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A red light was blinking in their house. She knew that was wrong. Daddy had said to find a hiding spot when the red light blinked.

“Daddy!” she cried. “The warding.”

Her father strode into the house, grizzly and hardened. “They found us and pulled down the warding.”

He was all hard edges. She’d seen the hardness take him more and more each day. Tears streaked down her cheeks. She knew what this meant, and still she ran into her father’s leg and held onto him tight. “Daddy, I don’t want to.”

“You must,” he said in his thick Scottish accent.

“I’m strong. I’ll stay here with you.”

His hand settled into her hair, and then he bent down to pick her up in his arms. “Shh, now, my darling, you know what we have to do.”

She rubbed her face in his jacket, drying her eyes. “Hide.”

“That’s right. I’ll take care of everything.”

“Daddy…”

“Come now.” He set her on her feet. “We don’t have much time.”

She ran ahead to the back room where Daddy had installed a false drop through the floorboards. He pushed aside the rug, pulled up the flooring, and revealed a space just big enough for a young girl to settle into.

He kissed her temple. “I love you so much, my wee darling.” He slid his fingers under her cheeks, brushing away her tears. He pressed a kiss there and eased her down into the hollow.

She heard the front door crash open.

“No,” she gasped.

Daddy put a finger to his lips. “Not a peep.”

She nodded even as her tears began anew. The flooring settled back into place. She could see from the light filtering in from between the boards. Then the rug was thrown back on top of her hiding spot, and she was cast into darkness. All she heard now was yelling and pleading and screaming.

“Kierse,” a voice broke through the screaming.

Kierse thrashed against the hand on her. A second hand gripped her shoulder and shook her, repeating her name over and over again.

“Fuck, what is that?” the voice said.

“No,” she moaned. “No, no, no, no, no.”

“Kierse, it isn’t real. Whatever you’re seeing is a dream. Wake up.” The shaking grew more frantic. “Come back to me.”

She was still there. Locked in that floorboard. The screaming all around her. Tears running down her face. And there was nothing she could do. No way to escape, except to give away her position, and then it would be all for nothing.

“Kierse!”

And then she was ripped free.

Everything was gone. No screaming, no floorboards, no locked rooms. The tears were real, though. They had soaked the collar of her sweater and into the pillowcase. She scrubbed at her cheeks to erase the evidence of her pain.

A dream. It was just a dream.

Her breath came out in heaving pants as her vision cleared to reveal Graves. She was okay. She was with Graves. He had an arm around her shoulders, and she was cocooned against his bare chest.

“What…what happened?” she whispered.

Already the edges of the dream were fuzzy. Like she’d been clinging to something important that only slipped through her fingers the tighter she held on.

She couldn’t remember what had happened. A woman’s screams. No, had it been a man yelling? Something about hiding or being chased down. It had been terrible. As had most of her dreams in the last couple months.

“You started screaming,” Graves said. “Like someone was harming you and I couldn’t wake you.”

“Oh.” Kierse shuffled upright. She didn’t want to move away from him. In fact, his arms had been one of the few things to silence the terror in her mind. “Sorry I woke you.”

“I don’t care if you wake the entire block. That’s hardly my concern. Has that happened before?”

She bit her lip and nodded. “Most nights.”

At his displeasure, she wanted to take it back.

She shouldn’t have confided in him, but having someone there to wake her in the middle of it made her feel safe.

Gen had helped her through it in Dublin.

In fact, she’d been studying her healing magic to make Kierse sleeping concoctions.

And while the brews had dimmed the dreams, they’d only resumed in a murkier and more hypnotic form, as if she were swimming under water.

Sometimes she preferred sheer terror to being trapped in a potion-induced sleep.

“Do you dream of the hole under the floor every night?”

Kierse jerked backward. “What do you mean?”

He furrowed his brow. “That is what you were dreaming, correct? Your magic was drained enough that I got a read on it when I touched you.”

“You read me?” she accused.

“You were screaming ,” he shot back. “It wasn’t intentional. I thought you would absorb it, and when you did not, you practically threw the images into my mind.”

Kierse pursed her lips. “I did not.”

“How it happened is irrelevant. Answer the question. The same dream?”

