Then he exhaled.
“After you and I… argued. After I learned you’d left London without—” He stopped. Swallowed. “Without speaking to me first. Without saying goodbye. Dash and I made a night of it.”
“At White’s?”
“Among other disreputable establishments, yes.”
Beatrice dipped the cloth into the vinegar. The wound was ugly, but shallow.
Thank God.
She knew, of course, the sort of trouble Gideon and Dash had once found together. Before Lady Hannah. Before Ambrosia. Before age and consequence forced respectability upon them.
Still, something sharp and unpleasant moved through her.
Not surprise, exactly. Or outrage. Something sharper.
“Brothels?” she asked, very carefully.
Gideon’s gaze cut to hers. “Yes.”
Beatrice kept staring at his arm.
“We didn’t… Neither of us…”
Gideon sighed and continued.
“There was something in my tea,” he said grimly. “I could taste it… And yet, I drank it anyway.”
Concentrating on his words, she did not look up. Instead, she carefully drizzled some of the pungent liquid onto a clean square of linen.
His forearm was warm beneath her fingers, the tendons shifting slightly whenever he moved. Dark hair brushed her fingertips as she steadied him.
Beatrice kept her attention there.
On the wound.
And simply listened.
“Later that night, I had… visions.” The word emerged reluctantly.
Beatrice stilled. “Of what?”
He gave a short, humorless breath. “I thought I saw Sebastian.”
Oh.
“It felt real,” he said. “Far too real.”
For a moment, neither of them spoke.
“It is a terrible thing,” she said carefully, “not being able to trust one’s own mind.” She kept her attention on the linen in her hands.
She had spent years trying to reconcile what she remembered with what she did not. Sharp fragments. Blank spaces. Certainty in one moment, doubt in the next.
But she did not say that.
She merely pressed the cloth gently to his arm.
