“What price did you set?” I school my breath slow and even, waiting for his reply,

He moves to my side, guides me to the glass and directs my attention below. “I have had difficulty staffing lately. My servers keep dying on me.”

The skin of my spine begins to crawl.

“One club in particular is hard to keep staffed. The Tuxedo Club is constantly requiring replacements.”

It is the subclub where the servers dress in tight black leather pants and bow ties, and serve topless.

“Your Sean was good enough to fill in for a time.”

Bile rises in the back of my throat. “My Sean does not belong here.”

“Perhaps. But even you have to admit he looks good in the uniform.”

I look where he’s pointing. The back I admired on my way up the stairs has known my hands on its shoulder blades as he moved inside me. I have tickled it many nights as he drifted to sleep. I have massaged it when he worked the nets overlong. I have kissed each and every muscle and curve. It is, indeed, a beautiful back.

“How long?”

“I haven’t decided.”

“Don’t do this to me.”

“Why.”

“He is …” I stop and sigh. This man would understand nothing of what I would say.

“Go on.”

“Sean is my soul mate.”

“Soul mate.”

He mocks me. He mocks God. “Such things are sacred.”

“To who? Your god may love soul mates but man does not. Such a couple is vulnerable, particularly if they are fool enough to let the world see how shiny and happy they are. Their risk rises tenfold during times of war. There are two courses a couple in such circumstances can chart: go deep into the country and hide as far from humanity as possible, hoping like hell nobody finds them. Because the world will tear them apart.”

He is wrong. He knows nothing of soul mates. Still I cannot help but ask, “The other?”

“Sink up to their necks in the stench and filth and corruption of their war-torn existence—”

“You mean behave like common criminals. Would you prefer us ruthless animals? Why are you doing this?”

“I mean look at it, Katarina. See things for what they are. Drop your blinders and raise the sewer to eye level; admit you’re swimming in shit. If you don’t acknowledge the turd hurtling down the drain toward you, you can’t dodge it. You have to face every challenge together. Because the world will tear you apart.”

“You are manipulative, cynical, and base.”

“Guilty as charged.”

“Life is not as you see it. You don’t know anything about love.”

“I am intimately acquainted with the vagaries of fate in times of war. They’ve been my worst and best centuries.”

“That is not love.”

“I didn’t say it was.” He flashes a smile, white teeth gleaming in shadow. “I prefer war. The colors run more brilliant; food and drink are more rare, and the sweeter for it. People are so much more interesting. More alive.”

“And more dead,” I say sharply. “We lost nearly half the world and you find it ‘interesting’? You are a pig. Barbaric and cruel.” I turn away. I have had enough. If this is his price then I am free to go. There is nothing more I owe him. He has already taken it all.

I move for the door.

“You must tell him, Katarina. If you are to have any hope at all.”

I stop. He cannot know. There is no way that he could know. “Tell who, what?”

“Sean. About Cruce. You must tell him.”

I whirl, hand fluttering to my throat. “What in God’s name are you talking about?”

I search his eyes and I see there that somehow he knows my deepest shame. They hold a secret smile and a certain amused resignation. As if he has watched humanity’s idiocies play out in front of him so many times that they have begun to … not pain but perhaps perturb him. As if he wearies of watching the rats in the maze run into the same walls over and over. I expand my empath gift, I push with all I’ve got, and still I can’t even sense that he is in the room with me. There is nothing where he stands.

“If you don’t tell Sean that Cruce is fucking you while you sleep, it will destroy what you have with him more certainly than any job in my club could. That, down there”—he points to Sean serving a drink to a pretty, nearly naked Seelie—“is a bump in the road, a test of temptation and fidelity. If your Sean loves you, he will pass it with flying colors. Cruce is a test of your fucking soul.”

I don’t bother arguing with him. He knows. Somehow he knows. Perhaps he can read thoughts like I read emotions. It is a terrifying idea. “Why can’t I feel you?”

“Perhaps the lack is not mine. Perhaps it is within you.”

“No.” Of this I am certain. “There’s something wrong with you.”

Again he flashes that smile. “Or something right.”

Perhaps I take the coward’s way. Perhaps I take the honorable path. I cannot decide. My head is a muddle. But I give the Tuxedo Club wide berth and pull up the hood of my cloak. I do not confront my Sean as I leave. If he tells me, we will discuss it. If he does not, we will not. I tell myself I am respecting his boundaries, preserving his dignity. This is where he will be instead of in my bed in coming nights.

The price of saving my abbey is a piece of my heart and the lion’s share of my spine. That is what Ryodan called due.

My Sean will face temptation alone every night at Chester’s, and I will face it alone at the abbey, in my bed.

This is not a world I ever wanted to know.

One night when Mac and me were killing Unseelie back-to-back, she had a kind of meltdown and started crying and yelling while she sliced and diced. She said that she was going to send them all straight back to hell because they stole everything from her that mattered. She said she used to know her sister, everything about her, and that was where love was, in the knowing and sharing, but it turned out Alina had a boyfriend she’d never mentioned and a whole other life she knew nothing about, and not only didn’t Alina love her, her entire existence to date had been one great big fat lie. Her parents weren’t her parents, her sister probably wasn’t her sister, nobody was what they seemed, not even her.

In Rowena’s stash of journals chronicling her nasty, evil reign, I found Mac’s sister’s diary. I have over four hundred journals locked away with the Grand Mistresses emblem emblazoned on dark green kidskin leather. She was eighty-eight when she died, though she didn’t look a day over sixty. She had a Fae she’d been nibbling on for decades locked in a vault beneath the abbey. I killed it when I found out about it.

When I discovered Alina’s diary, I tore out pages and got them to Mac on the sly, trying to make up for silencing her sister’s voice and show her she’d meant everything in the world to Alina.

“Why the feck are we here?” I say crossly. I wouldn’t even be thinking about Mac if we weren’t. Christian’s been sifting me around the city, helping me plaster my Dailies on lampposts. I been letting him touch my pinky finger to do it. He keeps trying to put his arms around me. His last sift deposited us catty-corner to Barrons Books & Baubles, with the street between us.

I feel like puking.

I ain’t been here since the night Mac found out the truth about me. The night she baked me a cake and painted my fingernails and saved me from the Gray Woman, only to end up ready to kill me herself a few minutes later.

In the middle of a ruined city, Barrons Books & Baubles stands untouched. I think a silent benediction: May it always. There’s something about this place. As if its mere existence means the world will always have hope. I can’t explain why I feel that way but all the folks I know that have ever visited it, all the other sidhe-seers, feel the same. There’s something different, something extraordinary on this island, in this city, on this street, in this precise spot. It feels almost like once, a very long ago time, something terrible nearly happened here at this longitude and latitude, and somebody put BB&B on the gash to keep the possibility from ever occurring again. As long as the walls stand and the place is manned, we’re okay. I snicker, picturing it looking just like it does right here and now, in prehistoric times. It doesn’t seem so improbable.