Alexander stilled. For a fraction of a second, the room seemed to shift.
“You remember me now,” she said, not as a question.
He glanced at Diana. She was watching him closely.
There was something in her expression he could not fully name—hope, perhaps, or uncertainty, or the quiet, aching tension of someone who had been hurt and did not yet know what to expect.
“Yes,” he said.
Lady Salford’s lips curved, not in surprise, but in something far more knowing. “I thought as much.”
Diana’s brows drew together slightly. “You… knew?”
Lady Salford gave a soft, dismissive sound. “My dear, I have lived long enough to recognize when a man is not entirely himself. He looked at me as though I were a pleasant strangerthe first evening I arrived, and while I may be many things, I am not forgettable.”
Alexander huffed a quiet breath. “You did not say anything.”
“No,” she replied simply. “Because I saw how you looked at her.”
Silence fell, and Alexander heard Diana’s breath catch, just slightly.
“And I thought,” Lady Salford continued, her voice softer now, though no less perceptive, “that whatever had altered in him, it had brought him closer to what he ought to have been all along. I saw no reason to interfere with that.”
Alexander’s gaze remained on Diana.
He wondered if she understood what that meant. If she understood that even then, before he had remembered himself, something in him had already turned toward her in a way he had not been able to resist.
Lady Salford straightened.
“Well,” she said briskly, reclaiming her usual sharpness, “now that I have confirmed you are not dead, I shall leave you to more pressing matters.” Her eyes flicked between them, far too perceptive for comfort. “Do try not to do anything else reckless in the next hour.”
With that, she turned and left.
The door closed behind her.
Diana moved back to the chair slowly, though she did not sit at once. She hovered there, as though uncertain what to do with herself now that the urgency of the past days had been replaced by something quieter and far more dangerous.
Alexander reached for her hand. He could not seem to stop himself. His fingers closed around hers, rough, warm, grounding, and the contact sent a sharp, immediate awareness through him that had nothing to do with pain.
“I should not have allowed you to leave the house,” he said.
She stiffened slightly.
“You did not allow it,” she replied, though her voice was gentle. “I chose to go.”
“I should have been there.” The words came harder, more honestly.
“I should not have left you alone to be—” He stopped, his jaw tightening. “To be vulnerable to him.”
Diana’s fingers shifted in his grasp, her thumb brushing lightly against his hand in a motion so small and so instinctive that it nearly undid him.
“You could not have known,” she said.
“I should have known.”
He lifted his gaze to hers fully now, and for a moment, the strength that had carried him through everything seemed to falter, not in his body, but somewhere deeper. What he was about to say required more of him than the wound in his shoulder ever could.
“There is no version of this in which I am not at fault,” he said, his voice low, but unsteady in a way he had never allowed before, the words pulled from him rather than offered. “I left you to face things you should never have faced alone. I let pride and fear dictate my actions, and in doing so…” His breath caught, his jaw tightening as though even now he could not quite bear the weight of it. “I put you in danger.”
