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The step came.

“Again.”

Another.

The stair-rail under her palm.

Halfway up his knees gave once. Luc caught him before she could. Damian made an angry sound deep in his throat, less pain than humiliation.

It was the most reassuring sound she had heard all night.

He went under again the moment they laid him in his own bed, as if the mattress had been the only permission he was waiting for.

She drew the sheet to his waist and left the new seam open to the air, as Luc advised. The old work she left uncovered too.

She did not let herself stand there staring at the rise and fall of him for more than a moment.

A short moment.

Two.

Her babe gave the faintest flutter low in her belly, gone almost before she had decided she felt it. She put her hand there anyway and then took it away.

There would be time.

There had not been any time left, an hour or so ago.

“Go down,” she told Luc. “There is cold meat in the larder, and beer. Eat something. Then sleep where you can hear him.” A tilt of her head toward the floor, and the faint, tireless drone beneath it. “And if he works loose, hit him with something.”

“With pleasure, milady.”

It was the nearest thing to feeling he had shown all night.

“Luc?”

He stopped at the door. She had a dozen questions and no strength to spend on any of them, so she settled for the only thing that mattered.

“Thank you.”

He glanced at the bed, at the big quiet shape in it.

“He should not be,” he said. “He is.”

He shrugged, as though that settled it, and went out, and shut the door softly.

The room held. The lamp made a gold country of the coverlet and of the wrecked geography she was no longer going to pretend she had not been shown. She could still feel the bloody floor in her knees. She could still smell iron and waxed thread and the sweetish ghost of camphor that had followed them up from a different sickroom, months ago, as if Edward’s death and this near-miss had agreed to share a house.

Ophelia drew the chair to the bedside.

Then she took a little pack from her pocket. A spare set that lived on her person the way other women carried a cross. She dealt them on the coverlet in the morning light. One hand to herself. One face-down by her husband’s open hand, close enough that if he woke and reached he would find them without hunting.

She squared his edges with one fingertip.

Habit, she told herself. Tenderness was not something she would admit to a table.

She had knelt in blood tonight and lied to no one and had never in her life been less decorative. Every certainty she had brought into this house, fallen, one after another, all summer long.

What remained was a breathing man who had already died once and declined to make a habit of it. His cards, dealt and waiting by his fingers.