Page 28 of 13 Nights

"Then someone removed it."

"Tom?"

"Doubtful. It could be that your mother hid it somewhere you haven't found."

Ashley's expression tightens. A missing document in a collection this carefully preserved isn't an oversight. It's a decision. "She kept everything else, every note, every annotation, every scrap of correspondence. Why would she remove the one document that explains why she left?"

"Because she understood what kind of person would find that drawer. A warning wouldn't frighten them away. It would give them a question they couldn't leave unanswered."

The words leave my mouth before I've considered them, and the accuracy of them sits between us like a blade laid flat on the table.

Diane the researcher preserved a record. Diane the mother removed the bait. Both actions make sense. Neither cancels the other.

"The warning may mean the Gate takes anyone who loves me," I say. "It may mean the Gate takes something from them. It may mean something else entirely. The passive voice is the problem. The Horseman is loved. It doesn't require me to love back. If Eliza's feelings were enough to trigger the Gate without my reciprocation, then Ashley⁠—"

"Then I'm already in danger," she finishes. "Because the question isn't whether you love me. It's whether I love you."

Neither of us answers. The silence carries weight precisely because neither of us can dismiss the possibility.

"Look at me."

The command brings her eyes to mine. Not meekly. She meets me with the same steady challenge she's brought to every order I've given her, the one that says she'll comply when the command earns it and not a moment before.

"You've known me for six nights," I say. "Whatever you feel, don't dress it up as love. Obsession looks the same at this distance. So does adrenaline. So does the particular madness of standing too close to something dangerous and confusing the fear for attraction."

"I'm not confused."

"You're an investigative journalist trapped in a cottage with a dead man who can do things to your body that living men apparently cannot. Your objectivity is not merely compromised. It has fled the state."

"My objectivity is sitting right where I left it." She doesn't look away. "I can want you and still assess whether wanting you will kill me. Women do that calculus every day. We're practiced."

The observation hits with the force of the historical assessment it is.

"If I ordered you to leave Sleepy Hollow tonight," I say, "would you go?"

"No."

"Even knowing what happened to Eliza."

"But we don't know what happened to Eliza. We don't know how much of the story she knew. She could easily have vanished without the full picture. I have documentation, a partial chain of evidence, a warning no one has translated completely, and a ghost who keeps leaving physical proof that the curse is failing. That's not love overriding my survival instinct. That's a case I refuse to abandon before I can draw a real conclusion."

"You're rationalizing."

"I'm investigating. The fact that I want to kiss you while I do it doesn't make my methodology unsound."

I close the distance between us. My hand finds her wrist before I've decided to reach for it. Her pulse beats against my fingers with a clarity that stops me. On Night Four I could feel pressure when I touched her. Warmth. Resistance. Tonight I can feel the individual rhythm of her blood, the slight acceleration when my grip tightens.

I hold on and count the beats and say nothing, because the sensation is so specific and so alive that speaking would ruin it.

"Severin von Brandt." She says my name deliberately, watching my face.

The cottage lamp brightens. The temperature in the room rises by a degree I can measure, because I can feel temperature now, and the change is immediate and unmistakable. My fingers tighten around her. For one beat my form is more solid than it has been all night, she feels it, I see her register the increased pressure against her pulse, and then the effect fades, leaving me exactly as I was and not at all as I was.

The wind leans against the cottage windows. A cold awareness presses at the margins, sharp and sudden.

"The horse is back."

Ashley turns toward the window. "At the tree line?"