As soon as I approached the bars, however, I drew my reaching hand back, startled. He was still cast in shadow, the lines of his face blurred like pencil beneath my smudging thumb. Yet the orange glow of the corridor’s lamp showed that he was not a liar in at least one respect. He was handsome. A quirked smile on his lips said that he knew I had seen it. Dark eyes that tipped up at the corners. A smooth sweep of his cheek. Mouth twisted with mirth. He was taller than me, though not greatly, and narrower than I had expected. It was easy to forget he was behind bars. It was easy to believe he could tempt a married woman into bed. Any woman.

I grabbed the coat. “Happy with yourself?”

“Always.”

I shrugged into the coat. It was only a little too big, and warm. It was a color Middlings were allowed to wear, cobalt blue. If the blue were any brighter, only a High Kith could wear it.

“You smell like bread and sweat. And something green,” he said musingly. “Like crushed grass. What have you been up to?”

I didn’t want to think about clinging to the flowering indi vine while the soldier fell. I buttoned the coat. A fine perfume lingered in its fabric. “Well, you smell like a woman.”

“Hardly surprising.”

I tried to imagine the woman he had been caught with. Frail features. Long auburn hair. Exquisitely pretty. Yes, he would enjoy someone like that. I thumbed the coat’s last button into its hole.

“Ah, better,” he said.

I lifted my head, shaking hair out of my eyes. “What is?”

“My view of you.”

I looked at him through the murk of the prison corridor. He smiled halfway. He said, “You are almost exactly as I believed.”

“Almost?”

“I’ll tell you how sometime.”

“Why not now?”

“You are too far away. This is something better whispered.”

“It is a good thing,” I said, “that you are behind bars.”

He laughed. “You look so serious.”

I pulled away from the bars and out of the corridor’s wan lamplight.

“I like it,” he said.

I could smell the scent of his skin on the coat beneath the woman’s perfume. I had seen the flash of his bare arms in the darkness. “You must be cold,” I said. “I’m glad.”

“Are you smiling when you say this?”

It was as if nothing I could say would bother him, as if he were coated with glass. Everything would slide right off him. I realized, with an unhappy spike in my belly, that I had wanted him to have been as arrested by my face as I was by his.

I had wanted to keep staring.