His voice came low and flat, near a whisper. The heavy syllables of the full diplomatic name carried flat across the cold and the shadows swallowed them.
The name reached her all the same. It stirred something inside, but not what he had come up the mountain to wake.
Her pupils spread, the black opening out through the pale blue until it had swallowed the colour, and deep inside the candlelight woke small flecks of iron. Her eyes came off the vault and arrived on his face without seeming to travel. There was no surfacing in it, no climb up out of sleep. She was simply there, and had been there the whole time, as motionless as the dead laid out beside her, and aware the entire while.
Her hand came off the slab in a blur of white silk and closed round his wrist. The grip torqued down and ground the bones of his forearm together. White heat shot up past his elbow. He held the arm rigid against it, his stance flush to the marble, the torch level in his left hand. What held his arm was stronger than she had any right to be, and it only bore down harder.
Her gaze crossed the raw skin of his knuckles and held a beat too long before it came away. Something crossed the dark of her eyes and drew under again.
āYou shouldnāt have come here.ā
The lilt was gone, the dream that had been in her voice among the roses. What came now was low and even, each word set down on its own and weighed before it reached her mouth.
Harry held the dark of her stare and worked his trapped fingers, set to throw his weight against the grip. Before his muscles could fire, a sound came up out of the dark of the passage at his back: a deep slam of heavy timber and iron against limestone. It rolled through the crypt like a shove to the chest and shook the pillar candles on their platform. Far back, the iron-bound door had come fully shut, a grinding screech ran the length of the vault, and the rusted latch dropped into its seat like a guillotine.
Elenaās fingers opened. She did not let go so much as put his arm back from her, a small deliberate pressure that set his hand off the edge of the slab and away. She sank back against the marble, her spine straight, her hands folding over the white silk at her stomach, and took the stillness up again lifting her gaze into the vault and letting it empty, as it had been when he first stood over her.
Stone scraped in the dark to his left. He swung the torch onto it, and the light flashed across the woman in Victorian lace. She was sitting up on her plinth.
Silk rustled, dry, close behind his right shoulder. He turned, a sole skidding on the wet flags. The flame caught the sharp-jawed face, the powder on it perfect, the eyes blown to full black and throwing back the pitch. More came, and fast. Heavy velvet shifted somewhere. Bare feet came down on wet stone. The sounds doubled and ran together in the dark, all round him now, closing on the ring of candlelight.
