“I thought—I mean, I guess—” Before I could get any more incoherent, I quickly said, “At first I thought you fainted. Sometimes I have that effect on guys. It’s too intense. They can’t take it.”

Lucas laughed. The sound was sort of hollow, but he was laughing. It was really okay; he really didn’t know a thing. Relieved, I put my arms around him and hugged him tight. Lucas held me, too, and for a few moments we stood there, wrapped in each other, and I could pretend nothing had gone wrong at all.

His hair gleamed like bronze in the sunlight, and I breathed in the scent of him, so much like the woods that surrounded us. It felt so good, the knowledge that he was mine—I could hold him like this, out in the open, because we belonged to each other now. And every second we touched, the memories became stronger: kissing him, feeling his hands on my back, the salty softness of his skin between my teeth and hot blood gushing into my mouth.

Mine.

Now I knew what my mother had meant. Biting a human wasn’t as simple as taking a sip from a glass. When I drank Lucas’s blood, he became a part of me—and I became a part of him. We were bound now, in ways I couldn’t control and Lucas could never understand.

Did that make the way he held me less real? I closed my eyes tightly and hoped it didn’t. It was too late to do anything else.

“Bianca?” he murmured into my hair.

“Yeah?”

“Last night—I just fell into the railing like that? Mrs. Bethany told me how it went down, but it seems to me—Well, I don’t remember any of it. But you do? You remember?”

His old suspicions about Evernight must’ve been kicking in again. The obvious thing to do was say yes. I couldn’t bring myself to do it; it was one lie too many. “Kind of. I mean, it was all really confusing, and I—I guess I panicked. It’s all kind of a blur, if you want to know the truth.”

That was the worst dodge imaginable, but to my astonishment, Lucas seemed to believe it. He relaxed in my arms and nodded, like he understood everything now. “I’ll never let you down again. I promise.”

“You never let me down, Lucas. You never could.” Guilt crushed me, and I clung to him more tightly. “I won’t let you down either.”

I’ll keep you safe from every danger, I swore. Even from myself.

Chapter Nine

AFTER THAT, IT SEEMED AS IF I LIVED IN TWO worlds at once. In one of them, Lucas and I were finally together. That felt like the place I’d always wanted to be my whole life. In the other, I was a liar who didn’t deserve to be with Lucas or anyone.

“It just seems weird to me.” Lucas’s whisper was pitched low, so that it wouldn’t carry through the library.

“What seems weird?”

Lucas glanced around before he answered me, to make sure nobody would overhear. He needn’t have worried. We sat in one of the far archways, one lined with hand-bound books a couple of centuries old—one of the most private corners of the school. “That neither of us really remembers that night.”

“You got hurt.” When in doubt, I stuck to the story that Mrs. Bethany had come up with. Lucas didn’t wholly buy it yet, but in time he would. He had to. Everything depended on that. “Lots of times, people forget what happened just before they got hurt. It makes sense, doesn’t it? That iron scrollwork is sharp.”

“I’ve kissed girls before…” His words trailed off as he saw the look on my face. “Nobody like you. Nobody even close to you.”

I ducked my head to hide my embarrassed smile.

Lucas continued, “Anyway, it doesn’t make me pass out. Not ever. You are a seriously great kisser—trust me on that—but not even you could make me black out.”

“That’s not why you passed out,” I suggested, pretending that I really wanted to go back to reading the gardening book I’d found; the only reason I’d picked it up in the first place was some lingering curiosity about what the flower was that I’d glimpsed in my dream months before. “You passed out because this huge iron bar whacked you in the head. Hello.”

“That doesn’t explain why you don’t remember.”

“You know I have some problems with anxiety, right? I freak out sometimes. When we first met, I was in the middle of a huge freak-out. Huge! There are parts of my great escape that I don’t remember very well either. When you got hit in the head, I probably freaked out again. I mean, you could’ve been killed.” That part, at least, was close to the truth. “No wonder I was scared.”

“There’s no bump on my head. Just a bruise, like I fell or something.”

“We put an ice pack on it. We took care of you.”

Unconvinced, Lucas said, “Still doesn’t make sense.”

“I don’t know why you’re still thinking about this.” Even saying that made me a liar again, and worse than before. Sticking to the story was something that I had to do for Lucas’s own protection, because if Mrs. Bethany ever realized that he knew something was up, she might—might—oh, I didn’t know what she might do, but I suspected it wouldn’t be good. But telling Lucas that he was wrong to have doubts, that the good and sensible questions he had about Evernight and his memory lapse that night were just foolishness—that was worse. That was asking Lucas to doubt himself, and I didn’t want to do that. I now knew how bad it felt, doubting yourself. “Please, Lucas, let it go.”