“The Duke Pretended to Be in a Coma After the Carriage Accident…Just to See If She’d Stay—What She..

“I married you to destroy you.” That was what he had expected her to say. The axle cracked like a gunshot. The horses screamed, and as Duke Alaric Thorne’s body was hurled against the splintered door of his carriage, the last thing his eyes found before the darkness swallowed him whole was Julianne’s face through the fractured window glass. Not calm, not cold, but shattered. Her mouth was open in a silent scream, her hands outstretched and clawing at nothing, reaching for him—a man who had given her no reason whatsoever to reach.

When awareness crept back, it came slowly, like candlelight seeping under a heavy door. He could not move, could not speak, could not even part his lips to draw a deeper breath. But he could hear the low, rhythmic murmur of the physician’s voice. He could feel the tight, suffocating press of linen wound around his skull. He could feel the bruise burning across his cheekbone like a searing brand. Most strikingly, he could feel, with a precision that stunned him, the warmth of two small hands folded around his, holding on, refusing to let go.

The physician spoke from somewhere near the window. “Your Grace, his skull has endured considerable trauma. The mind, it often retreats in moments like these. He may hear nothing; he may feel nothing. We simply cannot know.” A long silence followed. Then, Alaric felt it—the faint, trembling press of lips against his knuckles. It was desperate and reverent, as though his hand were a holy relic. Julianne’s voice came, barely above a breath, cracked at the edges like old porcelain. “Come back, please. I know you never believed I wanted you to, but come back. I have not finished fighting for you yet.”

Inside the prison of his motionless body, something Alaric Thorne had kept armored for thirty-four years split clean in two. He had staged this. He had planned this. Three weeks ago, when his intelligence officer had laid the documents on his desk—evidence suggesting his new wife had been placed in his household by his political enemies—Alaric had made a cold, calculated decision. The carriage accident had not been an accident at all. He had arranged for the axle to be weakened on a road with an embankment soft enough to injure without killing. He had planned to wake from his coma after forty-eight hours, having overheard enough confessions to destroy Julianne Voss Thorne in every court in the empire.

He had expected her to summon his cousin Silas within the hour. He had expected to hear the scratch of a pen on paper as she signed away his estate. He had expected—because he had always expected the worst of those who stood to gain from him—to finally be proven right about love being nothing more than a transaction with a prettier name.

What he had not expected was this. He had not expected her to dismiss his personal physician at the door and refuse to leave his bedside. He had not expected to hear her quiet, furious voice ordering the head butler to lock the east wing against Silas Thorne’s early, predatory arrival. He had not expected the soft, rhythmic sound of her crying herself to exhaustion in the chair beside him, only to wake an hour later and begin again: checking his pulse, pressing cool cloths to his bruised face, whispering his name like a woman praying. And he had not expected, in his most fortified and cynical heart, that the sound of his own name in her voice would feel like the first warm thing he had touched in years.

“Stay dead,” he told himself, his mind wrestling with the reality. “You need more time, more proof. This could still be a performance.” But her hands were shaking. And in the far corner of the chamber, half-concealed by shadow and the dark navy of her uniform, a young maid stood completely still, watching the Duke with eyes that were far too sharp, too knowing for a girl who was supposed to see nothing. She had seen it—the single, involuntary curl of Alaric’s finger around Julianne’s hand. The question remained: whose side was she on?

The journey back to Thorne Manor had taken four hours through roads still frozen from the last frost of winter. Alaric had felt every rut, every stone, every jarring heave of the wagon that carried him flat on his back beneath a weight of wool blankets that did nothing to warm the cold spreading outward from the center of his chest. It was not from the injury, but from the crushing weight of guilt. He heard Julianne’s voice before he heard the physician’s. She was riding alongside the wagon rather than in the comfort of her own enclosed carriage, speaking in low, terse instructions to the driver.

“Slower. Slower. Every jolt could worsen the bleeding.” Her voice had none of its usual careful restraint. It was stripped raw, and Alaric lay in the dark of his own mind, cataloging that rawness with the obsessive precision of a man who had just discovered he may have made the single most catastrophic error of his life.

When they arrived at the manor, the entire household had poured onto the front steps. Footmen, maids, and the ancient housekeeper, Mrs. Corvin—who had served three Dukes of Thorne and wept openly now without any apparent concern for her dignity—all watched with bated breath. They carried him up the great staircase with the terrible gentleness reserved for things already considered broken.

