I LOVE YOU (TERMS AND CONDITIONS APPLY)

The knife was already in her neck when Mackenzie Doyle arrived in chapter two.

Not in it, exactly. Against it. Laid along the left side of her throat like a violin bow, just under the jaw, with enough pressure that she could feel a warm thread running down into the collar of a dress she had never owned, and a hand she did not know holding the hilt with the terrible patience of a man who has done this before and found it restful.

One second earlier she had been on the Blue Line.

She was almost sure of that. The Blue Line, outbound from the Loop on a January Monday, the car smelling of wet wool and somebody’s reheated curry, her work boots gritty with the ash of a two-flat fire in Logan Square. She had been finishing a book the way you finish a bad meal you’ve already paid for, grimly, out of principle, and when it was over she had opened the review page and typed with the savage precision of a woman who had spent seven years writing denial letters for Great Lakes Mutual.

One star. The villain is the only character in this book with a coherent motive, and the story cheats him at every single turn. Also, Mercy Hollis deserved better than dying in chapter three so a man could have a reason. I want a refund.

She had hit post. The train had lurched out of the tunnel into the gray dusk above Division. And the phone in her hand had said, in a font she did not recognize:

[Complaint received. Refunds are not available at this time. Alternative remedy: PARTICIPATION. Thank you for your patience!]

Then the curry smell was gone, and the wet wool was gone, and the train was gone, and there was a knife.

The room was dark except for a green-shaded lamp on a desk the size of a small boat. It smelled of old paper, beeswax, and something colder underneath, like the inside of a stone church in August. Tall windows with the shutters drawn. Bookshelves climbing to a ceiling she couldn’t see. On the desk, a skull. Not a Halloween skull. A small, yellowed, extremely sincere skull, being used as a paperweight.

Mack’s heart was going like a two-dollar smoke alarm, but some part of her brain, the part that had walked through three hundred burned houses and learned not to look at the teddy bears until the paperwork was done, was already taking inventory.

Hardwood floor, heart pine, original, worth more than her car. Persian rug, silk, knotted by somebody who had gone blind doing it. A man behind her, taller by most of a foot. His other hand flat between her shoulder blades, not pushing, just present. A knife that was not steel. She could see the edge of it at the bottom of her vision, pale and faintly translucent, like a shard of old piano key.

Bone. The knife was made of bone.

Oh, she thought. Oh, no.

Because she knew this room. She had read this room. She had read it forty minutes ago on a train, in chapter two of Crown of Ash and Bayou (The Marrow Cycle, Book One), a four-hundred-page dark-fantasy novel by an author who used the word ichor eleven times, and in that chapter a nothing girl named Mercy Hollis crept into the study of Lucian Marrow on Twelfth Night, and he caught her with a bone knife, and she threw herself at him, and he took her to bed with the air of a man accepting a tip, and in chapter three she was found dead in his sheets with her throat opened, and the whole witch city of New Orleans decided that he had done it, and the plot finally got going.

Words appeared in the air in front of her. Clean white letters, hovering a foot from her face like the end credits of a movie she hadn’t bought a ticket for.

[NARRATIVE COMPLIANCE SYSTEM v3.1.4]

[Welcome, Participant! You have been placed in the role of: MERCY HOLLIS (Minor Character, Expendable).]

[Your objective: Seduce LUCIAN MARROW. Current scene: Seduction Attempt (1 of 1).]

[Scheduled termination: Chapter 3. Thank you for helping us keep stories on track!]

Below it, a little spinning wheel, like a webpage loading.

“You’ve gone very quiet,” said the man with the knife, “for a thief.”

His voice was low and unhurried, faintly accented, the long vowels of old New Orleans pressed flat by expensive schooling. He sounded bored. He sounded like a man reading the fine print on a parking ticket.

“I’m not a thief,” Mack said, and her own voice came out steadier than she had any right to expect. “I’m lost.”

“Mm. In my study. At two in the morning. On Twelfth Night, with every ward on this house singing like a church choir.” The knife shifted a quarter inch. The warm thread on her neck became a warmer ribbon. “Try again, Miss Hollis.”

So she was Mercy Hollis. The System hadn’t been kidding.

What had Mercy done, in the book? Mercy had turned in his arms, pressed herself against him, whispered something about how she’d dreamed of him, and he’d laughed and put down the knife and picked her up. Then she was dead by morning.

So not that.

