It doused her like sudden rainfall. One moment, her nostrils burned from the cigarette smoke, her ears rang with the throaty purr of a woman’s laughter, and her fingertips skimmed over the rough-hewn pearls of her beaded purse.

The next moment, Laila felt like a grasping shade. Textures vanished. Sounds collapsed. Colors muted.

No, she begged. Not now … not yet.

The blankness hadn’t stolen through her since the Isola di San Michele visit. She had almost convinced herself that it was a waking nightmare until this moment. Laila looked down.

Four.

Four days left to live.

Laila tried to pull air into her lungs. She couldn’t feel her ribs expanding or the perfumed air irritating her nose. She must have succeeded else she would have passed out by now … but perhaps that was not how she was made.

The idea sickened her.

She looked up, staring at the revolving sculpted faces. For a moment, she remembered her village in Pondicherry, India. Was this what the jaadugar had done for her parents? Had he merely skimmed his wizened hand across a ceiling of ribbons before he found the face she would wear for the next nineteen years?

“Signora, you look as though you wish to start over.”

Laila turned, as if in slow motion, to the woman speaking to her. She was tall and dark-skinned, her golden eyes just barely visible behind an all-velvet moretto mask. The woman gestured to a section of the room Laila had barely paid attention to when she had first entered. Hands stretched through curtains, patrons walking past dropping anything from coins to sweets into waiting palms.

“Let fate give you guidance,” said the woman. “Take some sweetness into the world and start anew…”

“I—” Laila tried to speak, but her tongue felt thick.

“Come, come,” said the woman. “It is a beloved custom for those who visit our sanctuary. For only here can you divest yourself of the face you put on for the world. Only here might you tempt love in a new form or summon a new fate entirely.”

A new fate.

Slowly, she followed after the woman. The numbness hadn’t retreated. If anything, it had intensified. The world had taken on a blurry sheen. Her pulse was thready, sluggish.

“In here, signora,” said the woman warmly. “Merely ask for what you wish, and see what fortune provides.”

With that, the woman drew the curtains shut. Laila stood still, the world swaying around her. Before her, the silken fall looked like the veil to a different world. Laila stuck her hand through the fabric. She didn’t feel the weight or scratchiness of the raw silk on her wrist. That blankness engulfed her. Laila felt unmoored from the world, no more than a flimsy wisp of consciousness on the verge of being folded back into that darkness.

Laila cleared her throat, whispering, “I wish for life.”

She waited a few moments. She was on the verge of withdrawing her hand when she felt the slightest touch on her wrist. She froze.

On the other side, someone lifted her hand. Dimly, she felt the scratchy weight of the curtain, caught the ghost of cigar smoke clinging to the drapes. The stranger brought their lips to her wrist, and Laila felt the heat of their kiss like an unfurling bloom. The colors of the room sharpened. The background noise she had taken for granted earlier rushed in to shatter the silence. If her soul had felt flimsy before, now it seemed to tether itself back to her bones.

Around her, the world spoke its eloquence in perfumes and chandelier light, the velveteen nap of parting curtains, the gnarled nubs of wood poking through her slippers. Laila felt intoxicated by it all. And yet, there had only ever been one person who made her feel the vividness of the world like this, and, as if summoned by the thought, the room yanked the stranger inside—

For a moment, Laila lost track of where she was. The small, silk-lined room full of Forged candles melted away when she saw him. She’d always considered Séverin a warning … the wolf in bed. The apple in a witch’s palm.

But he was so much more dangerous than something from the pages of a fairy tale.

He was someone who believed them.

Someone who thought magic and wonder had made an exception for him.

Séverin glanced at her wrist, then her face, and then … he smiled. It was a glib grin of delight, as if he knew that he was the one who had made her feel alive again … as if it meant he had a right to her.

She hated him for it. In that second, her hand moved of its own accord.

Séverin winced at the slap, his hand moving to the reddening mark on his cheekbone.

“Undoubtedly, I deserved that,” he said, looking up at her.

For the first time in what felt like years, Laila studied him. The past few days had changed him. There was a new sharpness to his features. He seemed like a well-constructed sword, the line between danger and beauty too blurred to distinguish. There was something feverish to his handsome features that seemed to singe the very air around them. His black hair—now a touch too long—fell across his brow, drawing attention to those strange eyes that were the precise color of sleep.

“Laila…” he said. His eyes looked wide. Frantic. “I know I have made mistakes. I know I said unforgivable things, and grief was no excuse. I know I will regret those moments for the rest of my life, but I can make it up to all of you. I swear it. Are they here?” He looked around the room, a hopeful smile touching his face. “Are they well? Can I see them?”

Laila managed to shake her head.

“Please, Laila, I can take care of everything—”

Finally the words snapped out of her.

“But you didn’t,” she said coldly.

Séverin stilled. “I know my actions in Lake Baikal looked unimaginably cruel—”

“Actually, they didn’t,” said Laila. Her throat felt raw. The words she had longed to say rushed out: “I wish I could say I was surprised, and yet, I wasn’t. You had already changed so much. Everything … every person … was disposable to you.” She advanced on him, her hands trembling. “All this time, you thought you could get away with devastation so long as it justifies some irrational calculus in your head. And now you apologize for appearing ‘unimaginably cruel’?” Laila laughed. “What you did was so in line with who you are that when I became conscious, I wanted nothing to do with you. I smashed that Mnemo butterfly because I knew there was nothing you could show me that I wanted to see. Nothing you could leave me that I wanted to chase.”

Séverin’s smile finally fell. “You broke it?”

She nodded. She watched his eyebrows twitch upwards. It might have looked like surprise, but she knew that look. Not surprise, but caution.

“What can I do, Laila?” he asked finally. “You can hate me until the day you die … but let me make that day your choice. Let me use the lyre to help you … to help all of us.”

Laila felt rooted to the spot. Séverin took a step closer to her. He lowered his mouth to her ear. “Name any penance, and I will pay it kneeling.”

This close, she caught the mint and smoke scent that clung to him. Before, she used to imagine that Séverin burned a new path wherever he went, and that the smoky smell of fire shadowed his steps. But she was wiser now, and her mind recognized what her body did not. She remembered the scent of mint and smoke from the funerary fires burning along the banks of the river of her childhood. Even the fragrance that clung to him was fatal.