The physician, Dr. Emery, whom they had brought in from the city, spent an hour over him, lifting Alaric’s eyelids and pressing fingers to his throat, murmuring to his apprentice in the clipped, authoritative tones of a man performing for an audience. “Severe cranial contusion. Disrupted consciousness. The higher faculties may be entirely lost.” Alaric had nearly opened his eyes at that. Entirely lost? He had built an empire from a ruin of debt at the age of twenty-two. His higher faculties were, at this precise moment, composing a list of every person in this room with the means and motive to betray him.

Julianne stood at the foot of the bed during the examination. She did not pace; she did not weep. She stood with her arms folded at her waist and her dark eyes fixed on him with a terrible stillness—the stillness of someone who has already decided something and is simply waiting for the world to catch up with their resolve. She had changed from her traveling clothes into a deep navy dress, plain and severe, with a white nurse’s apron tied at her waist. Alaric realized with a jolt that nearly broke his performance: she had dressed as a nurse because she intended to care for him herself, rather than delegate it to the household staff.

When Dr. Emery finally gathered his instruments and turned to offer his prognosis, he addressed his remarks to the empty doorway, as though already composing the letter he would write to Silas Thorne. “Your Grace,” he said, “there is little more I can do tonight. The Duke breathes. His heart is strong. Whether his mind will return to him is a matter beyond medicine.” He paused with the particular delicacy of a man about to say something profitable. “In cases such as these, I have seen families seek to bring the patient comfort to ease his passage should it become necessary.”

The room went very still. Julianne turned her head toward Dr. Emery with the slow, precise deliberateness of a woman who had understood every syllable of what had just been offered. “Get out,” she said. The doctor blinked. “Your Grace—”

“Remove yourself from this manor,” she commanded. Her voice did not rise; it dropped, and somehow that was worse. “Remove your bag, your apprentice, and whatever arrangement you made with whoever sent you here. If I see your face in this house again, I will ensure the medical board of the northern counties receives a full account of this conversation.”

Dr. Emery left quickly. The door closed, the candles guttered in the draft of his exit, and Julianne turned back to the bed. She crossed the room and lowered herself into the chair at Alaric’s side with the careful, aching slowness of someone carrying a wound they refused to acknowledge. Her hand found his in the dark, and Alaric Thorne, the most powerful and most foolish Duke in the northern empire, lay perfectly still and began, for the first time in his adult life, to be genuinely afraid. He was not afraid of his cousin’s ambition or the conspiracy closing around his estate like a fist; he was afraid of what it would cost him when she found out what he had done. The game had begun, but Alaric was no longer certain he was the one playing it.

They came before the physician’s carriage had even cleared the gate. Alaric heard them first: the particular rhythm of expensive boots on marble, unhurried and proprietary—the footfall of men who already believed a place belonged to them. There were three of them, by his count. His cousin Silas led, as he always led, with the quiet confidence of a man who had spent two decades waiting for exactly this moment. The others were peripheral: Alaric’s uncle Bertram, who had contested the title once and lost badly, and a solicitor whose name Alaric had never bothered to learn because men like that were entirely interchangeable.

“The physician’s assessment is quite grave,” Silas said. He had not addressed Julianne; he spoke to the room itself, as though she were mere furniture. “Naturally, the family felt it necessary to gather.”

“Naturally,” Julianne said. She had not risen from the chair beside Alaric’s bed; she had not even turned her head. “And yet the family waited until the physician departed before arriving. Curious timing.”

A brief silence followed, the kind that meant a man was recalibrating. “You must be exhausted,” Silas continued, his voice smoothing into something almost gentle. “You’ve been through a terrible ordeal. Allow us to sit with him tonight. You should rest.”

“I am resting, Silas. You will address me as ‘Your Grace,’ or you will address me not at all.”

Alaric felt Silas’s pause like a physical force. His cousin was not accustomed to such recalibration; it clearly cost him something.

“The estate,” Bertram began with the bluntness of a man too old to bother with subtlety, “cannot be left in an uncertain state. There are decisions to be made.”

“Then make them tomorrow,” Julianne said, “when my husband is recovered enough to make them himself.”

