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The stockroom is eight feet wide. I know because I measured it for shelving in May. Right now it feels like four, with him in it, breathing my clove candles and my dust and whatever's left of me.

I step in. One step. I don't decide to.

He doesn't move back. He never does. He goes still the way he goes still for everything, and his eyes drop to my mouth and stay there, and the string of orange lights over the door buzzes once and steadies.

"Maren."

"Don't say it like that."

"Like what?"

"Like you're about to be good."

His hand comes up. It stops an inch from my jaw, right where the chain bruise used to be, and hangs there in the air between us like he's asking a question he already knows the answer to.

Heat goes down my spine and pools low and mean.

I could close it. One inch. I've done it twice and both times he kissed me back like a man coming up for air.

I don't.

Because the mirror just told me he'd call it my choice, and the mirror isn't wrong, and if I kiss him in this stockroom right now, I won't know which of us did it.

I put two fingers flat against his chest and push. Not hard. Just enough.

He lets me. His heart is going like he ran here.

"Not with that thing writing on my glass," I say. My voice comes out rougher than I planned.

"Okay."

"Don't 'okay' me. I'm furious."

"I know." One corner of his mouth moves. "You've got your hand on my chest."

I take it back like he's a stove.

He picks the box up again and puts it on a shelf that doesn't need it, and neither of us looks at the other for a full ten seconds, and the candles out front flare white and settle without anybody asking them to.

Instead I ask him where we're sleeping tonight, because his house isn't a house anymore, it's a box with something walking around it.

"Evelyn has an answer," he says.

"You hung up on her."

"I did."

"Are you going to tell me what it was?"

"Sorrell House."

I put the price gun down. "The coven? You want me to sleep at the coven?"

"I can’t make that decision for you." His jaw does the thing. "But there are thirty witches behind those gates, and they should be able to protect you, Maren."

The rush hits at noon and it's glorious.

I sell forty masks. I sell a Victorian mourning brooch to a woman who tells me it "wants to come with her," which is the single most accurate thing a customer has ever said in this shop. I sell the entire rack of velvet capes.