Chapter 6: The Door Between Us

I was a married woman, and I spent my wedding night sitting on my own bed in a nightgown, listening to the wind.

The door in the wall stayed shut, as agreed.

I drank the nightly tea, because the habit was too old to break in one evening.

It tasted as bitter as it always had.

Around ten the storm arrived.

The windows rattled in their frames, and at half past the lights went out all over the palace at once.

I sat in the dark with my knees drawn up and thought about what Garrick had said on the terrace.

Ask your wife what Wintermere is worth.

I had told Lucan the plain facts after supper, standing in the corridor.

Alpha Osric had taken Wintermere under his protection the week my parents died.

It had been a kindness, I had always been told.

Behind the wall, something heavy fell and broke.

I stopped breathing and listened.

Then I heard a sound I knew from the boathouse, low and tight, the sound of a man trying not to make a sound.

I was across the room before I had decided anything.

I lit a candle from the matchbox on the desk, took hold of the handle of the shut door and opened it.

Lucan was on the edge of his bed in the dark, in a loose white shirt, with a lamp in pieces on the floor.

One hand was pressed flat against his left side.

"Go back to your room," he said through his teeth.

"The wound."

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