She had not been able to sleep.
This was not unusual — Gorgina Wadee had not slept with any consistency since the Winter Ball, had not slept deeply since before that, had conducted the better part of her ducal responsibilities on the back of three or four hours of shallow, unsatisfying rest that left her sharp in the head and somewhere else entirely in the chest.
But tonight was different.
She could not have named what had pulled her out of bed and into the corridor at this hour with a lamp in one hand. Some sound, perhaps — or not a sound but the absence of one, some disruption in the household's nighttime quiet that her sleeping mind had registered before her waking mind could catch up.
She was almost at her own study when she heard it.
Not loud. That was what stopped her — not a crash, not a shout, but a specific and controlled quality of struggle, the kind that happens between people who are trying very hard not to be heard, which was somehow more alarming than noise.
She was moving before the thought was fully formed.
The cedar bedroom door opened.
Light from her lamp filled the room.
Three men. One down. One with blood across his face. One holding Gerffron from behind with a forearm across his throat while the third raised a blade.
Gorgina Wadee had not become the Duke of Zenos by being the kind of woman who stood in doorways.
She crossed the room in four steps.
The third man turned at the sound of her entrance, which was the error that cost him. She was not a large woman, and she was not carrying a sword — only the lamp — but she had been trained in the particular principle that the most effective thing a blade can encounter is not another blade but someone who moves without hesitation, and she moved without hesitation.
The lamp connected with the third man's temple with enough force to extinguish both the flame and his immediate consciousness.
The man holding Gerffron made a calculation.
He looked at the Duke of Zenos standing in the lamp-dark room with broken ceramic in her hand and the particular expression on her face of someone who has just decided that mercy is a resource to be allocated elsewhere.
He released Gerffron.
He went out the window considerably faster than he had come in.
Gerffron, released from the hold, did not fall gracefully. He went sideways, caught himself on the bedpost with the hand that was not holding the stolen knife, and stayed there, breathing.
Gorgina looked at the two men on the floor. She looked at the open window. She looked at Gerffron.
She crossed to him in three steps and took the knife from his hand — not forcefully, only steadily, the way you take something from someone whose grip has gone unreliable — and set it on the nightstand.
"Sit down," she said.
He sat on the edge of the bed.
She called for the guards.
While they came and while the room filled with the controlled chaos of aftermath — the unconscious men removed, the window secured, Sera appearing in the doorway with wide eyes that she quickly disciplined back to their usual composure — Gorgina stood beside the bed and did not move away.
She was not touching him.
But she was not moving away.
Gerffron sat on the edge of the bed with his cut forearm pressed against his chest and his head bowed and breathed, and for the first time in fourteen months something outside the east tower had broken through the careful distance he had maintained between himself and the world and lodged itself somewhere he could not immediately identify.
He was too fevered and too exhausted to examine it.
He simply sat.
And Gorgina did not move away.