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I extend my hands without thought, drawn to the textured walls and the calming color. My fingers dance over the names, rings rasping gently as I trace the connected letters, dotting the i’s, swerving and looping. “Who are all these people?”

Eli rolls his head around the cave and back to me with a heavy, burdened look, unlike his usual unreadable one. “They’re my ancestors. Every father of every son.”

“Your family can be traced back that far?”

“All the way back to the beginning.”

“No daughters?” I drag my hand along the wall, stepping deeper into the cave. Rain beats the mountain outside.

“My family line doesn’t have daughters.”

I pause. “At all?”

“Not one in all the millennia.”

“That’s not…natural.”

He tugs on his earlobe, eyes flitting from wall to wall. “I know.”

His admission has me searching for somewhere to look besides his face. “How did you know the Centress was keeping Milo and me at the Ring?”

“I’d followed her there before.” He tosses his pack against the wall, and his hands settle on his suspenders, pulling the straps and snapping the ammo against his chest. “I found out she goes every night, but I didn’t know why.”

“To choose which babies stay and go, and to take their magic?” I ask.

“It seems so.”

“Why were you following her?”

His jaw clicks back and forth as he hesitates. “I was looking for someone.”

“Kelter?” The possibility flickers through me like tiny wings in my veins.

“Only to save me the trouble of finding him later.” He drops his gaze to the floor, toeing figure eights into the thin layer of mud with his boot. He’s different inside this cave…looser.

But he’s responsible for us being in Sonnet. It’s his fault Kelter is being held by the Centress, yet knowing that he was looking, that he’s planning to keep his end of the deal—it makes it even harder to be mad.

“How did you make the pain stop?” I blurt out. “The Centress put her hands on me, and I thought it would never end, but then you were behind me, holding me…and it was gone.”

His head pops up, daggers in his eyes. “She must have pulled back her magic.”

“I don’t—” The look in his eyes turns desperate, silencing me, but I have no doubt that the second his arms wrapped around me, the pain started to wane. I fold my wet arms over my middle. “It’s freezing.”

Eli leans back, one knee bent with his boot flat to the cave wall while he stares at me, and I’m reminded of Kelter back in the stone room—how he leaned against the wall and said everything he could to upset me solely to keep me warm, when all I really needed was his arms.

Minutes pass before he severs the silence. “Take off your clothes.”

“What?”

“You heard me. You’d be a lot warmer without the wet fabric on you. Your body can’t keep up.” He cracks his face into a brazen smile. “And I wouldn’t mind.”

Right. True, but—“I’m not doing that.”

“It’d help.”

“What is it about you?” I hug my stomach tighter.Hold on to the anger. “You’re a jerk to me in front of your friends, and they don’t even notice or care. They stand by you no matter what. But the other guards think you’re beyond awful. Then you’re nice tome—you act like you care, and you kiss me like you mean it. Then you want to fuck me, yet you think it’s okay to lock me up so I won’t…what? Leave you? I don’t know what I’m supposed to think.”

“Nothing.”