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Then I looked down at his hand.

It was shaking badly.

He wasn't pulling away because he didn't want me. He was using everything he had to stop himself because wanting me had become dangerous.

I put my other hand over his and held it there until the trembling eased.

Eventually, he stepped back.

He turned toward the old wooden bench and the oldest of the rose bushes, the thick, gnarled one in the cracked stone trough that I had noticed the first time I came here.

One rose remained on it.

It was dark red, almost black, blooming out of season in the damp heat of the Glasshouse.

Kaelen took the old secateurs from his pocket and cut it carefully, low on the stem.

He left every thorn.

When he turned back to me, he held the flower between us.

"This was my mother’s first bush," he said. "She planted it the year I was born. That's the last rose. It won't flower again until spring."

He started to hand it to me, then looked at the ruined bandages around my palms and stopped.

Instead, he slipped the stem gently through the torn velvet lacing at my side until the rose rested just above my heart.

I looked down at it.

"Every thorn," I said quietly. "Every single time."

"I wanted you to understand that I knew what it cost to give me anything." His eyes lifted to mine. "That it could hurt. That I wasn't asking you to pretend otherwise." He looked faintly embarrassed by the confession. "I didn't know how else to say it. My father… He knows those roses. Every week I told myself I wasn't going to leave another one where someone might find it."

"But you did."

"Every week."

I opened my mouth to answer.

Then I saw movement through the glass behind him.

Torches were coming through the gate from the harbor steps.

There were dozens of them spreading across the courtyard, and behind the flames came gray coats. Metal flashed on their lapels: the wolf-and-dragon.

Then I saw the weapons in their hands.

Short black dart guns.

The same kind I had seen once before on the second level of a parking garage in the rain.

Kaelen followed my gaze and turned.

The gold disappeared from his eyes.

By the time he looked back at me, they were gray and cold.

"Enforcers."