In those moments, I could feel the regret pressing close to me, as if the guilt could corporealize and physically reach out for me with its serrated fingers.

And the last night in Lviv, before Morgan was being discharged to go home, she looked right at me and said, “I’ll never forgive you. Or Maxen.”

“You can hate me all you want,” I said tiredly. “But don’t hate Colchester. He doesn’t deserve it.”

“I don’t hate him,” she said, turning her gaze to the chipped beige wall across from her bed. Through the thin curtain separating her part of the room from the person she shared it with, I heard a cough and then several muttered words in Ukrainian. “I can refuse to forgive him and still not hate him.”

“Morgan, you know the doctors didn’t tell you the whole story when you woke up. The children—”

“Yes,” she snarled suddenly. “The children. You don’t have to tell me again.”

“You would have done the same.”

She closed her eyes. “You have no idea what I would have done. You can’t possibly have any idea.”

“Maybe we’re not biologically related, but we were both raised by Vivienne Moore. You would have done the thing that would have looked best on paper. The thing that would sound good in your memoir.”

“Is that why you did it? To look good in the history books?”

I thought of those children we pulled off the boat, their soot-brushed faces and panicked cries. And then I thought of Colchester murmuring to them in Ukrainian, vy v bezpetsi, vy v bezpetsi.

You are safe, you are safe.

I thought of my name from his mouth; his lips and tongue and throat making the noises that uniquely signified me.

“There were other reasons,” I admitted.

“You suddenly have a conscience? Is that it?”

“I’ve always had a conscience,” I informed her. I grinned, even though her eyes were closed and she couldn’t see me. “I’m just really good at ignoring it.”

She heard the grin in my voice and fought off a smile of her own. “You’re incurable.”

“And I’ll never make you forgive me for it.”

“Embry,” she said, opening her eyes and looking at me again. “Before I go home, I wanted to tell you…” She paused, her eyes moving up to the ceiling, her teeth digging into her bottom lip. She ran her fingers across her forehead, and for a minute she looked so much like Colchester that it stunned me. But then she dropped her hand and sighed, as if she’d changed her mind about something.

“Be careful around Maxen,” she said finally. “He’s not the man you think he is.”

“You don’t have to be coy, Morgan. I saw what your body looked like after a week with him.”

She chewed on her lip again. “I could see what he was. Is, I mean. I see what he is because I’m like him in what I want, how I love. But Embry—you’re not.”

“Not what? Game for being spanked?”

She rolled her eyes, looking like a teenager again, like the bossy older sister that would bother me when I was trying to watch TV.

“It’s a lot more than spanking, you know.” Her expression turned serious. “He wouldn’t just want your body. He’d want your mind, your thoughts, your heart. Your surrender. That’s more than a few playful slaps. It’s power and pain and control. He might be able to live without it, but even if he could, the need for it would gnaw at him every day.”

“And you think I can’t handle that?”

She looked incredulous. “Embry, you are the most selfish person I’ve ever met. You don’t take anything seriously, all you want to do is drink and fuck, and on top of that, you brood all the time. Or at least, you brood when you’re not fucking and drinking. Do you really think you’re the ideal person to bear the brunt of Maxen’s needs? You can’t even handle your own!”

She had a point. Several good points, actually. I couldn’t imagine willingly allowing someone to hurt me, allowing someone to take the reins in bed. I was too much of a fuck-up emotionally to even play around with giving up my emotions to someone else.

“How do you know about all this kinky shit anyway?” I asked my stepsister. “You are way too knowledgeable.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Do you really want the answer to that?”

I thought for a moment and said quickly, “You know what? I don’t.”

She laughed.

I stood. “I guess I should go. Are you sure you’re okay leaving the hospital?”

“Yes, Nimue is picking me up and flying with me.”

Nimue was my mother’s youngest sister, closer to our age than to hers, and as a genuine, quinoa-eating, crystal-wearing Seattle hippie, she was a perennial embarrassment to Lieutenant Governor Vivienne Moore. But she was nurturing and kind and also a professor of sociology, so she was fiercely intelligent. Morgan would be in good hands.

I bent down and hugged my sister as best as I could in her hospital bed, careful of her injured shoulder. “Love you, sissy.”

“Love you too, bubby. I still don’t forgive you.” She pulled back from the hug so she could look up into my face as she spoke. “And don’t forget what I said about Colchester. For the sake of your own happiness, you should stay far, far away from him. Find a nice girl. Maybe a quiet blonde who likes books. She’ll be much less trouble.”