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“Of course.” He stepped aside. He held the door.

I walked past him with my coffee in my hand and my back held so straight it hurt. And I was two steps into the hall, and the door was closing, when his voice said, low and almost too quiet to hear:

“Lex.”

I turned. Something brushed the back of my skull, a faint hum, like a wet finger run around the rim of a glass. Then it was gone, and I decided it was the coffee.

He stood in the doorway, framed in the yellow light of the room, one hand on the frame. The bag of bread sat behind him on the desk. He looked, for that half-second, less like a monster than anything I’d ever seen. He looked like a man who’d been waiting a very long time for something and had just remembered how much it could hurt.

“Eat something,” he said. “Please.”

Then he shut the door.

I stood in the corridor for a long time. Long enough that the elevator opened, and Jason came out balancing a tray of four coffees and a dozen donuts, and stopped dead when he saw my face.

“Jesus, Lex,” he said. “What happened?”

“Nothing,” I said.

I hoped that was still a lie I could keep telling.

Chapter 7

MAKSIM

It Slid Off

Ishut the door on his back and stood with my palm flat against the wood.

I counted ten seconds and then twenty while his footsteps went away down the corridor, followed by a second voice, cheerful and much too loud, saying something about donuts. I listened to Lex’s answer, the flat, false nothing, until the elevator swallowed them both.

Then I turned around and looked at the bag of bread on the desk, and I understood, quite calmly, that I had done something unforgivable.

I want to be exact about it, because I have spent a long time being inexact about the things I did in the past, and it has never helped.

I did not take his memory. I did not make him forget. I did not do any of the large, obvious, terrible things that I had promised Tamsin, and myself, that I would never do to him. But when I said his name at the door, when he turned, when the light fell across his face and I saw how thin he looked, how tired, how frightened and how stubbornly he was still standing there, I felt the old thing move inside me. The oldest and cheapest of our talents. A hum, low in the throat, that puts a thought into a human head the way a hand puts a coin into a pocket.

Say nothing. Tell no one. Sleep well.

Three small suggestions. Nothing that would hurt. Only enough to keep him quiet and keep him safe, and to let me stop being afraid.

I had done it before ten thousand times. It takes half a breath. It has never once failed.

It failed.

I mean this precisely. It did not weaken, or glance off, or fade after a few seconds the way it does on the very drunk or the very stubborn. It went out from me and touched him and slid, as water slides off a stone. I felt it go, the way you feel a foot go through a step that isn’t there. Lex stood in the doorway with his coffee in his fist and his face turned up and simply looked at me, and he was not dazed and not soft-eyed but sharp, tired, and entirely himself.

“What?” he had said, nearly.

I had said, “Eat something. Please.” And shut the door.

Now I stood with my forehead against the wood and my hand still pressed to it, feeling the last of that cold hum drain out through my fingertips, and I said aloud, in a voice I did not recognize, “You stupid old fool.”

It was not a discovery. It was a confirmation.

Yelena had told us, the winter she came to teach Sabine the laws and I sat in the corner pretending not to listen, that the mind of a mate is a closed door to the person it belongs to. You cannot lead them, she said. You cannot lull them. Not because you are forbidden, but because they are not built to be led. It is the only true equality left to us. I had listened with the polite skepticism of a man who had been dead for eight hundred years and had ignored every elder who ever tried to teach him anything.

I had wanted to believe it was a story.