The affair settled into a rhythm that would have looked like sense if anyone had written it down.

When Derek could be stolen—an empty office, a locked gallery, the hour after midnight in his rooms—Stiles took him and came back to her own bed marked and satisfied. When he buried himself in work for days and would not look at her in council, she did not starve. A guard who owed her a silence. A visiting envoy who thought he was the one doing the seducing. Once, in a linen closet, a boy who carried towels and left walking like a man.