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I stayed.

I told myself it was because the Archive was warm, and that was partly true. Every so often, though, I found myself looking up from the pages about pelicans and weasels to watch his hands.

They were long, pale, and completely steady as he worked, laying gold across cracked letters with the kind of patience that made every movement deliberate. Before I could stop myself, I wondered what it would feel like to have those hands touching me with that same care. My face. My waist. Somewhere much less appropriate to imagine while sitting in a library.

After that thought, I lowered my head and became extremely interested in the bestiary for the next twenty minutes.

At nine, without looking up, Ronan said, “Good night, Miss Hale.”

It was the first thing he had said to me that did not sound rehearsed.

I stopped near the door with the bestiary still in my hands.

“Is it true?” I asked. “The part about weasels killing basilisks?”

He kept working.

“It is a thirteenth-century bestiary, Miss Hale. It also claims the pelican is a devoted mother.” He paused. “I have met pelicans.”

I laughed before I could stop myself, and the sound carried through the quiet Archive.

Ronan’s head came up sharply.

For a moment, he simply watched me from across the room. Whatever he was thinking, I could not read it.

Then he lowered his eyes again.

“Put it back in the correct section,” he said. “Since you’re so particular.”

I returned the book to the shelves with the other bestiaries.

When I glanced back at him before leaving, the brush in his hand was no longer moving.

The next morning, I returned to the Archive because I refused to let one embarrassing interaction keep me away from a room I wanted to use.

The long table was empty except for one object placed directly in front of the chair where I had been sitting the night before.

It was a slim book bound in faded green cloth, positioned neatly with its edges aligned to the edge of the table.

There was no title on the spine.

On the first page, written in a looping hand, were the words On the Sleeping Beast.

There was no note.

I looked toward the large desk at the far end of the room, but Ronan was not there. The gold leaf, brushes, and restoration tools had all been put away.

The book smelled of old paper and carried another faint scent beneath it, dry and warm, the lingering smell of a fire that had gone out hours earlier.

I read On the Sleeping Beast in one sitting that night, curled on my iron bed with the blankets around my shoulders and the rose in its jug on the washstand beside me.

Most of the book was difficult to understand. It was older than the bestiary, or at least seemed to be, and it had been written in cramped English full of long s’s that looked like f’s. It took me most of a paragraph to realize that the beaft fleepeth was not a spelling error.

The book described shifters who changed late, or never changed at all. It spoke of beasts buried so deeply inside a person that ordinary methods could not reach them.

One passage stopped me.

I read it so many times that I nearly memorized it: