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The adrenaline pulsing through me is almost greater than it was the night I woke up to find my house on fire. Because this can’t be happening. This is my greatest fear—Xeran finding out about Nora. I’ve been able to keep it a secret for this long, and I’m not going to let it all come out now.

He’s made it clear multiple times he’s only here to fix up his father’s house—deal with it. And he’s keeping Nora and me here for… some reason. A sense of obligation, maybe. Because his uncle and brothers are the ones trying to come after us.

“Maybe I didn’t communicate myself clearly enough,” I say, using magic to muffle my voice so hopefully Xeran won’t be able to hear it as I pull my daughter through the door to our room and fix her with a look. “You are not to talk to him. You’re not to leave this room without me, actually.”

“But why?” Nora asks, turning and crossing her arms—a move that I’ve never seen from her before, but which feels like the start of a teenage phase I am not ready for.

“Because it might not be safe if we’re not together—”

“No, why can’t I talk to him?”

“Nora,” I breathe, blinking at her and shaking my head. “Are you forgetting the fact that he’s keeping us here against our will? We tried to escape, and—”

“And he saved us! I don’t see any bars on the windows, and he doesn’t lock the door.”

I gasp. “Have you been outside ?”

Nora looks away, petulant. I have never seen her like this before. “Now, who’s the one keeping me here against my will?”

“It’s not a good idea.”

“But you won’t tell me why . And you won’t tell me who he really is, you won’t tell me why you don’t like him. All of this is happening all at once, and it’s like—it’s like you just…” She mimes zipping her mouth shut.

And it’s true. I’ve always kept her in the loop. Always been upfront and honest with her about the things going on. When people on our block didn’t like us, I told her as much. I made it clear what would happen if she mentioned magic at school. All of that was clear.

So it must be frustrating for her now to not know what’s going on with Xeran. To not understand why I don’t trust him.

But of all the truths I’ve shared with her, none of them have ever been about what happened back then. With the girls, my friends. With Xeran.

With Nora herself.

And I still can’t bring myself to tell her the truth now, so I decide to settle on something else I know to be true. Sitting down heavily on the bed, I look up at her through my sleepy eyes.

“Nora, everything about this situation is temporary. Xeran is going back to—well, wherever he went when he left. We’ll make our plan to get out of Silverville, too. I don’t want you to get attached to him, to this place, because nothing about this is going to last. Okay?”

“What do you mean, when he left ? Why did he leave?”

I bite my tongue. “Let’s talk about it tomorrow.”

She opens her mouth, sucking in a sharp breath, and I expect her to call me out on that, to point out that I’ve said it before as a way of pushing the conversation to another time, never picking it up again.

But she doesn’t. Instead, she snaps her mouth shut, takes a deep breath, and turns to change into her pajamas.

I sit on the edge of the bed and try to calm my racing heart. Try to forget about the way Xeran looked at me when he turned around and saw me standing there on the stairs.

Nora crawls into the opposite side of the bed, careful not to touch me as she curls into the blankets. I lie down, mind filled with thoughts of Xeran.

Thoughts of him then. Thoughts of him now.

Thoughts of how much he wants to know about what happened back then.

Sometimes, no matter how hard I try to keep them at bay, the details come back, anyway. I see Xeran back then, his teenage self a little softer. Standing alone in that hallway, just him and me.

For a stupid, stupid moment, I thought he was going to kiss me.

“I told you not to talk to me at school,” he hissed, his head tipped down, his voice not unkind but not gentle, either. Even as he said it, the only thing I could focus on was his other hand, pinning my hip against the locker, the sparks running through my body at the frisson of it.

“Sorry,” I’d murmured, but my eyes had closed of their own accord, giving into the way my body melted for him.

It had been exactly three weeks since we first started meeting up.

Always somewhere secret, and always on his terms. I understood why—it’s not like Xeran was the first person who didn’t want to be seen with me at school.

I was decidedly devoid of friendships. If my family name and affiliation weren’t bad enough, thanks to my brother only recently making a name for himself in the drug-dealing game, the fact that I accidentally cast a spell during a school assembly had sealed the deal.

I’d gotten suspension and then detention for weeks and weeks. My mother wept silently in the car on the way home the day it happened, imploring me to never do something like that again.

Today was the first time in my life that I directly disobeyed her.

“Fuck, Phina,” Xeran said, and when he spoke, the breath of his words fluttered over my face. I was so gone for him, so astounded by the fact that this amazing boy from this amazing family would want anything to do with me. That his eyes could linger on me the way they did.

That he had chosen me. That somehow, the body I existed in seemed to serve him well.

It was also the first time I was starting to appreciate that body, focusing more on feeding it, making sure I didn’t skip meals, even when it was harder to find something at a home that couldn’t care less about nourishing me.

A door slamming at the end of the hall had him springing back from me, his eyes blazing like I was the one who had snagged his wrist, pulled him around, kept him back.

“Don’t fucking follow me,” he spat, shaking his head and backing up, even as his eyes lingered, falling to the hem of my skirt. Loving the feeling of his eyes on me, I curled my fingers only slightly, creating a breeze from nowhere that ruffled it upward to show off more thigh, more skin.

Xeran swallowed hard, those blue eyes locked on me for a moment longer before he forced himself to turn and walk away.