“I don’t…I don’t usually remember.” She blinked. Graves could see her dream. He could remember it. “You remember it, though?”

“Yes,” he said with a sigh. “I remember. How much do you recall?”

“Mostly the sense of being chased and hiding. I was under the floor?”

Graves sighed. “I came in when you’d already been in the dream. You were young. You called a man Daddy while he put you in a hole under floorboards. He told you to stay quiet as he covered you up. Then there was screaming.”

“The screaming I remember.” She shivered. “The screaming is always there. I hate these nightmares.”

“I don’t think it was just a nightmare. It had the feel of a memory. It’s different than the quality of dreams.”

“But my…dad,” Kierse whispered. “I don’t have any memories of him. Except that I was only six when he left.”

“And that never struck you as odd?”

“What?”

“That you remember nothing else?”

“I assumed the trauma…” She trailed off. “Wait, do you think it was the spell?”

He nodded. “It must have wiped away all knowledge of your parents. And if I had to guess, you’re starting to remember.”

“Oh,” she whispered.

A part of her wanted to believe her parents were still out there, but that was just a dream, too.

Her mom had died in childbirth, and in her head, she knew that if her dad was still alive, he would have come back to New York at any time in the last twenty years and found her.

But he hadn’t. Which meant that her parents were dead. And she would never find them again.

“Why is it like this?” she asked. “Why can’t I remember?”

“A spell like that is incredibly powerful. The amount of magic needed to hide your identity as well as erase parts of your memory had to have been outrageous.”

“Beyond you?”

“ Not my kind of magic,” Graves said—though he didn’t deny that he was powerful enough. “What matters is that you are remembering.”

“Well, fuck,” she said, standing from the bed and pacing away from him. “What I don’t understand is why the memories were taken in the first place. Why would someone do that? Why bother to put this spell on me? Why didn’t they kill me?”

Graves wavered at that. “My guess is as good as yours. But I do know that the best way to get answers is to retrieve your memories.”

She huffed. “Yeah.”

“What? Do you not wish to remember?”

“I do,” she said on a sigh. “But the bracelet—the one I stole from the queen…”

“Yes?”

“I’ve been trying to find a way into the goblin market in Dublin. I stole the bracelet to trade for a way inside.”

Graves frowned. The sheets fell from his bare torso as he rose to his feet. “The actual market and not the bookshop?”

“Yes, Nying Market,” Kierse said, waving him off.

“Nying Market is not a place for you.”

Kierse narrowed her eyes at him. “You don’t get to decide what is and isn’t good for me.” She held her hand up to keep him from saying more. “I wanted to get rid of my nightmares.”

“Nightmares you now realize are memories.”

Kierse nodded, hugging her arms around her waist. “So now I can get a gift from Nying to remember them.”

“That is not a good idea.”

“It’s perfect.”

“Nying does not require fair value for trades, Kierse,” Graves told her. “There’s no guarantee you’ll get exactly what you want, and it always takes more than it gives.”

“So I should forget it altogether?” she demanded. “Whoever did this to me took my first six years . I can’t sit back and do nothing, and this is the best plan.”

“I didn’t say you should do nothing. There are other ways to retrieve memories.”

Kierse glanced down at his hands as she realized what he was suggesting.

Graves could read people. But not her—not unless she was drained of magic, like she was tonight.

She couldn’t just turn off her absorption powers, and frankly, she didn’t want to.

He might be able to get back those memories, but who knew if it was even possible to let him into her mind without leaving herself utterly vulnerable?

This felt like the easier of the two options.

“No,” Kierse said flatly.

“You’d rather go into the market than let me help you?”

“I’d rather at least try,” Kierse said.

“You’re being obstinate.”

“And you made me that way.” She wrenched away and turned to face the window.

The tower was illuminated in all its glory.

“There’s a reason I don’t trust you in my mind.

You were the one that hid my identity from me.

You were the one who burned this bridge.

You don’t get to choose the terms for when to mend it. ”

“Fine,” Graves said through clenched teeth. “Then you’re not going into the market alone.”

“What?” She looked at him over her shoulder. “Don’t you have to run home to New York? Prepare for the auction to get your precious cauldron?”

“If you’re going to be at risk, then I’ll be at your back.” He took a step into her space. “Every time.”