He hadn’t always dressed up for those evenings out. In fact, I remembered the last time he had dressed in the particular finery that he had worn again tonight. He’d been going not to his usual pub that time, but to a play put on by a visiting troupe. I hadn’t gone with him myself, but from the way that he’d combed his hair again and again in front of the mirror beforehand, I had found myself wondering…

I reeled in my seat with horror. “Do you think he’s having an affair with the Countess?”

“What?” Leander sat bolt upright for the first time since I’d met him. “My countess? How could he be having an affair with Carmilla?”

“They’ve met before,” I said dazedly, “by themselves. He didn’t tell me about it afterwards, and he tells me everything. And they worked together, didn’t they, to get us both out of the way? If they wanted more time alone together—”

“Surely not.” Leander was always pale, but he looked truly ill as he tugged at his cravat now. “They’re hardly likely to be in each other’s style, are they?”

“She is stunning,” I told him flatly, “and they’re around the same age. She told Sebastian Netherpool, at that ball the other week, that she isn’t interested in younger partners.”

“But—no! No.” He let out a sigh of pure relief, sagging against his cushioned seat. “Not that it’s any of my business whom she chooses to consort with…but they have generally been ladies.”

“Generally?” I repeated. “Or always?”

“We-e-ell…” His brows drew together. “She doesn’t chat about her affairs of the heart with me, thank darkness, and I try not to find out about them if I can possibly help it. However…” He sighed. “Now that I come to think of it, there may have been a gentleman or two in her past as well.”

“Drat.” My fingers started drumming on the seat beside me. “Do you think we should turn back?”

“What?” Leander let out a crack of laughter. “Do you actually want to walk in on the two of them doing…anything they might want privacy to do?”

“No!” I cringed at the image. “Not in a million years. But—”

“You think you need to protect him from her.” Leander’s words rang with unmistakable astonishment.

“Of course I need to protect him! He’s protected me all my life. That’s what families do.”

Leander’s dark eyes shuttered against me...

And I recalled, with a sudden, sweeping wash of cold, that his family had tossed him out of their lives the very moment that his inconvenient powers had developed. They had handed him over as a young child to a true beast of a necromancer and washed their hands of him thereafter. It was the Countess, not any relative by blood, who had helped him to finally win his freedom.