“I know you probably won’t ever come around to liking me after our introduction,” he said, “but I am sorry. It didn’t occur to me that you were keeping that information secret.”

“It’s fine,” I said. “But what does that have to do with my work assignment?”

For a few moments, he didn’t say anything at all. He just…stared.

“Will you stop?” I muttered, feeling both flustered and annoyed at once. “If I say you’re forgiven, will you stop doing that?”

His mouth turned up in a handsome grin. “No.”

Clancy, who apparently had never been taught about respecting someone’s personal space, took a step forward, and I took a step back, off the porch, my feet sinking into the sticky mud. Instead of backing off, he seemed to take it as a challenge, and came toward me again. For whatever reason, mostly the flutter of nerves in my gut, I let him.

“Listen,” he said, finally. “The reason I told Mike not to assign you anything is because I’m hoping that you’ll come work with me.”

“Excuse me?”

“Come on, you heard me.” His hand closed over my arm, and it was like a bee had been set loose inside of my skull. My brain seemed to lurch full speed back into life, flooding with milky-white images of the two of us sitting in front his desk, staring at each other as a fire devoured everything around us.

The images he was flooding into my mind.

I don’t know how he did it, but it was so real. The image was burning me up from the inside out, blistering my lungs. Pockets of acrid smoke bubbled up under my skin, until it felt like I was about to burst open. My vision burned to black at the edges. Fire bloomed on my clothes, singeing my hair.

This is not real, this is not real, this is NOT REAL—

Clancy must have let go, or I must have found a way to twist away, because just as quickly as the fire came, it went back out, dispersing in three shaky exhales.

“You can’t block me,” he said, his eyes wide. “Do you even know how to use your abilities? The file the League had on you made it sound like you could control it.”

Wasn’t it obvious? I shook my head. That’s why I’m here, I wanted to say. That’s why I need you.

His gaze flicked down over me, from head to toe and back up again. When he spoke, his voice was soft. Sympathetic. “Look, I know how it is. You don’t think I struggled with this, too? How lonely it is to not be able to touch someone the way you want to, how terrifying it is to be trapped in somebody else’s head without knowing the way out? Ruby, everything I’ve learned I had to teach myself, and it was awful. I want to save you from that. I can teach you things, tricks—how to use your talents the way they’re meant to be used.”

I hoped he couldn’t see the way my hands were shaking. Oh my God, he had offered—I hadn’t even had to ask—and I still couldn’t say a damn thing.

Clancy’s posture relaxed, and when he touched me again, flicking my braid back over my shoulder, there was no ill will behind it. “Think about it, okay? If you decide you want to, just come to the office. I’ll clear my schedule for you.”

I pressed my lips together, biting down hard on my tongue.

“There’s nothing wrong with wanting to know how to use your abilities,” Clancy added. “That’s the only way we’re ever going to beat them.”

Beat who?

“There are so few of us left,” he said. “Until you showed up in the system, I actually thought I was the only one.”

“Well, there’s at least one more. His name is Martin—”

“And he’s with the Children’s League,” he finished. “I know. I accessed their report on him. Creepy kid. When I said us I meant the non-psychotic Oranges.”

I snorted.

“I’ll think about it,” I said, finally. I was pinned under his dark gaze again; the hair on my arms standing on end, like a whisper of electricity had run over it. I took an unknowing step closer to him.

“Listen to your gut,” Clancy said, turning to head back inside the Office. A cluster of kids called out to him from where they were setting up lunch near the fire pit and, ever the president’s son, he smiled and waved at them real pretty.

Listen to your gut.

So why was it at odds with my head?

I made a beeline for the wood dock I had discovered the afternoon before, needing to find some way to wash out the jitters racing through my heart. My mind felt tangled with the possibilities.

Clancy Gray had just offered me everything I could have asked for. A way to avoid repeating what had happened to my parents and Sam. A way to be with Liam, to find Grams, to not live in constant fear of what I could do to them. So why hadn’t my yes come tumbling out, then?

I ducked under the rope tying off the path to the lake and made it all the way down the trail before I realized anything was amiss.

“Crap,” I said when I saw him.

“Oh no—no, no, no,” Chubs said. The goofy grin dropped off his face and he stopped throwing bread crusts out to the ducks gathered in the water. “This is my secret hideout. No Rubys allowed.”

“I found it first!” I huffed, plopping down next to him.

“You most certainly did not.”

“Try a week ago, while you were unpacking.”

He balked at that. “Well…fine. But I got here first today.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be on Garden duty?”