It was her turn to look away, eyes lifted to the ceiling in an effort to contain her embarrassment.

  “It is not transparent. Only the water made it…made it so.” Leena tried to subdue her rising panic, but, by the Saints, just how much had he seen?

  She raised herself to her full height, once more attempting a dignity she did not particularly feel. “Can we please refrain from discussing my…my clothing any more?”

  “Certainly. Although I thought we were discussing the lack of it.” Still she did not look at St. Silas, but she heard the laugh in his voice.

  Hearing him like this, the shades of reservation and composure usually hovering between them cast away, Leena almost convinced herself that she could let go of the turbulent emotions welling inside her.

  She almost convinced herself that the battlegrounds had all been laid out—that the battle had already been fought, and it had nothing to do with her.

  It mattered little that Leena knew St. Silas’s secret, that he was the 17th Lord Avon. It changed nothing within their contract and her task remained the same.

  And would it not have been easier if they could have stayed in this moment, pulsating with fragility and humor and something as yet unnameable between them, away from dangerous and painful truths?

  Yet Leena, who had never learned to walk away from the things that could hurt her, could not walk away now.

  He watched her with his arms crossed across his chest, eyes nearly lost within the shifting storm-wrought shadows of the cave. She wished she could ask him to step into the light.

  Whatever levity had existed between them had transformed, replaced with the revelation that weighed them both down, waiting to be voiced.

  “Then forgive me for my breach in good manners on several occasions today.” She gave him a deep curtsey and, when she rose, she met his shadowed glance. “Most notably that I did not sooner make my bows to the master who has come home.” Still she did not evoke a response. “My Lord Avon.”

  Silence—so searing she felt the stab of old wounds.

  “You found Percival Avon’s ghost?” he asked sharply, the sudden flash of lightning once more revealing his angular features and rapt eyes.

  “No, I have not found him.” But she understood better why he had been so eager for this quest, for this particular ghost.

  His father.

  With that confirmation, St. Silas schooled his face once more, wearing the same expression he used when taking his confessions—a studied casualness, as if he was an indifferent observer to someone else’s misery.

  Then he did something that Leena didn’t expect.

  He smiled, dark eyes suddenly dancing as if they were once again sharing a jest. He narrowed the space between them in two long steps. “Miss Al-Sayer, you are still shaking.” His voice was laced with silky concern. He reached for her frozen hands and cupped them in his own, bringing them close to his mouth to breathe on them. “Never mind all of this. Come here—I shall warm you.”

  A charge went through her the moment he touched her, and she forced herself to jerk away from him.

  What St. Silas did not realize was that she, too, had begun to know him, to unravel the workings of his mind as perceptively as he saw hers. He was trying to make her doubt her own convictions by distracting her. This was the Saint of Silence as he was, layers of subtle manipulation to conceal the truth.

  “I am warm enough without more lies,” she said, her anger once more building in her refusal to be diverted by him. “You are Percival Avon’s son.”

  The smooth smile dropped. His eyes were alert again, their dark flecks enhanced in the storm’s gloom.

  “That changes nothing.”

  “It changes everything,” Leena whispered fiercely, head tilted upward to meet his, to ensure that he didn’t mistake the earnestness on her face. “You are master of the last fortress in the north; all the land until the sea is yours by birthright. Your father was Percival Avon. You come from a lineage as old as the First Marquess of Avon, traced back nine hundred years.”

  Another sudden blaze of light, then the distant roll of thunder. The electricity in the air coursed over her skin again, raising tiny hairs at the back of her neck.

  She felt exposed under St. Silas’s eyes, every pore on her skin vibrating under his focused attention, until she felt as charged as the lightning.

  “What do you want from me, Leena?” The sudden change from his indifference—the fervency with which he asked the question—roared in Leena’s ears. She remembered when she had asked him that exact question not long ago, how it had torn through her own throat and left blood marks from how badly she’d wanted to know.

  “The truth,” she responded, just as low. “Nothing else.”

  He returned her curtsey with a low bow of his own. Even as he did so, his eyes lingered on her neck, sliding momentarily lower, his pupils dilating.

  “The Seventeenth Marquess of Avon, at your service.” He even spoke like an aristo. She’d always wondered about his cultured accent—his voice a drawl, like wine spilling into a glass, while Leena’s tongue gnashed at her Rs and tasted her Ts like grit. “Does it displease you to find out I am an Avon?”

  “No…”

  “Are you angry?”

  “Anger is a very useless emotion,” she gritted back—the same words he had used on her long ago. “No, I am not angry. I am not even angry that you withheld this information. I would be a hypocrite if I were to deny that we all have painful secrets we wish to hide.” Leena could see that he had not been expecting that answer, but she pressed on before he could interrupt.

  “Do you know about the Avon curse? Do you know what the First Marquess of Avon promised to the demon living under Weavingshaw?”

  There was no change to his expression; it was as if they were merely speaking of polite nothings over dinner. “This is the history of my lineage. I have known it since I was old enough to speak.”

