Ryan was the decisive factor in Gilia's defeat.
Before the final engagement, he had broken their cipher—worked through it alone, over two sleepless nights, until the pattern gave way. What the decryption revealed was that the entire Gilian advance had been a feint, an elaborate misdirection designed to draw Albion's forces forward into an overextended position. Instead, Albion pulled back entirely and struck from the flank, hard and without warning.
They hit the Crown Prince's detachment directly.
Ryan could still see the man's face when they brought him in—the moment the composure cracked and gave way to something raw and furious.
"Son of a bitch. I will tear you apart with my own hands someday."
The soldiers standing guard had tensed, hands tightening on their rifles, even though the prisoner was a crown prince and surrounded. The hatred in his eyes had that quality—the kind that made trained men nervous.
Rumor had it that even after the prisoner exchange, even after the peace negotiations had concluded, the Crown Prince of Gilia would grind his teeth at the sound of Ryan's name and reach for whatever profanity came to hand first.
Men who felt that way did not simply cool with time.
*Both problems at once.*
Ryan felt the familiar disgust rising from somewhere deep, and recognized it immediately—the same feeling that had followed him through the capital like a second shadow. The sense of being trapped between forces that didn't care particularly about justice, only about outcome. It had made everything feel gray. Made eating feel pointless. Made sleep feel like something that happened to other people.
He'd assumed Blissbury would be different. Baron Stanford had assumed it too. Quieter surroundings, simpler work, time to recover.
*When did I start eating again?*
The answer came to him immediately, and despite everything, a short laugh escaped him.
Eloise. Sitting alone in the kitchen of Blissbury with an apple pie, eating it with a concentration and evident pleasure that had no interest whatsoever in appearances. Crumbs on the table. Mouth full. Completely absorbed.
He had watched her and felt, for the first time in months, genuinely hungry.
From that day, things had shifted—slowly, then less slowly. The gray had begun to lift. Not because anything about his situation had changed, but because Blissbury had stopped being an empty room to sit in and had become somewhere he found himself looking forward to being.
*From the day Eloise arrived at Blissbury.*
He said her name quietly, the way he might have tested the temperature of something. Then again, slower.
It had a quality he couldn't quite account for—almost a texture. He'd never said anyone's name that way before. Never had reason to.
The back of his neck was warm. His pulse had picked up without his permission, and his mouth was dry. His body was behaving as though something significant had happened, though he was sitting perfectly still in a quiet room. It was not unpleasant. It was like floating in warm water with no particular urgency to surface.
After a long moment he looked back at the letter.
*That's why I sent it the way I did. My brother's adjutant, that adjutant's wife, her cousin, the cousin's maid, and an errand boy the maid stopped on the street. There may have been others I don't know about. I'm curious what postmark it reaches you with.*
*In any case, my feelings may be unfounded. You know how common this is among people like us, after a war. My own doctor called it sensitivity and I felt embarrassed to have brought it up at all.*
A bitter smile. The Baron wasn't wrong that it was common—men who had spent years watching for surveillance sometimes found themselves unable to stop, even in peacetime. Physicians had a name for it. It was considered a kind of wound, invisible, but real.
But Ryan didn't think Stanford was imagining things. He never had been the type.
He read the last line.
*Don't use this letter as an excuse to come back to the capital. Write and tell me you're fine.*
Ryan sat with that for a moment.
Stanford knew him well enough to anticipate the instinct—something stirs, you move toward it, you act. A lesser excuse than this had sent him toward danger before.
But the instinct wasn't there. He turned inward, looking for it, and found something else entirely in its place.
*We need to at least see out the holiday.*
He almost laughed at himself. The holiday was a reason, not the reason. He knew that perfectly well.
The image surfaced again, the one from his imagination—Eloise turning to the music, face bright, clapping in time. More alive than she was in ordinary moments, and she was already more alive than most people he'd known.
He wanted to see it. The real version, not the imagined one.
Ryan folded the letter carefully and put it at the back of the desk drawer. He would write back tomorrow. Tonight he couldn't settle to it—his thoughts were moving too quickly and in too many directions.
He stood and went out into the corridor.
There was light coming from the half-open door at the far end.
A smile found him before he'd quite decided on it.
Eloise's room. Still awake, then—which was no surprise. For the past week she'd been the last person in the house with a candle burning, working through lists and arrangements until she simply couldn't anymore.
He walked toward the door and coughed deliberately, loudly. Twice. Three times. It was only courtesy—she didn't have anything secret in there, but it gave her a moment to put away whatever she wasn't ready to show.
He knocked lightly.
"Eloise?"
Nothing.
He waited, then looked through the gap.
She was on the sofa, head tipped back against the cushions, entirely asleep. A paper was still in her hand.
"Eloise."
Her eyelids didn't move.
He stood in the doorway for a moment, thinking it through. A gentleman had no business entering a lady's room uninvited. That was not a complicated position—it was simply correct.
*She needs to be told to go to bed properly.*
He stepped inside.
He crossed the room quietly and stopped a few paces away, looking at her. The dark circles beneath her eyes had deepened since yesterday—he was certain of it. Her color wasn't good. She'd been running herself past the point of sense, and there were still two days before the celebration began.
He was going to say something to Baron Stanford about this, when he saw him. About how much Eloise Severton cared for this estate—not as a duty, but in the way that people cared for things that had made them who they were. If Mr. Severton ever retired, Blissbury would be in better hands with her involved in its management than almost anyone else Ryan could imagine.
Eloise's eyelashes moved.
Slowly, her eyes opened—unfocused at first, then settling. Green, and round, and finding him immediately across the quiet room.
For a moment she simply looked at him.
And he looked back at her.
*I want to see this face for the rest of my life.*
The thought arrived with the calm certainty of something that had been true for some time and was only now being said aloud.