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“What you saw,” he says, his voice weary, “was the fourteen-year-old version of me. I swear, I’m changed, I’m—”

“Youkilledmy dad! Are you seriously going to try to deny that?”

Killian stands before me. In a quiet voice, he says, “I didn’t know it was your dad. To me, he was just another Timekeeper. And he was hardly the first.”

I think about the one he left for dead in Versailles, then wonder how many others there might’ve been before he got to my dad.

“But why are you killing them if you need them?” I ask.

Killian huffs out a breath. “We didn’t know we needed them. Up until you, it was all trial and error. We were finding our way with no one to guide us.”

“Until I came along.” The truth leaves a harsh, bitter taste on my tongue.

“You’ve turned this whole thing around, Shiv. Made the dream possible.”

“So, you work as Arthur’s Timekeeper assassin?”

Killian shrugs, rubs his hands nervously together. “You can think what you want,” he says. “But Arthur saved me, much like he saved everyone else on that rock. And I guess I felt like I owed him. And considering how I lived before, in a constant fight for survival, well, I found a way to make peace with it. But after a while, I realized it was taking a toll. So I asked if there was some way I might try to even out the karmic score.”

“Let me guess,” I say. “That’s when you started saving people from witch hunts and the like.”

He shrugs, rubs a hand against the back of his head. “It made it easier to live with myself.”

“Is any of this even true?” I ask. “I mean, you were fourteen when you got left behind, so just how many people could you have saved before then?”

“I’m not from your timeline, Shiv. There. You happy now that you’ve managed to get that truth out of me?” He shakes his head, rolls his knuckles across his browbone. “Life was brutal back in my day. Kids grew up fast. Childhood was nothing but a shortcut to get to adulthood. The first life I took, I was ten. I was about to hang when Arthur saved me. Since then, I’ve made a point of paying that forward. You’ve got to believe me when I say I’ve saved more lives than I’ve taken. That’s gotta count for something. Shiv, don’t you believe in redemption?”

“Sure,” I say. “But don’t look to me to grant that for you. Not after you took the one life that meant everything to me. Also, you lied to me—lied about nearly everything,” I remind him.

“And what choice did I have? How was I supposed to tell the girl I’d fallen for that I’m the reason her father never returned? Tell me, Shiv—would you still have kissed me if you’d known?”

“Of course not,” I say. “And I regret every moment I shared with you before then.”

“Please don’t say that.” His tanned face turns suddenly pale, blunted by the agony, the futility, of a past he can’t change. “Isn’t there any way you can forgive me? Isn’t there anything I can do?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Go back in time and undo it.”

“You know that’s not possible,” he says. “I can’t enter the same river twice. And Shiv, it’s already done.”

“But maybe I can go back and stop you.”

It’s as though the lights in his eyes have switched off, and the way Killian looks at me, hollow and anxious, it’s clear I’ve gotten to him.

Good. I want him to be worried. I want him to think I’m just angry enough to go back in time and erase his existence.

The thought is so tempting, maybe I will. But there’s a long list of other things I need to do first.

“You have no idea what you’ve done,” I grind out the words. “That one simple act had far-reaching effects. It shattered my mother. She was never the same, and she never recovered. And it shattered me, too. It led to a stream of horrible decisions that landed me at Gray Wolf.”

There’s a notable shift in Killian’s mood. It’s like all the candles were snuffed and the windows thrown open to let in the cold.

“But see, that’s where you’re wrong,” he says, regarding me with a merciless gaze. “You were always headed for Gray Wolf. You’ve been on Arthur’s radar for much longer than you realize. Why, you’re the first female Timekeeper in history.”

69

The words spin through my head, robbing me of breath. I saw that, too, but I guess I was so sidetracked by everything else that it didn’t really land until now.

“Funny how I know more about you than you know about yourself,” Killian says.