Reid accepted his in a reflexive movement, too polite to decline. I knocked it from his hand to the floor. “They also mean death.”

“Ah.” Her dark eyes glittered with mischief. “Yes, I suppose that is one interpretation.”

“We’re sorry if we disturbed you, madame,” Reid muttered, his lips hardly moving, his jaw still clenched. He stooped to retrieve the flower and handed it back to her. “We’ll leave now.”

“Nonsense, Reid.” She winked cheerily, returning the lilies to the shelf. “Manon won’t find you here. You and Louise may stay as long as you like—though do lock the door when you’re finished, won’t you?”

We both stared at her, alarmed, but she simply spun with unnatural grace and . . . vanished.

I turned to Reid incredulously, mouth parted, but he’d resumed glaring at me with a single-minded intensity that immediately roused my defenses.

“What?” I asked warily.

“Who was that?” He articulated the words slowly, precisely, as if expending extraordinary effort to keep his temper in check. “And how do you know her? How does she know us?”

When I opened my mouth to answer him—to tell him I hadn’t the faintest idea—he cut across me abruptly, voice harsh. “Don’t lie to me.”

I blinked. The implication of his words stung more than I cared to admit, rekindling my anger. I’d only lied to him when absolutely necessary—like when the alternative had been him burning me alive. Or Morgane chopping off his head. Don’t lie to me, he said. Just as sanctimonious and arrogant as he’d always been. As if I were the problem. As if I were the one who’d spent the last fortnight lying to myself about who and what I was.

“You can’t handle the truth, Reid.” I stalked past him toward the door, a flush creeping up my cheeks. “You couldn’t handle it then, and you can’t handle it now.”

His hand caught my arm. “Let me decide that.”

“Why? You don’t have a problem making decisions for me.” Jerking away, I pressed a hand against the door, fighting to prevent the words from spilling out of me. To swallow the bitter vitriol that had settled in my bones after weeks of his disapproval. His hatred. Aberrant, he’d called me. Like a sickness. A poison. And his face—after I’d saved his ass with the ice in La Ventre—

“I’m clearly not making decisions for you,” he said dryly, dropping my arm. “Or we wouldn’t be in this mess.”

Hateful tears welled in my eyes. “You’re right. You’d be dead at the bottom of a pool with a frozen dick.” My hand curled into a fist against the wood. “Or you’d be dead in the remains of a pub with a burnt one. Or bleeding out in La Fôret des Yeux from a thief’s blade. Or in La Ventre from werewolves’ teeth.” I laughed then—wild, perhaps hysterical—my nails biting into the door hard enough to leave marks in the wood. “Let’s pick a death, shall we? God forbid I take the decision away from you.”

He pressed forward, so close now I felt his chest against my back. “What happened in the blood camp, Lou?”

I couldn’t look at him. Wouldn’t look at him. Never before had I felt so stupid—so stupid and callow and unappreciated. “A funeral,” I said, voice wooden. “For Etienne Gilly.”

“A funeral,” he repeated softly, planting his hand on the wood above my head, “for Etienne Gilly.”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because you didn’t need to know.”

His head dropped to my shoulder. “Lou—”

“Forgive me, husband, for trying to keep you happy—”

Snapping his head up, he snarled, “If you want to make me happy, you’d treat me like your partner. Your spouse. You wouldn’t keep secrets from me like a foolish child. You wouldn’t play with memories or steal Balisardas. You wouldn’t turn yourself to ice. Are you—are you trying to get yourself killed? I don’t—I just—” He pushed away, and I turned, watching him drag a hand through his hair. “What is it going to take, Lou? When are you going to see how reckless you’re being—”

“You churlish ass.” My voice rose, and I fought the urge to pound my fists and stomp my feet, to show him what a foolish child I could be. “I have sacrificed everything to keep your ungrateful ass alive, and you’ve scorned me at every turn.”

“I never asked you to sacrifice anything—”

I lifted my hands to his face. “Perhaps I can find a pattern to reverse time. Is that what you want? Would you rather have died in that pool than lived to see me become who I truly am? I’m a witch, Reid. A witch. I have the power to protect the ones I love, and I will sacrifice anything for them. If that makes me a monster—if that makes me aberrant—I’ll don the teeth and claws to make it easier for you. I’ll get worse, if that justifies your twisted rhetoric. Much, much worse.”

“Goddamn it, I’m trying to protect you,” he said angrily, flinging my hands out of his face. “Don’t turn this into something it’s not. I love you, Lou. I know you’re not a monster. Look around.” He extended his arms, eyes widening. “I’m still here. But if you don’t stop sacrificing pieces of yourself to save us, there won’t be anything left. You don’t owe us those pieces—not me, not Coco, not Ansel. We don’t want them. We want you.”

“You can cut the shit, Reid.”

“It’s not shit.”

“No? Tell me something, then—that night when I robbed Tremblay’s townhouse, you thought I was a criminal, not a witch. Why?”

“Because you were a criminal.”

“Answer the question.”

“I don’t know.” He scoffed, the sound harsh and jarring in the stillness of the shop. “You were wearing a suit three sizes too big and a mustache, for God’s sake. You looked like a little girl playing dress-up.”

“So that’s it. I was too human. You couldn’t fathom me being a witch because I wasn’t inherently evil enough. I wore pants and ate sticky buns and sang pub songs, and a witch could never do those things. But you knew, didn’t you? Deep down, you knew what I was. All the signs were there. I called the witch at Tremblay’s a friend. And Estelle—I mourned her. I knew more about magic than anyone in the Tower, loathed the books in the library that denounced it. I bathed twice a day to wash away the scent, and our room smelled permanently of the candles I stole from the sanctuary. But your prejudices ran deep. Too deep. You didn’t want to see it—didn’t want to admit that you were falling in love with a witch.”

He shook his head in vehement denial. It was as good as a condemnation.

A sick sort of satisfaction swept through me. I was right, after all. My magic hadn’t twisted me; it’d twisted him, taking root in the space between us and wrapping around his heart. “After everything, I thought you could change—could learn, could grow—but I was wrong. You’re still the same as you were then—a scared little boy who thinks all things that roam the night are monsters, and all things that rule the day are gods.”