You know how much I burn for you. Have always burned, since that summer long ago. I realize this is why you have avoided me and refused my offers to dance. But tonight, you have given me such hope. Please, tell me my hope is justified!

Feeling your supple waist beneath my fingers, seeing your eyes—blue, so blue—mere inches from mine, watching your lips move as you smiled or laughed … It felt like that summer all over again. Please, please consent to meet me tomorrow, in the Winter Garden, at the tenth chimes. I will ensure that we are alone.

Do you remember that first night together, Safiya? The way you laughed when I led you into that garden in Veñaza City? There was the alcove hidden by jasmine, and I pulled you close, our lips and hands desperate. And do you remember how I lifted you onto—

Safi slammed down the letter. Her eyes bulged, her cheeks scorched, and she rocked back from the privacy screen’s protection.

No, it wasn’t just her cheeks that were aflame—her whole body was. Not a word in this letter was true, of course, but gods below, the detail! Anyone who read it would surely think Safi and Leopold had shared an extremely passionate teenage affair.

No wonder Nika had looked so delightfully scandalized.

Well done, Polly. Safi now appeared, for any spies who might be peeking in her bedroom, like a woman who’d just read a lascivious letter from her lover. One could not fake a flush like this one, and she was even fanning herself against sweat—because hell-fires, the encounter in this letter was so acrobatic, she could scarcely imagine what body parts went where.

Oh, well done, Polly. Safi still didn’t trust him, and given a chance, she would gladly do him bodily harm. But she couldn’t deny this had been a clever ruse. No one in court would bat an eyelash if she and Leopold began an affair—not even the Emperor. Lovers outside of marriage were so common among Cartorran nobility, it was considered strange not to have one.

As the old skipping song went, Robins and magpies on branches above. Money for marriage, and Heart-Threads for love.

The cleverest element of Leopold’s letter, though, was that it had given Safi the perfect reason to send away her attendants and a perfect reason to sit at her desk with the privacy screen. Now she could easily withdraw the item burning in her pocket.

While she shifted her dress around her, as if trying to billow in more air, she slipped out the small metal cylinder. And while her left hand tousled her hair, fanned at her face, her right hand slid the cylinder onto the desk beneath the privacy screen.