POV: Dorian
He had sent four blankets.
Dorian realized this approximately twenty minutes after he did it, when the heat of the moment had passed and his brain had caught up with his hands. He had walked out of her room, gone straight to Petra, and said she needs blankets with an urgency that made absolutely no sense given that it was mildly cold at best and she was a stranger he had known for eleven minutes.
Petra had looked at him with that expression she had — the one that said she was laughing on the inside and had far too much self-control to do it on the outside.
He had gone back to his study. He had not thought about it again.
He had thought about it constantly.
The food on his desk had gone cold. He ate it anyway, standing up, reading a report he had already read twice. This was normal. This was his life and he had built it carefully and it worked. Alone, controlled, predictable. No soft things. No warm things. Nothing that could be taken away.
The door opened.
He did not look up. "I did not say come in."
"You never do," Petra said pleasantly, and came in anyway.
This was also normal. Petra had worked for him for eleven years and in that time had developed a complete immunity to his moods that he found both useful and deeply irritating. She collected the cold plates from his desk, stacked them with the quiet efficiency of someone who had done this ten thousand times, and then — instead of leaving — stood there.
He looked up.
"What."
"She is not afraid of you," Petra said.
"I do not care."
"You sent her four blankets."
"It is cold."
"It is fifty-four degrees." Petra tilted her head. "Every other woman we brought here cried within the first hour. The second one cried before she even reached her room. The third one took one look at the gate and asked to go home immediately."
"Your point."
"My point is that this girl got attacked on the road tonight, arrived with a torn coat she did not mention, found her bag had been searched and said nothing about that either, looked you directly in your one visible eye without blinking, and then asked for a blanket." Petra paused. "She is either the bravest person I have ever met or she has been through enough difficult things that you genuinely do not frighten her."
Dorian set down his report.
"She is probably too simple to understand the danger," he said.
Petra looked at him the way she sometimes looked at Emmett when the boy said something that sounded clever but was actually wrong. Patient. A little sad.
"She is probably too smart to pretend to be frightened when she is not," Petra said. "There is a difference. You should learn it."
"Petra."
"Yes."
"Leave."
She picked up the plates. She walked to the door. And then — because she was Petra and had never once in eleven years done only what she was told — she set something on the corner of his desk on her way out.
A second cup of tea. Filled. Still steaming.
The door closed behind her.
Dorian stared at the cup.
He did not drink it. It was not his cup, it was not his tea, he had not asked for it and he did not want it. He went back to his report. He read the same paragraph four times and retained none of it.
He looked at the cup again.
It was a ridiculous thing to be distracted by. A cup of tea. He ran a territory. He commanded men who had fought in real wars. He had sat across a table from Countess Isolde Fenwick herself — the most dangerous woman in the empire — and kept his face completely still while she smiled at him like a knife smiling. He was not a man who got distracted by cups of tea.
He pulled Corvin's report from under the stack of papers.
The scar on Verity's palm. He had noted it on the staircase and spent the last hour trying to convince himself he had imagined it. But he had not imagined it. He had seen that mark before — in the Harwick bloodline records, a text so old and rare he had only ever found one copy. The mark was called the Seal of the First House. It appeared on the left palm of the true blood heir. Not just any Harwick. The primary heir. The one who carried the full inheritance — lands, title, and something else. Something the book had described in terms he had not fully understood at the time.
The Seal carries authority over all contested Harwick claims. No court in the empire can override it.
He sat back slowly.
Isolde knew. That was why she had sent men to the road tonight. Not to stop a marriage. Not to protect some financial scheme. She needed Verity dead before anyone who understood what that mark meant could look at it.
He reached for the cup of tea without thinking. Drank it.
Then he went still.
Because outside his study door, very quietly, he heard something that should not be happening at this hour.
Footsteps. Small. Careful.
Heading toward the east wing.