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"Sissily." My hand found the newel post as the foyer tilted around me. "How bad is it?"

"I don't know." She hugged her own elbows like she was cold. "That's what I've been trying to tell you. Nobody knows. He won't let anybody get close enough to find out, not even the pack healer."

I didn't stop to think it through. Or give Sissily a chance to persuade me from disrespecting River's wishes and breaking a boundary I shouldn't have.

The stairs to the third floor are narrower than the ones below them, and the house had gone that particular kind of quiet that settles in right before dinner. My heels sounded like gunshots as they smacked on the hardwood floor. I took them off two steps up, hooked them over the same hand as the oxblood boot, and went the rest of the way barefoot like a burglar with a very expensive shoe collection. My heart was jackhammering my ribs like it had a personal vendetta against them.

I felt it at the landing.

The cold.

It was not a draft. Drafts in old houses smell like something, mildew or wet leaves or the inside of a chimney. Or something. This cold had no direction and no smell at all. It came out from under one closed door at the east end of the hallway and lay across the floorboards in a band about the width of my two feet. Stepping into it was like stepping into a spring right where it trickled from a crack in the mountain with a temperature of zero degrees.

Every hair on my arms stood up on end.

My pentagram did not itch. I glanced at my hand, my eyebrows dipping low over my eyes.

A lifetime's worth of that little tattoo warning me about every demon, hex, and terrible decision within a two-mile radius, and standing in the cold outside that door it sat on the side of my finger as quiet as a freckle.

Whatever was in that room, my own body refused to file it as a threat.

Which, thinking about it now, was so much worse.

"River." I knocked with two knuckles, the sound too loud to my own ears. "It's me. I'm coming in, so if you're indecent, this is your one warning. And honestly it'll be your own fault if I end up seeing your hairy ass."

Nothing.

"Okay. I want it on the record that I gave you a warning." Swallowing thickly, I took a deep breath and grabbed the door handle.

I opened the door.

The room was dark and it took me aback long enough to pause at the threshold. It wasn't the absence of light that bothered me. The dark felt all wrong somehow so instead of leaving I tightened my hold on the handle and squinted to see better.

He'd dragged the heavy curtain across the entire window, and there was a lamp on the desk with a shirt thrown over the shade, so there was light. Muddy orange, low, enough to see the shape of things by. But the light didn't go anywhere. It sat around that lamp in a lame bubble like it had given up on the whole idea of illuminating. Past the edge of it the corners of the room were as black as Danika's heart.

River Blackman sat in a chair by the window with his forearms on his thighs, his hands draped loose between his knees and his head hanging heavy toward his chest.

He wasn't doing anything. That's what made my heart skip a beat. In all the time I've known that male I have never once seen him look so defeated. He fiddles with his cufflinks. He leans on doorframes. He crosses his ankles and uncrosses them and does that infuriating slow blink when he's decided to let me finish being an idiot before he speaks. He is always, always animated.

He sat there like a statue waiting in a museum after hours.

"Hi," I offered dumbly, my voice coming out too shrill for my liking.

"Hazel." His voice came out of the dark before he lifted his head. I sucked in a breath when the dull glow of his peepers settled on me. Dark circles marred his skin and shadows made his sunken in cheeks look worse. "You're supposed to knock and wait to be invited to enter someone’s personal space."

"I knocked."

"The waiting is the part that…"

"Yeah, we've discussed my relationship with patience before, we both know it's non existent." I stepped in and shut the door with my hip. I stood there with my shoes in one hand and a nine-hundred-dollar boot in the other until my eyes finished adjusting to the sudden darkness.

His hair had grown. The long wave on top had gone past his eyebrow and he hadn't pushed it back, which River would never allow under normal circumstances, because that male's vanity is a load-bearing wall. He wore a plain gray t-shirt and jeans. No button-down. No dress pants.

No cufflinks.

I'd known him long enough now and I had never seen his wrists bare. Little silver flames etched into the metal, announcing to every supernatural in the room exactly what he was, like a business card he wore on his body.

"Where are your cufflinks?" It came out pathetic and much smaller than I wanted it to.