She had not meant to hear all of it.
That was the thing Lena told herself afterward, sitting in her room in the dark with her hands in her lap and the specific quality of silence that arrived after you had learned something that rearranged the entire architecture of what you thought you understood.
She had not meant to hear all of it.
She had been in the corridor outside the east sitting room at half past eleven on Thursday night because she could not sleep, which had been true every night since she arrived back at Crimson Ridge, because sleep required a quietness of mind that had been unavailable to her since the summit dining room and the boot and the hands and the look on Damon's face in the doorway.
Not the look of disgust.
She had been braced for disgust. She had known, in the im