  She could not keep the astonishment from her voice. “So if you knew, why are you looking for a way to reclaim Weavingshaw? No, do not deny it; this entire hunt for your father was always about taking back Weavingshaw.”

  “Because it is mine.” The words were not a statement but a proclamation of war.

  The rain outside had sharpened its onslaught, breaching the defenses of the cave, a few droplets reaching them. It had turned into sleet. Soon, it would start to snow.

  Even as they argued, Leena was aware that St. Silas’s gaze struggled to remain on her face, continuously dropping below her collarbones before jerking up again, and her face flamed. But still she persisted.

  “It was also Percival Avon’s,” Leena returned, and the hollow cavern twisted her words into a dark echo. “And I saw a memory of him standing over the lake in the crypt, pleading with the demon to stop feasting on him.”

  St. Silas shrugged, not at all disturbed by that knowledge. “My father was a weak man. He could not control the demon, so it controlled him—to his demise. I will be different. I will curtail the beast underneath, eradicate it in time.”

  She stared at him uncomprehendingly. She could not understand this ferocious tether to a land, being perpetually unmoored herself.

  A refugee was just another type of ghost.

  Leena shifted her bare feet against the hard rocks in frustration, her entire body tense with thought.

  St. Silas had been watching her movements in silence, his eyes slightly out of focus as he once more traced her soft outline in the dimming light.

  “If this is to be a fair fight”—his voice was gruff, that unguarded look in his expression again—“then my concentration cannot be shredded to pieces.” He reached for Leena’s coat buttons and roughly fastened them, one at a time. “This cannot remain open.”

  It took all her strength not to redden further as she stood rigid, allowing him to perform the task intently, not daring even to breathe.

  The intimacy of having a man—this man—slowly fasten the buttons of his own coat on her, his hands large and focused on their task, caused a maddening havoc to momentarily overtake her mind.

  She let out a staggered exhalation. His gaze pinned itself to her mouth before he abruptly dropped his hands and stepped away, a high color on his cheeks.

  “Did you not hear what I just said?” When Leena spoke again, she sounded hoarse to her own ears, even as the threads of frustration still tugged at her. “The First Marquess of Avon made a contract—bound by blood—that every Avon henceforth would be irrevocably tied to that cursed demon until it killed them. And that includes you.”

  The return of the resolute gleam in his eyes told her what his silence did not—that he would not give up Weavingshaw even if his own death walked hand in hand with it.

  For a moment, they were engulfed in the sound of crashing waves and violent wind.

  Leena could not stop herself this time. She turned away from him first and started to furiously pace the tight enclosure of the cave. She found an old, corroded kerosene lamp. The oil in the reservoir was depleted, but she opened the cap to check, just to have something to do.

  She heard his movements as he came up beside her, gently taking the lamp from her hands and putting it back down on the ground.

  “How did you find out?” he asked, and Leena knew that the mild curiosity in his voice belied a much deeper void that he needed to fill.

  She withdrew the timepiece and thrust it toward him. Leena still could not understand the meaning behind these timepieces—why Margery and Lord Avon had both possessed one—but she sensed that this was not the time to question St. Silas. The moment Leena returned to Golborne, she would go to Margery and demand some answers.

  “Avons can cross,” Leena said. “The old housekeeper—your old housekeeper—told me that the current Lord Bramwell Avon had visited her. That was all.” The night they had both followed Lady Hargreaves flashed into her mind with clarity. When she had met St. Silas just outside the inn, boots caked in mud, cravat undone, mood alight. He had been returning from his visit to the housekeeper. And, as the old lady had boasted, had restocked her firewood while he was there.

  St. Silas took the timepiece, staring hard at the engraved message for a long moment, before giving it back to her wordlessly. “That is not all,” he said roughly. “You’ve been watching me like I’m one of your phantoms.”

  “My phantoms,” she whispered, clutching the timepiece in her cold fingers, “are far less stubborn, reticent, guarded, unholy…” Bewitching, she thought desperately, remembering Moira again and her destruction at the hands of an Avon man who put Weavingshaw above all else. “If you continue down this path, my lord, it will not be long before you become a phantom, and I will have to spend my days trying to release you.”

  The return of the intensity in his eyes was so harrowing that Leena brought a hand to her chest to steady the ache.

  His words were slow, guttural. “Is that why I found you half frozen in the ocean? Because you are afraid you will grieve my loss?”

  She could not tell a convincing lie; of that they were both certain. It was not only her voice but also Moira’s, spanning across a decade, that at last answered, “I would grieve it.”

  His eyes flashed. But there was no satisfaction in his look, no victory, only starvation for more.

  “I won’t come back to haunt you.” He made this vow like it was a cursed thing, burning his tongue on its way out. His head imperceptibly tilted toward her as he drank her in, his eyes lingering on her lips. “The contract forbids me to.”

  She didn’t take a step away this time. Her pulse pounded, and she imagined what it would feel like if he closed the space between them, if his unyielding mouth met her own. If this would soften the iron of their bitter contract.

  She was deaf to the sounds of the downpour calming and the snow finally starting its descent, nor did she see the last orange rays of the sun break through the black clouds.

