Julian’s smile faded. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’d hidden the crossbow there earlier—”

“I didn’t know,” Emma said. “It’s my job to sense what’s going on with you in battle, to understand it, to anticipate you, but I didn’t know.” She threw the bath towel; it landed on the kitchen floor. The mug Julian had broken earlier was gone. He must have cleaned it up.

Despair bubbled up inside her. Nothing she’d done had worked. They were in exactly the same place they’d been before, only Julian didn’t know it. That was all that had changed.

“I tried so hard,” she whispered.

His face crinkled in confusion. “In the battle? Emma, you did everything you could—”

“Not in the battle. To make you not love me,” she said. “I tried.”

She felt him recoil, not so much outwardly as inwardly, as if his soul had flinched. “Is it that awful? Having me love you?”

She had started trembling again, though not from the cold. “It was the best thing in the world,” she said. “And then it was the worst. And I didn’t even have a chance—”

She broke off. He was shaking his head, scattering water droplets. “You’re going to have to learn to live with it,” he said. “Even if it horrifies you. Even if it makes you sick. Just like I’m going to have to live with whatever other boyfriends you have, because we are forever no matter how, Emma, no matter what you want to call what we have, we will always be us.”

“There won’t be any other boyfriends,” she said.

He looked at her in surprise.

“What you said before, about thinking and obsessing and wanting only one thing,” she said. “That’s how I feel about you.”

He looked stunned. She put her hands up to gently cup his face, brushing her fingers over his damp skin. She could see the pulse hammering in his throat. There was a scratch on his face, a long one that went from his temple to his chin. Emma wondered if he’d just gotten it in the fight outside, or if he’d had it before and she hadn’t noticed because she’d been trying so hard not to look at him. She wondered if he was ever going to speak again.

“Jules,” she said. “Say something, please—”

His hands tightened convulsively on her shoulders. She gasped as his body moved against hers, walking her backward until her back hit the wall. His eyes gazed down into hers, shockingly bright, radiant as sea glass. “Julian,” he said. “I want you to call me Julian. Only ever that.”

“Julian,” she said, and then his mouth came down over hers, dry and burning hot, and her heart seemed to stop and start again, an engine revved into an impossibly high gear.

She clutched him back with the same desperation, clinging on as he drank the rain from her mouth, her lips parting to taste him: cloves and tea. She reached to yank his sweater off over his head. Under it was a T-shirt, the thin wet cloth not much of a barrier when he pressed her back against the wall. His jeans were wet too, molded to his body. She felt how much he wanted her, and wanted him just as much.

The world was gone: There was only Julian; the heat of his skin, the need to be closer to him, to fit herself against him. Every movement of his body against hers sent lightning through her nerves.

“Emma. God, Emma.” He buried his face against her, kissing her cheek, her throat as he slid his thumbs under the waistband of her jeans and pushed down. She kicked the wet heap of denim away. “I love you so much.”

It felt as if it had been a thousand years since that night on the beach. Her hands rediscovered his body, the hard planes of it, his scars rough under her palms. He had once been so skinny—she could still see him as he had been even two years ago, awkward and gangly. She had loved him then even if she hadn’t known it, loved him from the center of his bones to the surface of his skin.

Now those bones were clothed and covered in smooth muscle, hard and unyielding. She ran her hands up under his shirt, relearning him, tracing him, embedding the feel and the texture of him in her memory.

“Julian,” she said. “I—”

I love you, she was about to say. It wasn’t ever Cameron, or Mark, it was always you, it will always be you, the marrow of my bones is made up of you, like cells make up our blood. But he cut her off with a hard kiss. “Don’t,” he whispered. “I don’t want to hear anything reasonable, not now. I don’t want logic. I want this.”

“But you need to know—”

He shook his head. “I don’t.” He reached down, grabbed the hem of his shirt, dragged it off. His wet hair showered droplets on them both. “I’ve been broken for weeks,” he said unsteadily, and she knew what that cost him, that admission of lack of control. “I need to be whole again. Even if it doesn’t last.”

“It can’t last,” she said, staring at him, because how could it, when they could never keep what they had? “It’ll break our hearts.”

He caught her by the wrist, brought her hand to his bare chest. Splayed her fingers over his heart. It beat against her palm, like a fist punching its way through his sternum. “Break my heart,” he said. “Break it in pieces. I give you permission.”

The blue of his eyes had almost disappeared behind the expanding rims of his pupils.

She hadn’t known, before, on the beach, what was going to happen. What it would be like between them. Now she did. There were things in life you couldn’t refuse. No one had that much willpower.

No one.

She was nodding her head, without even knowing she was going to do it. “Julian, yes,” she said. “Yes.”

She heard him make an almost anguished sound. Then his hands were on her hips; he was lifting her so she was pinned between his body and the wall. It felt desperate, world-ending, and she wondered if there would ever be a time when it wouldn’t, when it could be soft and slow and quietly loving.

He kissed her fiercely and she forgot gentleness or any desire for it. There was only this, his whispering her name as they pushed aside the clothes that needed to be pushed aside. He was gasping, a faint sheen of sweat on his skin, damp hair plastered to his forehead; he lifted her higher, pressed toward her so fast his body collided with hers. She heard the ragged moan dragged out of his throat. When he lifted his face, eyes black with desire, she stared at him, wide-eyed.

“You’re all right?” he whispered.

She nodded. “Don’t stop.”

His mouth found hers, unsteady, his hands shaking where they held her. She could tell he was fighting for every second of control. She wanted to tell him it was fine, it was all right, but coherence had deserted her. She could hear the waves outside, smashing brutally against the rocks; she closed her eyes and heard him say that he loved her, and then her arms were around him, holding him as his knees gave way and they sank to the floor, clutching each other like the survivors of a ship that had run aground on some distant, legendary shore.

*

Tavvy, Rafe, and Max were easy enough to locate. They’d been in the care of Bridget, who was amusing them by letting them annoy Jessamine so that she knocked things off high shelves, thus sparking a “Do not tease ghosts” lecture from Magnus.

Dru, on the other hand, was nowhere to be found. She wasn’t in her bedroom any longer, or hiding in the library or the parlor, and the kids hadn’t seen her. Possibly Jessamine could have helped them more, but Bridget had reported that she had flounced off after the children were done bothering her, and besides, she only liked talking to Kit.

“Dru wouldn’t have left the Institute, would she?” Mark said. He was stalking down the corridor, shoving doors open left and right. “Why would she do something like that?”