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Damian had knelt by Edward’s bed with the truth in his mouth. He had meant to say it. I did not survive Waterloo, Ned. I only came back from it. But Edward’s face when he had seen him in the doorway. That ruined, radiant relief. The fever-bright eyes filling with joy.

Damian had swallowed it and given his dying brother a half-uttered promise instead. And now Edward was buried in the churchyard. There was no one on this earth who knew what walked around Hartleigh wearing his brother’s title. And no one who ever could.

No one had made him laugh since the cellar.

No. That was not true.

She had.

The memory came up from earlier that night, unbidden and unwelcome. The drawing room and the card table drawn near the fire. His mother and Lady Clarke ranged against them. Ophelia seated at his left with her cards fanned and murder in her mild blue eyes. His mother had spent the third rubber narrating the entire parish. The rector’s chest cold. The Framptons’ new barouche. And in the midst of it she had trumped Lady Clarke’s winning ace. Her own partner’s ace.

There had been a silence.

And his bride, gathering the trick with her white hands, had murmured, for his ears alone, “Her ladyship shows great courage, my lord. She trumps friend and foe alike.”

The laugh had gone off in him like a mortar. He had heard it before he could stop it. A short, rusty bark of a sound. Both mamas had stared at him as though the sideboard had spoken. Ophelia had simply led the next card, all rose-petal innocence, while her eyes danced.

She had known every card out against them by the fifth trick. He would swear to it. She had played like a horse guard and looked like a pretty watercolor. Afterward, tallying the points, he could not keep his eyes where they belonged. The gold of her hair went molten where the curls came loose at her neck. When she leaned across to sweep the last trick, the pale slope of her bosom showed above the gown. He studied the fire irons like a green lieutenant caught staring at the colonel’s wife.

How dare he lust after his wife.

He growled, shifting in the cooling water.

Enough. It did him no good, that memory, and he kept returning to it anyway, worrying it the way the tongue finds a cracked tooth. He could not justify it. A man ought to be on cordial terms with his bride. Laughter between them would ease the household. His brother would have wished them friends. All perfectly sound. All perfectly false. The truth was simpler and worse. In that first hour playing at the card table on that first occasion, she had dealt to him. Looked at him across the baize, at the scarred side and all, added up his discards and abused his conservative leads and demanded he attend, sir, this is whist, not a funeral. For one hour Damian Archer had been a man playing cards with a pretty woman instead of a tragedy being managed by a household.

She was the only one. His mother’s eyes filled every time he entered a room. The servants handled him like a miracle. Stiles bathed the wallpaper. Ophelia had trumped his king and smiled at him like she’d do it again.

And that was exactly the trouble, because a wife in name was one thing. A wife he liked, a wife with gold hair and a gambler’s nerve and a mouth made for murmuring insubordination at card tables, a wife he lay awake wanting? That was another thing entirely, and it was not a thing an undead man could have. The wanting itself was an obscenity. Things from the grave did not get to sit up and reach for warm things.

Stiles approached with the sponge again, aiming for the left shoulder, and at the last instant his hand went light and quick and his eyes went to the roses, and something in Damian simply finished.

“That will do.”

“My lord, the⁠—”

“Leave the linens. Leave all of it.” He kept his voice level. It was not the man’s fault. It was not anyone’s fault, which somehow made it worse. “Good night, Stiles.”

A pause, exquisitely brief. “Very good, my lord.” The valet set the toweling within reach, banked his expression to nothing, and withdrew … with relief, Damian thought, though the man would have died before showing it. Mourning, perhaps. Grieving the late baron who had never needed to be handled like ordnance. The door clicked.

The door clicked. Even that. Even a valet leaving a bedchamber could put him back in the dark under the weight of other men’s bodies, listening for the boots on the cellar stairs.

Damian sat until the water went tepid, then stood, sheeting wet, and stepped out onto the toweling before the fire. The looking glass waited in the corner where it always waited. He made himself walk to it. This was discipline of a kind … know the ground, know the asset, know the damage. A commander inspects.

The glass showed him the commander’s report.

Above the collarbone, a man. Tanned, hard-used, in want of a haircut, the left cheek webbed with scarring that climbed from the jaw toward the temple. It was bad, but a soldier’s bad. England was full of faces like it this year. A woman could learn to pour tea across from that face.

Below the collarbone, the cellar’s work. The seams ran across his chest and rode up over the left shoulder like a mended sail, ridged, puckered, wrong-colored, and stitched. Stitched, the black thread grown into the healed flesh in neat, obscene ladders, as though some meticulous devil had signed him. He had never dared take a blade to them. Some nights he told himself it was caution. Other nights he admitted the real thought, the one that lived down in the gut of him: what if I come undone?

He leaned closer and looked at his eyes, because he could never help it. Blue, both of them, and not the same blue. The left was a shade paler, or flatter, or older; he could not fix the difference, only that there was one, that the two did not quite agree, like witnesses who had rehearsed separately. He suspected that it was not his eye, but one borrowed from another body.

He covered the right eye with his palm. Through the left, the candle flames wore faint halos and the room arrived a half-beat behind itself. Or it did not, and he imagined it. That was the refinement of the thing. He could not remember what color his eyes had been before Waterloo. He could not trust the man in the looking glass, and he could not trust the memory of the man who ought to be there, and between those two failures stood … this.

Even if he could have her. His breath fogged the mirror’s edge. Even if the grave’s law were suspended, even if he were entitled to a living wife in a living bed … Look at it. Be honest, Captain. What woman weds a face and then lives, year upon year, with what the coat conceals? What woman wakes at night with her hand on those seams and does not, eventually, begin staring at the wallpaper?

None. None, and it was idle cruelty to hold the question up to the light at all.

He turned from the looking glass, dried himself with rough care, and dressed for the end of the night. Loose trousers tied at the waist, and the banyan over all, dark blue wool, lapped closed and belted. Armor of a kind. He was reaching for the brandy when someone knocked at the door.