St. Clair gets up from the bed. “Jealous boyfriend?”

“I told you. He’s not my boyfriend.”

“But you like him.”

I blush. “Well ... yeah.”

St. Clair’s expression is unreadable. Maybe annoyed. He nods toward my door. “You still want to go out?”

“What?” I’m confused. “Yeah, of course. Lemme change first.” I let him out, and five minutes later, we’re headed north. I’ve thrown on my favorite shirt, a cute thrift-store find that hugs me in the right places, and jeans and black canvas sneakers. I know sneakers aren’t very French—I should be wearing pointy boots or scary heels—but at least they aren’t white. It’s true what they say about white sneakers. Only American tourists wear them, big ugly things made for mowing grass or painting houses.

It’s a beautiful night.The lights of Paris are yellow and green and orange. The warm air swirls with the chatter of people in the streets and the clink of wineglasses in the restaurants. St. Clair has brightened back up and is detailing the more gruesome aspects of the Rasputin biography he finished this afternoon.

“So the other Russians give him this dose of cyanide in his dinner, lethal enough to kill five men, right? But it’s not doing anything, so Plan B—they shoot him in the back with a revolver. Which still doesn’t kill him. In fact, Rasputin has enough energy to strangle one of them, so they shoot him three more times. And he’s still struggling to get up! So they beat the bloody crap out of him, wrap him in a sheet, and throw him into an icy river. But get this—”

His eyes shimmer. It’s the same look Mom gets when she’s talking about turtles, or Bridge gets when she’s talking about cymbals.

“During the autopsy, they discovered the actual cause of death was hypothermia. From the river! Not the poisoning or the shooting or the beating. Mother Nature. And not only that, but his arms were found frozen upright, like he’d tried to claw his way out from underneath the ice.”