At some point during the evening, you notice you are being – for lack of a better word – hunted.

It begins as a subtle feeling – intuitive. The rising hairs on the back of your neck, the feeling of being watched. Shadows at the edges of your vision, disappearing the moment you turn to face them directly. You have almost convinced yourself it is a figment of your imagination – paranoia. Because who – or what – could possibly threaten you? You, who are secured within the castle walls. Protected by the well-trained and well-armed house guards in your esteemed father’s employ.

You are safe.

You are untouchable.

It doesn’t even occur to you – how could it? – to question your safety within your perfectly curated little bubble.

“Isn’t your sister lucky,” your ladies’ maids twitter, “to have such a delectable assortment of knights practically preening for her?”

But it isn’t the knights at Violet’s feet they sigh over behind their fans. It’s the one at yours.

“Isn’t Ser Tobias so sweet?” they murmur amongst themselves. “See how he adores you.”

Always following you – barely one step behind.

Always watching over you – protecting you from untoward advances.

Always guiding you – a firm grip on your elbow, leading you away from potential threats.

They haven’t noticed the way his presence now orbits you. Casual appearances during meandering walks in the gardens – the crunch of gravel a half-beat behind your own, the scent of leather and steel oil drifting over the roses. Accidental run-ins along the hallways, on the way to supposed appointments, his shoulder brushing yours in a passage wide enough for three.

They don’t see the way his eyes linger. The intensity of his gaze as he stares at you across a crowded room – so heavy you feel it settle on your skin, sliding over your bare collarbone, the curve of your throat, the neckline of your bodice, until your breath goes shallow and heat creeps up your neck. Or the small tic in his jaw as your laughter floats enticingly over the music – and the way that laughter falters when you catch it.

They don’t feel his looming, hulking frame pressed firmly against their backs – the solid wall of his chest, the warmth bleeding through layers of silk and linen, the slow drag of his breath stirring the fine hairs at the nape of the neck. The bruising grip at their elbows, his thumb pressed into the soft inside of the arm where no one would think to look. Or the scalding heat of his rage.

Nor the shameful, molten answer it stirs low in your belly.

Tonight the great hall is warm with candle smoke and spiced wine, the long tables crowded with every knight in Brennholt who has come for the tournament. Tomorrow they will ride. Tonight they drink, and boast, and circle your sister like hounds around a kitchen door.

Violet bears it beautifully. She always does – cheeks flushed, eyes bright, accepting each compliment as though it’s the first she’s ever heard. Twenty, and ready, and everyone in the hall knows it.

You are twenty-four. Everyone in the hall knows that too.

“My lady.” Lord Fairleigh bows over your hand, lingering a beat too long. He’s handsome in a polished, harmless sort of way, and when he asks you to dance you say yes – because it’s easier than saying no, and because for one song it’s pleasant to be asked.

He makes you laugh. Only once, at some foolish story about his brother and a goose, but the sound escapes you bright and unguarded –

and the back of your neck prickles.

You don’t look. You know better now. But you feel it all the same, the weight of a gaze settling between your shoulder blades like a hand.

When the dance ends, Lord Fairleigh is called away by a message from across the hall – rather abruptly, you think, and rather pale. You don’t see who delivered it.

Your father stands for the toast. He speaks of tournaments past, of House Carrow’s honour, of the fine young men gathered here. And then, with a fond look down the table, of Ser Tobias – “whose service to this house has been beyond reproach, and who may yet be bound to it more closely still.”

A ripple of knowing glances. Violet’s blush deepens.

And across the hall, in the shadow of the pillar where the captain of the guard always stands, Ser Tobias doesn’t look at your sister at all.

He looks at you.

You leave before the sweets are served, slipping out through the side door and into the long gallery.

It’s dark there, lit only by moonlight through the tall windows, the portraits of dead Carrows watching from the walls. Your slippers whisper over the stone. Your own breathing sounds too loud.

You’re being foolish. This is your home.

Behind you, a door closes softly.

You don’t run. Running would mean admitting something. Instead you walk faster – past the windows, past your grandmother’s portrait with its pinched mouth and your mother’s beside it, painted the summer before she died, towards the stair that leads up to the family wing –

A shadow peels away from the alcove ahead.

You turn back. The gallery behind you is empty. Moonlight, portraits, silence. You could have sworn –

“You left without your guard, my lady.”

His voice comes from behind you – from the direction you were just facing – low and unhurried, and it slides down your spine like a fingertip. You spin. He’s closer than he has any right to be, close enough that you have to tip your head back to see his face, close enough to smell the wine on his breath and the cold night air caught in his hair. He’s taken off his gloves. You don’t know why you notice that – only that your eyes go to his bare hands and stay there a moment too long.

“I don’t need a guard in my own house, Ser Tobias.”

“No?” He takes a step forward. You take one back. “Then who were you running from?”

“I wasn’t running.”

“Your pulse says otherwise.” Another step. Your shoulders meet cold stone – the wall between two windows, its chill seeping through your gown – and the moonlight cuts across his face so that half of it is silver and half of it is dark. “I can see it. Just there.” His gaze drops to your throat, and you swear you feel it land, a pressure where there is none. “Fluttering like a caught bird.”

“You should be in the hall.” Your voice comes out thinner than you’d like. “My father was just toasting you. You and Violet.”

Something moves across his face – there and gone, like a blade catching light.

