Emma cleared her throat. “You said I could hurt Diego, without laying a hand on him. What did you mean?”

He pushed his free hand through his hair. He looked disheveled—and so gorgeous it hurt. “It’s probably better if I don’t tell you.”

“He hurt Cristina,” Emma said. “And I don’t even think he cares.”

He reached up to rub the back of his neck. The muscles in his chest and stomach moved when he stretched, and she was aware of the texture of his skin, and wished desperately she could turn back time somehow and be again the person who wasn’t shaken to pieces by seeing Julian—who she’d grown up with, and seen half-clothed a million times—with his shirt off. “I saw his face when Cristina ran out of the entry hall,” he said. “I don’t think you need to worry that he isn’t in any pain.” He put a hand on the doorknob. “No one can read someone else’s mind or guess all their reasons,” he said. “Not even you, Emma.”

He shut the door in her face.

*

Mark was sprawled on the floor at the foot of Emma’s bed. His feet were bare; he was half-rolled in a blanket.

He looked asleep, his eyes shadowy crescents against his pale skin, but he half-opened the blue one when she came in. “Is she really all right?”

“Cristina? Yes.” Emma sat down on the floor beside him, leaning against the footboard. “It sucks, but she’ll be okay.”

“It would be hard, I think,” he said, in his sleep-thickened voice, “to deserve her.”

“You like her,” she said. “Don’t you?”

He rolled onto his side and looked at her with that searching faerie gaze that made her feel as if she stood alone in a field, watching the wind stir the grass. “Of course I like her.”

Emma cursed the intensity of faerie language—like meant nothing to them: They lived in a world of love or hate, scorn or adoration. “Your heart feels something for her,” she said.

Mark sat up. “She would not, I think—feel that way about me.”

“Why not?” Emma said. “She certainly isn’t stuck-up about faeries, you know that. She’s fond of you—”

“She is kind, gentle, generous-hearted. Sensible, thoughtful, kind—”

“You said ‘kind’ already.”

Mark glared. “She is nothing like me.”

“You don’t have to be like someone to love them,” said Emma. “Look at you and me. We’re pretty similar, and we don’t feel that way about each other.”

“Only because you’re involved with someone else.” Mark spoke matter-of-factly, but Emma looked at him in surprise. He knows about Jules, she thought, for a moment of panic, before she remembered her lie about Cameron.

“Too bad, isn’t it,” she said lightly, trying to keep her heart from hammering. “You and I, together, it would have been . . . such an easy thing.”

“Passion is not easy. Nor is the lack of it.” Mark leaned into her. His shoulder was warm against hers. She remembered their kiss, thought of her fingers in his soft hair. His body against hers, responsive and strong.

But even as she tried to grip tight to the image, it slid away between her fingers like dry sand. Like the sand on the beach the night Julian and she had lain there, the only night they’d had together.

“You look sad,” said Mark. “I am sorry to have brought up the matter of love.” He touched her cheek. “In another life, perhaps. You and I.”

Emma let her head fall back against the footboard. “In another life.”

6

THERE THE TRAVELLER

Since the kitchen was too small to hold the inhabitants of the Institute plus twenty-odd Centurions, breakfast was set up in the dining room. Portraits of Blackthorns past looked down on plates of eggs and bacon and racks of toast. Cristina moved unobtrusively among the crowd, trying not to be seen. She doubted she would have come down at all if it hadn’t been for her desperate need for coffee.

She looked around for Emma and Mark, but neither of them were here yet. Emma wasn’t an early riser, and Mark still tended toward the nocturnal. Julian was there, dishing up food, but he was wearing the pleasant, almost blank expression he always wore around strangers.

Odd, she thought, that she knew Julian well enough to realize that. They had a sort of bond, both of them loving Emma, but separated from each other by the knowledge Julian didn’t realize she had. Julian trying to hide that he loved Emma, and Cristina trying to hide that she knew. She wished she could offer him sympathy, but he would only recoil in horror—

“Cristina.”

She nearly dropped her coffee. It was Diego. He looked awful—his face drawn, bags under his eyes, his hair tangled. He wore ordinary gear and seemed to have misplaced his Centurion pin.

She held up her hand. “Aléjate de mí, Diego.”

“Just listen to me—”

Someone moved between them. The Spanish boy with the sandy hair—Manuel. “You heard her,” he said, in English. No one else was looking at them yet; they were all involved in their own conversations. “Leave her alone.”

Cristina turned and walked out of the room.

She kept her back straight. She refused to hurry her steps—not for anyone. She was a Rosales. She didn’t want the Centurions’ pity.

She pushed through the front door and clattered down the stairs. She wished Emma was awake. They could go to the training room and kick and punch away their frustrations.

She strode on unseeing until she nearly collided with the twisted quickbeam tree that still grew in the shabby grass in front of the Institute. It had been put there by faeries—a whipping tree, used for punishment. It remained even when the punishment was over, when rain had washed Emma’s blood from the grass and stones.

“Cristina, please.” She whirled. Diego was there, apparently having decided to ignore Manuel. He really did look awful. The shadows under his eyes looked as if they had been cut there.

He had carried her across this grass, she remembered, only two weeks ago, when she had been injured. He had held her tightly, whispering her name over and over. And all the time, he’d been engaged to someone else.

She leaned back against the trunk of the tree. “You really don’t understand why I don’t want to see you?”

“Of course I understand it,” he said. “But it’s not what you think.”

“Really? You’re not engaged? You’re not supposed to marry Zara?”

“She is my fiancée,” he said. “But—Cristina—it’s more complicated than it looks.”

“I really don’t see how it could be.”

“I wrote to her,” he said. “After you and I got back together. I told her it was over.”

“I don’t think she got your letter,” Cristina said.

Diego shoved his hands into his hair. “No, she did. She told me she read it, and that’s why she came here. Honestly, I never thought she would. I thought it was over when I didn’t hear from her. I thought—I really thought I was free.”

“So you broke up with her last night?”

He hesitated, and in that moment of hesitation, any thought that Cristina had been harboring in the deepest recesses of her heart, any fleeting hope that this was all a mistake, vanished like mist burned away by the sun. “I didn’t,” he said. “I can’t.”

“But you just said you did, in your letter—”

“Things are different now,” he said. “Cristina, you’ll have to trust me.”

“No,” she said. “No, I won’t. I already trusted you, despite the evidence of my own ears. I don’t know if anything you said before was true. I don’t know if the things you’ve said about Jaime are true. Where is he?”

Diego dropped his hands to his sides. He looked defeated. “There are things I cannot tell you. I wish you could believe me.”

“What’s going on?” Zara’s high, clear voice cut across the dry air; she was walking toward them, her Centurion pin gleaming in the sun.

Diego glanced at her, a look of pain on his face. “I was talking to Cristina.”