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"Much obliged."

The stage came back into view, but too late. Louise had retreated from the lights. Rodrick gripped the tattered velvet of his pit chair and smiled ruefully. He had risked being remembered by an irritated gentleman to see her. Curiosity was an expensive vice.

Movement near the audience exit caught his attention. Colonel Arlesford stood guard there, positioned beneath the entrance to a private box.

The ever-loyal Arlesford did not attend ballet. He barely attended dinner. The fellow regarded pleasure as a French conspiracy intended to weaken the British constitution. His brooding gaze was fixed on the stage, his arms crossed.

Another officer of the Horse Guards lounged near the pit, and a second stood beside the passage leading toward the dressing rooms.

Well. The Foreign Office must have discovered Louise's identity. How inconvenient.

Rodrick recalculated the extraction. The artists' entrance was gone. Arlesford would cover it before the curtain fell. The western corridor remained possible if he moved Louise before the audience emptied. The scenery passage opened onto Bow Street, assuming no one had locked the door since his last visit.

He would need to confirm it. He started to stand when the music shifted from martial to sensual. The Salamander and her sovereign faced each other in triumph.

Louise moved into Vestris's arms, and Rodrick sank back into his seat. Apparently her passion was not confined to warfare. When Vestris drew her close, her lips came within inches of his. Rodrick gripped the armrests, and his intention to inspect the western corridor suffered an administrative delay.

When Louise spun toward his side of the stage, Rodrick uncrossed his legs and leaned forward. The moment the chandelier light spilled over his face, Louise's gaze swept across the pit and found him as though every other face in Covent Garden had been removed.

She could not have recognized him. They had never met. She might have caught the movement of his white glove, or noticed the solitary gentleman leaning out from beneath the boxes when everyone around him sat in the light.

Still, her eyes remained on his. Gray. The reports had mentioned them. The reports had neglected their effect.

Rodrick had been watched by monarchs, soldiers, other spies, women who wanted him, husbands who wanted him dead, and several men deciding whether a knife would make a cleaner argument than conversation. None of them had produced this peculiar impression of light entering somewhere it had not been invited.

Look somewhere else, Salamander.

He stared back. Retreating from the gaze of a ballerina would constitute an indignity from which British intelligence might never recover.

So Rodrick remained precisely where he was, half in shadow and half out of it, while Napoleon Bonaparte's daughter looked directly at him.

The irony was difficult to miss. He had come to Covent Garden to see her.

Napoleon's daughter appeared to have seen him first.

Louise sat at the vanity. In the mirror, the Salamander blinked back beneath stage paint and blackened lashes, composed enough if one ignored the pulse beating visibly at the base of her throat. She was no longer onstage, yet the stranger's gaze had followed her into the dressing room.

Why had he chosen that seat? Covent Garden was a place where people came to be noticed. Yet he had placed himself beneath the first tier, in the shadow. Only the white gloves had betrayed him. They had caught the light whenever he moved his hands, and Louise had found herself watching them between turns.

Men reacted to dancers. They leaned forward. Smiled. Whispered to companions. Raised opera glasses when a skirt lifted. Applauded too early when they wanted the woman on stage to know who was applauding. This man had only watched, face half in the light, half in shadows, waiting for what?

She was tired. That was all. A cloth waited beside the basin. It would be so easy to wipe the Salamander away. Then she could take down her hair, put on her clothes, and leave by the stage door. She could be home in fifteen minutes.

Still, Hélène was in France. Céleste was in Kent. Even Sophie had moved on. The apartment would be dark. Louise pictured the few blind seconds before she found the tinderbox and immediately wished she had not.

Sighing, she opened the vanity drawer and, pushing the stockings away, drew out the lithograph. Napoleon sat with his son upon his knee.

The image had been made for public consumption, of course. Louise knew that emperors did not distribute their intimate lives without purpose.

She knew all that.

It never helped.

Napoleon inclined his head toward the child, one hand supporting the little boy while the other rested near his waist. Had he ever wondered what she looked like? Her vision blurred, and Louise angrily brushed away the tears.

Was that what she would do? Mope about the dressing room, count the carriages passing by, hoping that one of them would bring a savior? Some forgotten princess in a tower? She had never been that girl. England was not a tower, and she had not been abandoned in it. She had been left at a post because the larger campaign required her there.

Her father's greatest commanders knew that. Masséna had held Genoa while Bonaparte crossed the Alps. He didn't need to see the whole campaign to understand his part mattered. Distance was not abandonment. Silence was not neglect. Sometimes one held because holding was the only way to serve.