“I see.”
“You do not.”
“Nay,” he said, and let himself almost smile. “I do not.”
She backed toward the passage, cheeks pink. “Good night, Lord Ashcombe.”
“Thomas.”
She stopped.
He had not meant to say it.
The chamber seemed to listen.
Her face softened in a way that made him want to retreat behind every wall Ashcombe still possessed.
“Good night, Thomas.”
Then she was gone, leaving him with the fire, the accounts, and the unsettling knowledge that for the first time in weeks, he was not thinking of Michaelmas as the day Ashcombe ended.
He was thinking of tomorrow. Which was far more dangerous.
AMELIA
Amelia woke before dawn to the sound of a rooster screaming as if someone had stolen his inheritance and insulted his mother on the way out.
For one blessed, foolish second, she didn’t remember where she was.
Then the straw beneath her shoulder scratched through the linen of her shift, the air smelled of smoke, old stone, rushes, and someone’s damp woolen stockings instead of hotel soap and carpet cleaner, and everything came tumbling back into place.
Ashcombe.
Thomas.
Falling through time to the year 1265.
Her mom.
That last thought struck hard enough that Amelia sat up too quickly and cracked her head on a beam.
“Ow. Spinach fudge.”
Alyson snuffled in her sleep on the pallet nearby and rolled over, one small hand tucked beneath her cheek. Edith, curled beneath a blanket near the wall, snored loud enough to wake the dead, which Amelia decided she would never mention unless she wished to die young and unmourned.
For a moment she sat in the gray dark of the chamber, one hand pressed to the sore place on her head and the other fisted in the blanket.
Her mom would know by now that Amelia had vanished. Linda Quinn had raised one daughter alone for the past twenty-nine years. They always communicated. Amelia texted when she landed. She texted when Bree’s footballer wedding became every bit as ridiculous as predicted. She would have texted after the reception too, probably something about wet shoes, overconfident groomsmen, and how she couldn’t wait to come home.
Except she hadn’t texted.
She’d vanished in a storm, wearing a summer cocktail dress and heels that could barely survive gravel, much less a police search.
By now her mother would have called Bree. Her cousin, back from her honeymoon by now, would have cried, because Bree cried when coffee shops were out of oat milk and would likely dissolve over an actual missing cousin.
Someone would have checked the hotel, found Amelia’s suitcase with the neatly folded backup outfit, her phone charger, her hair products lined up like little soldiers on the bathroom sink, and the itinerary printed in triplicate because her mother teased her for being the only person alive who packed emergency copies of vacation plans.
Maybe they found her purse in the tower.