What did Lucian Marrow want? That was the problem with Lucian Marrow, and the reason he’d been the only character she liked. He wanted, as far as the book let anybody see, not to be touched. Not to be managed. Not to be lied to, although the book lied to him constantly. His mother drowned, his father had been a monster, and every single thing he had reached for in four hundred pages had been snatched out of his hand by a golden boy with lightning and a blonde bob of a haircut who was supposed to be the hero.

He wanted, she thought, the one thing nobody in that book ever gave him, which was a straight answer.

Well, she couldn’t give him that. The straight answer was I’m from Chicago and I think I’m inside a paperback, and that got you killed or committed.

The next best thing, then. The oldest move in the adjuster’s playbook. When a claimant is about to explode, you tell them something so unexpected they have to stop and process it. You give them paperwork. You make them read.

The loading wheel spun. The knife waited.

Mack thought, very clearly, I am not dying in chapter three for a man who uses a skull as a paperweight.

And she said, “I love you.”

The knife didn’t move. That was the first good sign. The second good sign was the silence, which went on long enough that she could hear a clock ticking somewhere in the dark and, beyond the shutters, faint and far away, a brass band playing the same four bars of “Li’l Liza Jane” over and over like it had forgotten the rest.

“I beg your pardon,” said Lucian Marrow.

“I love you,” Mack said again. It came out easier the second time. It was just words; she had said worse things to angrier men in flooded basements. “That’s why I’m here. That’s the whole story. I’m not stealing anything. I’m not here to hurt you. I just couldn’t stand it anymore, and I thought, it’s Twelfth Night, everybody’s at the parties, I’ll go and see him. I’ll just see him. So.” She lifted her hands a little, slowly, palms out, the universal sign for I am not holding a weapon or a subpoena. “Here I am. Seeing you. It’s going great.”

The white letters flickered.

[Deviation detected. Participant is advised to proceed with SEDUCTION as scripted.]

“Not a chance,” Mack said, under her breath.

“What?”

“Nothing. I said you’re even taller than I pictured.”

The hand between her shoulder blades turned her around. He did it without effort, the way you’d turn a lamp to get the light right, and the knife came with her, never leaving her throat, so that now she was looking up at him along the length of a bone blade.

The book had described Lucian Marrow on page nine, and page forty, and page one hundred and twelve, and none of it was right. It had said cruel beauty and eyes like tarnished silver, and what Mack actually saw was a tired man in his thirties with black hair that needed cutting, his cuffs turned back, a faint pink line of old scar tissue running from his left ear into his collar, and gray eyes that were not tarnished anything. They were only very tired, and very careful, like the eyes of a guard dog that has been kicked by every visitor it ever wagged at.

He looked at her the way she looked at a water-damaged ceiling. Measuring how far the rot went.

“You love me,” he said.

“Yes.”

“You, Mercy Hollis, last and least of a dead coven, who has spoken to me twice in her life, once to ask whether I was in line for the restroom at a Conclave function.”

Mack had no idea whether that was true. “I was nervous.”

“And you broke through eleven wards to tell me.”

“I’m very motivated.”

A muscle moved at the corner of his mouth. It was not a smile. It was the place a smile would have gone if the building had been zoned for one.

“People have come into this house to kill me,” Lucian Marrow said softly. “People have come in to rob me, to bargain with me, to beg me for the lives of their husbands and to curse me for the deaths of their sons. A woman once came in to try to sell me her own grandmother’s tongue. Nobody has ever come in to tell me that.”

“Well,” Mack said. “First time for everything.”

He looked at her for a long moment. Then his eyes dropped to her neck, where the blood was running, and something passed across his face so quickly she almost missed it, like a car’s headlights sweeping a dark room.

“Prove it,” he said.

There are a lot of ways to prove you love somebody, and Mack was fairly sure the one Lucian Marrow had in mind involved her dress coming off.

The System certainly thought so. The white letters bloomed into a helpful little menu:

[Suggested actions:] [> Kiss him.] [> Remove garment.] [> Whisper: “I’ve dreamed of this.”]

She looked past them, which took some doing, like reading a menu board through a smeared windshield, and met his eyes.

“How?” she said.

“How what?”

“How do you want me to prove it? Because I can tell you what I know about you, if that helps. I can tell you that you take your coffee black with chicory and you let it go cold because you forget it’s there. That you sleep about four hours a night. That there’s a boat you keep thinking about.” She was pulling details from the book as fast as she could remember them, the scraps of him