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“Have your gears wound themselves back up again, my dear?” I murmured against her mouth.

“Stop talking in metaphors.”

I caught her beneath the thighs and lifted her.

Cora gasped, then her legs locked around my waist and her arms went around my neck. I carried her away from the door, kissing the soft line of her jaw and the pulse beating beneath it. Her scent filled every breath I took. Bitter orange and dark fig and pepper, and beneath all of it the warm iron song of her blood.

When I reached the bed, I lowered her onto the mattress and followed her down. She caught my shirt and pulled, and her fingers moved over the planes of my chest and the old ink there. I freed myself from my trousers and lifted the skirt of her dress. The moment I was inside her, nothing else existed.

There was only her. Everything was her.

I kissed her again and again, recalling which places made her breath catch and which made her fingers tighten against my shoulders. Afterward, Cora lay curled against my chest while I traced the curve of her hip. Beyond the balcony doors, the tide had begun to turn.

“Caspien’s nameday ball is a week away. That gives me until then to figure this out.”

She turned her head to look at me. “Figure what out?”

“Our future.”

Cora was quiet for a while. Then she said, “I’m worried. It feels reckless to be planning a future when we have so much to do.”

“It would be reckless not to plan, darling,” I reassured her. “For the next six days, we need to maintain a respectable distance from one another in public.” I brushed her hair back from her temple. “But between now and then, I will be moving chess pieces so that our future won’t feel so fraught.”

Her pulse stumbled beneath my fingers.

“You would do that?”

“Absolutely.” I pressed my mouth to her shoulder, leaving a cold kiss against her skin. “Know that every second I am away from you, I will be thinking of you. Of this. And of everything I intend to do when those six days are over.”

“If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you sounded like Captain Cortez.”

I grinned, then leaned closer to her ear. “That’s because I am Captain Cortez.”

“You?” she gasped.

I nodded.

Cora spent a full minute grasping for words, which I greatly enjoyed watching, then she smacked my shoulder. “There isn’t a single gentlemanly thing about you. It’s all an act. I knew it.”

Truthfully, I was enjoying the way she was looking at me as she continued to chastise me for keeping this secret from her. “You haven’t even begun to see the extent of my ungentlemanly side.”

With a longing moan, Cora extricated herself from my arms and slid off the bed. “I should draw the wards in Adrien’s room before you do something that convinces me to stay.”

I let out a sigh and tucked my hands behind the back of my head. “The torment of watching you leave my bed might just kill me.”

She paused at the door, one hand on the frame, and looked back at me over her shoulder with her hair loose and her laces uneven. “Then perhaps Captain Cortez should come to my room tonight.”

“You’d have to ward your room against pirates to keep him out.”

Before my security meeting with Rochefort, I found my way out of the castle and through the gates of La Roseraie.

The morning had arrived gray and hot, and the garden was quiet except for the water moving through the channels and the low hum of insects. White roses climbed the stone arch behind the angel who guarded Emmaline’s tomb, heavy with drops of dew.

I sat on the bench across from her and ran both hands through my hair. At first, I just stared at the ground, letting one thought chase another around, until I finally let out a heavy breath.

“I love someone else,” I said. “I don’t know whether or not that betrays your memory.” I looked at her name carved into the stone. “She is not you. She is nothing like you. But if you were here, I think you’d fall in love with her too.”

A seagull cried out in the distance.