His chest was heaving. The wound in his shoulder had opened fully now, blood soaking through the linen in a spreading stain that was almost black in the dying firelight. He could feel the silver fragments that Isadora had missed — the deep ones, the ones she could not reach — burning through the muscle with each heartbeat, and the pain was extraordinary, and he did not care.
Elenora stood up.
She moved around the desk with that fluid, smoke-like grace that was so wrong on a woman who should have been mortal, who should have been ordinary, who should have been safe in a village thirty miles north with flour on her apron and a gap-toothed boy at her knee.
"You never loved me," she said. "Did you."
It was not a question.
