The espresso machine wheezed.

It had been wheezing for two months, because the espresso machine in this house was a thirty-thousand-dollar piece of Italian engineering that did not like being touched by anyone except Conrad, and Conrad was in the orchard at 9 AM doing something to a peach tree that was either gardening or demonic, and I was here, in my pajamas, holding the portafilter like a hostage negotiator who had been promised coffee and would not be leaving without it.

"Honey, are you fighting that machine again?"

Diana glided into the kitchen carrying a magazine, a tote bag, a candle, and the energy of a woman who had been awake since 6 AM working on a project.

"It started it."

"It's been here longer than us, sweetheart, you have to be gentle with it." She kissed my temple and set the magazine down on the marble. "I have news. Sit."

"I'm fine standing."

"Sit, Leni."

I sat. I should not have sat. Sitting was a tactical error in a house where my mother had recently learned to use the word "tactical" because Conrad said it once and she liked the sound. I picked up the magazine. The cover said BRIARWOOD QUARTERLY — Spring Equestrian Issue. There was a woman on the cover in a navy blazer holding a horse by its face.

"What is this?"

"I submitted family applications," Diana said, in the same voice she'd once used to tell me she'd signed me up for sleep-away camp. "All four of us. Conrad called in a favor. The board accepted us in eighteen hours. Apparently that's unprecedented."

I stared at the woman holding the horse by its face.

"Briarwood is the most exclusive country club in the state, sweetheart, and I would like us to be a family that goes to brunch in white." She set down a tennis whites catalog. Dog-eared pages bristled from the catalog like tiny white flags. "I picked out three options for you. None of them are mesh. I know you hate mesh."

"Mom."

"I know it's a lot."

"I don't want to join a country club."

"I know."

"I'm twenty-seven years old, I have demon-sight, I live in a mansion with seventeen bathrooms and a man who is technically my stepbrother but who I also—"

"Quietly, sweetheart."

"—who I am also doing many things with that the country club would not approve of. I don't want to wear white. I don't want to play tennis with women who are wives. I don't want a sponsor."

Diana, untouched, refilled my espresso cup with one hand and started lining up almonds on a plate with the other.

"You'll like it," she said. "It has a pool."

The portafilter began to hum.

I looked down. It was not the portafilter humming. It was my hand, holding the portafilter, vibrating faintly under the skin in a way that was new and bad and not supposed to happen at 9 AM in the kitchen when nothing was even threatening me. The brass handle was warming to the touch.

I set it down very carefully on the counter and put both my hands flat against the marble. The marble warmed.

The marble should not warm.

"Mom. Can you—"

"What is it, honey?"

"Can you go check on Conrad."

"He's in the orchard."

"I think he's whistling for you."

Diana, who had not heard whistling but who was a woman with a great love of being whistled for, drifted away through the French doors with her tote bag swinging. The doors clicked shut. The marble continued warming.

I looked at my hands. Faint amber under the skin. The kind of glow that, three months ago, only happened when I was about to kill something.

Now it happened because Briarwood Quarterly had a horse on the cover.

The door behind me opened, and the temperature in the room dropped two degrees.

Ryn did not announce himself. Ryn was not the kind of person who walked into a room. Ryn was the kind of person who appeared in a room, taking up a different amount of space than was technically there, and you noticed because the bond moved before your eyes did.

He crossed the kitchen. Did not say my name. Did not ask. Slid his palm flat against the back of my neck under my hair.

The glow drained.

It did not pulse out or shimmer or dissipate or any of the other words I had used the last two months to describe what was happening to me. It just left. Went into him. The marble cooled under my hands. My fingers stopped vibrating.

Neither of us moved.

"That was not a fight," he said.

"I noticed."

"That was a magazine."

"I noticed that too."

His thumb settled into the dip behind my ear. The grounding wasn't done. Through the bond I could feel him doing something inside himself, a controlled venting somewhere I couldn't see, the way you'd open a window on a furnace.

"Leni."

"Yeah."

"This is the third time this week."

"I am aware."

He didn't move his hand. The kitchen smelled like burnt sugar.

"What did your mother say."

"She joined us all to Briarwood." I picked up the catalog and held it up over my shoulder. "Tennis whites."

"Christ."

"I think it was Christ-adjacent."

His hand finally lifted. The skin under my hair went cool too fast and I did not look at him. I looked at the portafilter. I looked at the magazine. I looked at the bowl of almonds. There was, on the windowsill above the sink, a slimer the size of a tangerine watching the whole thing with the polite attention of someone at a dinner party.

I gave it a small, professional nod.

It nodded back.

"We need to talk," Ryn said, quiet.

"You said that three months ago."

"And we did."

"And then we tore up the contract."

"And now we need to talk again."

He stepped around me and started the espresso machine like a person who had not just put out a fire on the marble. The portafilter clicked into place the way it never did for me. The machine started purring. He took down two cups. The cups were the small white ones that I liked. He'd noticed which ones I liked.

I watched him fix the machine with the easy competence of someone who had been fixing things for three centuries and tried to decide whether I was in love with him or running a fever. Both. Definitely both.

"Tonight," he said. "Study. After Diana goes upstairs."

"What are we talking about."

He set my coffee in front of me. Brown eyes with amber underneath, exactly the way I'd memorized them, and the almost-smile that had been arriving more often lately, the one I was no longer pretending I didn't catalog.

"New terms."

"For what."

"For this." He tipped his chin at my hands, the marble, the slimer on the windowsill, the catalog with the horse, the two feet of kitchen between us that had stopped being two feet the second he'd stepped close. "All of it."

I drank my espresso.

Outside, Diana was telling Conrad about the orchard and the tennis whites and the Spring Equestrian Issue. She was using her happiest voice. The one that made people on planes ask if she did motivational speaking. The slimer on the windowsill drifted higher and parked itself near the ceiling.

"Tomorrow," I said.

"Tonight."

"Tomorrow," I said again, because the only power I had left in this kitchen was to make him wait, and because if he came to the study tonight I was going to do something to him that the new terms would not have the chance to regulate.

Ryn looked at me. He understood, the way he understood most things, in one slow blink.

"Tomorrow," he said.

He left through the French doors without touching me again. The kitchen filled with the smell of espresso and orchard and a faint, expensive perfume that meant Diana was on her way back in to tell me about tennis whites.

I picked up the magazine.

The woman on the cover was still holding the horse by its face. Behind her, faint in the photographer's lens flare, were three small, translucent shapes hovering near the stables.

The country club had slimers.

Of course it did.

I closed the magazine and waited for my mother to come back inside, and decided, in the time it took the espresso machine to cool, that I was going to spend the next twelve hours not thinking about a contract, a bond, or what either of those things would mean if Ryn signed something tomorrow that put his hand on my neck for the rest of his very long life.

I was going to fail.

I drank my coffee.