Chapter 2: The Midnight Intruder
The embers in the hearth had collapsed into a mosaic of crimson and ash, whispering heat into the cavernous room. Leonid turned a page of his volume on maritime law, the dry sound like the flutter of a moth’s wing. The rain had softened to a persistent sigh against the glass.
A knock, softer than the rain.
He did not look up. “Enter.”
The door opened, not with the respectful hesitation of a servant, but with the swift, silent slide of someone who expected no welcome. A draft snaked in, making the candle flames bend and twist.
She stood there, a slight figure swallowed by a large woolen blanket she had dragged from her own bed. Her black hair, still damp from Rosé’s ministrations, hung in straggling ribbons, dripping onto the obsidian floor. The firelight caught the edges of her, the hollow of her throat, the sharp point of a bare shoulder.
Leonid finished his paragraph. He placed a silk marker between the pages and closed the book with a precise snap. “Your room is down the hall, Jennie.”
“I know where my room is.” Her voice was hoarse. She took a step in, the blanket trailing behind her like a shed skin. “It’s full of shadows. They’re… loud.”
“Shadows are not audible.”
“Mine are.” She was beside the bed now, looking down at him where he sat in a high-backed chair. The blanket slipped, revealing the simple linen shift she wore beneath. The memory of it, transparent and clinging in the bathwater, flashed unbidden in his mind. He extinguished it. “I can’t sleep there.”
“Then read. Count sheep. Bother Rosé.”
“Rosé is asleep. She sleeps like a stone. It’s boring.” Her eyes, reflecting the dying fire, were wide and unblinking. “Your room is quieter.”
“It was.” He leaned his head back against the chair, regarding her. The chill from her body reached him, a subtle wave of night-air and damp. “You are dripping on the floor.”
She ignored this, her gaze traveling over the stark planes of his bedchamber—the silver-inlaid chest, the stand holding his fencing rapier, the dark canopy of the bed itself. With a movement devoid of grace or ceremony, she dropped the blanket in a heap at the foot of the massive bed. Before he could form another sentence of dismissal, she had crawled onto the mattress, her cold, narrow feet slipping beneath the heavy brocade coverlet at the opposite side.
A sharp, involuntary tension corded his shoulders. “Get off my bed.”
“It’s bigger. And warmer.” She burrowed down, pulling the covers up to her chin, her wet hair staining the linen pillowcase a darker grey. She turned onto her side, facing him. In the gloom, she looked younger, a creature of nest and den. “You can keep reading. I won’t make a sound.”
“Your presence is a sound, Jennie.” He stood, his shadow suddenly immense and wavering on the wall behind him. He walked to the fireplace, taking up the iron poker to stir the embers. A handful of sparks raced up the flue. “You have the entire manor at your disposal. The library. The winter gallery. Why must it always be here?”
Her answer was muffled by the coverlet. “You’re here.”
He replaced the poker, the clang of iron on stone too loud in the quiet. When he turned, she had shifted. Her cold feet, seeking warmth, had found his side of the bed. They were now pressed against the space where he had been sitting, a blatant invasion. He could almost feel the chill of them through the layers.
“My patience is not infinite,” he said, his voice lower now, the beautiful instrument tuned to a warning note.
“Yes, it is.” She dared a small, knowing smile. “You didn’t make Rosé drag me from your bath. You just let me sit there. Until you got tired of looking.”
He was across the room in a few strides. He did not touch her. He stood over the bed, the candlelight carving the severe lines of his face into something resembling one of the stone gargoyles on the roof. “You mistake forbearance for permission. They are not the same thing.”
She didn’t flinch. She held his gaze, the animal in her recognizing a predator’s stillness. Her hand emerged from the covers, fingers brushing the empty space beside her. “You’re not sleeping either. The chair will hurt your neck. Rosé says you get headaches.”
“Rosé talks too much about things that do not concern her.”
“Everything here concerns me,” Jennie said simply, as if stating a law of nature. Her fingers plucked at the threads of the coverlet. “You were thinking about the bath.”
He went very still. “I was thinking about maritime law.”
“Liar.” She breathed the word into the fabric, a secret just for him. “You were thinking about how I looked. All wet. You were thinking it was… unpleasant.”
He had been. The memory was a physical imprint: the press of her knees against his hips under the water, the shocking warmth of her skin through the soaked shift, the defiance in her eyes that dared him to react. It had been unpleasant. It had been a chaotic, grubby disruption of his peace. He wanted to say this. The words felt like ash.
Instead, he said, “You smell like lye soap now. Not the stables. It is an improvement.”
Her smile widened, a flash of white in the dim. She took it as a victory. She always took everything as either a victory or a war, with no territory in between. She shifted again, worming her way deeper into the bed, fully claiming the center. “See? Civilized. Now come to bed. I’m cold, and you’re blocking the fire.”
He stared at her. The rain whispered. A log cracked, spitting a final jet of flame. The tension in the room was a thin wire, humming. He could call for two footmen to remove her. He could go to the guest wing himself. He could stand here until dawn.
With a slow exhalation that seemed to release the stiffness from his very bones, he blew out the candle on the bedside table. The room sank into the deep, pulsing gloom of firelight. He did not disrobe. He simply lay down on top of the coverlet, on the very edge of the wide bed, his back to her, staring at the wall where the shadows danced thickest.
The silence stretched, taut and fragile.
Then he felt it. The tentative, icy touch of her toes against his calf, through his breeches. He stiffened.
“Just warming up,” she whispered, her voice sleepy and sly.
He did not acknowledge it. He did not pull away. He lay there, rigid, listening to the soft, eventual rhythm of her breath as it evened out into sleep, feeling the slow seep of her coldness into his skin, a brand he could not, and would not, scrubbed away.