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“I know this.”

He gets his hand between us and his thumb where it does the most damage, and I go off like a struck bell, crown to heels, one long note with no edge on it, my whole body ringing and the noise coming out of me, and he stays in it with me until it turns me inside out twice.

Then he breaks too. A word I don’t know. He goes deep and stops, shaking, his forehead down on my throat and his shoulders under my hands and his cock pulsing in me, and I hold on to a cold man on a filthy table and feel him give me everything he has.

Afterward I lie on the table with his arm across my ribs and a dead woman’s dress in a heap on the floor beside me, in the only room in Morlac that doesn’t lie about sound, and I say nothing at all for nine minutes.

I know it is nine because I count it off in my head at the speed I count a cooling pour, and I have nothing else to do with myself. The want hasn’t gone. I am lying on a man I have just had and I want him again, and that is half of why I will have to leave.

He notices. Of course he notices.

“You have stopped talking,” he says.

“Mm.”

“Are you hurt?”

“No.” I am close to crying, which is ridiculous. “This is the first quiet I’ve been able to stand since the spring. I’d like to stay in it a while.”

His hand moves in my hair. Once.

“Then stay,” he says.

I am so nearly asleep that I hear it as part of the room.

“What?”

“Stay.” His voice has gone rough.

“I am.”

“Not here. With me. Come with me tonight, before the hall shuts. I have a house and it is too quiet. You would fill it, and I would let you fill it. You would not have to stand on the block in the morning.”

And there it is.

A good thing, offered to me in the dark by a man with no face, hours before the worst morning of my life. I am glad for exactly one breath. Then I am frightened, because I know what it costs.

If I walk out of Morlac with him tonight there is no sale. No sale, no lot share, no physicians riding out to the foundry, and Corentin dead in that chair by winter.

I want to go with him so badly I have already got one foot on the floor. I’m ashamed of that, and it does not move my foot back.

There is a second reason, and it is the one I would never say out loud. Good things go bad when I keep them. I have watched it happen to every good thing I have ever been given, and the last one is sitting in a chair with a blanket over his knees while a physician writes down that he does not know what is wrong.

I tell him neither.

“Ask me at sunrise,” I say.

He is quiet for a while.

“All right.”

I wait for him to sleep, and he does, eventually, which surprises me, and he does it like a wall. No movement at all.

The mask is still on him. Gold, fine as lace, and under it a mouth I have had on every part of me and a face I have not seen once.

I get my fingers to the edge of it. The gilt is cold. One lift and I would know what he looks like.

I want to. I want to so much my hand is shaking on the edge of it. And I am frightened of what comes after, because if I see his face this stops being one night and starts being a man, and I cannot afford a man. I can afford one night. I take my hand back.