She was still staring at where the man had been.

The blood. The absence. The impossible, clean ’nothing’ where a large, sweating, terrible person had been pressing himself against her spine thirty seconds ago.

Her dress was torn at the front.

Her hands were holding both sides of it together over her chest — the full, soft weight of her breasts pressed behind her own fists, the nipples still peaked from cold air and adrenaline, the fabric edges jagged where his hands had been.

She looked up.

At the man in the doorway.

He was — she didn’t have a word for it immediately.

The sunlight from the shop’s high window came down at the angle that hits people either badly or very well, and it hit him the way it hits the subjects of portraits that expensive painters get commissioned for — the dark hair, the jaw, the specific quality of his stillness that her brain kept trying to categorize as ’noble’ and kept abandoning because it wasn’t quite that.

The purple eyes found hers.

She opened her mouth.

Closed it.

Opened it again.

"A map," she said.

The words came from somewhere entirely automatic. Her mind was still processing the blood, the dissolution, the way it had ’whipped’ and ’vanished’ — and the part of her brain responsible for basic social function had taken over from sheer survival instinct.

"Yes." The corner of his mouth. "Of the town."

"Of— yes. The town. Yes."

She stood.

Or rather, she ’tried’ to stand, her legs making an attempt and her body making a counteroffer, and she compromised on a slow rise that involved the counter edge and more dignity than she felt she had access to.

One hand still held her dress together.

The other found the edge of the lower drawer behind the counter — the one she kept locked, the one with the inventory records and the deed and the map that the previous owner had left and which she’d never had occasion to use but had kept anyway because getting rid of documents had never felt like the right call.

She pulled it open.

Pulled out the map.

Turned.

Extended it toward him with the specific, slightly dazed gesture of a woman who is operating on a delay — her hand out, the rolled parchment in it, her eyes somewhere between his face and the middle distance.

He took it.

"Thank you."

"You’re welcome," she said.

She heard herself say it. The words landing in her own ears with the quality of something said by someone she was watching from a short distance.

He looked at her.

At the torn dress. At the hand still holding it closed over her chest.

He moved.

Not toward her face. Toward the fabric.

His hand found the torn edge — both edges, his fingers taking the material, the knuckles pressing briefly against the curve of her chest as he brought the pieces together. Not roughly. The deliberate, practical motion of someone closing a wound.

She felt his knuckles.

Through the fabric. Against the soft swell above where the tear ended, the warmth of them a specific, grounded heat against skin that had just been cold and frightened and was now receiving something entirely different.

She looked down.

Her face went warm from the collarbone up.

He pressed the edges together as far as they would go — which was not far, the tear too wide for the fabric to hold without something to bind it — and simply held them there for a moment, considering the structural problem.

"You should sew this," he said, "for the man you want to have."

His eyes, when she looked up, were on the fabric.

Not on her chest.

That somehow made it worse.

"I—" Her voice. "Yes. I will keep that in mind."

He let go.

Stepped back.

She held the dress together with her own hand again, her heart doing something loud and uninvited, her face thoroughly betraying her.

He unrolled the map.

The parchment crackled — old, well-made, with the hand-drawn detail of someone who had walked every street they were depicting. Hartfield County, full spread, every alley and district and landmark marked in faded ink.

He looked at it.

She looked at him looking at it.

He was ’gorgeous.’

The word arrived with the specific, embarrassing clarity of a thought she’d been avoiding since he’d stepped through the door. Not just attractive — ’impossible.’ The kind of impossible that your eyes keep returning to because some part of your brain is still running verification, still trying to confirm that a person this assembled exists in the same physical reality as torn dresses and corrupt shopkeepers and the specific smell of cheap ale that still lingered where the man had been.

She was staring.

She knew she was staring.

She couldn’t stop.

The purple eyes came up.

She looked at the map.

"The eastern district," she said, quickly, with the energy of a woman who has just remembered she knows things. "By the grain warehouse. The men there — the ones with the red sashes — they charge passage fee. Anyone who needs to move goods through that street."

He looked at the map. Found the district. His finger traced it.

"Since when."

"Since the Count died. Before, they were his men. Now they work for themselves." She leaned slightly forward — the dress, she remembered the dress, pulled it tighter — and pointed at a street junction two inches north. "Here, also. The well. They put a man at the well and charge for water."

"For water."

"For water."

His expression didn’t change. But something behind his eyes did — a small, interior shift, like a switch being set.

She watched it happen.

"And here—" Her finger moved again, this time to the south quarter, "—the brothel district has been expanded. Two buildings that used to be homes. Families were—" She stopped. "They were told to leave."

"Told."

"Or they left because of what happened to the ones who weren’t told first."

He looked at the map for a long moment.

Then he looked at her.

"You know this city well."

"I live in it," she said simply. "You learn it or you don’t survive it."

His stomach made a sound.

Low, unambiguous, the sound of a body that has been doing significant work since before dawn and has not been provided fuel for any of it.

He looked mildly surprised.

Not embarrassed — that wasn’t in his register — just surprised. The specific expression of a person who has just been reminded that they have a body and it has opinions.

She looked at him.

Something shifted in her chest — the gratitude that had been sitting there since the moment the blood ’whipped’ and ’vanished’ finding a direction to move.

"Are you hungry?"

He opened his mouth.

She was already moving.

"My house is just there." She pointed out the shop’s side window, at the narrow stone building pressed against the shop’s wall, close enough that the walls shared warmth. "Come. It’s nothing special but I have—come."

"It’s really not—"

"Come," she said again.

She was already at the door.

He followed.

The street was quiet in the way that streets near recently-dissolved corrupt shopkeepers tend to be quiet — the few witnesses who had been nearby having found elsewhere to be with considerable speed.

’Why do I feel déjà vu?’