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It had taken me days to decide that I trusted him enough to show it to him.

“This was under the plaster in the Lantern Tower,” I said. “Do you know what it is?”

Ronan stared down at the white hart with its sweeping antlers.

For several seconds, he said nothing.

Then the color drained from his face.

“A motif,” he said finally. “It appears in several of the older buildings.” He pushed the drawing back across the desk without touching it. “I would plaster over it again, Miss Hale, if I were you.”

“Why?”

“Because...” He stopped. His jaw tightened, and I watched him swallow whatever he had almost said. “Good night, Miss Hale.”

“It’s Wren,” I said. “You can call me Wren. We’ve spent eight days together, Mr. Ashgrave.”

For the briefest moment, the corner of his mouth moved.

Then he brought it under control.

“Ronan,” he said after a pause. There was a strange reluctance in the way he offered the name, as though using it here crossed some line he usually kept intact. “Mr. Ashgrave was my father. He was insufferable.”

I laughed.

He looked at me across the lamplight, and for a moment his expression changed. He seemed caught off guard by the sound, not unhappy exactly, but unfamiliar with what to do with it.

There was still one question I had been carrying since the ferry, and I asked it before I could change my mind.

“Ronan, does the Council watch people before it finds them? I mean physically watch them. Parked cars, that sort of thing.”

He was silent for a moment.

His fingers touched his high collar and then dropped away again.

“The Council finds people through their blood, Miss Hale,” he said. “It has no need to watch them first.”

I studied him.

It was one of the most carefully constructed answers I had ever heard.

He had not said that the Council did not watch people. He had said that it had no need to.

Those were not the same thing.

I kept turning the distinction over in my head, but it refused to settle into anything useful. Maybe the car belonged to the Council. Maybe it belonged to someone else. Maybe there were people close enough to the Council to use its methods without answering to it.

Ronan did not ask why I wanted to know.

I noticed that too.

That night, I wrote to Marion again.

This time, I knew better than to mention ferries, the Beastglass, the white hart in the wall, or anything else that might interest a man armed with a ruler and a pot of black ink. I sat on my iron bed with my notebook balanced across my knees, my injured ankle propped on a pillow, and the two roses beside me, their petals already beginning to darken in the jug.

Then I started writing, choosing each word carefully.

Dear Marion,