Cold to the Touch

She dozed against the cold statue at dusk. At full dark, the statue's chest was rising under her cheek.Wren Ashby fixes clocks and leaves towns. The Aldervane contract was supposed to be no different: repair the cathedral's failing mechanism, collect her fee, move on before anyone could ask her to stay. She didn't know the tower's stone watcher comes alive between dusk and dawn - fever-warm beneath all that cold marble, winged, ancient, and dryly, devastatingly courteous with the few words his hours allow.Corvus has guarded the bell-chamber for three hundred years and has long since stopped letting himself want things; wanting only sharpens the grief. But Wren works the same impossible night hours his curse allows, meets the impossible fact of him with curiosity instead of fear, and night by night the repair turns to conversation, the conversation turns to touch, and the touch turns to something they can only have before the sun comes up.Then Wren realizes the cruelest thing a craftswoman can: finishing the job she was hired to do is the one act that will trap him in stone forever.She has until dawn to decide what kind of woman she actually is.And dawn is already coming up over the valley.