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Instead, he pulled me closer, finally urging me to the oversized floral couch that was along the side wall, the place where I would lie and think for hours.
    Besides Cadence, he was the only one I’d let down here, the only one who understood how private this room was to me.
    “I don’t understand why you saw her now and never before,” I said to him, catching his gaze as his hand moved across my back.
    “Maybe she didn’t want me to see her before. I caught her off guard,” he said, smoothly leaning back and inviting me into his embrace. “I never doubted she was real…” he promised with a murmur.
    I reached for the blanket on the arm of the couch and pushed it between us in a vain attempt to shield him from my freezing touch.
    His eyes smiled painfully at me. “I like the cold…always have.”
    I let my exhausted stare fall to the floor as I leaned away from him. “I thought you and Jewls were on again?” He wasn’t coming on to me. He hadn’t dared to do that since we were sixteen. Nevertheless, I wanted to move the conversation on to him and his life instead of mine. I didn’t want to think about the reasons he never minded the cold.
    He pulled me back against him. “On, off…I can’t tell the difference. I wasn’t hitting on you, Indie. I really do like the cold. It reminds me of…well, you know what it reminds me of.”
    I felt a blush spread across my pale skin.
    “On again, off again Jewls knows you’re here?” I asked, trying to change the subject once again.
    “Maybe. She knows Gavin and I were out tonight. Your house is usually what ‘out’ means for Gavin.”
    “Apparently, not lately. And don’t play coy with me. Cadence called the two of you and told you about the night terror. You’re supposed to come down here and act like you are giving them room to talk and in the meantime dig inside my head and make sure I’m okay—and if Jewls isn’t working out, Sophia told me she had a thing for you today.”
    I heard him breathe a grin, and felt his arm tighten around my waist. I wanted to tell him to hold me tighter, to do something, anything, to fill the void I was feeling now that Skylynn had stripped me of the one thing that had kept me sane all these years.
    “Okay, so maybe he called her, and maybe she told him you had a run-in with the queen of evil right after climbing the ceiling like a mad woman. And maybe we were only a mile away and decided to swing by for a nightcap. They still need to talk, and I still like hiding in this darkroom.”
    When I didn’t respond, he leaned me back so he could look into my eyes. “Is it Wilder? Is he pushing you?”
    “No, he learned the hard way about that last fall.”
    “Which led to him vacating town,” he said, raising his brow to emphasize his point. “I was really rooting for the guy.” His grin spread across his deceivingly innocent face, meaning he wasn’t at all rooting for him. He always said Wilder didn’t sit well with him, but he could never tell me why. Mason kept Wilder close anyway, surely trying to figure out what it was about him that he didn’t trust.
    “Yeah. He told me you gave him tips—starting with the Halloween mask,” I muttered as I thought of the day that happened.
    When I’d broken it off with both Mason and Gavin, stopped it before it became too serious, they both asked me why, and I told them it was because I couldn’t feel the beats, that I wanted to feel two rapid beats in one. I wanted to feel that burn of life on the inside of me, the one I felt when Skylynn gave me my scarf, the one I felt in the North Wing. I told them that I wanted them to feel that for someone.
    To be funny, when Wilder started to ask about me, when he was trying to find a way to introduce himself to me for the first time, Gavin and Mason told him to wear a mask, catch me off guard.
    Of course, they were hiding outside my window, the one Wilder was perched on outside my bedroom. When the laughter stopped and I found my