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He turned the corner, walked through the passage, and stopped on the far side of the void.

“You’ll want to go back,” he said.

She screamed. Raised the lantern and the cane like weapons and the light lurched. Some old, trained part of him catalogued her before his mind had given permission. The angle of the cane: a weapon at that height, blunt force, easily disarmed. The reach: short, a foot less than his own. Her exposed throat, the tendons standing out beneath the skin, the thin neck a quick snap would finish. The information arrived cold and fluent, a language his body spoke without his consent.

He hated this part of himself. He hated more that it had turned its attention on a frightened woman.

She was smaller than he’d expected. The cane bore much of her weight. Her face was pale and sharp and furious and frightened. The cane seemed too large for her.

“Stand back,” she said. “I have...” He watched her slender wrist raise the lantern higher. “Stand back or I will...” Her cane moved higher.

“Go out the way you came. Come round to the side door.”

“You are trespassing. Get out.”

He turned away, crossed to his room, and closed the door. He sat on the bed and leaned forward, pressing his knuckles to his forehead.

She shouted threats. Pointless threats. He’d seen the shock on her face at the state of the house. Come morning she’d see she couldn’t do it alone. Not if she wanted the roof to stay where it was.

Bang. Bang. Bang. The trunk hitting every riser. Her voice was loud, breathless, fuming. She reminded him of a robin. Tiny, furious, absolutely certain it could win a fight it had no business starting.

She pounded on his door. Demanded he leave. Demanded he sleep in the stable.

He heard the faint thud on oak. Her forehead, he thought. He stood and placed a hand flat against the door.

When she spoke again, her voice had changed. Quiet. Fierce. Not for him.

“I am not leaving.”

Something moved in him. And it sat wrong against his chest.

Chapter three

Ash in a Bowl

Do the thing badly before you let a man tell you that you cannot do it at all.

— The Wicked Widow’s Rules

Audrey

She woke to the sound of chopping.

Steady. Rhythmic. Coming from below and to the left, somewhere outside. She lay still and listened. Chop. Pause. Chop. Pause.

He hadn’t left.

Audrey opened her eyes. Grey light. The ceiling was lower than she’d thought: dark beams, old plaster, a crack running from the window to the wall like a river on a map. The room was cold. Her hip had set overnight into something that felt like a rusted hinge, and when she sat up, her whole left side objected with a sharp, grinding ache that made her breath catch.

She sat on the edge of the bed and dressed: short stays, petticoat, her muslin morning dress.

His door, the one across the corridor, was open now. The room was empty. Bed made, corners tight. Nothing on the walls. Nothing on the floor. A razor and a comb on the windowsill. That was all.

She stood in the doorway longer than she needed to. The room told her nothing. It was the room of a man who could leave in two minutes and hadn’t.

She went downstairs.

The house in daylight was a different creature. Not less ruined. If anything, the grey morning light was less forgiving than the dark, exposing every stain and crack the lantern had been kind enough to obscure. But the terror had receded, and in its place was something almost worse: the sheer, grinding reality of scale. Every wall. Every ceiling. Every floor she tested with her cane before trusting it with her weight.