“I bought flowers,” he said unnecessarily, waving the whispering bundle. The tiny flowers, tendrilled and softly wafting perfume through the morning air, seemed to make the sound of the traffic muffle into silence. “Also you didn’t give me what you took out of my room yet.”

  “You can’t come back in here,” Viv said, stepping out onto the concrete step and letting the door shut behind her, bumping against her shoulders as it did so.

  “Yes, I can,” said Luca, grinning up at her. “I can get in much easier than you can, too. You can’t keep me out just by shutting the door.”

  “Jasper is just waiting to put a collar around your neck again!” Viv said crossly. “The minute you step back inside, he’s going to be plotting and planning how to get you under guard as soon as possible!”

  “Is that what he told you?” asked Luca, stepping up onto the first, and then the second step.

  “No, but it’s exactly what he will do, and you know it,” she told him, putting a hand on his shoulder to prevent him from stepping up the final step to the landing with her. “How did you even get inside the—no, never mind that. You need to leave.”

  “But I just got here,” he objected, presenting the flowers to her.

  “I’m not going to take flowers from you,” Viv said. “You shouldn’t be giving me flowers, either.”

  “You’re only saying that because you’re feeling guilty about the collar,” said Luca, terrifyingly accurate. “Are you worried that I’ve fallen for you because you kept me prisoner? Or because you could have pressed your little button at any time to make me do what you wanted me to do, and I’m confusing that with love?”

  “Not confusing it,” said Viv, helpless to be anything else but completely honest. “But I had a lot of power over you, and sometimes when someone has enough power over you, your mind can convince you to do what you need to do to survive.”

  “You weren’t the one who put it on me,” he pointed out. “And if you hadn’t had it, right at the start, I might have…I might have done something that I couldn’t undo. When I understood that you weren’t just pretending to be helpless to manipulate me, I started to see you properly.”

  “It’s not just me basically holding you prisoner,” Viv said. “It’s also…everything. You’ve barely been in the human world for long enough to work out how it all works, and you certainly haven’t been around enough people to know what a healthy relationship looks like.”

  Unspoken was the growing conviction that Viv herself had not been around enough healthy relationships to know what healthy was, either.

  “I’m not stupid, you know,” Luca said, and although his eyes were still bright, she didn’t think she’d ever seen him quite so serious or steady. It was hard to keep meeting those eyes. “My brain doesn’t go along the same tracks as yours, but I’m not stupid. My brain just starts in different places and goes along a different road to get anywhere. I’m not a kid, either.”

  “Sorry,” Viv said, her cheeks reddening. “I wasn’t trying to say that you were stupid—I meant that you don’t have very much experience yet, and you should have a chance to meet more people before you start giving flowers to the first woman you’ve spent any time with above the water.”

  “I’m not going to be your prisoner,” Luca said, his gaze still on her and now bright again. “I was barely your prisoner before; I could have escaped nearly a week before I did—or any time I wanted to by going back to the other jail. I only stayed because you were here, and because the case was interesting.”

  “That’s—” Viv nearly said That’s not the point, but it was the point—or at least most of the point. She was just as effectively a jailer in this way as she had been before. It would be devastatingly easy to become that kind of jailer to Luca.

  “I thought that you might be worried about that,” he said, nodding. He took advantage of her speechlessness to bounce up the final step onto the landing, and Viv automatically gave him space to do so, her hand falling to her side again. “It took me a while to realise it was that and not that you didn’t like me; I wanted to tell you that I was leaving so that you wouldn’t need to worry about it, but I didn’t know how much of you would think you had to be loyal to Jasper and tell him what I was planning.”

  Viv just barely restrained herself from throwing her hands into the air. “Then you shouldn’t have come back now! You can’t know if I’m still working with Jasper to make sure you’re locked up in the Tea House again!”

  “You aren’t,” Luca said, with such certainty that Viv was entirely speechless. Taking advantage of her silence, it seemed, he added, “I saw you on the roof with Jasper last night when I was testing the Tea House’s defences for today.”

