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“Callie,” he says when he sees I’m awake, relief coating his words. He pulls my head in close. “Callie, Callie, Callie,” he murmurs—more, it appears, to reassure himself than to get through to me.

The Bargainer and I are tangled in soft sheets, our bodies naked.

I pull away from him long enough to look into his eyes. He has no idea that right now I’m coaching my mind to not see him as a threat. The bite of that blade feltsoreal.

I swallow.

A nightmare is all it was.

I draw in a shuddering breath, the last of the dream sloughing away. “I’m okay—it’s okay.”

Early morning light filters through the window of our room, the sun making the scent of flowers come alive around our suite. At some point last night, the two of us slipped away to our rooms, finishing here what we’d started in the forest.

I stretch myself back out along the bed, dragging Des down with me. Reluctantly, he lets me pull him to the mattress, tucking me against his side.

I’m not ready to wake up, but I’m not sure I can fall back asleep either.

“Tell me a secret,” I murmur.

He plays with a strand of my dark hair, not saying anything for a long time. Finally, “My mother’s hair was exactly this color.”

“It was?” I ask, tilting my head to peer up at him.

He smooths the lock of hair back down. “Sometimes,” he says, lost in his own thoughts, “when I’m feeling particularly superstitious, I think that’s no coincidence.”

I don’t know what he means by that, but the confession raises the gooseflesh along my arms. This was the woman who raised Des, the scribe whose death he blames on his father.

“Tell me about her—your mother.”

He holds me close. “What do you want to know, cherub?”

I draw circles onto his chest. “Anything—everything.”

“Demanding thing,” he says fondly. His tone sobers when he speaks again. “Her name was Larissa, and she was someone I loved deeply…”

Something thick rises in my throat. It’s not so much what he says as how he says it, like his mother fashioned all the stars in his sky.

His chest rises and falls as he swallows. “It was always my mother and me, ever since my earliest memory.”

I notice he conveniently skirts any mention of his father.

“She was my guardian, my teacher, and my closest confidante. Perhaps it shouldn’t have been that way—I’m sure she didn’t want it to be that way—but in Arestys…my mother and I were seen as oddities.”

My finger pauses on his chest.

Des, an oddity? And in the Otherworld of all places?

“Even by Arestys’s standards, we were poor,” he says. “We couldn’t afford lodgings, so we lived in the caves I showed you. And under my mother’s roof, I had to live by two hard-and-fast rules: one, I must never use my magic, and two, I must control my temper.”

I don’t know where Des is taking this story, but his eyes are far away. For once, he isn’t mincing his words.

“Naturally, I worked my way around both rules.”

The Bargainer bent someone’s words to fit his needs? How shocking.

“I couldn’t wield magic, so I learned to bargain with magical creatures for bits of theirs.”

Sothat’swhere Des came by his affinity for deals. I never stood a chance against him.