Cutting him off, the Countess clapped her hands sharply together to catch the attention of the ballroom. Even the drifting, reedy music in the background stopped at that sound, and the dancers went still. “Now, then!” she announced into the sudden silence. “There’s no point in waiting any longer for our evening’s entertainment, is there? As we all know, Sebastian Netherpool has made the mistake of challenging Leander Fabian to a duel to reclaim the minions that once belonged to him. All stand witness!”

The dance floor swiftly cleared, with onlookers grouping in a wide, tightly-packed circle around it as murmurs of anticipation swirled through the room. Even the undead musicians, visible at last, scuttled hastily away, carrying their long wood-and-bone instruments to safety.

Leander flicked a speck of invisible dust from the velvet cuff of his left coat sleeve and strolled forward to take his place on the far side of the dance floor without even bothering to glance at his opponent along the way.

“So smug,” Netherpool growled. “So damnably smug.”

He wasn’t wrong about that…but the glint in his bloodshot eyes, as he followed, held more than a hint of worrying satisfaction.

From what I’d gathered, Leander had already proven himself to be by far the stronger necromancer. Therefore, the only reason Netherpool could already feel so confident about the battle’s likely outcome would be the very reason Leander had claimed that he needed me to accompany him tonight: Netherpool planned to cheat.

Of course he did.

But of course, that wasn’t the real reason for Leander’s invitation after all. As I watched him lounge casually in place on the dance floor with his eyelids half-lowered and his chin tilted in an attitude of impressively haughty disdain, I caught the covert side-glance that he sent me…and the missing pieces of the puzzle finally clicked together like the scattered elements of a brand-new invention snapping into a new and unexpectedly appalling shape.

“We don’t reveal our emotions in public,” the Countess had told me. No doubt she had given Leander the same instruction when she’d gifted him with all of her other helpful advice. She was, after all, the only person in his life who had ever stood up for him before—and even she hadn’t been allowed to do so directly.

But with that damnably smug façade as my only source of information until now, how could I have imagined the real reason behind my invitation—or just how shocked he must have been when I’d shown up, all those weeks ago, to protect him from our local townsfolk and their torches?

…Or how horrified, for that matter?