve of my neck and wrapping his arms around me. I held him tightly for a few moments.

We lay back down together with relief. The unspoken boundaries between us had shattered. We were no longer two people navigating attraction amid supernatural danger; we were partners negotiating the terrifying terms of real devotion.

Across the room, sitting on the dark mahogany bureau, Fabian’s phone lurked in the shadows.

Chapter Twenty

A few days later, we met in the Conclave’s sub-basement archive. Down here, thirty feet beneath the soil, the air smelled of cedar and stone. The space was massive, most of it taken up by metal shelves filled with labeled boxes. There were a few worktables, a sink, and a bathroom against the far wall.

At the end of the worktable we were gathered around, Bart cradled an oversized porcelain mug of coffee, looking as haggard as usual. The rest of the Conclave appeared alert and rested despite the fact it was only a little after 8 AM. I was seated, but Tristan stood near my left shoulder, his hand on the back of my chair as he leaned around me to look at the objects on the table.

There were fourteen artifacts, each tagged with a white label on a string. They were the spoils of three raids on storage lockers leased under Osric Taylor’s name in Boston and Providence. Among all his books, records, and objects associated with Curses, the Conclave's investigators had found the artifacts.

“They aren't just hunting the ritual objects from Stylos.” Tanvi didn't look up from the leather folder in her hands. “These pieces span four continents and eleven centuries. According to Osric's notes, found with the items,” she tapped the papers in her leather folder, “they were used in attempts to bind, suppress, or remove a Curse from its vessel.”

“To any other collector, this chalice would be worthless.” Edmund peered through a magnifier light. “It's fourteenth-century Florentine silver plate, poorly cast and structurally unremarkable. But Osric somehow knew what it was used for? How?”

“The how isn't as important as the why.” Alistair frowned at the pieces. “Even if these were used in rituals, none of them have any magical residue. He might as well make new ones, which could be done by simply examining pictures of these objects. So, why obtain the artifacts? What use are they?”

“May I have a look at the chalice?” I asked.

Edmund inclined his head and stepped back, offering me the magnifier. I stood up and went to the chalice, but instead of using the magnifier, I angled its light flush against the rim of the chalice, casting high-contrast shadows across the interior bowl.

“What is it?” Tristan moved closer.

“Give me a minute.” I leaned down until my nose was four inches from the metal. A faint sulfur scent rose from the patina. “Look at the base of the bowl.” I straightened and aimed the magnifier light at a faint, pale ring circling the interior. “This has been altered. See the tool marks? Those aren't casting flaws. Someone scored channels into the silver and filled them with lead.”

Tanvi stopped writing. Her pen hovered above the page. “Why lead?”

I shrugged. “Lead blocks electrical fields and radiation. Maybe that has something to do with it.”

“Please examine the others.” Tanvi motioned at the artifacts.

I moved down the table and picked up a broken bronze mirror from the Levant, turning it under the light of another magnifier. The reflective surface had been scored with crosshatches. Around the rim, dried dark-amber residue clung to the mounting.

I scraped the edge gently with my fingernail and sniffed it. “Mastic. Something was attached to this.” I moved to the next item and then the next, until I had examined them all. “None of these artifacts are preserved in their original state. Every single one has been modified.”

“Let me see the mirror.” Cassian stepped around the table to stand before the bronze mirror.

Reaching out, he closed his eyes, and his bare fingers hovered an inch above the scored bronze. He did not touch the metal, but as his hand passed over the scratches, the faint scent of ozone and honeyed apples filled the room.