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Pieces of Nina’s hair had become unclasped.

She’d forgotten gloves. A scarf. One boot remained untied. Her cheeks mottled in the cold, her knuckles reddened and cracked. She looked exactly as frayed as she sounded, and Patrick inwardly berated himself for not seeing it sooner—her enduring love for her mother, her desperation to save her.

Patrick wondered if Nina felt the quiet tremor in the earth. If she was aware of dust hovering inches above the ground at her feet. Or was she lost in that suspended state of disbelief?

She sagged, descended to her knees in the dirt. “He can’t be dead,” she insisted. “It isn’t possible.”

He wished he had told her sooner, even if it extinguished the last of her unreasonable hopes. Had he not trusted her, or had he done it to protect her, as he’d always told himself?

“Union fighters captured him in Belavere City,” Patrick began, lowering himself to see her face, to ensure she heard him.

“He was hiding in the basement of a lord. Our men brought him back here, and I killed him, just as my father had ordered me to.” Patrick gritted his teeth, flexed his hands with the memory of it.

“We buried his body in the hills. It was only afterward that I got word my father had been captured.” He swallowed bitterly.

“Believe me, Nina. There is no one here who wishes it were otherwise more than I.”

“No,” she mumbled again, racked with tearless sobs.

Patrick knelt in front of her. “Nina. I promised you I’d save them, didn’t I?

Hey, look at me.” He took her shoulders in his hands.

Waited until her glossy eyes looked up at him.

“I swear it, Nina. I’ll get her out. But I need to know you won’t do anything like this again.

You have to promise me,” he said firmly. “The Alchemist is dead.”

“No.”

He wanted to shake her. “Yes.”

“He isn’t dead… The bluff.” And her eyes solidified on that which she had been so desperately searching for. “The bluff stores I saw. And the idium I took… How was it siphoned if not by Domelius Becker? He was the last Alchemist.”

And this, Patrick knew, was always how secrets unraveled. Carefully woven fabrications unspooling one after the other.

“No,” he uttered. “Not the last.”

Her eyes narrowed at first, then widened as she understood.

“That title now resides with me.”

Patrick took his coin from his pocket. It was heavier than the usual farthing, more darkly tinted than it should be.

Black as terranium. He perched it on the edge of his thumb and flipped it in his practiced way.

Only this time, the coin did not land. Instead, it hovered in midair, spun slowly as moonlight refracted off its inky surface.

Nina whispered in astonishment, “You’re the Alchemist.”