Yes. He was stabbed repeatedly with a sharp knife. His wounds are identical to those we discovered on the bodies of Filomena di Angelo and Basil Pounceby.

Alastair stared stonily at Elias. Cordelia said, “Was it a fight? A battle between him and his attacker?”

His attacker approached from the front, as deduced from a study of his wounds. There is no sign that a fight took place. There were no weapons at the scene, and there is no evidence on the body to suggest that Elias Carstairs drew a weapon.

“He was probably too drunk,” Alastair muttered.

Perhaps. There was no kindness in Enoch’s voice, and also no cruelty. There was no emotion at all. Or perhaps he knew the person who attacked him. We see from wounds on his hands that he raised them to protect himself, but by then it was too late, as he had already received a mortal wound.

“I don’t understand,” Sona said in a hoarse whisper.

“He means,” Cordelia said, “that Father waited until the last moment to defend himself.”

“But why?” Sona’s voice rose in anguish. She caught at the material of Elias’s coat, fisting it in her hand. “Why did you not fight, Elias? You, who slew a Greater Demon—”

“Mother, don’t,” Alastair said. “He isn’t worth it—”

Cordelia could bear it no longer. Wrenching her hand free of James’s, she hurried out of the Ossuarium: away from the gray wax figure of her dead father, away from her sobbing mother.

Just past the stone square outside the Ossuarium was a narrow corridor. Cordelia turned down it, only to find herself confronted by the sight of a long, thin passage, twisting away into utter blackness. It was foreboding enough to stop her in her tracks. She slumped against one of the walls, the cold from the stone seeping through the wool of her coat.

Sometimes, she thought, she wished she could pray, as other Nephilim did, to Raziel, but she had never learned quite how. Her parents had not been observant of the religion that bound all Shadowhunters together: the worship of the angel who had made them who they were, who had committed them to a destiny as harsh as beauty, as unforgiving as goodness itself. To remember that you worshipped Raziel was to remember that you were separate, for good or ill, from those you were sworn to protect. That even in a crowd, you might be alone.

“Daisy?” It was James, having made his way almost silently into the corridor. He leaned against the opposite wall, his eyes fixed on her.

“You didn’t have to follow me.” Her voice was a whisper, echoing down the hall. The ceiling above them rose into shadow: it could have been a foot above their heads, or a thousand feet.

“I’m here because of you,” he said. Her eyes flicked up to him: he was a poem in black and white in the shadows, his hair like streaks of dark paint across the pale canvas of his skin. “And I want to be here. Because of you.”

She took a shuddering breath. “It’s just—I’ve been angry at him since he came back from the Basilias.” If she were truthful with herself, she had been angry with him since she had first learned the truth from Alastair. “I never welcomed him home. Never accepted him. Now that he’s dead, I’ve lost the chance to reconcile with him, to forgive him, to understand him.”

“My father,” James said, and hesitated. “My father used to tell me that sometimes you cannot reconcile with someone else. Sometimes you have to find that reconciliation on your own. Someone who broke your heart is often not the person who can mend it.”

Someone who broke your heart. Cordelia thought of her father. They would never have a good moment between them again. If only she had let him walk her down the aisle. Lucie would have understood. If only she had given him a chance.

She should have stopped him from running out of her house last night. The awful truth was that she’d been glad to see him go, and worried, not on his behalf, but on James’s. All she’d been able to think was that somehow, her father had humiliated her again. What did Father do to James? What had he said? James had insisted steadfastly it had been nothing, but he had looked sick to his stomach and had gone to bed early.

“Did you see it?” she whispered.

It was so quiet she could hear the scrape of James’s jacket against the stone wall as he moved. “See what?”

“Did you dream it? Him dying?”

James put a hand up to cover his eyes. “Yes.”

“It was the same killer?” Her voice sounded tiny and dry. “The same murderer, the same hate?”

“Yes. But Daisy—”

She put her hand over her stomach, feeling the urge to wrap her arms around herself, to keep herself from breaking apart. “Don’t tell me. Not now. But if there’s anything—”

“That might tell us who did this? I’ve been racking my brain, Daisy. If there was anything, anything at all, I would tell you, I would message Jem, my parents—” He shook his head. “There’s nothing more than before.”

“Then tell me why he came to our house last night.” She gave a dry little laugh. “Pretend I’ve won a chess game. I can owe you an answer. But tell me the truth. What did he want?”

There was a pause before James said, “He wanted money.”

“Money?” she repeated, incredulous. “How much money? What did he need it for?”

James was very still, yet oddly, the Mask had not gone up. Cordelia could see what he was thinking, feeling. The agonized look in his eyes. He was letting himself feel all of it, she thought, and more than that. He was letting himself show it.

“Your father asked me for five thousand pounds,” he said. “Where he thought I would get it, I can’t imagine. He told me I should ask my parents. He insinuated that they had so much money they would not even notice it. He said it was for Cirenworth. That he could not afford the costs of the house. I don’t know whether that was the truth.”

“I have no idea,” Cordelia whispered, though plenty of alternate possibilities presented themselves. Gambling debts. Unpaid loans. Unsettled scores. “Why didn’t you tell me?” Her body felt like fire and ice—burning and freezing with rage and despair. “If I had only known he was in trouble, I could have helped him.”

“No,” James said quietly. “You couldn’t have.”

“I could have stopped him from going out into the streets, in the snow—”

“He didn’t die from lack of money,” James said. “Nor did he die from the cold. He was murdered.”

Cordelia knew that James was being reasonable, but she had no use for reason. She wanted to explode with fury, wanted to destroy something. “You didn’t need to give him five thousand—you could have given him a little bit, a little money to get him safely home.”

Something flickered in James’s eyes. Anger. She had never seen those golden eyes furious before, not at her. She felt a sick sort of gladness: now, instead of feeling nothing, she felt rage. She felt despair. She felt the agony of hurting James, the last thing in the world she wanted to do.

“Had I given him any money at all, he would have gone out to spend it at the pub, and he still would have been staggering drunk and he still would have been killed. And you would still be blaming me, because you don’t want to think that his own choices—”