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As Saff got up to leave, another familiar face entered the Jaded Saint, scanning the room as if to find someone.

Tiernan.

He was dressed in his silver cloak, proudly pinned at his throat with the sapphire brooch Saffron had dreamed of for so long. His curls were a mess atop his head, and he squinted despite his thick-rimmed glasses. When his gaze found Saff, his shoulders sagged with relief.

She pushed through the throngs of intoxicated bodies and smiled reassuringly at him.

“Saff,” he said, throwing his arms around her. He was a couple of inches shorter than her, and his hair tickled her cheek. “Thank the Saints.”

“Everything alright?” she asked carefully, pulling away, keeping her guard up.

“I’m so sorry about last week.” He rushed the words out so fast they crashed into one another.

“I’ve stewed on it for seven straight days, and …

god, I was a vock. ” Saff laughed; vock was a crude Bellandrian word for a male appendage.

“I understand, you know. The reason you lied about your accreditation … I’d do anything to make my parents proud.

” He raked his hand through his messy hair.

“You were just doing the same, weren’t you?

And it’s even harder for you because they’re gone. And I’m sorry. ”

Something frozen thawed slightly in Saff’s chest. “I forgive you.”

“Are you alright? That should have been my first and only question.”

“I will be,” Saff said, though the answer didn’t feel particularly robust.

She’d never felt able to share her darker emotions with Tiernan or Auria; she didn’t want to taint them, overwhelm them.

And yet she had so easily confided in Levan about the brick of grief in her chest—and the terrible, traitorous relief that followed her parents’ death.

Perhaps there was a darkness in him that called to a darkness in her.

Clearing her throat, she asked, “Is Auria still …?”

Angry? Ashamed of me?

Mourning her grandfather?

“She needs a bit more time, I think. I’m sorry.”

Saff wanted so badly to ask about Papa Marriosan, but she couldn’t let Tiernan know that she knew. It was far too damning.

Tiernan gnawed at his bottom lip, still visibly in self-loathing turmoil. “You’re a good person, Saff. I hope you know that.”

The image of Kasan’s empty eye socket came to her, but she said nothing to refute the idea.

“Can I buy you a drink?” Tiernan asked, a hopeful note in his voice.

Saff shook her head. “I have to go. But thank you for coming. It means more than I can say.”

“Of course. Take care of yourself, Saff.”

Levan was waiting for her across the street, leaning back against a shopfront with one foot pressed flat against the wall.

Beside him, Rasso was enjoying a staring match with an underripe lemon that had fallen from a nearby tree and rolled into the moonlit gutter.

The fallowwolf’s ears were folded over, as if to block out the noise of the taverns.

At the sight of Saffron, Levan stepped forward.

“Well?” The word was urgent, laced with equal parts hope and desperation. By his side, his hand clenched into a fist, but the gesture wasn’t threatening, just … determined.

Determined to find this necromancer.

Who was he trying to bring back to life? Necromancers could only work with fresh corpses, and he’d been trying to find Zares for weeks. Maybe longer.

Harrow Claver’s curtailed words played over and over again on a loop.

Darling Levan will never take another life partner. Not after what happened to …

The kingpin’s son had loved and lost someone. That much was clear.

And then the revelation from earlier this evening, when she’d asked why he hated Vogolan.

He killed someone very important to me.

The pieces slotted together.

She thought about the night she had first met Levan, how utterly dead behind the eyes he’d seemed.

Like all the light had gone from his life.

And she supposed that it had. He’d lost his mother as a child, and the person he loved as an adult.

His despair had been so deep and dark that he’d run straight into lox’s gnarled, suffocating arms.

There had been glimmers of internal life since, she thought. Brief flares of emotion before he smothered them.

Was Levan’s loss recent enough that finding a necromancer was worthwhile, potentially fruitful?

Saff recalled a book her mother owned on the maligned art.

One moon cycle was around the longest a body could lie dead for before a necromancer revived it, and even then it would require extremely complex and power-draining magic to preserve the corpse as well as it needed to be preserved.

When had his life partner died?

“Silver?”

He took several more steps toward her, close enough that she could feel his breath on her face.

Hunger burned in his eyes, so potent her heart stumbled and faltered.

She knew now, after being around him for seven days, that his gaze was not something he gave easily, casually.

She had something he wanted, and that want coursed between them like a current.

In that moment—that brief and fleeting moment—she had the power.

The control.

There was a curious sense of tension in all the places their bodies ran parallel but did not touch, and for several beats, it seemed he might reach out to her, close the gap through sheer impatience, through a deep, penetrating desperation for the contents of her mind.

Some primal part of her wondered what it would be like if he did.

She wondered how she might respond, how she might run a palm over his chest in search of an old, pitted brand scar. How she might seek power another way.

But she couldn’t—or wouldn’t .

This assignment was her life’s purpose. She would not set fire to it just to heed a base impulse.

Besides, he was not hungry for her. He was hungry for what she knew.

She took a deep breath, a little afraid of what she might be handing him on a platter.

“I know where you can find Nalezen Zares.”