He's in the doorway. Unhurried, fully dressed, looking at the notebook in my hands and then at me. He takes in the coat, the shoes still in my hand, the window.
"Miss Merris," he says.
Clara's name. After everything. The mockery of it lands exactly as he intends it to.
"My lord," I say, from somewhere. "I couldn't sleep."
"Of course." He steps into the room. "The dead drop. Day two, wasn't it." His eyes go to the window, the angle, the loose stone just visible in the moonlight. "You've been checking it every morning. Best sightline in the manor for that section of wall." A pause. "The signal's been blank for eight days."
The floor goes out from under the cover.
Not all at once—a crack, running from the window to my feet—and I stand still and breathe and feel it spread and think:there it is. There it is, finally.
"I don't know what?—"
"You do." He crosses the room and stops close—close enough that the cold of him reaches me and the heat lunges toward it, thirty-five days of court magic and whatever the last six hours have done all layered on top of each other. My nipples tightenagainst the inside of my bodice. I hold very still. "Whoever you're running has gone quiet. That worries you." His eyes don't move from my face. "You burned Lena Riley's last message two paragraphs in because you already knew what the third paragraph said."
Lena.
He said her name like it's a file he keeps on a shelf. Like she is already catalogued and accounted for. Some part of my mind—the professional part, the part that has been losing ground for thirty-five days—files this undercritical breachand tries to send up a flare, and the rest of me is focused on the specific problem of his cold and my heat and the eight days of nothing in the stone outside the window.
"I'm afraid I don't know?—"
"I know," he says, with the patience of someone who has been waiting for a specific moment and recognises it when it arrives. "I don't suppose you do."
He steps closer, and the heat spikes—a full surge cresting, my whole body pitching toward him before my training catches it—and he sees it, the way he sees everything, and I am suddenly acutely aware of the state I am in. Soaked underthings, aching clit, nipples so sensitive I had to put my coat on to walk down the hall, and the head of his cock was inside me forty minutes ago and Ileft, and my body has been informing me of this error at high volume ever since.
I am in significant difficulty. A trained professional would have an assessment. What I have is: significant difficulty.
"The heat's breaking tonight," he says. "Your body knows where to be."
"I'm fine."
"You're standing at a window at half past one with shoes in your hand and a notebook you stopped writing in because yourhands aren't steady." He looks at my hands. He is correct about the hands. "You know what you need, Miss Merris."
"Don't," I say.
"Don't what?"
I hate that question. I have hated it every time and I hate it more now because my body is already answering it, has been answering it since he walked in, and the professional face is running on fumes and we both know it. The heat is a roar underneath everything—all of it aimed at him—and he is three feet away and his cold is reaching me and I left his rooms forty minutes ago and I have already been thinking about going back. Not as a decision. As an inevitability my body accepted while my mind was still negotiating.
This is the worst possible intelligence analysis I have ever had to conduct.
He reaches out and takes my notebook. Sets it on the sill. Then he turns back and looks at me with that expression—patient and total and entirely certain of the outcome—and says: "Hands and knees."
The words land in my spine before my mind catches them.
"No," I say.
"Hands and knees, Miss Merris." His voice is completely calm. "Or I take what I know about Lena Riley and make a decision about it tonight without your input."
The cold of the room. The blank stone on the wall outside. Eight days.
I consider my options. The professional part of me would like to point out that these are not good options. The professional part of me has been losing votes in this coalition for thirty-five days and tonight the margin is not in its favour.
I go down.
My knees hit the flagstone, my hands flat on the cold floor, and the heat doesn't care at all about the humiliation of it—theheat thinks this is exactly right, the heat isrelieved, the heat has been trying to get me here since the second lesson and is currently experiencing something adjacent to vindication. I hate the heat. I hate it with the specific focused hatred of someone who has been overruled by their own body for over a month and has just run out of appeals.