Page 57 of Flowerheart

“Stubborn, you mean?”

“No.” He rubbed his hand against the back of his neck. “Fearless.”

I didn’t know what to say. I bit my lip. He watched.

“Good night,” I burst out at last. “I mean, I know it’s still early—”

“Good night.” He bowed his head, his hair flopping over his forehead, and then slipped into his bedroom, clicking the door shut behind him.

I touched my gloved fingertips to the striped grain of the oak door. I needed the truth from him. Whatever he was hiding from me, it left him likethis.Isolated and desperate, wrapping himself in brambles and shame.

Whatever he was hiding from me... was in the notebook locked away in the kitchen.

I barreled down the spiral staircase. A tiny, sweeter voice in my head seemed to say,He’s keeping it private for a reason.

But I knew him. Heneverasked for help, even when he seemed to be screaming inside. I had to find answers for myself. It was for his own good. If I learned whatever his secret was, I could help him. It would be worth it in the end. He didn’t even need to know that I had pried at all.

Back in the kitchen, I stared down the locked drawer. He stored the till in there at the end of the day. So whatever was in that book, he saw it as equally valuable. And he had the key with him upstairs.

But I had magic.

I glanced at the green front door in the foyer. The door I had opened and knocked over.

Flexing my gloved fingers, I carefully held onto the drawer’s handle.

“All right, magic,” I whispered. “Let’s be gentler this time.”

First—embrace emotion.

I breathed deeply and kept him forefront in my mind. The way he made me feel. Happy. Safe. Welcome.

This affection for him, the sparkling feeling in my stomach when we stood side by side. The burning in my cheeks, the quickening of my heart.

Next, intention. I imagined opening the drawer smoothly, silently, effortlessly.

Lastly, tempering.

“Not too much,” I whispered to my magic. “Just a gentle... little... pull...”

I tugged on the drawer, and it flew out of the workstation, punching against the boning of my corset with a loudthump,knocking the breath out of my lungs. All the coins inside the till jangled around, and I hoisted the drawer onto the floorboards, my heart hammering and my stomach throbbing with pain.

After such a racket, I stood perfectly still, watching the staircase. Surely Xavier had heard. Surely he’d suspect. I’d tell him it was an accident. That I was looking for quill ink. Or that my magic had acted on its own.

I waited. Then I stole a quick glance at the watch on my chatelaine and blew out a sigh of relief. Two minutes had passed and he hadn’t come to investigate.

Kneeling beside the drawer, I pulled out the leatherbound notebook and flipped through the pages.

They were instructions for potion-making. All in Xavier’s spidery handwriting. Lists of ingredients, flowers and seeds and roots and oils of different kinds. On the top right-hand corner of every page, a date was written, and then an Xwas markedin the corner. Some pages had the text scratched through with great gashes of ink, like a wound bleeding black.

I riffled through the recipes until I found the most recent one. Some of the amounts of ingredients were struck through, and on the top of the page, he’d written a note:

Tested on a young girl in the second stage of Euphoria’s thrall. 102, 103 ineffective.

I sat back on my heels, my shoulders sinking. This wasn’t a notebook where he kept his darkest secrets. It was simply a record of the Euphoria cures he’d attempted. Over a hundred of them.

My thumb brushed across the edge of the pages, making them rapidly flip by. The numbers at the top of the pages grew smaller and smaller—81, 70, 64, 52, 25, 11—

At the front were some unnumbered pages. More potions, labeled this time with descriptions and notes.

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