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"In the drawer." He answered exasperated with a heavy sigh.

"Why?" I refused to let it be. If I annoyed him it sucked to be him.

"Because they aren't accurate anymore." He delivered it the way you'd read out prognoses for the weather. The cold in that room dropped another two degrees.

My skin erupted in goosebumps and I shivered before I could catch myself. Frowning I looked around trying to find the source of it until realization dawned on me. It was coming off him.

I crossed the floor without a second thought.

"Don't." He didn't move but an invisible wall formed between us to keep me away from him. His hands closed, slowly, like he was folding something away and struggling to keep it at bay. "Firefly. Stop walking."

"Make me." I ground out through clenched teeth. "You'll need to hurt me to stop me from approaching you."

"That is precisely what I'm trying to avoid, so please stop walking."

I stopped three feet out with my heart fluttering like a bird trapped in a cardboard box. Up close I could see his skin had gone the color of paper left too long in the sun. His eyes were still that melted chocolate with the gold in it, except the gold wasn't flecks anymore. It had spread. It sat behind the brown like a lit window behind a curtain, and it did not blink when his eyelids did. That was the dull light I saw from the doorway. A horrible realization punched me at the center of my chest.

"You told me they didn't get it." My mouth had gone dry as a sock. "In the sickroom. I sat on that bed and held your stupid hand and I asked you point blank what they took, and you looked me right in the face and said my grace, and no, they didn't steal it all. You told me they needed you conscious. You told me you burnt yourself out to stop them."

"I did tell you that."

"Was it true?"

The silence went on for three entire breaths.

"No," River finally admitted.

I hit him then.

I would love to report that I handled the situation with dignity. I did not. I dropped both shoes and the boot on the floorboards with a clatter that probably woke the whole third floor, and I slapped my open hand against his stupid pretty face, hard, the way you'd hit a door that wouldn't open. He let me. Under my palm he was cold as a windowpane in middle of February in Alaska.

He didn't turn to ash from my crazy magic.

Neither did I from touching an angel uninvited.

"Angels and fallen need intent," he'd told me once, in a car, with his hands loose on the wheel. "Every story about it is a story about a choice somebody made. Not a rule."

I took my hand back anyway, and hated myself for it. I watched him see me do it, too.

"That was months ago." My voice shook and I let him hear it. I couldn't care less anymore. "Months, River. You lied to me while I was holding your hand, and then you climbed out of that bed and walked around inside that lie every single day since."

"You had just walked out of the same losing battle I did." He straightened in increments, and the whole room seemed to tilt very slightly toward him while he did it. "You hadn't slept. Alex was standing outside the door, his energy almost crushing with the guilt he felt for letting you put yourself in danger like that. That male would have died for you twice over in a blink of an eye. And you asked me a question that had exactly one answer that would keep you in this house instead of going back into that city to find something to kill." His mouth twisted into a self-deprecating smile. "So, I gave you the only answer that was right at the time. I couldn't tell you the truth."

"That was not your call to make."

"No," he agreed easily. "It wasn't."

"Then why now?" My arms flew out at my sides. "You've been fine. You were fine at the coven. You were standing behind me in that chamber. What changed in eleven days?"

"Nothing changed. That's the part I got wrong." His jaw worked like he was chewing on glass. "An extraction of grace isn't a simple moment, firefly. It’s apparently a process. They got it started, and my burnout slowed it. I woke up with my wings still attached and did the quick math the way anybody does when they want an immediate answer." His shoulders lifted. "I was alive. Therefore, I assumed they failed. It just took the rest of it this long to finish walking out of me unfortunately."

Something cold slid under my ribs and made itself at home. If his grace was gone there was nothing I could do about it now. Nothing that I know of anyway.

"Don't ever do it again, River, I'm not a child. Not about anything." I jabbed a finger at his chest without touching him. "I don't care how noble you think you're being. I don't care if it's about the weather. No more lies, no more managing me, no more little conferences about Hazel in rooms where Hazel isn't standing." My breaths were coming out loud in little gasps and I had to clench my fists so I wouldn't grab him to shake some sense into him. "Say it."

"No more lies."

There was a pause there.