A shudder ran through me, and I forced myself to turn away. “Baron Leodra. He was dead already, Marcello. The Demon of Death just hadn’t caught up to him yet.”

The half-dozen soldiers escorting us flooded the courtyard, weapons at the ready. Marcello shook himself like a wet dog and took command, ordering some to search the inn grounds to make sure Leodra hadn’t had accomplices. One offered me a handkerchief, with a murmured apology that spoke to its stunning inadequacy. Others removed Leodra’s body.

I didn’t stay to watch. I walked out through the garden gate alone and into the soft, silvery field with its border of sentinel cypress trees and the rolling hills beyond. I wiped at my arms and hands with the handkerchief until not a speck of white remained on it, and then I cast it aside on the ground.

Tears pressed at the back of my eyes, but I refused to shed them. I couldn’t feel sorry for Leodra, not after he’d tried to have me killed. But the man had been a frequent guest in our drawing room. Watching him die had shaken me to the core.

In time, the noise died down. The soldiers went back to bed, the dog stopped barking, and quiet settled over the night. The song of crickets rose to the distant moon. I shivered in the deepening cold, but I couldn’t go back to bed. Leodra’s blood still drenched my eyes, and the words he hadn’t said hung silent between the stars.

Footsteps sounded in the grass behind me. I turned, and there was Marcello, weariness in the line of his shoulders. A glimpse of his chest showed through the plunging neckline of his nightshirt. He’d slung his belt over his shoulder, so his rapier and flintlock hung close at hand.

“Amalia. Are you …” He shook his head. Neither of us was all right, and he knew it. “Do you want to come inside?”

“He was trying to warn me of something.” I rubbed my freezing arms. It was strange to feel my own living flesh through my nightgown and know Leodra had lost this vital animation, when he’d been alive and frightened an hour ago. “He wanted to tell us who kidnapped the children in return for mercy. Now he can’t, and that knowledge is gone.”

I didn’t mean it as an accusation. But Marcello blanched. “Hells. I didn’t know.”

“You couldn’t have.”

He sank down into a crouch, cradling his face in his hands. “And I killed him. Graces forgive me.”

I knelt on the cool grass, trying to catch his eyes, alarm bubbling up in my stomach. “He wasn’t an innocent man, Marcello. I’m only alive because his attempt to murder me failed. You couldn’t have known he wasn’t about to shoot me.”