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“Among other things.”

“Among other things?” I repeated, trying to wrap my brain around the idea that one might be able to have multiple powers. It was something I hadn’t even considered since no one had presented it as a possibility. I took a breath and sighed. “Of course you are. Why have one impossible secret when you can stack them and keep them in your own private library.”

The corner of his mouth twitched in the hint of a smile that never made a full appearance.

I leaned forward, and made myself look into his painfully beautiful eyes and say it plainly, because the whole point of coming here was to be the one who said things plainly for once. “I’m not telling anyone.”

The stillness shifted, not easing, not yet. But something in him heard the sentence and did not seem to know where to put it.

“I know,” he said.

“Do you?”

“If you were going to, you would’ve already.”

“That’s not trust,” I said. “That’s evidence.”

“Evidence is safer.”

It should not have made something ache under my ribs, and it did anyway, so I put both my hands flat on the table between us. “You heard me last night.”

“Yes.”

“All of it.”

“Yes.”

“The review. Calder Street. The fire.”

His hazel eyes did not leave mine. “Yes.”

I waited for the shame to hit, because I had braced for it the whole walk down here. The hot flood of having handed the worst of myself to a wolf that turned out to be a boy who could turn pages and remember every word.

It came, but not as hard as I’d braced for, maybe because the true worst of it had already happened out there in the dark, and this was only the echo. Maybe because Linden was not looking at me any differently now that he had his human face back on. There was no pity, no new caution, just the same steady watchfulness he’d always had. “Then we’re even,” I said.

“No.”

That landed sharper than I was ready for. “No?”

“You knowing what I am and me knowing what you survived are not equal weights,” he said.

“I don’t need a scale.”

“I do,” he countered.

There it was, an opening the width of a hair. “Why?” I asked.

His hand closed around the edge of the book, and for a moment I was sure he wasn’t going to answer at all, that he’d let the lamp flicker and the ivy shift and the silence do the refusing for him, and then he answered. “My family watches,” he said. “That’s the first doctrine. Be unseen. Be patient. The record is everything.”

It came out flat and even in a way I recognized. Not the flatness of a man who believed a thing but of a thing that had been put into a person before he was old enough to refuse it, worn so smooth by repetition that it no longer had a texture he could get a grip on.

“The record is everything,” I said back to him, testing it.

“My family has documented Æscholt for two hundred years,” he said. “First-generation admissions. Removals. Retcons. Bloodline interventions. Memory actions. Deaths written up as transfers. Transfers written up as withdrawals. Withdrawals written up as names that nobody says out loud again.”

Cold moved through me, slow, from the stomach out. “The others,” I said.

His jaw set. “Yes.”