For a moment—a long, aching moment that seemed to suspend itself outside the flow of ordinary time—I sat there, paralyzed by the horror of what I believed I had done. The weight of it bore down on me with a suffocating finality, a terrible certainty that I had spoken the words aloud, that the ugly, jagged truth had torn itself free from the fragile prison of my mind and now hung between us, irreversible, unerasable. I thought I had ruined everything. . My heart hammered against my ribs, wild and frenzied, as if it, too, sought some desperate means of escape. I could already imagine the narrowing of Lord Evander’s pale eyes, the tightening of his mouth into a grim line, the cold shift of his manner from politely indifferent to dangerously intent.
But then, very slowly, reality began to fil