“The physician said—”

“The physician said a great many things,” she interrupted, turning to face them. Alaric could hear the shift in her posture, the faint, deliberate creak of the chair. “Most of them paid for. Goodnight, gentlemen. Mrs. Corvin will show you to the guest wing. You are welcome to remain until morning, at which point I expect your carriages to be packed.”

The silence that followed had a different quality to it—something tighter, like a held breath. Then, Silas said very quietly, “You are making enemies you cannot afford, Julianne.”

“I already have them,” she replied. “I simply prefer them in front of me.”

The boots retreated. The door closed. Alaric Thorne, who had broken three business rivals and outmaneuvered a sitting magistrate in the same calendar year, lay motionless and experienced something he did not immediately recognize. It took him a long moment to identify it as pride.

The candles burned lower. The house settled into its nighttime language: distant footsteps, the creak of old wood, the moan of wind through the lancet windows. The blue-gray light of a cloud-covered moon filtered through the glass, laying cold, geometric panels across the foot of Alaric’s bed. Julianne did not sleep. He could tell by her breathing, which never quite deepened into the slow rhythm of rest. She shifted in the chair at intervals, careful, controlled movements that nonetheless carried the particular tension of a body fighting discomfort. He heard the soft exhale through her nose that a person makes when they are choosing not to acknowledge pain. He heard the small, barely-there catch of breath when she stood to check his pulse, her fingers gentle at his wrist.

She checked him every hour. He had begun counting. On the third check, her fingers lingered a moment longer than necessary, and she pressed her thumb lightly to the inside of his wrist—not to count the beats, but in the way a person holds something they are desperately afraid of losing. She stood there in the dark for a long moment, head bowed, and said nothing at all.

By the fifth hour, her movements had slowed; the chair had become insufficient. She had folded herself against the edge of the mattress, her head resting on her arms beside his hand, her breath finally beginning to even out—not into sleep, exactly, but into something adjacent to it. It was the last stage of a body that had simply refused for too long and could refuse no longer. Alaric could have wept.

He had cataloged her when they were first married with the efficient detachment he applied to everything. Julianne Voss, the youngest daughter of a minor noble house on the verge of financial collapse. Twenty-three years old, quiet, economical with words and expressions alike. He had chosen her because she seemed the least likely of his available options to interfere with his business interests, and because her stillness had, he admitted privately, reminded him of competence. He had not looked further than that; he had not wanted to.

Now, lying in the dark with her breath warm against his hand and her exhausted weight gentle at his side, he understood with the sick clarity of a man arriving too late that he had looked at a cathedral and only noted that it didn’t block the road.

He heard her injury before he saw evidence of it. Dawn was beginning to gray the windows when Julianne finally rose from the chair. Alaric tracked the sounds of her movement with an attention he now devoted entirely to her: the soft slide of slippers, the quiet gathering of herself back into composure, the careful, deliberate steps toward the window. Then came the small, involuntary sound she made—barely audible. It was the kind of sound a person fails to suppress when weight falls on something that should not bear weight. She stopped walking. There was a pause—three seconds, four—in which Alaric imagined her pressing her lips together, overriding whatever had escaped her. Then she continued to the window, her steps even, giving nothing else away. But he had heard it.

He ran back through the hours since the accident. She had been on horseback alongside the wagon for four hours. She had stood at the foot of his bed through an hour of the physician’s examination. She had stood to confront Silas and Bertram. She had risen from the chair seven times through the night to check on him. And at no point, not once, had she mentioned, referenced, or given any outward indication that she herself had been in the carriage when the axle broke.

The full weight of it landed on him slowly, the way cold does—not all at once, but settling deep into the bones. She was hurt. She had been hurt since the beginning, and she had said nothing and done nothing about it because she had spent every hour since the crash ensuring that he—a man who had engineered the whole disaster—was not alone. Alaric had never hated himself before. He found now that he was rather talented at it.

The house quieted again by midmorning. Silas’s retinue, apparently deciding that a tactical retreat was preferable to a prolonged confrontation with the Duchess, had requested breakfast and then departed with a cold civility that promised future action rather than abandonment. Alaric filed this away. His cousin had never been a man who abandoned anything; he was a man who waited.

A different maid entered to stoke the fire—not the sharp-eyed girl from the corner, who had not reappeared since that first night. This one moved with the blunt efficiency of someone who had no particular interest in the occupants of the room and left without ceremony. Then Julianne came back. She had changed her apron. Her dark hair, which had been slipping free of its pins by the small hours of the morning, was neatly dressed again. She carried a tray herself rather than waiting for a servant: broth, water, and the small collection of medicines the physician had left before his dismissal.

