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At least Caleb had written it for me, so I didn’t have to figure out a way to praise the woman who was meticulously crafting my demise.

The merciless servers came with champagne flutes—mine full of sparkling cider, thank god—and it was time. All eyes on me. I cleared my throat, stood, lifted my glass in a motion copied entirely from television.

“Grandma Iris,” I said. “Today—” I coughed, covered my mouth, winced. “Sorry. Today—” I coughed again. There was something at the base of my throat, like a bit of beef fat and gristle. “Grandma Iris,” I tried again, but then my cough turned into a fit. I covered my mouth and bent over, holding my glass out to the side. Eli took it from me before I could spill it as I hacked, lung-deep coughs that tore at my throat and the thing choking me, and then it came free.

It hit the empty plate in front of me with a soft, wet splat and sat in a thin pool of scarlet blood. It looked for a moment like a blood clot or a bit of raw meat, the size of my thumbnail. And then it pulsed.

It was a heart. A heart from the chest of some small scurrying beast, and I’d coughed it up. My fingers were coated red and my mouth was full of blood. I stared in mute shock. Celia reared back from the table; Desmond made a wordless sound of horror, echoed from several directions.

Iris dropped her napkin over the thing and said quietly, “It’s all right.”

“How is that all right?” Mom demanded, erupting to her feet.

“We need to get her to a hospital,” Simon said.

“This isn’t a matter for a hospital. She’ll be fine,” Eli said. He extended a calming hand.

“She won’t be if the house is rejecting her,” Roman said.

“It isn’t,” Caleb replied. “It won’t. We just need—”

“How long has this been happening?” Roman demanded. “Even the damn house isn’t fooled. She’s no Mistress of Harrow. How long are we going to keep up this charade?”

I put my hand against my throat, feeling my own pulse. Voices argued back and forth—my mother’s, racked with worry, Roman’s sharp with accusation, Caleb’s calm.

I turned and walked out of the room. Mom called after me. I broke into a run.

I couldn’t be in there. I couldn’t stand still. I ran and I didn’t pay attention to where I was going, to which corridors I went down. I just wanted to get away.

I wasn’t a proper Mistress of Harrow. I didn’twantto be. But Harrow wouldn’t let me go. It was drawing me in, tighter and tighter. Inward along the spiral. Inward along these hallways. Toward a center I couldn’t see. Toward—

I stopped. I was in a corridor I vaguely recognized. But there was something strange about it.

The familiar pressure pushed at my skull. I’d been running through the halls, and now the effect of it was making the world lurch. But that wasn’t why this felt wrong.

I looked one way down the hallway, then the other way. Why did it feel off?

I closed my eyes, tried to picture the interweaving halls and rooms. They looked chaotic—until you picked out the patterns. Nothing was random. It followed strict rules, every dead end balanced with a twin. Except this corridor.

I should have been nearly at the center of the house, next to the ballroom. But I wasn’t.

That sense of things being off... I closed my eyes. Could it be?

I checked the room next to me. It was an interior room, no windows. A desk sat in the corner, and I rummaged through the drawers and found a pen. I went back into the corridor and crouched, putting the pen down on the hard wooden floor. I let it go. Slowly, it rolled away.

The floor was sloped. Not so much that you’d even notice that you were walking downward. But how far did this hallway stretch? How far down had I come, running blindly through the house? My mental map told me that this hall didn’t connect with any others for a long way. There were a few stairways up to thesecond floor farther back, but would I have noticed an extra stair? Or that the stairs were a bit steeper than they should be?

No. Because everything was rigidly patterned so that what you expected was what you saw. Enough chaos to create doubt; enough rigidity to create certainty. Balanced perfectly to manipulate you into believing what you needed to believe. Like believing that Harrowstone Hall had only three floors.

I walked farther down the hall slowly, following the wobbling roll of the pen as it continued to trundle away from me. Eventually it snagged on something and turned enough that it stopped, but I kept going.

Something lay on the ground by the wall. I knelt and picked up the familiar leather bundle. Bryony’s charm—the one I lost the night the Folded One bit me. I stared at the flat expanse of wall in front of me. If my mental map was correct, the center of the house was right beyond that wall.

Find the heart of Harrow.

I pressed my hand against the wallpaper.

“Helen?”