  Don’t explain, said the sensible side of Viv’s brain. Don’t explain, and don’t soothe his feelings. The feelings are already a bad idea. It’s all right if he gets angry and reconsiders because he saw me hugging Jasper.

  She said, as briefly as she could, “Yes, there was a misunderstanding I wanted to clear up, and Jasper needed comfort.”

  “Is that what you were doing? Clearing up misunderstandings? Jasper has been doing a lot of that, lately. Touching your face and holding your elbow, that sort of thing.”

  “Jasper is…fragile right now,” said Viv, acutely uncomfortable and feeling too hot. “And like I told BoRa, I think he tends to think he doesn’t need help until he’s falling apart. I’m not going to apologise for trying to make him feel better.”

  She didn’t expect for Luca to still be smiling at her, his expression almost achingly fond. “I didn’t want you to apologise,” he said. “I was just checking.”

  “I’m going to keep doing what I think needs to be done,” she said, trying to extinguish that look before it prompted her to do something stupid, like wrap her arms around this dangerous little man until her arms ached. “And I suppose Jasper will also keep doing the same.”

  “Jasper is doing what Jasper does,” Luca said, his eyes bright and very faintly mischievous. “I don’t care; what he does isn’t the important thing.”

  “Good,” Viv said. “This isn’t a competition between you and Jasper, and I’m not planning on dating anyone at work.”

  “I only have to worry about what I do,” said Luca, as though he agreed with her. Then, with unsettling honesty, he added, “Well, and what you do is important, too.”

  “I hugged Jasper,” Viv reminded him, hardening her heart against the things she wanted to say as much as against Luca’s warm, bright, breath-taking presence.

  “Yes, but you had to stand on a vent to hug him,” Luca said. “There’s nothing appealing about having to stand on a box to hug someone; my shoulders are at a much more comfortable height. Take the flowers, Viv, I picked them especially for you.”

  “I’ll take them,” Viv said, almost helplessly. “But you have to go now!”

  “I’m not going away,” said Luca, grinning at her again. “Viv, you’re purposely misunderstanding me. I’m going inside.”

  “Absolutely not,” she said firmly, standing in front of the door.

  “All right,” Luca said cheerfully, and Viv heard and felt, rather than saw, the multitudes of spiders that began to boil up beside her in the surface of the Tea House wall next to the door.

  She caught at his sleeve as he stepped forward, turning in a vain attempt to stop him walking through the wall, and heard Bazza’s big voice say, “You’re not supposed to be here,” as the spiders closed up the wall again, dropping single spiders that scuttled away and out of sight.

  Viv said, “Sugar!” and wheeled back to the door, snatching it open and darting back inside the lobby of the Tea House, her flowers clutched to her chest like a baby.

  Bazza stood up behind his desk, at his most rocklike, and Luca stood directly before it, wearing an expression of such complete innocence that Viv was, for several seconds, absolutely convinced that he had somehow made the troll freeze.

  Then the craggy mouth moved again to say, “I pressed the panic button. You’d better not try to hurt little sis.”

  “I’m not trying to hurt her,” Luca said cheerfully, leaning his folded arms on the top of Bazza’s massive desk to grin at him over the top of it. He gestured back at Viv. “Look, I gave her flowers.”

  Bazza seemed as though he wasn’t sure whether or not to take both the remark and the leaning as a threat. His eyes flicked from Luca to Viv and back again, then to Viv, where they stayed, uneasily. “You all right, little sis?”

  “I’m fine,” Viv said, grabbing the back of Luca’s waistcoat at the neck and jerking him away from the desk. She tugged him back toward the door ineffectively as she said to Bazza, “He won’t hurt me. He thinks he’s going to work for Jasper again.”

  Luca ducked his head and turned on his heel, pulling Viv much closer than was businesslike in the waiting room, her hand still caught up over his shoulder. The flowers, pressed between them, seemed to whisper. “You’re so forceful, Viv,” he murmured up at her.