She set it on the table beside Alaric’s bed and stood for a moment, looking at him. And the expression on her face was not one designed for an audience. He had seen her composed; he had seen her precise and cool and carefully contained. He had never seen her face when she believed herself entirely unobserved. She looked, simply, like a woman in love with someone who had never given her sufficient reason to be.

She sat. She worked through the small rituals of tending to him: cooling cloths, pulse checks, the careful tipping of water past his lips in the slow, patient method that ensured he wouldn’t choke. Her hands never shook. Her movements were practiced and sure, and Alaric understood suddenly that she had been reading, preparing, and somewhere had found the knowledge of how to do this properly. She had done so before the accident, as though she had known or feared that she might need it.

The candles burned down to their collars as afternoon became evening. The chamber grew dim. Julianne lit a single new candle rather than calling for more, as though light itself were a resource to be conserved, and sat back in her chair with his hand folded between both of hers. The silence stretched long and soft between them.

Then she spoke. Her voice was barely above the level of a breath—the voice a person uses when they are speaking to themselves, or to God, or to someone they have decided cannot answer.

“I know you probably wouldn’t want to hear this,” she began. “If you could hear it. You would find it inconvenient. You would construct a reason why it changes nothing.” A pause. “That is very much like you.”

Alaric stayed absolutely still.

“I married you,” she said, “because I had no choice. That is what I told myself. That is what I told my father. It was a reasonable explanation and it cost me nothing to offer it.” Her thumb moved once across his knuckles. “It was not true.”

The candle flame moved in a draft. “I had overheard the conversation. In my father’s study, Silas Thorne and two men I didn’t know and a document that would have handed your estate into receivership through a false debt claim before you ever knew the challenge existed. You were supposed to be ruined by winter. Your title disputed, your holdings liquidated.” She stopped, steadied herself. “My father was meant to be part of it. He didn’t know I was listening. He didn’t know I understood what I was hearing.”

Alaric’s chest was very tight.

“I convinced my father to approach you with the marriage offer instead. I told him it would settle our family’s debts through a legitimate alliance rather than through whatever Silas had promised him. I did not tell him the rest.” A long breath. “I thought if I could get close enough to you, I could find evidence of the conspiracy before it was too late. I thought it would be a transaction. I thought I would manage it the way I manage everything: carefully, at a distance, without allowing anything to cost me.”

She laughed, barely a sound at all—sad and rueful and achingly private. “You were so difficult,” she said. “You never spoke more than was required. You looked at me as though you were waiting for me to reveal something terrible. And yet…” Another pause, longer this time. “You replaced every piece of furniture in my rooms without being asked because you had noticed I preferred the window seat in the library, and you had the same style built into my chambers. You never mentioned it. You just did it.”

Her voice had gone rough at the edges. “You thought I didn’t notice. I noticed everything.” She leaned forward, resting her cheek against their joined hands, eyes closed, in the exact posture she had held in the first dark hours when she thought she was alone. “I do not know precisely when it stopped being strategy,” she said very quietly. “Only that by the time I realized it had, it was already too late, and I was… I was yours, Alaric, in a way I had no preparation for and no defense against. And I have been terrified every day since that you would see it because a man who looks at everyone the way you look at people—like you’re adding up what they want from you—that man would only ever see my feelings as a liability.”

She exhaled. “Or as a weapon to be used.”

The silence held.

“I tried to stop the carriage,” she said, barely audible now. “When I realized what was wrong with the axle, I screamed for the driver to slow. He either didn’t hear or…” She stopped. “I grabbed the interior handle to brace, and when the carriage went over, I fell against the door. My hip. It is nothing serious. Please don’t…” A fractured sound, half-laugh, half-something broken. “Please don’t worry about it. That is an absurd thing to say to a man who can’t hear me.”

The candle guttered. “Come back,” Julianne whispered. “Whatever you think of me when you do, whatever you decide, just come back. The house needs you.” A breath. “I need you. And I am tired of saying true things only to men who are sleeping.”

She sat back, folded her hands in her lap, and looked at the flame. Alaric Thorne lay in the wreckage of his own making with the evidence he had been looking for. Not the evidence of betrayal, but something far more damning, far more irreversible; he understood that the only coma in this room had always been his own.

