“This was the best leave of my life.” He cut her off. “And you can’t lose me. You’re stuck with me for good. Your last name is now the same as mine. You are wearing my grandmother’s ring. I’m well and truly yours.”

Sophie closed her eyes and listened to the steady beat of his heart beneath her ear.

“The answer to your question is yes,” he said presently. “You are unnatural.” His lips found the hollow behind her ear. “Unnaturally brilliant, unnaturally beautiful.” His hand slid under the sheet over her hip. “And most of all,” he whispered, “unnaturally bewitching.”

Sophie opened her eyes. “Show me,” she said.

And he did.

Sophie wasn’t sure what had woken her.

She lay in the bed, listening intently, but nothing disturbed the stillness aside from Piotr’s steady breathing. Her husband had indeed had more than a few ideas on how best to spend what little time they had left before he was required to report back, but then so had she. Both had finally fallen into an exhausted, sated sleep sometime in the small hours before dawn.

She crept from the bed with care and opened her small suitcase as quietly as possible, feeling for her clothes.

“Leaving me already?” Piotr’s sleepy voice mumbled out of the dark.

“Just to watch the sunrise,” she said, pulling a simple frock over her head. “Go back to sleep.”

“Not a chance. This is the first dawn of the first day of our life together. I’m coming with you.” The bed creaked, and a light flickered on.

Sophie buttoned the collar of her dress and slipped on her shoes. Piotr joined her a moment later, and they exited the old stone building and stepped out in front. Turning away from the empty street that led back in the direction of the town center, they circled the hotel and found themselves in a deserted, grassy expanse. Based on the long, dilapidated building that sagged forgotten on the south side of the space, Sophie guessed that, in a century past, the expanse might once have been a carriage yard.

Dawn was pushing at the horizon, a soft gold glow layered below the bruised purples of a retreating night. The air was cool, sharp edges of an encroaching autumn lurking on the breeze. Sophie caught Piotr’s hand and tugged him along a well-trodden path that crossed the yard to end near a pasture gate, dew making the toes of her shoes wet where they brushed the grass.