But most of all, he knew when that pleasurable squeezing started and stopped, started and stopped, started and didn’t stop, that she was racing toward climax.

He raced for it with her.

They dug their nails into each other. He felt the silken soles of her feet leave the ledge of his buttocks to scrabble for foothold on the edge of the window seat. Heard the rhythmic squeak of wood keep time with his quickening thrusts and the lush sound of their flesh smacking together, the finest symphony ever composed. And when she opened her mouth against his neck to stifle her scream, the gathering warmth in his balls shot forward and he came—quietly, muscles quaking, heart stopping, soul bursting apart into a million points of light.

When he pulled out, still hard, he was so spent, he wobbled on his knees. “Come here,” he murmured, summoning the strength to hoist her onto his hips while he repositioned them. He sat on the window seat with her across his legs, and wrapped her in his arms.

“Look at that,” he said, gazing through the window. The rooftops of Pacific Heights rolled down the hill toward the Golden Gate. “If you look close enough, I’ll bet you can see the lighthouse past the hills.”

“No, you can’t,” she said with a husky laugh and pressed her hand against the windowpane. “But it’s beautiful, isn’t it? And it’s ours.”

Their city. For it seemed at that moment to have been painted across the landscape just for the two of them.

He sighed, wholly content. Another minute, perhaps, and they’d have to leave. If they stayed gone too long, someone would notice. He thought of Aida’s words in his ear: Thanks for keeping my secret. Road goes both ways. If she knew, how long would it be before she confessed her suspicions to Winter?

“Bo?” Astrid asked. “What happened to the young scholar and the fox spirit?”

He rested his chin on top of her head, stroked over her bare shoulder, and then gently grazed his nails down her arm, memorizing her anew.

Impossibly soft.

Scent of roses.

Voice that made his heart warm.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m afraid I just don’t know.”

TWENTY-FIVE

The week between Christmas and New Year’s Day was, bar none, the happiest in Astrid’s life. Firstly, it didn’t rain a single day; the historic storm was finally, truly over. Secondly, they didn’t catch even a glimpse of Max and his knife, nor did Astrid experience any disturbing visions—though a visit to Velma told her that the tea she’d prescribed wasn’t helping; the unwanted shadow on Astrid’s aura was still very present. But despite this disappointing news and the fact that Bo and Astrid’s impending date at the carousel of Babel’s Tower was quickly approaching, they were able to put it out of their minds.

Easy to do when you’re basking in bliss. Because Bo made time every day to steal away and visit her at the top of the turret. And one morning he even sneaked her into a taxi and took her to his apartment in Chinatown, where they spent two glorious hours wearing out the springs of his single bed before walking a block to eat dim sum at Golden Lotus.

“I remember you,” the restaurant owner, Mrs. Lin, had said with a kind smile after she’d kissed both of Bo’s cheeks and seated them at a table with a view of Grant Avenue’s bustling sidewalk. “You are Mr. Magnusson’s sister. You and another young girl came to visit Aida when she boarded with me upstairs.”

“Benita,” Astrid said, remembering fondly and wishing her old friend was here to share her secret about Bo. She’d almost written her about it, but changed her mind; it felt too intimate a thing to share in a letter. “She was my seamstress. We’d brought Aida a new coat that afternoon. That was right before the fire in her room.”

Mrs. Lin’s face darkened for a moment, but she quickly shook it away. “Mr. Magnusson paid for the repairs and now everyone wants to rent that room because it has the shiny, new private bathroom. I charge big dollars for it. What do they call that? Silver lining,” she said with a grin.

The old restaurant owner had then proceeded to command every dim sum cart to make a beeline to their table with hot food straight from the kitchen, and Bo fed her steamed pork dumplings from the tips of his chopsticks until she nearly burst—from both the abundance of food and the sheer happiness at being able to sit beside him at a public table while he laced his fingers through hers.

Astrid carefully preserved all of these moments in her mind and tried to be grateful for today, and today only. But the morning of New Year’s Eve, she found herself unable to stop the future from leaking into her thoughts. And after some deliberation and self-honesty, she finally made a plan for what she was going to do about school. What she was going to do with herself.

What she wanted.

It was a risky plan—not a scheme, she told herself indignantly—and one that required a little more faith in herself than she was absolutely sure she had, but there it was. Her plan for the future.

She decided she would tell Bo after the clock struck midnight. A new year, a new plan, a new, more serious Astrid. No matter what happened, she would be able to say that she tried, and that was a small boon to her heart.Evening fell, and though Bo and Winter had worked until dawn the previous night, delivering the last of their liquor runs to all the hotels and clubs around town hosting big New Year’s parties, they were both taking the night off. Winter planned, he told Astrid, to be asleep with his wife and baby when the city was counting down the new year. And Bo, of course, planned to get into Heaven with Astrid.