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But it’s always lingered there, like a sickness.

So…doI want this brand of crazy that Nero’s brought into my life?AmI turned on by him sneaking into my room, touching me, and coming all over my body while I sleep? Or is it just that some fucked-up part of me thinks I deserve it?

Regardless, it doesn’t explain how I crave more every time I even think about him. Doesn’t explain why I can’t stop wondering what comes next.

“Oooo!”

I’m yanked from my thoughts quite literally by Evie tugging on my arm. “Let’s go in here! This place is adorable.”

I look up and blink in surprise when I see that we’re outside a super-cute, Parisian-themed used bookstore. Then that predictable feeling flickers to life.

“I thought we were looking for dresses,” Brooklyn sighs.

“We are. Later,” Evelina declares. “I just want to browse a little. Plus, I want a photo of that mirror in the back.”

I follow them in, grateful for the chance to focus on something other than my thoughts.

The store smells like old paper and leather. Every surface is stacked—books on books on books. Dusty hardcovers, yellowing paperbacks with crinkled and worn spines, even a whole section of vintage pinup magazines, which is really cool. A turntable near the register plays soft, scratchy jazz.

Evie is snapping away at the vintage mirror on the back wall that she spotted from outside, asking the shopkeeper where she got it. Brooklyn is with Bane, browsing the oldPlayboysand other pinup magazines.

I drift toward the fiction section. I know exactly what I’m looking for, because at this point, it’s a freaking compulsion. Bookstore? Library? Must go in and look.

The Sorrows of Young Werther.

Part of me looks for it because it holds such nostalgia for me. It’s the book that got me through the dark times when my mom died. And of course, it’s also the book that led me tohim.

But there’s another reason I look, especially in used shops.

The night of violence, when I ran from my pen pal’s embrace and returned home to learn the truth about my family’s war on Nero’s, our correspondence ended.

We never exchanged names, or numbers, or emails. The only way we could reach each other was between the pages of a book in the New York Public Library.

I was in lockdown for a week after that night—Uncle Levka’s orders. I learned later from Papa that Levka had actually used outside muscle to go after the De Lucas, to minimize blowback on our family. Papa told me he hated that that had been the case, but he also swore me to secrecy.

To this day, I don’t know if anyone but Papa, Levka, and I know thatour familywas behind the De Luca tragedy.

I honestly get the sense that Papa is still embarrassed that it happened at all, even though it’s pretty much the event that shocked him into recovery. I firmly believe it jump-started his body into fighting harder to kill that fucking cancer, so he could get back in charge of the empire.

After that lockdown ended, though, the first thing I did was go to the main branch. I wanted to tell him everything, tell him how sorry I was for what happened to him and his family. I had a tear-stained letter in hand, spilling my guts, telling him I was pretty sure I’d fallen in love with him.

That I still wanted masks, but I wanted him without them, too.

But when I got there that day, there was no book. It wasn’t checked out, but it wasn’t where it was supposed to be, or in any other of our spots.

I tore that library apart formonthslooking for it. But it was gone.

Eventually, one of the librarians figured out what I was doing and took pity on me. She told me gently that sometimes older books were rounded up off the shelves and either donated or sold to used book stores, and that sometimes a human error would make it look like the book was still in the library system, when it wasn’t.

So that’s why I look in old shops like this.

I’m not just looking for any copy ofThe Sorrows of Young Werther.I’m looking forthecopy.

Our copy.

It’s a shot in the dark, and I doubt I’ll ever find it, but it never hurts to look.

When I get to the Classics section, I scan the shelves for a minute before I find the G's. There’s a battered, but not super old, paperback that includes part one and two of Goethe’sFaust. But noWerther.