As always, after seeing him at school, my heart was pounding in confusion. Alone, he was tender, sweet. Anywhere near the school grounds, he could be a little rough with me, pushing me against the lockers.

Not to mention bullying me.

Xeran was never loud, but quiet with his ruthlessness. A muttered comment to his friends that I couldn’t hear, though I always felt the pain from their laughter. The way their eyes would swing to me, assessing.

Even then, I knew Xeran hated that he was interested in me, even just physically. And he took it out on both of us.

And that day, when I was still reeling from another interaction with him, a voice rang out from the end of the hallway, sharp and sure, laughing.

“I saw that,” she said, sauntering down the hallway, a lollipop dangling from the corner of her mouth as she looked me up and down.

Her short, choppy hair was dyed several shades of blue, starting with the darkest shade at her roots, then fading out toward the tips.

She wore shorts that were far too short for school.

I couldn’t believe she hadn’t been dress-coded yet, forced to put on a pair of baggy sweatpants over the top of them.

My blood turned to ice at what she said. I saw that.

She saw me and Xeran. What did that mean? What would she do about it?

I answered, like some sort of mob boss, “No, you didn’t see anything.”

“Relax,” she laughed, coming closer to me and popping the sucker from her mouth. “I’m not going to tell on you, Phina.”

Then she reached up and twirled a lock of my hair around her finger, almost absent-mindedly. Like it was her own hair and not mine that she slid between her thumb and pointer finger.

It was the most surreal moment of my life—a total stranger touching me, and yet, I couldn’t pull away. She smelled like strawberries and something bubbly, acidic. Champagne?

“You can’t tell on me because I didn’t do anything wrong,” I protested a little breathlessly, eyes skipping back and forth between hers. She was the first person I ever met with blue eyes so pale that they were practically gray, basically silver.

“Uh, I’m pretty sure doing magic is against the rules.”

Her voice was so soft, it was like she was humming instead of talking. She had seen that. Xeran—who hated magic like his father and grandfather—hadn’t even noticed my little trick. But this girl did.

“Do we have a class together?” I asked, ducking out from under her arm and trying to get my beating heart under control. “Or did we?”

“Sure,” she said, brow wrinkling as she shook her head, a little laugh rising up out of her. “Are you kidding, Phina? Wait—what, you forgot my name or something?”

Her easygoing attitude made me feel like an idiot. If she went to the school—if she lived in Silverville—that meant that I’d known her basically all my life. Unless she’d moved in recently.

But she knew my name. And I didn’t know hers.

Before I could ask, she said, “I’m starting a little club. Wanna check it out?”

Then I was following her down the hallway, turning into a little back room—more closet than room, actually—and finding Aurela Cambias, of all people, sitting at the table. Lachlan’s twin sister.

She looked up, her eyes widening when she saw me. Likely, she was under the same instructions from her parents as Xeran. Stay the hell away from the Winwards.

But instead of scoffing or telling me to get out, her eyes went to the girl with the blue hair next to me, already pulling out two more chairs at the table.

“You were telling the truth,” Aurela said, looking dumbfounded.

The girl nodded and laughed, throwing her arm around my neck merrily. “Yes,” she said. “I always tell the truth, so you can trust me. This club is going to be lit.”

For the rest of the night, I dream about that first club meeting, the three of us cautiously casting little spells together, the spark of the moment too infectious to not let it touch us.

It was the first time in my life that practicing magic felt like flexing a muscle, rather than shoving my foot into a too-small shoe.

And the next morning, when I wake up and open the door to our bedroom, I nearly trip over a little pile of stuff in the hallway.

Xeran is gone—I can feel it in the cool breeze of the hallway, in the way that his scent only lingers instead of pulsing. He’s either training with the guys or off fighting another fire.

“Woah,” Nora says, appearing next to me, leaning down and picking up the books without another thought. I see the first one in her hand—something weighty, a paranormal science book about daemonic fire.

It’s what the two of them were talking about last night.

I’d heard her asking him questions about fighting fires before I cut them off.

They had a discussion about it, and Xeran went out of his way to bring Nora books on the subject.

When I turn and look at her, I see the admiration growing in her eyes.

“This is sick,” she says, turning one of the books over in her hand. Then her gaze skitters up to me for the first time, as though remembering I exist. “Can I read these, Mom?”

I have never told her she couldn’t read a book before. Now, I stand in the doorway, desperately wanting to tell her to drop it like a dog holding rotten meat in its maw.

But the book itself isn’t bad. It’s what it symbolizes, what it shows about Xeran.

His thoughtfulness. It’s the exact kind of thing he used to do back in high school, leaving a single flower on my windowsill in the middle of the night.

Little acts I could never prove came from him, but I knew were from him all the same.

But what good are the little acts without being there? Without staying? What good is any of this with the weight of our history between us?

I can’t tell Nora to put the books back, to leave them outside his room instead. It will break her heart, and besides, it might be good to have something for her to do. So instead, I just sigh and nod.

“Yes, you can read them.”

She hugs them to her chest, whispering something I can’t quite make out. Maybe I can’t tell her to put them back, but I can do something to make sure we’re even. That the good deed tally doesn’t go to Xeran this time.

Stepping out into the hallway, I roll up my sleeves, take a deep breath, and get to work.