  Viv let go of his waistcoat, stepping back, and put her free hand on her hip. “You’re absolutely insane,” she said. “If Bazza has pressed the panic button⁠—”

  “I have,” said Bazza, folding his arms across his massive rocky chest with the sound of grinding.

  “I’m so flattered,” Luca assured him, leaning on the desk again. “I could probably take you down, but I didn’t expect you to panic about it. You hide it really well.”

  “Little sis,” said Bazza, after a pause. “Sorry, but I’m going to squash him.”

  Viv tried to choke down a laugh, but it came out anyway. “I wouldn’t bother,” she said. “I don’t think it’s possible to squash him, at this point. Luca⁠—”

  “Viv?” said Luca, his pale eyes dancing at her over his shoulder.

  The elevator dinged, piercing Viv’s heart with a sudden fear, and the doors slid open with sinister swiftness, pulling her eyes down the hallway with dreadful inevitability. Jasper strolled out of the elevator and toward the desk. He wasn’t surprised; he knew that Luca was here. He also wasn’t panicked.

  It seemed to Viv suddenly that the scent of Luca’s flowers was terribly, warningly strong, clinging to her hair and clothes, and perhaps the air of the room itself. Her arm ached where she clutched the bundle to her chest. She found that she had stepped in front of Luca only when he put his hands on either side of her waist and shifted her bodily, easily, and gently out of the way.

  Jasper’s eyes had narrowed, but he didn’t stop until he was in front of the grinning Luca.

  “Are you here to finish the job?” he asked Luca coldly. One of his hands remained in his pocket; he looked elegant, unbothered, and completely collected.

  Luca, by contrast, was at his most cockatoo, his shirt collar very slightly askew and unbuttoned by one button, his cuffs rolled up to display wiry, muscled forearms covered with fine, golden hair and his trousers very faintly speckled with something that luminesced in the lower light of the lobby.

  “I would have killed you last month, if that’s what I was going to do,” he told Jasper. “I’ve come to bargain with you. You can have my services again, but you’ll have to pay for them. Properly, this time.”

  Viv glanced back at Jasper just too late to see his eyes; they had vanished behind the now-reflective glass of his spectacles. “Then you’d better come up to the sixth floor,” he said coolly. “I’m not going to bargain with you in the waiting room.”

  Jasper was nowhere to be seen that night. Viv was, on some level, not really surprised; he was likely very aware that she wanted to talk to him. She also thought that he might be trying to come up with some way to make sure that Luca stayed that involved less open and above-board means than he had currently agreed to.

  She knew he had not yet managed to do so, because despite being firmly shut out of the sixth floor along with everyone else while Luca and Jasper were doing their negotiating, she had seen them both enter the lunch room where she was eating dinner with BoRa and SooAh, and neither of them appeared to be damaged, bloody, or even very ruffled.

  “This will be fun,” BoRa had said, her voice flat. She was speaking English today, and not being translated by the Tea House for Viv, and it was difficult to tell whether the flatness was a result of that, or of BoRa’s own emotions on the subject.

  Since she put out an extra glass for Luca and poured him some of the iced tea that the Lunch Lady had put on their table in a carafe, however, Viv had taken it as a sign of the former.

  Viv had just got comfortable for the night when Seffy’s tentacles made an appearance. They often did at night time; wherever Luca had been while he was outside the Tea House, Seffy at least had kept up normal visiting hours. Normal visiting hours in this case being supper, after everyone else had settled into their rooms—or, like BoRa, were sneaking out—and Viv was settling down with a cup of tea and a few biscuits. She didn’t know exactly where Seffy took the couple of biscuits that Viv allowed her to steal, or how she ate them—or if it was even healthy for an octopus to eat biscuits—but Seffy hadn’t yet shown signs of distress, so Viv had taken to asking for a couple of extra biscuits with her tea just for Seffy.

  No doubt both of them would do better not to be eating biscuits at this time of night, but Viv didn’t care enough about the extra padding it might give her hips to stop, and it was very clear that Seffy had no intention of stopping, either.

