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He did not remember the door of his chamber. Or the passage. Or deciding anything at all. He was simply here, halfway along the gallery in the flashing dark. A man had to give himself some account of his own movements. He gave himself a rational one … he was making his rounds. He had barred the great doors himself at eleven. He had tried the window latches on the principal floor. Walked the terrace door. Seen the lamps out. A house must be guarded. He would walk the corridor, test every latch, and go back to bed.

Lightning took the gallery. Six generations of Archers sprang out of their frames and glared down at him. Hard-mouthed men in armor and lace and regimentals. Every one of them born, married, and buried in the ordinary honest way. Then they disappeared back into the dark.

His feet carried him past the stair-head. Past the linen closet. Past his mother’s door, where no light showed. Past Lady Clarke’s. His feet had no interest in latches. His feet had known where they were going before he left his room. They brought him to a stop at last where they had always been going, at the last door in the hall. He stood in front of it in the dark with his heart beating too hard and understood himself too late.

Ophelia’s door. The one place in the house where an undead, unholy creature had no right to stand.

But Ophelia’s company was the only place the cellar did not follow him. That was the raw truth. The reason his feet had committed mutiny. He had refused to examine it, the way a man refuses to count his ammunition when he knows the count will make him lose his nerve. Near her, the memories went silent.

He should go back.

Shirt only. Throat open like a drunkard. Bare feet on her threshold past midnight, and her mother asleep not thirty feet down the passage. There was no version of this that his honor survived.

He did not remember knocking. Perhaps he had not. Perhaps he had, and the sound was so small the storm was meant to take it. One knuckle. Once. A coward’s knock that hoped to go unanswered.

The door opened.

She was awake.

She stood in the gap with her hand on the edge of the door and a shawl caught round her shoulders over her nightgown. Her hair was out of its pins, a loosened plait hung over her shoulder, heavy and dark-gold in the almost-dark, coming undone at the end as if she had been worrying it with her fingers.

Behind her the fire was banked to a red glow. Lightning lit the room, revealing its corners. On the table by the window he saw patience laid out half-played, the neat ranks of it left mid-battle.

So she had her drills too.

Neither of them spoke. Thunder went over the roof like a battery of cannon crossing a bridge.

“The storm,” she said, as if he had asked her a question. Her voice was low. Even. “I could not sleep for the storm.”

It was not the storm. He knew that the way he knew the click of a misfire. A woman frightened of thunder did not open her door to a large man standing silent in the dark. She had not so much as blinked at the last peal. Her eyes were not on the weather at all. They were on him. On the open collar. On his bare feet. On his face.

He should have said something in response.

Forgive me … I heard … I thought … Good night. Anything with a bow attached to it. Anything that let them both pretend this encounter had only been the house settling, or the storm finding a shutter, or a husband who had mistaken one door for another. A sentence she could have taken back to the baize and laid among the other small night noises. A sentence that would have cost him nothing but exhaled sentences.

He said nothing.

He thought of the dark corridor, of his own cold room, of … the jars.

He never knew, afterward, which of them moved.

Her mouth was soft. Shockingly warm. That was what undid him. The warmth. The simple living heat of her, after weeks of stone in his memory and horrors on his mind.

The drawing-room kiss had begun cool. This was not that. She had been sitting up with a banked fire and a half-played patience, and her mouth was the temperature of a furnace. Heat, volatile as spilled blood, offered to a man who had been pretending he no longer ran at that temperature.

She moaned against his lips. Not protest. Nothing like protest. Nay, it was passion. Her fist closed in the front of his shirt and pulled.

He came through the door like a wall falling over.

His palm found the door behind him and pressed it shut. The latch went home under the thunder. He heard it seat. He felt it through the wood and through the bones of his hand. That was the last sensible thought he had.

She kissed him as she did everything else. Properly at first. Then not properly at all.

A correct press. Almost chaste. The courtesy a wife might owe a husband who had appeared at her door in a storm. Then the courtesy ended. Then she kissed him as if she had counted the pot and found it worth the stake. Her arms came up round his neck. The shawl slid from her shoulders and was gone in a flutter. Nothing under his hands but robe and nightrail, and the warmth of her emanating through it. His hand found the long line of her back, then the curve of her waist.

She was so small against him, and so entirely unafraid of his size, that it broke something loose in his chest.

He had been a large man before France and he was a large man still. Sixteen stone carried down a cellar stair by both the madman and his servant, he would hazard. Coats cut for broad shoulders. She came up against all of that as if it were only a door she had already decided to open. No flinch for the height, no care for the ruined cheek above her.