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“Swimming through a riptide seems like a dangerous way to clear your mind.”

He lets out a mirthless laugh. “This is where I learned to swim. Camille, too. Our father carried us out into the water and let us go.”

I stare at him, horrified, thinking of Marcus Felimath’s threat.I ought to have drowned you.“Alastair, that’s awful.”

“He’s hard on me because he loves me.”

I lay my hand in the space between us, my knuckles barely touching the edge of his knee. “He threatened you. That isn’t love.”

Alastair folds his arms, drawing up his shoulders as though to protect himself from my sympathy. “I don’t want your pity, Lacrimosa.”

“I’m not pitying you.” The wind catches at Alastair’s wet, tangled hair, pulling it over his face. The temperature is lowering ahead of the storm, and it makes me shiver. Alastair shivers, too. His nose and cheeks are reddened from cold. I shake out the bundled coat and drape it across his shoulders. “Here, put this on. You’ll catch a fever.”

“You sound like Camille. No one catches a fever. It’s a symptom, not an illness.”

“I can’t believe you’re arguing over semantics at a time like this,” I laugh. “You’re such a prig.”

He scowls at me. “I am not.”

“You are. An insufferable prig.”

“I hate the way she fusses over me,” he mutters, putting on the coat.

“It makes sense for her to worry about you, considering how you were ill so much when we were younger.”

“That’s why I hate it. Whenever she treats me like I’m going to break, it reminds me of the truth.”

He glances at me, then quickly away. He’s so tense: the angles of his wrists and his shoulders sharp enough that I imagine they might cut me if I touched him. Carefully, I ask, “And what is the truth?”

For a long moment, neither of us moves. Then, as though he’s afraid to lose his nerve, Alastair quickly reaches to the topmost button on his shirt. I watch, my cheeks burning, as he unfastens it, revealing his lean, bare chest. Dozens of scars are crosshatched over his ribs and abdomen. Some have faded to silver, others are bruise-dark, badly healed. The newest are above his heart, a scatter of pigmented, circular marks: an irregular constellation of cigarette burns.

“When I was five, I spilled a pot of ink on my father’s desk. He broke my arm so badly I needed a surgeon.” He gestures to an arrow-straight scar on the inside of his bicep. “After that… he realized it was easier to hide if he sent me away whenever I was hurt.”

“You mean… all the times you were sick, when your father kept you away from Camille and me, when he sent you to the clinic…”

I trail off. The images from our past are now colored in a new, horrible light. Alastair’s expression shuttering when I mentioned his time in Driftsea. The way he’d be separated from Camille inside their house, their father saying he was contagious.

Alastair dips his head in an acquiescing nod. “There was never any illness. There was onlyhim.”

“Does he…” I hesitate. It feels too awful to ask, but I have to know. “Does he hurt Camille as well?”

“No. As much as I’ve missed her, I was glad when Father sent her away to school. It meant she was safe. And that I could keep the worst of this from her.” Slowly, he glances up. His eyes are stark, laid bare with desperation. “You can’t tell her, either.”

I pick restlessly at the strands of grass beside me, twisting them around my fingers until they snap. All I want to do is tell Camille what I’ve heard, what I’ve seen. If one of my brothers were hurt like this, I would want to know. But Alastair stares at me so pleadingly that I can’t bear to argue. “I won’t.”

He lets out a tired sigh and his gaze drops away from mine. He turns back to look at the sea. “I wish you hadn’t overheard.”

There’s a hitch in his voice, a rise of color on his cheeks. He’s ashamed. But I don’t want to apologize, because I’m glad to know the truth of how awful Marcus has been toward his son. I’m glad Alastair doesn’t need to be in this alone.

I bite my lip, shift closer to him. “It’s silly, but when I first heard you on the phone, I thought you were talking to the Salt Priest. Theone from the mine. I’m certain I saw him that night in the arbor, outside of my house. What if he’s still here?”

“He couldn’t have stayed in Verse. The Salt Priests use a tincture in their rituals that’s highly addictive. If you stop taking it suddenly, it will poison you. It’s part of how they control the sect. None of them can leave the compound for longer than a few days before they start to sicken and have to return for another dose.”

“How do you know that?”

Alastair is silent for a drawn-out moment. Then he looks at me, gray-eyed and troubled. “That night in the mine, the boy who interrupted your betrothal—I know him. At least, I did. His name is Hugo Valentine, and when we met, he was a member of the Salt Priests.”

I stare at him, reeling as I set the pieces together. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”