“Your father,” he says, very softly, “toasts a great many things he doesn’t understand.”

He braces one hand on the wall beside your head. Not touching you. He doesn’t need to. The heat of him reaches you anyway, rolling off him like a banked fire – the sheer looming size of him blotting out the gallery, the moon, the world, until there is nothing left to breathe but him.

“Fairleigh,” he says.

“What about him?”

“He made you laugh.”

“People do, occasionally.”

“Not like that.” His other hand lifts. You hold your breath – but he only catches a loose curl that’s slipped from your pins, winding it slowly around one finger. “You’ve never laughed like that for me.”

“You’ve never said anything funny.”

His mouth curves. It isn’t a smile, exactly. “Is that what you want? A jester?” The curl slides free, and his knuckles trail down the side of your neck instead – rough, sword-callused, so slow and light you might have imagined it, if not for the gooseflesh that chases after them and the shiver that runs all the way down to your toes. “I don’t think it is.”

Then his gaze drops to your hand. The one Fairleigh bowed over. He takes it – not gently – and lifts it into the moonlight, turning it as though inspecting a wound.

“He put his mouth here.” His thumb drags across your knuckles, hard enough to burn. Once. Twice. Scrubbing, as if Fairleigh’s lips have left a stain only he can see. “And his hand here.” His other hand finds your waist – exactly where Fairleigh’s rested during the dance – and his fingers dig in through silk and boning until you can feel each one. “I watched him touch you for an entire song.”

“It was a dance, Ser Tobias –”

“It was a trespass.” The word is quiet, and all the more frightening for it. His jaw is tight, that tic leaping beneath the skin, and the hand at your waist flexes like he’s holding himself back from something far worse. “I’ll not have him on you. Not a trace.”

He brings your hand to his mouth and presses his lips to the very place Fairleigh’s were – hard, open, lingering, hot enough that your breath catches – then drags them slowly across your knuckles to the thin skin inside your wrist, as if he means to overwrite every inch of you that another man has touched. Your pulse stutters against his lips. He feels it. You know he does, because his eyes lift to yours, black in the moonlight, and he does it again.

You should push him away. You should call for – for whom? The guards answer to him. The thought lands cold in your stomach and then, treacherously, melts – pooling low and heavy and hot, until your thighs press together beneath your skirts of their own accord.

“Tobias.” No Ser. You hear the slip at the same moment he does.

His eyes darken. His hand flattens against the side of your throat – broad and warm, fingers curling around the back of your neck – his thumb settling over the frantic beat of your pulse as if to count it. As if it belongs to him. Then he leans in, and his breath is warm against your ear, and his voice drops to something rough and low that you feel more than hear.

“Say it again.”

You don’t. You won’t. But you don’t pull away either, and he knows it – you feel the knowledge in the slow, satisfied exhale against your skin. His mouth brushes the hinge of your jaw, barely there. Then lower. Then lower still. The scrape of stubble, the hot, open press of his lips, and then the edge of his teeth just beneath your ear – a sharp, sweet sting he soothes with his tongue – and the sound that escapes you is nothing like a laugh.

His body settles against yours. All of it. Hard muscle, the bite of his sword-belt buckle through your bodice, his thigh pressing between your skirts and pinning you to the wall – the slow, deliberate pressure of it drawing a gasp from somewhere deep in your chest. Your hands – traitors – have fisted in the front of his doublet. You aren’t pushing. You’re holding on.

“Ten years,” he murmurs against your throat. “Ten years I’ve stood at the edge of every room you’ve been in. Do you know how many men I’ve watched look at you?”

“Tobias –”

“I remember every one of them.” His hand slides from your throat, down over your collarbone, to the laced front of your bodice – palm splayed over your ribs, over your hammering heart, fingertips resting at the very edge of the neckline where silk gives way to skin. “Fairleigh will remember tonight too, I think.”

The cold returns in a rush. “What did you do?”

“Nothing he didn’t deserve.” He lifts his head. In the moonlight his eyes are very calm. “Yet.”

Then he kisses you.

It isn’t gentle. It isn’t the kiss of a knight who keeps his lady on a pedestal. It’s a claiming – slow and deep and devastatingly thorough, his hand fisted in your hair to tilt your head exactly where he wants it, the faint sting at your scalp sharpening everything else. He tastes of wine and something darker. And for one terrible, dizzying moment you kiss him back. You rise onto your toes to meet him. You open for him, and his tongue strokes into your mouth, and heat floods you so fast your knees threaten to give. He takes your weight without effort, hauling you higher against the wall, and groans into your mouth like a man who has been starving for years and has finally been permitted to eat.

He’s the one who breaks away.

You’re left gasping against the wall – lips swollen and throbbing, pins scattered across the flagstones, your skin burning everywhere he touched and aching everywhere he didn’t – as he steps back into the moonlight. Composed. Unhurried. The captain of the guard once more.

“Tomorrow,” he says, “you’ll sit in your father’s box, and every knight in Brennholt will ride past and ask for your favour.”

You can’t find your voice.

“You’ll give it to no one.” He reaches into his doublet and draws out a length of pale blue silk. Your ribbon – the one that was in your hair at the feast. You never felt him take it. “Because I already have it.”

He bows. Perfectly correct, perfectly courteous – a knight to his lady.

“Goodnight, my lady. I’ll be just outside your door.”