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He wrote my snark down, along with who knew what else, and I tried not to care that he had.

That was the worst part, not the failing. I had failed at plenty of things over the course of my life and usually had the grace to be angry about it, anger was at least a place to start. This was strange, like being asked to flex a muscle nobody had ever told me I had, while a man in gloves made careful notes on the quality of my inability to do it.

“What exactly are you documenting?” I asked, after the sixth exercise produced the same nothing as the first.

“The shape of the absence.”

“Absence has a shape?”

“Yours does.”

He made another mark.

The room grew colder as the light shifted. Outside the narrow windows, a strip of gray sky darkened toward rain. My shoulders ached from holding positions that meant nothing to my body. My patience, never a generous animal, began to chew at its leash.

“You’re bracing,” he said.

“I’m standing.”

“You’re standing like you expect the room to strike you.”

I said nothing just stood a little straighter. It was the only thing I could do.

His pen paused. For the first time, his eyes stayed on me, and there was something new in them, not warmth, nothing so friendly as that, but attention that had shifted a degree, the way a man looked at something he suddenly found interesting.

Then he stood.

“Again. Feet under you. Shoulders down. If you attempt to reach while your whole body prepares to run, all you will find is the exit.”

“Useful information.”

“Not for this.”

He came around the table. I should have stepped back, and I did not, because stepping back would mean admitting I had noticed him getting close, and that wasn’t something I was prepared to do. He smelled faintly of ink, wool, and something clean enough to be expensive soap, which wasn’t a surprise given I knew he was wearing an expensive suit. He stopped at my side, angled so he did not quite face me, the way a man stood next to someone whose stance he was correcting and not someone whose company he kept.

“Your arm.” He held his hand out like he was waiting for me so I lifted my arm. “Not like that.” Impatience, clipped clean. “Here.”

He took my wrist with his gloved hand. Barely a touch. Two fingers and a thumb, impersonal, no more intimate than correcting a line of writing on a page.

The room went quiet. Not silent. Quiet.

There was a difference, and my body knew it before I could find the words. Silence was an absence of sound. This was the sudden absence of something I had not even known was running until it stopped. Like a refrigerator suddenly clicking off. The air around us seemed to hold its breath, the lamp flame narrowed to something no larger than a thread, and the cold that had been radiating from the stone seemed to pull back, the way the fire had bent away from me in the Walkers’ burning hall, that pocket of impossible absence where heat refused to enter.

Under my skin, the prickle woke, low and warm, moving up from the place where his gloved fingers held my wrist. It started under my nails, before it went into my palm, then moved along the bones of my forearm. It was the same hum from the cards in the reading room, the same impossible absence from the fire. Recognition, maybe, except I did not know what in me had recognized what in him, only that both of them had leaned toward each other like two ends of a broken thing looking for the seam. That was what unnerved me the most. The fact that I was being drawn to him instead of away from him.

Cormac must have felt it too because he went still. It was just his hand at first, but the stillness seemed to spread through him like a wave. For one second his face opened, and what I saw there was not boredom, not contempt, not even professional interest.

It was fear.

Then it was gone.

He released me as if I had burned through the glove. As if I was the fire from the Walkers’ home, hot and bright, destroying whatever was in my path.

“We’re finished,” he murmured.

I looked at the window. “It hasn’t been an hour.” Had it? It didn’t look like the light outside had changed that much.

“It has been sufficient.”