And in the stunned, half-furious moment in which he’d realized that, he’d also looked at her and seen someone else. Someone very different from the outstanding junior officer whose career he had shepherded because it was the responsibility of senior officers to develop the next generation of their replacements. Much as he’d respected her, deeply and genuinely as he’d admired her accomplishments, she’d always been just that: his junior officer. Someone to be nurtured and instructed and groomed and developed for higher command. Possibly even someone who would surpass all his own achievements… someday.

But that evening in the library, he’d suddenly realized “someday” had come. She’d still technically been his junior—in Manticoran service, at least; her rank in the Grayson Navy had been another matter entirely—but that comfortable sense that there would always be more for him to teach her, more for her to learn from him, had been demolished and he’d seen her as his equal.

And that had killed her.

His jaw muscles ridged and the ice-blue eyes reflected in the clear armorplast burned as he made himself face the truth at last. It was hardly the time or place for it, but he seemed to have made a habit out of picking the wrong times and places to realize things about Honor Harrington, hadn’t he? And conveniently timed or not, it was true; it had killed her.

He still didn’t know what he’d done, how he’d given himself away, but she’d always had that uncanny ability to see inside people’s heads. He must have done something to give her a peek inside his at the moment all the comfortable professional roles and masks and modes of relationship came unglued for him. It shouldn’t have happened. They were both Queen’s officers. That should have been all they were to one another, however his perception of her abilities and talents and readiness for high command had changed. But his own awareness had ambushed him, and in that moment of recognition, he’d recognized something else, as well, and seen her not simply as an officer, and his equal, but as a dangerously attractive woman.

And she’d seen it, or guessed it, or felt it somehow. And because she had, she’d gone back on active duty early, which was why her squadron had been sent to Adler, which was how the Peeps had captured her… and the only way they could have killed her.

A fresh spasm of white-hot fury went through his misery, and his cursed memory replayed that scene, as well. The falling body, the jerking rope, the creak and sway—

He thrust the image away, but he couldn’t push away the self-knowledge he had finally accepted as he stood there in the boat bay gallery, waiting. His awareness of it might have come suddenly, but it shouldn’t have. He should have known the way his feelings for her had grown and changed and developed. But it had all taken place so gradually, so far beneath the surface of his thoughts, that he hadn’t even guessed it was happening. Or perhaps, if he were totally honest, he’d guessed it all along and suppressed the knowledge as his duty required. But he knew now, and she was dead, and there was no point in lying to himself about it any longer.