  Leena, who had never been kissed before—not while ghosts haunted her every step—wanted to experience for the first time in her life the abandon of doing something she wanted. Not for survival, not because it was the right thing to do, but because she needed to.

  Yet his mouth never met hers.

  St. Silas jerked away before it could happen, his breathing ragged. He dragged a hand down his face. For a moment, he looked undone. Conquered.

  Like she had bewitched him.

  “This can’t—” The words tore from his throat unevenly.

  Leena stared at him, her own breaths harsher than normal.

  She brought a quick hand to her lips as if they were bruised. In spite of himself, he followed the gesture, his eyes darkening—swallowing her whole.

  Leena turned away from him, toward the opening of the cave, looking at the sea that had begun to soothe itself after its show of righteous fury. She struggled to keep her tone brusque; it was an insult to them both to pretend after what had occurred between them. “I won’t tell a soul of what I’ve learned today.”

  She could feel his stare burning into her profile. “Not even the Wake?” he asked quietly, knowing that a promise from her would mean a betrayal of her father. Leena felt her gut twist at his words. The Saint of Silence was a powerful man and notoriously reclusive. Any secret about him could surely be used as a bargaining chip with any group that wanted power over him.

  Leena also knew, with a certainty that dug deep into the marrow of her bones, that she would never do this, and that was precisely where the pain was seeping from. “What did the Wake do to you?”

  He didn’t answer. Even now, he kept his secrets close to his chest.

  “It was Lord Hargreaves and your father. They were the Wake.” All of Leena’s questions and the unsolved riddles written in her notes started to fall into place. She looked at St. Silas with both dawning understanding and wretched sympathy. “The Wake traded in prisoners.” Her hand stung with the urge to reach out to him. “Did they also trade you? Did Lord Avon trade you—his only son, his only heir—to a demon?”

  “Promise me, Leena, that you will not seek him. Hargreaves.” His voice was at war with his body. Leena could see he was trying to sound calm, but the clench of his fist and the hardness of his shoulders gave him away.

  She continued, unable to comprehend the cruelty of his past. “Is that why you have those ledgers? Is that why you collect confessions? For them? For the demons?”

  He took her by the shoulders, his thumbs brushing her collarbones. “Promise me. Do not seek the Wake.”

  The horror deepened in her throat, scorching her. She could not tear her wild gaze from the ferocious set of his face.

  Leena could not find a homeland on any map, but she’d found it in her father’s booming laugh, in his kind hands, in the brown eyes she’d known from the moment she was born. And what St. Silas was asking of her would inevitably turn her into an exile again.

  He shook her lightly. “Not just for my sake.”

  “I promise never to reveal a word about you.” Leena repeated the oath in a whisper, much like kneeling at the altar before a holy Saint.

  His words were vehement, a low command. “Promise for yourself.”

  She stepped away from him, already feeling the loss of the warmth of his hand on her skin. She walked toward the light snow, the dropping temperature sending goosebumps over her spine.

  She was silent as she bent forward, slowly unlacing the shoes that St. Silas had brought with him from the beach. It was only when she wore them that she turned back to face him once more. “You seek to reclaim a home, my lord. Well, so do I. But I won’t seek the Wake until we’ve concluded our business.” She nodded at him. “We should head back now before it turns fully dark.”

  He didn’t immediately follow her into the open air. Leena took her first steps into the freshly fallen snow, the twilight obscuring her footsteps as she started to climb her way back, her heart immeasurably heavy.

  What she left behind in that cave was yet another promise—to herself this time—that she would survive this, no matter how painful, no matter how never-healing the wound would be. Unlike ill-fated Moira, she would eventually walk away from Bramwell Avon without turning back.

  Avons can cross.

  St. Silas understood.

  The message had been left for him by his father. Whether it was meant as a warning or a guide, it did not matter. What mattered was the diary. What mattered was finding Percival Avon’s ghost. What mattered was Weavingshaw.

  At dawn on their final day, St. Silas went to the crypts alone.

  He had learned the trick of the passages as a boy, and it was deceptively simple—one right turn for every three left ones. To survive, do not light the sconces. Do not open the barred metal doors. Do not cross the lake.

  He’d made a mistake a few nights ago, and Rami had nearly been maimed. Leena had nearly been possessed. The rational side of his mind—the one that schemed and plotted—could not help but be fascinated by how attuned she was to the remnant powers left by demons. The other side could not forget how pale she had looked as she fought the possession. How the fear had burned his own throat. It was that part he tried to deny, to starve out, to extinguish. It was that part that would kill him if he allowed it.

  He would not allow it.

  The Hall of the Lake was undisturbed since they had left it last: the black waters, the penetrating darkness, the disfigured statues, the single raft. It was demon-made. He’d spent enough time in the underworld to recognize the distant hum of their power, that sharp current in the air, so foreign, so wrong.

  He’d felt it the moment he’d set foot here once again, for the first time since the age of twelve: the land humming beneath his feet, the hush in the trees, as if the very house had been plunged into worship by his arrival. Of course it was. He was an Avon; this was Weavingshaw. They were one and the same.