Cassandra's POV
"Why are you looking at the ceiling like it owes you money?"
Sebastian's arm tightened around me fractionally, which told me he had not known I was awake, which told me he had been lying there for some time trying not to wake me while whatever was moving through his head worked itself out without witnesses. I turned my head and looked at his face in the grey early light and read it the way I had been learning to read it for weeks, past the composed surface and into the things moving underneath, and what I found there made me sit up.
"It did not work," I said. Not a question.
He looked at me and for a moment he was simply a man trying to find the right words for something he had not wanted to say, and in that moment I felt for him in a way that bypassed every complicated
