ALARIC

  The marks on his calendar did not belong to him.

  Alaric stood at his desk and counted them. Tally marks in dark ink beside a date he had circled weeks ago. His handwriting, or close enough.

  He could not remember making them. The date meant something and the reason for it was gone, erased between one morning and the next.

  The tug came next. Low in his chest, directional, pulling toward the east wing the way it had pulled since the night he bled over the altar stones. Stronger now.

  The weeks of house arrest had dulled everything else. Good food tasted flat. Wine did nothing. Servants came and went and he barely tracked which ones.

  But this. This had weight.

  He crossed to the window and then back to the desk without deciding to move. His hand found the calendar again. The circled date was today. He had no memory of circling it.

  The tally marks beside it counted something he could not name, and when he pressed his thumb against the ink, it was dry and old. Days old at least.

  Evelyne. He wanted her under him, her voice saying his name. The certainty arrived whole and finished, no buildup, no warning.

  The wanting sat in his chest with a specificity he could not explain. It pointed somewhere. It pointed at a time.

  He reached for the door.

  The guard posted outside his chambers was sitting against the wall with his eyes open and his hands in his lap, legs stretched across the corridor. He was breathing. He could not stand. The second guard, the one who patrolled the stairwell, was three steps down with his shoulder against the railing and his chin on his chest.

  Alaric stepped over the first man's legs and walked toward the east wing. Nobody stopped him. No one could.

  A servant passed him carrying folded linen. She pressed herself flat against the wall to let him by and stayed there after he was gone, her legs shaking, the linen sliding from her grip. Tomorrow she would remember a quiet morning and nothing else. Evelyne's charm worked that way, settling in weeks ago and smoothing the edges of what the household noticed.

  He reached Evelyne's door and knocked twice.

  EVELYNE

  She was late.

  The knock pulled her from the edge of sleep. Two sharp raps, no pause between them. She sat up and the exhaustion pressed down before her feet touched the floor, the same tiredness that had been dragging at her for weeks.

  Everyone in the household had it. She was no different.

  A dull ache low in her abdomen. She pressed her hand there and felt warmth, her skin flushed even through the chemise. She had been tired and sore for days and could not explain either one.

  Before she moved in, she had been the one who traveled to him. She chose the nights, managed the risk, timed the visits.

  Since the rooms three corridors away became hers, rooms the imperial decree did not authorize her to occupy, guards charmed into forgetting she lived there at all, the pattern had reversed only in distance. She still went to him. Every day. He waited in his chambers and she arrived.

  She had overslept this morning. Her body had been pulling her under more often and she stopped fighting it.

  She opened the door and he was standing in the corridor. Barefoot. Shirt open at the collar. His eyes tracked her. No blink. No drift.

  Behind him the hallway was empty. No guards. No servants. Just Alaric, who had been under house arrest for weeks, standing outside her door.

  He had never done this. In all the weeks since she moved in, he had waited in his chambers while she came to him. Every single day. And today he was here, three corridors from where he was supposed to be, because she was late.

  "You're late," he said.

  He took her arm above the elbow and walked her back toward his chambers.

  ALARIC / EVELYNE

  His door closed behind them and his mouth was on her throat before she could ask why he had not waited. His hands found the hem of her chemise and pulled it over her head. She wore nothing underneath. Her spine hit the wall beside the door and the air left her lungs.

  "What's gotten into you?" she asked.

  He did not answer. His hands moved across her bare skin. Her breath caught and she grabbed his shirt to pull him closer.

  Against the wall the first time. He lifted her with no visible effort, weeks of house arrest having done nothing to diminish him. She locked her ankles behind his back. Hard and ready and so focused she could feel the difference from every other time.

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  He pushed into her in one stroke and the sound she made filled the room.

  "Yes," she breathed. "Finally you see me."

  He fucked her hard against the stone. His grip on her thighs would leave marks and she wanted every one. His hips drove into her with a rhythm that did not falter, did not slow even when her legs shook and her voice broke on his name.

  The candle flame on his desk held steady. The far corners of the room looked deeper than they should.

  None of it registered. His cock inside her and his hands on her body and the sounds he drew from her throat every time he thrust deep. That was all there was.

  She came with her face pressed into his shoulder. He kept going. Her nails dug into his back and he fucked her straight through the aftershocks until her legs gave out and he held her up with one arm, steady, unbothered.

  He set her down on the bed. She sat on the edge and the room tilted.

  The floor came up fast. Her knees hit first, then her palms, and then nothing.

  She came back to his hand on her jaw, tilting her face up. He was crouched in front of her, still undressed, and his eyes were fixed on hers. He was checking whether she was functional.

  "What happened." No question in it.

  "I'm fine." Her vision was still patchy at the edges. "I stood up too fast."

  She hadn't stood up at all. She had been sitting and the room had gone sideways. The exhaustion had been getting worse for weeks but she had never lost consciousness before.

