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She fit. She had been fitting, he understood with a delayed, stupid clarity, since she had stood next to him in church and said her vows.

He gathered her up. Not off her feet, mindful of the babe in her belly, but gathered as close as he could gather. His hand went into her hair. The plait gave way. The whole warm weight of it came loose over his fingers, silky gold, still holding the plait’s shape for a moment and then not. All of it in his hands now, and she shivered, and pressed closer, and whispered his name against his mouth.

“Damian.”

Not a question. Not a scruple. Not my lord, and not the formal address he had been paying her since he had left her among the fallen cards. Only his name, and the sound of yearning. He felt it in his mouth and in the wreckage she had made of his defenses and in the simple, disastrous fact that she was not afraid of him, not even a little.

Her fingers were at his throat.

At his collar. The frontier he held at every hour of every day to hide the proof beneath. The whole silent fortification of cloth he had built between the world and what the world must never see. Her fingers worked the tapes loose.

He let her.

All the walls he had built to protect her from himself, and she took them apart, and he stood in the storm-light and permitted it as if permission had ever been his to give.

She drew the shirt free of his waistband. Gathered it. Lifted. He bent.

He had to bend. She could not have reached. There was a terrible sweetness in bending his neck for her, as if the unholy body which could never be buried in consecrated ground might still offer her that much. She pulled the shirt over his head and let it fall. Storm-light flickered across him, revealing his scars.

She did not flinch.

She had to feel them, even if she had missed them in the flash of light. She could not fail to. Her palms were flat against his chest. Under her palm lay the whole atlas of what had been done to him. The great seams across his chest. The ridged tracks of them climbing his left shoulder like lines of solder laid by a hurrying hand. The smaller stitchery scattered round it. The puckered country of a body that had been blown open and sewn shut.

He was shaking. Not with cold. The room was not cold. He was shaking because she had put her hand on the damage and had not lifted it away.

She spread her fingers wide over the worst of it, as if she meant to warm it through. Then she turned her head and put her mouth to a seam at his shoulder.

Once. Softly.

He stopped breathing altogether.

After that there was no order in anything.

Her mouth. His hands full. Full of her hair. Full of the small of her back. Her hip through worn lawn. The gentle new roundness of her that he had no earthly right to find precious, and found precious past all reason. His hands full of everything an undead man is not given.

Wife. Warmth. Morning. The future.

All of it here. All of it real. All of it pressing itself into his keeping, trusting him.

He kissed her with every iota of yearning for connection he possessed. He learned the catch in her breath when his mouth found the place beneath her ear. He learned that she rose onto her toes to keep him. He learned that she was not careful of the ruined left side, and that her carelessness was a mercy which brought tears to his eyes, the only thing they had fully agreed on since waking in that grotesque cellar.

A living moment passed between them, one he could not be certain he had felt, and he gathered her more carefully for it and did not let her go.

The backs of her knees met the bed.

She went down onto the counterpane pulling him with her, both fists full of him. He set a knee to the mattress and bent over her. Her hair spread bright across the coverlet. Her face tipped up to him with nothing in it but wanting.

The bed was there. Neither of them was stopping.

God forgive him. He was not going to stop.

The lightning came then.

Not one stroke, but three in a row. One hard upon another upon another. A full salvo. The room did not flicker white. It filled white and stayed. Three whole seconds of merciless light, and the thunder tearing loose overhead.

In the tall looking glass beyond the foot of her bed, Damian caught sight of them.

A sutured monster was bending over a beautiful woman.