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Still, over those six days, I began noticing things about him and filing them away in my mind with the same attention I would have given a symptom.

Every morning at eleven, a cup of tea appeared beside my elbow. I never saw Ronan bring it. It always had milk and no sugar, exactly the way I made it, although I could not remember ever preparing tea in front of him. It was always too hot to drink immediately, yet somehow it never seemed to go cold no matter how long I ignored it.

The reading room was also warmer wherever Ronan happened to be.

I had noticed it the first night, but after several days there was no denying it. If he got up from his desk and walked into the stacks, the warmth went with him, leaving the space behind noticeably cooler. When he returned, the air around the table warmed again.

He never touched me.

Not once.

Whenever he handed me a ledger, he made sure his fingers stayed clear of mine. If he leaned over my shoulder to read an entry, he kept a careful distance between us. He could be close enough that I felt the warmth coming from him along my back, but never close enough for his clothes or skin to brush against me.

Except once.

On the seventh day, I found another altered entry and placed my finger on the scraped vellum at the exact moment Ronan reached down to turn the page.

His fingertips landed on the back of my hand.

The contact lasted less than a second.

We both went still.

His skin was startlingly hot, far hotter than anyone’s hand should have been, and the sensation traveled sharply up my arm before settling lower in my body as a tight pulse of heat between my legs.

It was an absurd response to a man standing behind me while we examined seventeenth-century Council records.

I heard Ronan inhale sharply through his nose. He was still standing close behind me, and I could feel the heat coming off him against my back.

Then he removed his hand with slow, deliberate care.

“I beg your pardon,” he said, so formally that the words might have belonged to another century.

He returned to his desk and did not look at me again for the rest of the afternoon.

I did not look at him either.

Instead, I stared at the same line in the ledger for nearly twenty minutes without absorbing a word of it. My hand remained warm until dinner.

Later that same day, Ronan reached for a book on a high shelf, and the movement pulled his collar slightly out of place.

That was when I saw the scar.

It was only a glimpse above the stiff edge of the fabric, along one side of his throat. The skin there was shiny, ridged, and darker than the surrounding flesh. My first thought was that it looked like old burn tissue, the kind I had seen on dogs that had been badly scalded.

Then I looked more carefully.

It did not look accidental.

The scar had defined edges, as though something had been pressed deliberately into his skin.

It was also exactly where his fingers went whenever I asked a question he did not want to answer.

My stomach tightened.

On the eighth evening, while I was packing up my notes, I pulled one last sheet from my notebook and slid it across the desk toward him.

It was a pencil sketch of the image I had found beneath the plaster beside my bed.