  When Seffy had taken her second biscuit and was curled comfortably, if somewhat damply, around Viv’s ankles and the base of her armchair, and Viv had just picked up her book, something displaced air in the room with the faintest of pops in her ears, and Luca was directly in front of her.

  Viv shrieked and flung her book at him.

  Luca ducked and caught the book in a single, fluid movement, then straightened, his eyes bright. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to startle you. What strong little arms you have, Viv! I suppose you’ve been playing cricket all your life.”

  Declining to comment upon her sporting past, Viv said with great firmness, “You can’t come into my room like this.”

  “I forgot about the door,” he said. “I don’t usually use them. You have to open them and close them, and they make the air move.”

  He passed the book back to Viv while she was still wondering exactly how to say that she would have exactly the same issue if he had burst through the door unexpectedly.

  “I came to tell you that you can’t leave those there,” he said, pointing at the flowers. “Not while you’re sleeping. You might get a bit too close to what passes for the Styx around here if you do.”

  Then he fell back through the floor and into another part of the Tea House, leaving Viv on the verge of both laughter and frustration. Since she was already very much awake and unlikely to be able to stop her heart beating too quickly for some time, she got up and picked up the vase full of flowers from the table by the window.

  It was exactly like Luca to give her flowers that could send her into a sleep that was just a little bit too deep, and to forget to tell her about it until after dark.

  Viv was still smiling rather ruefully when she exited her room. She sensed movement further along the hallway, near the elevator, and glanced that way more with a sense of self-preservation than because she thought it could be Jasper.

  But it was Jasper, passing almost noiselessly along the hall toward the elevator as though he preferred not to be heard or seen. Viv shut the door and started after him. She caught his eye briefly in the mirror just outside the elevator as he pressed the button, but he looked away at once, turning toward the elevator doors.

  So he was going to pretend he hadn’t seen her? Viv sped up her pace and reached him just as the elevator doors opened.

  “Jasper,” she said, catching at his sleeve before he could get in. “Just a minute. I’ve been trying to find you all evening.”

  She almost expected him to pull his sleeve away and get in the elevator; instead, Jasper stopped at once and turned enquiringly toward her, the elevator doors sliding shut behind him. His eyes dropped to the flowers that Viv had just removed from her room, and she saw the almost contemptuous smile that twisted up one side of his thin mouth.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I wasn’t going to go to sleep with them in the room.”

  “I’m glad to know that you have at least that much common sense,” said Jasper rather acidly.

  Before she could stop herself, Viv asked him, “Who spat in your cornflakes? You don’t have to keep Luca around if it’s going to make you snap at BoRa and make snide remarks at me.”

  Jasper’s nostrils flared, but he didn’t answer. Instead he leaned forward, took her free hand, and pulled her forward and right through the elevator doors as though they weren’t there. Once inside, he said, “I don’t think we’ll discuss this in the corridor, Viv.”

  It felt as though her stomach was left behind, but there was no other real sensation of movement before Jasper continued to pull her through the back doors of the elevator without waiting for them to open, either.

  “That was unpleasant,” Viv said, managing to regain control of her hand a few steps out of the elevator and into the soft, dewy grass of the garden. The flowers in their vase seemed to expand a little and stretch out to the fresh night air. “Who are you afraid might be listening? Luca, or BoRa?”

  “I don’t care if BoRa or Luca are listening,” Jasper said briefly. “We’re not their parents, and I don’t tend to give a great deal of thought to their feelings when I converse with you.”

  “Neither BoRa nor Luca are children,” pointed out Viv. “But if you think that Forex is listening, why⁠—”

  “Forex is always listening,” interrupted Jasper. “What did you want to discuss, Viv?”

  “I don’t think it’s wise to take Luca on again,” she said. Jasper would only listen to things that made sense to him; she simply needed to word it in a way that would appeal to him. Picking her words carefully, Viv said, “He was barely on our side this time. He was sneaking around both of us, not to mention my father’s apartment, and he knew from the start exactly what was happening.”