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His smile twisted. “I don’t do it for the attention.”

“No,” she agreed, and put up her chin. “You do it for art.”

“Miss Finch,” he murmured. “How well you know me already.”

“I know you enough to know I don’t know you at all. I don’t think anyone knows you.” She’d spoken too quickly and too boldly. The light went from his eyes. He looked at her, humorless, as though shaken. In a sense, this meant progress—wasn’t she here to figure him out, to help Jack stay one step ahead? Even so, she wanted desperately to recant. She covered her discomfort with a bright smile.

“Is there someone in particular you wish would listen to you?” She focused again on the complicated intersections of hair and tiny, razor-tipped fingers.

There was a long pause.

“It can be anyone?” He didn’t sound shaken. The question had an idle lilt. “Alive or dead?”

“Why not?” She freed one of Fritz’s paws and held his arm up by the wrist. “Rembrandt?”

No answer.

“Shakespeare?”

“Does the person only listen?” His voice had changed. Now there was a grimness to it. “Or can the person respond?”

“Both.”

“And will the person entertain anything I say? Hear me out, even if my words are shocking?”

She pulled back so she could see his face. The room’s light played over his features, but his eyes held that unfathomable darkness she’d noted before, when he’d asked about his nephew.

“Yes,” she whispered. Her breathing was too shallow. She could feel her pulse fluttering in her throat. “What do you want to say?”

Before, when their gazes had fused, she’d gone tense. The alertness had transformed into an urge, the desire to lean forward, to put her mouth on his skin.

She was tensing again, and she couldn’t tell if she wanted to lean in or lean away.

A muscle twitched in his jaw. His gaze unfocused.

She sat motionless, but something inside her teetered.

“What do you want to say?” she repeated. He was very near, and as they stared at each other, it seemed to her that they were mutually off-balance, that they could topple together in an instant or retreat to safer ground. And it seemed to her, too, that if it were up to her alone, she might choose to topple, to spiral with him into something unknown.

Fritz had set off this bizarre chain of events. It was Fritz who restored equilibrium.

Suddenly, he dug his claws into De’Ath’s forehead and pushed off, springing into Nina’s arms.

De’Ath didn’t flinch, but his gaze sharpened. A red line slashed down toward his eye, dotted with blood.

“Drat it.” Nina clutched Fritz to her chest. “You’re bleeding.”

“A scratch.” De’Ath had regained his composure, if he’d ever lost it. He dabbed at his brow with a handkerchief, his half smile aimed at Fritz, ironic and vaguely hostile.

“You,” he said to the marmoset. “Get used to the name Fyodor. You’re staying here, with Kuznetsov.”

“I’d understand if you sacked me.” Nina heard an undertone of hope in her voice. Perhaps a sacking would be for the best, after all.

She didn’t know what she’d expected from her first hours as De’Ath’s amanuensis, but it wasn’t this.

“You’re not sacked.” De’Ath felt on the ground for his cane. “I’ve picked a person, by the way. And he will listen. And then he will tell all.”

“Who?” She gripped Fritz tighter.