I can’t even think things like why? It doesn’t seem to matter. She did it. Res ipsa loquitur as Daddy would say. The thing speaks for itself.

I don’t have the emotional energy to dry my hair or put on makeup. I dress and drift downstairs where I slump on the sofa in the rear seating area, as thunder rolls in the leaden sky. The day is so thick with rain that it looks like dusk at noon. Lightning crashes.

I’ve lost so much. And gained precious little.

I’d had Dani in the gains column.

Finding out who killed Alina made the pain of her death fresh again. It made it all too visual for me. I’d told myself she died instantly and whatever had been done to her had happened postmortem. I knew better now. While they’d slowly drained her, she lay there scratching a clue into the pavement for me. I sat, torturing myself with thoughts of her torture, as if that might accomplish something useful, besides torturing myself.

Leftover cake mocked me on the coffee table. Unopened presents teetered nearby. I’d baked a cake for my sister’s murderer. I’d wrapped presents. I’d painted her nails. I’d sat and watched movies with her. What kind of monster was I? How could I have been so blind? Were there clues I’d never noticed? Had she ever slipped? Revealed knowledge of Alina she shouldn’t have had but I hadn’t been paying enough attention?

I dropped my head in my hands and squeezed, rubbing my temples, tugging my hair.

The journal pages!

“She has Alina’s journal,” I said, incredulous. The journal pages that had shown up for a brief time had made no sense to me. They’d never really told me anything and they’d appeared at the strangest times. Like the day Dani had brought my mail in and there’d been one in the stack. In a thick, fine envelope, just the kind a corporation like Rowena’s might use.

But why would she have given me those entries? They’d pretty much just been about …

“How much Alina loved me.” Tears stung my eyes.

The bell over the door tinkled.

I rose in a half crouch and waited. Who was here in the middle of the day?

My muscles stayed tense, and my gut tightened with anticipation. I eased back down to the sofa.

I responded that way to only one man. Jericho Barrons.

I was lost in grief and fury and hated being alive. And still I wanted to stand up, stripping as I went, and have sex with him right here on the bookstore floor. Was that the sum total of my existence? I didn’t get the erudition of I think therefore I am. Instead, I got I am, therefore I want to fuck Jericho Barrons.

“Got a little messy in my back alley, Ms. Lane.” His voice floated around bookcases, preceding him.

Not nearly as messy as I’d’ve liked. I wished I had those Unseelie bastards alive right now to kill all over again. How was I going to do what I was supposed to do?

Maybe I could just take her to an alley and give her to some monsters to die. She would be hard to catch, but my dark, glassy lake was stirring, whispering, offering all kinds of assistance, and I knew that I had more than enough juice to catch the kid. To do anything I wanted. There was something very cold inside me. Always had been. I wanted to welcome it now. Let it chill my blood and frost all my emotions until there was nothing left in me that was haunted because there was nothing left in me.

“The rain’ll clean it up.”

“I don’t like messes on my—”

“Jericho.” It was plea, lament, and benediction.

He stopped speaking instantly. He appeared around the last bookcase and stared at me. “You can say it that way anytime, Mac. Especially if you’re naked and I’m on top of you.” I could feel his gaze on me, searching, trying to understand.

I didn’t understand myself. The plea had been to not pick on me right now. Sarcasm would undo me. The lament had been a sharing of my pain, because I knew he understood pain himself. The benediction was the part I couldn’t explain. As if he was sacred to me. I looked up at him. He’d been with my alleged mother the night she’d left the abbey, the night the Book had escaped, and never told me. How could I revere him? I didn’t have the energy to confront him. Learning that Dani had killed Alina had left me feeling like a popped balloon.

“Why are you sitting in the dark?” he said finally.

“I know who killed Alina.”

“Ah.” The single word said more than most people can say in entire paragraphs. “Beyond a shadow?”

“Black and white.”

He waited. He didn’t ask. And I suddenly understood that he wouldn’t. This was part of who he was. Barrons did feel, and when he felt most strongly, he spoke the least, asked the fewest questions. Even from here I could feel the tension in his body as he waited to see if I would tell him more. If I didn’t, he would continue walking through the store and vanish as silently as he’d glided into view.

But if I spoke? What if I asked him to make love to me? Not fuck me hard, but make love.

“It was Dani.”

He said nothing for so long that I began to think he hadn’t heard me. Then he released a long, weary-sounding breath. “Mac, I’m sorry.”

I looked up at him. “What do I do?” I was appalled to hear my voice crack.

“You’ve done nothing yet?”

I shook my head.

“What do you want to do?”

I laughed bitterly and nearly began sobbing. “Pretend I never found out and go on like it never happened.”

“Then that’s what you do.”

I tipped my head back and looked up at him in disbelief. “What? Barrons, the great hand of vengeance, is telling me to forgive and forget? You never forgive. You never walk away from a fight.”

“I like to fight. You do, too, sometimes. But in this case, it doesn’t sound like it.”

“It’s not that I—I mean … it’s … God, it’s so complicated!”

“Life is. Imperfect. Royally fucked up. How do you feel about her?”

“I—” felt like a traitor answering him.

“Let me rephrase that: How did you feel about her before you found out she’d killed Alina?”

“—loved her,” I whispered.

“Do you think love just goes away? Pops out of existence when it becomes too painful or inconvenient, as if you never felt it?”

I looked at him. What did Jericho Barrons know of love?