Candlelight found her before he did — bleeding down the hallway from the great room, where the fire had already been built into something substantial. He didn't look surprised when she followed it.

"No power for a while," he said. "Come sit. I don't like leaving people alone in the dark in my house. Feels unkind."

She sat across from him, close enough to the fire that the cold outside stopped mattering.

"Tell me something true," Damon said, watching the flames instead of her, which made it easier, somehow, to answer honestly. "One thing. I'll allow you the rest of the fiction, for now."

"I don't like the dark. Never have."

Something eased in his face. "There. Not so difficult."

"Your turn."

He considered her a long moment. "I bought this lodge the year I decided solitude was safer than being disappointed by people. I haven't regretted it once — until you walked in out of that storm and made it considerably harder to enjoy."

"That's not a compliment."

"It's both a compliment and a complaint," Damon said. "You've cost me something I valued highly, Ms. Castellan, and I find I want to know exactly how much more it's going to cost me before this storm lets you leave."

"That sounds almost like a threat."

"Does it?" He leaned forward, firelight carving the angles of his face into something sharper, more dangerous than the warmth of the room suggested he should be allowed to look. "I don't make threats, Wren. I make observations, and then I act on them. Right now, my observation is that I haven't wanted anything this much in a very long time, and I'm not accustomed to letting things I want simply walk away when the roads clear."

Her pulse hammered. She should have been afraid. She was — and it did nothing to slow the reckless, traitorous heat spreading through her at the way he said it, like a claim already half-staked.

"You don't know me well enough to want to keep me," she said.

"I know enough," Damon said, "to know I intend to find out the rest, one way or another. Whether you make that easy for me is entirely your choice."

The storm screamed against the windows, and Wren sat very still, aware for the first time that the danger she'd come looking for had a great deal more edges than a folder full of secrets — and that some unwise, unprofessional part of her had already decided she didn't want to run from any of them.