“What can we do?” Ansel said anxiously.

“We can’t do anything.” Coco’s voice was hoarse from tears—or perhaps smoke. The honey had healed her burns, but it hadn’t repaired the bar. Claud had promised to pay the innkeeper for damages. “At least she knows now. She’ll be more careful.”

“And Reid?”

“He’ll come back to her. He always does.”

I didn’t deserve any of them.

As if trying to lift my spirits, the wind caressed my face, grasping tendrils of my hair in its wintry grip. Or maybe it wasn’t the wind at all. Maybe it was something else. Someone else. Feeling slightly ridiculous, I looked to the vast, ubiquitous clouds and whispered, “I need your help.”

The wind stopped teasing my hair.

Encouraged, I sat up and squared my shoulders, letting my feet dangle from the eave. “Fathers shouldn’t abandon their children. Mine was a shitty excuse for a human being—give him a kick from me if he’s up there—but even he tried to protect me in his own twisted way. You, though . . . you should do better. You’re supposed to be the father of all fathers, aren’t you? Or maybe—maybe you’re the mother of all mothers, and it’s like my own maman said.” I shook my head, defeated. “Maybe she’s right. Maybe you do want me dead.”

A bird shot from a window below me with a startled cry, and I tensed, peering down the edge of the building, searching for what had disturbed it. There was nothing. All was quiet and calm. Remnants of the last snowfall still clung to the corners of the rooftop, but now the sky couldn’t seem to decide between snow and rain. Aimless flakes drifted through the air. Though a few mourners gathered in the damp, narrow street below, most wouldn’t arrive until they finished with Requiem Mass.

Coco’s and Ansel’s voices had tapered off a few moments ago. Perhaps they’d gone to her room to resolve their own problems. I hoped they did. Whether together or apart, they each deserved happiness.

“Reid says I’m . . . lost,” I breathed. Though the words unfurled gently, softly, I couldn’t have stemmed them if I’d tried. It’s as if they’d been floating just beneath my skin, waiting patiently for this moment. For this last, desperate window of opportunity to open. For this . . . prayer. “He says I’m changing—that I’m different. And maybe he’s right. Maybe I just don’t want to see it, or—or maybe I can’t. I’ve certainly made a piss poor mess here. The werewolves left, and if my mother doesn’t kill me, they will. Worse, La Voisin keeps—keeps watching me like she’s waiting for something, Nicholina thinks we’re great pals, and I—I don’t know what to do. I don’t have the answers. That’s supposed to be your job.”

I snorted and turned away, anger spiking sharp and sudden in my heart. The words spewed faster. Less a trickle, more a torrent. “I read your book, you know. You said you knitted us together in our mothers’ wombs. If that’s true, I guess that joke was on me, huh? I really am the arrow in her hand. She wants to use me to destroy the world. She thinks it’s my purpose to die at the altar, and you—you gave me to her. I’m not innocent now, but I was once. I was a baby. A child. You gave me to a woman who would kill me, to a woman who would never love me—” I broke off, breathing hard and grinding my palms against my eyes, trying to relieve the building pressure. “And now I’m trying not to break, but I am. I’m broken. I don’t know how to fix it—to fix me or Reid or us. And he—he hates me—” Again, I choked on the words. An absurd bubble of laughter rose in my throat.

“I don’t even know if you’re real,” I whispered, laughing and crying and feeling infinitely foolish. My hands trembled. “I’m probably talking to myself right now like a madwoman. And maybe I am mad. But—but if you are real, if you are listening, please, please . . .”

I dropped my head and closed my eyes. “Don’t abandon me.”

I sat there, head bowed, for several long minutes. Long enough for my tears to freeze on my cheeks. Long enough for my fingers to stop trembling. Long enough for that window in my soul to slowly, quietly click closed. Was I waiting for something? I didn’t know. Either way, the only answer I received was silence.

Time slipped away from me. Only Claud Deveraux’s whistle—it preceded him to the rooftop—drew me from my reverie. I almost laughed. Almost. I’d never met a person so attuned to melancholy; at the first sign of introspection, he seemed to just appear like a starving man before a buffet of pastries and sweets. “I could not help but overhear,” he said lightly, dropping to the eave beside me, “your rather magnificent conversation with the celestial sphere.”

I rolled my eyes. “You absolutely could’ve.”

“You’re right. I’m a filthy eavesdropper, and I have no intention of apologizing.” He nudged my shoulder with a small smile. “I thought you should know Reid just arrived, whole if not unharmed.”

A beat passed as his words sank in.

Whole if not unharmed.

Lurching to my feet, I nearly slipped and fell to my death in my haste to reach the stairwell. When Claud caught my hand with the gentle shake of his head, my heart plummeted. “Give him a few moments to collect himself, chérie. He’s been through an ordeal.”

“What happened?” I demanded, snatching my hand away.

“I did not ask. He will tell us when he’s ready.”

“Oh.” That one simple word echoed my heartache better than a hundred others ever could. I was part of that us now, an outsider, no longer privy to his innermost thoughts or secrets. I’d pushed him away, frightened—no, nearly crazed—that he would do it first. He hadn’t, of course, but the effect remained the same. And it was my fault—all my fault. Slowly, I sank back onto the eave. “I see.”

Claud raised a brow. “Do you?”

“No,” I said miserably. “But you already knew that.”

A moment passed as I watched mourners—the poor and bereft, mostly, with their tattered black clothes—trickle into the street. The bell tower had chimed half past a quarter hour ago. Soon, Requiem Mass would end, and the burial procession would wind through these streets, allowing commoners to say their goodbyes. The Archbishop’s body would pass directly beneath us on its way to the cemetery, to the Church’s tomb in the catacombs and its final resting place. Though I still didn’t like Madame Labelle, I appreciated her forethought in this location. If there was one person in the entire kingdom who’d loved the Archbishop, it was Reid. He should’ve been the one to prepare the body this morning. He should’ve been the one to speak over it. Even now, he should’ve been the one holding vigil beside it.

Instead, he was forced to hide in a dirty inn.

He would miss the Archbishop’s last rites. He would miss lowering his forefather into the earth. He would miss his final goodbye. I forced the thought away, tears threatening once more. It seemed all I did was cry these days.

At least here, Reid would have one last glimpse of him.

If Morgane didn’t kill us all first.

I felt rather than saw Claud studying me. He had the air of someone trapped in paralyzing indecision. Taking pity on him, I turned to tell him to stop, to tell him it was okay, but his resolve seemed to harden at something in my eyes. He removed his top hat with a sigh. “I know you are troubled. Though I have long debated the time and place to tell you this, perhaps I might ease your conscience by freeing my own.” He looked to the sky with a wistful expression. “I knew your mother, and you are nothing like her.”