The servant’s name was Poole. Alaric had employed him for six years and had never once had cause to question him, which was, he now understood, precisely the point. Men like Silas did not recruit the suspicious ones; they recruited the invisible ones.

Poole arrived the following morning with a small ceramic bowl on a lacquered tray. “Broth,” he announced to Julianne, “prepared by the kitchen on the physician’s written instructions. Specific herbs, specific proportions, for the Duke’s recovery.”

Julianne looked at the bowl for a moment. Then she looked at Poole with the particular quality of attention she gave to things she had not yet decided about. “Leave it,” she said. “I’ll administer it myself.”

Poole left. Julianne sat for a long moment with the bowl in her hands, and Alaric heard what he had come to recognize as her “thinking silence.” It was the quality of stillness she produced when she was moving through a problem with the systematic patience of someone who had learned early that rushing cost more than it saved. Then she dipped one finger into the broth and touched it to her tongue.

Alaric’s entire body screamed at him to move. He could not. To move was to collapse everything—her safety, the evidence, whatever remained of his strategy. He lay with his hands fisted in the sheets below the level of her sightline and forced himself into stillness as Julianne set the bowl down on the table and sat very quietly for thirty seconds. Then she made the sound again—the one she produced when she was overriding pain.

“Oh,” she said very softly. It wasn’t frightened, nor dramatic; it was the voice of a woman noting an important fact. “I see.”

She stood carefully, walked to the door, and called for Mrs. Corvin in a tone so controlled that the housekeeper arrived at a walk rather than a run. Alaric heard her give instructions: the kitchen to be secured, Poole to be detained, a message to be sent to the constable in the village—all in the same level cadence she used to discuss household accounts. Then she returned to the chair, lowered herself into it with exaggerated care, and picked up his hand.

Her fingers were cold. By evening, they were trembling. She did not tell anyone. She sat in the chair and shook with quiet, furious dignity while Mrs. Corvin fussed at the periphery. And she kept Alaric’s hand in hers as though releasing it would cost her something she couldn’t afford.

The herb had not been lethal; he understood that much from what the constable’s man told Mrs. Corvin in the corridor. It was a disabling dose—enough to make her sick, pliable, and easy to move aside. Not enough to kill a woman who had only tasted rather than consumed. But it had been enough to hollow her out. Her breathing, which he had memorized over four days of enforced stillness, was shallow and careful. Her grip on his hand loosened and then tightened again, as though she kept forgetting and then remembering.

“Let me up,” he thought with a fury so clean and cold it was almost beautiful. “Give me five minutes and a clear corridor and I will end every single one of them.” But not yet. Not quite yet. Because Silas had not yet shown his hand, and a half-finished strategy was more dangerous than none. So he lay still and Julianne held on, and the night passed in increments that each cost him something.

Silas arrived the following afternoon with a solicitor, two witnesses, and a document that had clearly been prepared well in advance of any carriage accident. He did not knock. Julianne was standing at the window when the door opened. Standing, Alaric noted, because she had not yet managed to conceal her pallor sufficiently to receive visitors seated without inviting comment. She was still in the deep navy dress, still wearing the white apron. She had lost some color that hadn’t returned, and the shadows beneath her eyes had deepened to something that looked less like exhaustion and more like endurance.

She turned when Silas entered, and the expression on her face was the one he had come to think of as her armor: composed, precise, and giving away absolutely nothing.

“The document,” Silas said, dispensing with preliminaries with the efficiency of a man who believed he had already won, “grants temporary regency of the Thorne estate to the nearest male heir pending the Duke’s recovery or…” He paused, with the studied delicacy of a surgeon selecting an instrument, “…determination of incapacity. It requires only your signature as acting Duchess to be legally binding.”

“No,” Julianne said.

“It is standard practice in cases of genuine incapacity.”

“My husband is injured, not incapacitated. There is a distinction, and I suspect you know it.” She moved from the window, one careful step and then another, and positioned herself at the foot of the bed with her hands clasped in front of her. “If you wish to make a legal claim against this estate, Silas, you are welcome to make it before the full circuit court in the spring session. I will attend with considerable documentation.”

