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It seemed like a dream back then. Too good to be true.

And it was.

“Gideon?”

Rune’s voice broke through the memories. For a moment, half-stuck in the past, Gideon saw not Rune Winters standing on the measuring block before him, but Cressida Roseblood. Watching him like a lioness. Contemplating whether to play with her food before she ate it, or go straight for the jugular.

His heart hammered; his palms sweated.

“Is everything all right?”

Rune’s voice pulled him fully into the present.Cressida is dead.This was a different girl standing on his measuring block.

Rune stepped down, padding softly toward him.

On instinct, Gideon stepped back.

She froze, biting her lip, as if sensing his distress but not knowing how to ease it.

Snap out of it, Sharpe.

He cleared his throat. “Sorry. Yes. Everything’s fine. I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

“I’m the one who brought it up,” she said, her stormy gaze studying him. “If you want to talk about it—”

“I’d rather not.”

What was he thinking? This was the absolute worst personto tell his most shameful secrets to. The queen of gossip herself, who could ruin his reputation with a single whispered word.

Why had he said so much?

“Okay,” said Rune, who hugged herself.

She was shivering, he realized. Of course she was. It was freezing in here and she was standing in her underwear.

You idiot.He retrieved a woolen blanket from a chest against the wall. It was a blanket his mother had used to keep herself warm while working late on cold winter nights. Returning to Rune, he flung it over her shoulders.

“Just one more measurement and I’ll be done.”

She nodded. As he bent down, pressing the end of the tape to the floor next to her heel, his gaze slid over her smooth legs, checking for any silvery marks on the skin, just as he’d done with the rest of her body. But there was nothing. Her legs were so perfect, Gideon had trouble tearing his eyes away from them.

He’d found no hint of any casting scars. Frankly, that she would strip down and stand before him this whole time, for his perusal, seemed proof she had none.

Perhaps he’d been wrong. Maybe Rune Winters wasn’t the Moth.

“Stand on this for a second.”

When she stepped on the tape end, he pulled it straight to the top of her head, holding it taut, and noted her height. She was a whole foot shorter than him.

As he wrote the last measurement down in his notebook, he heard her move toward the shelves.

“Are these …”

He turned to find her cocooned in the woolen blanket, which fell to the top of her thighs. She seemed perfectly unbothered by his attention as she peered at his mother’s old notebooks. Asif standing half-naked in the same room as him was the most natural thing in the world.

Gideon swallowed, trying to stop his gaze from raking down her legs.

“My mother’s sketchbooks,” he said, loosening the collar of his shirt. “She kept all of her designs in them.”