It was almost four in the morning by the time we were all sitting around the kitchen table — Dorian, Marco, my mother with her ankle propped on a chair, me with an ice pack of my own pressed to the side of my head — and nobody had eaten anything and the candle from the glasshouse had somehow ended up on the table between us, still burning, the only light in the room besides one lamp.
"He wants to meet me," I said, into the silence.
"Sera, I already told you—"
"I'm not finished." I looked at Dorian. "What if he gets that. What if he gets exactly that, except not the way he's imagining it. Not a private meeting where he can make threats and nobody's watching. Somewhere public with witnesses where he can't act without consequences, because acting would mean acting in front of people whose