Silas’s expression shifted. The patience thinned. “You are ill,” he said, and there was something in the word that confirmed everything. He knew about the broth. He had been waiting for it to do what it hadn’t quite done. “You cannot manage this estate in your current condition. You cannot protect him. You are one woman, Julianne, and you are running out of allies.”

“Then it is fortunate,” she said quietly, “that I have never required many.”

A long pause. The solicitor shifted uncomfortably. One of the witnesses studied the middle distance with the focused intensity of a man who wished he had taken a different appointment today. Silas took one step toward the bed.

“Sign the document,” he said, and the gentleness had gone entirely now. “Or I will have you removed from this chamber on grounds of being unfit to discharge your duties. I have a physician who will support that assessment.”

“I’m certain you do,” Julianne said. “I’m certain he charges a great deal.”

Another step. “Julianne. Your Grace.” He stopped. And then, in a register so low only the room could hold it, he said, “The man in that bed is not coming back. Whatever you believe about him, whatever foolish attachment you have constructed, he is already gone. The kindest thing you can do for yourself, for the estate, for whatever future you imagine you might have, is to accept that and sign.”

Julianne said nothing. Her hands had tightened together in front of her; the only visible evidence of what it cost her to hold the line. She was as pale as the linen on Alaric’s pillow. She had been poisoned thirty-six hours ago, and she had slept perhaps four hours in five days, and she was standing at the foot of his bed telling his cousin “no” with the unshakeable finality of a woman who had decided on something and was simply waiting for the world to understand it.

Alaric had run out of reasons to stay still. But not quite yet. Not quite. The documents were the first thing. Silas’s solicitor had left a leather case in the corridor outside the chamber. Alaric had heard the man set it down, heard the weight of it. Inside that case, he was reasonably certain, was the false debt claim—the original instrument of the conspiracy that Julianne had described at his bedside. The thing that had started all of this.

That night, while the house settled into its second shift of darkness, and the guard Silas had planted at the end of the corridor dozed in his chair, Alaric moved. Not obviously. Not completely. He was not quite ready to abandon his position. He needed Silas inside the room with witnesses when it happened. But he allowed himself small, precise actions in the three-hour window between Julianne’s exhausted half-sleep and the household’s pre-dawn stirring. He found the leather case. He removed three documents from it and replaced them with equivalent weights of blank paper. He returned to the bed before the first light touched the windows and lay still again, breathing slowly, listening to Julianne’s breath across the dark.

The next evening, he heard movement in the dressing room that adjoined the chamber—soft, unhurried, belonging to someone who knew the layout of the room well enough to navigate it without light. Not a maid. Not a member of the household at all. He lay listening as the movement resolved into a single figure at the dressing room door, and then stilled, and then retreated when the sharp-eyed maid—appearing it seemed from nowhere—stepped out of the corner shadows and said, very quietly, “Not tonight.”

A long pause. Then the retreating footsteps. Alaric filed that away and revised his understanding of the maid in the corner.

Silas came back on the fifth night. He came without the solicitor this time. Without the witnesses. He came after midnight, when the house was fully quiet, and he came with the specific kind of silence that belonged to a man who had stopped pretending. Alaric tracked him through the chamber door, across the floor, around the foot of the bed. He heard Julianne’s breathing change—not quite waking, but shifting, her body registering the intrusion before her mind caught it.

He heard Silas pause beside the bed, heard the soft, purposeful sound of something being lifted from the side table. The pillow.

And then Julianne did wake, because she had trained herself in five days of fractured vigilance to come awake at the “wrong” kind of silence, and her voice came fast and sharp: “Don’t you.”

Silas moved. Alaric was faster. He had been a large man before the accident; the accident had done nothing to change that. What it had changed was the quality of his stillness. It had sharpened him these five days, stripped him down to something fundamental and cold and absolutely certain. He came off the bed with the momentum of a man who had been coiled for precisely this moment. One hand caught the pillow mid-arc, and the other closed around Silas’s collar with a grip that owed nothing to mercy. The sound Silas made was not dignified. Alaric drove him back across the room and into the wall with a force that sent a portrait rattling on its hook, and held him there with his forearm braced across the man’s chest and his eyes, finally fully open, fixed on his cousin’s face with an expression he didn’t try to moderate.

“Alaric,” Silas began, his breath hitching.

“Don’t,” Alaric said. His voice was rough from five days of silence, and it was the sound of a storm finally breaking.