  "Something is wrong with this household," she said. Her hand found his knee for balance. "The guards at your door could barely stand this morning. The kitchen staff have stopped coming. Two of them, gone, and nobody knows why."

  She slept and woke tired. Her muscles burned through simple tasks. And now this.

  "We should send for physicians," she said. "Or contact the Empress. If everyone in the estate is sick, someone needs to look at it."

  "No." His voice was level. "The Empress's attention risks the arrangement. The guards are bought but the system is fragile. Physicians ask questions. Servants talk. One investigation and the house arrest loses its privacy."

  And her rooms. One investigation and someone would notice that the disgraced Lady Malenthra had been living in quarters the imperial decree never granted her.

  "And if it gets worse?"

  "The wards have been failing for weeks. Everyone near the damaged estates feels it. This is not illness. It is geography."

  She wanted to push harder. The old Evelyne would have sent for physicians herself. But that woman had allies and family who took her calls and a name that opened doors.

  She had none of that now. Her mother had returned her last letter unopened. The household ran on Alaric's money and Alaric's judgment, and his judgment said no.

  She could have pushed harder. She almost did.

  His hand found her hip and pulled her to the edge of the mattress. She expected him to come down over her. He knelt upright between her thighs instead, lifted her legs onto his shoulders, one and then the other, and the angle changed everything.

  She felt every inch of him when he pushed in. Deep. The kind of deep that made her grab the sheets and hold on.

  He fucked her from there, upright, watching. His hips drove into hers and her body rocked with every thrust but he stayed still from the waist up. Controlled. His eyes tracked her face the way they had tracked her body between rounds, reading something she could not name.

  "Give me everything." Quiet and sure.

  "I already have." Her voice came out wrecked. "What else is left?"

  "Everything," he said again.

  His palm pressed flat against her belly. Below the navel. His fingers spread wide and the cold of his skin cut through the heat of hers. She sucked in a breath at the temperature difference and his hand did not move. Stayed there, pressing down, while he kept fucking her at the same measured pace.

  "You'll give me this." His thumb traced a slow line across her abdomen. "All of it."

  She would have said yes to anything. The angle had her pinned and the pressure of his hand made every thrust land harder.

  The room was colder than when they started. The candles guttered on the desk and the flame bent sideways in air that was still.

  She came with his palm still pressing down and her legs shaking on his shoulders. He did not stop. Kept the same pace, the same depth, unhurried, until she came again and her voice cracked on something that was not his name.

  He finished inside her with his palm still flat against her abdomen and his body locked upright above hers. The heat of him poured into her. His hand stayed cold.

  Outside the door, someone sat down on the corridor floor. A servant who had brought fresh linens thirty minutes ago and now could not stand. Her tray rested on the stones beside her. She leaned against the wall and closed her eyes and did not know why her legs had stopped working.

  Neither of them heard it.

  EVELYNE

  Afterward, she curled against his side and felt the bruises forming on her hips. Her body was sore and used and she pressed closer because the soreness was proof. A draft came through the window he never closed. She did not move away from it.

  "That was different," she said. "Better."

  He stared at the ceiling.

  "Different how."

  "You wanted me. Actually wanted me. Not just allowed it." She traced a line down his chest with one finger. "I felt it."

  Nothing. The ceiling held his attention more than she did. His breathing had settled into something too even, too controlled. A man who had just fucked her twice against a wall and across a bed should not be breathing that slowly. She filed it away and did not know what to do with it.

  Something cold settled low in her belly. Distinct from the ache, deeper, in a place she had not felt before. She shifted against the sensation and it did not move with her. She dismissed it as soreness. Her body would ache for days and she looked forward to every reminder.

  She pulled her chemise over her head while he lay still. He did not watch her. She smoothed the fabric down and was reaching for the door when his voice came from behind her.

  "Tonight."

  She turned. He was still on his back, still looking at the ceiling. His hand rested on the mattress where her body had been.

  "Come to my room tonight. We have the whole day."

  Her chest tightened. Twice in one day. He had never asked for that. She pressed her lips together to keep the smile from showing.

  "I'll be here," she said.

  He did not respond. She slipped into the corridor before her face gave everything away.

  She thought about the last dispatch that reached the estate before her network went dark. The Flamebearer still on the road with her military escort. The Crown Prince's man still positioned at her side, the soldier who had been at Seraphina's shoulder since the day they left the capital. Seraphina's soldier. She filed it under useful and moved on.

  She walked back through the corridor. Someone had left a cup on the window ledge at the first turning. She did not know whose it was.

  The guard who had been slumped at Alaric's door was still there, conscious but gray in the face, his hands loose at his sides. She stepped past him without connecting his condition to her own exhaustion or to the servants who could not stand or to the kitchen staff who had stopped coming.

  She reached her rooms and sat on the edge of her bed. Her belly was warm where his hand had pressed. Cold underneath, in a place she could not reach. She reached for the blanket. Her hand missed the fabric twice before her vision narrowed to a point and went dark.