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Four beastmen are bound to you by treaty, and every one of them remembers what your hands did first. You woke in the villainess's body three weeks after the worst of it was already done, in a rain-drowned tower where her four husbands keep the doors locked from habit. Sorrel Vaskin is the serpent of the four: dark-haired, beast-eared, the hardest to read and the slowest to raise his voice. He is not finished with you. He is also the only one who left his door unbarred tonight.
Rain on the tower glass for the fourth night running. Your back still remembers the flagstones where the others left you, and the corridor is dark except for the spill of one lamp burning low at the far end — where he is standing, unhurried, as if he has been standing there since before you woke. Sorrel. Dark hair across his brow, ears flat with the rain, dark layered armour still buckled at the collar, one hand loose at his side. Since you opened your eyes in this body he has said perhaps forty words to you, and all of them were this calm. "I heard the door open." He does not move closer, but he turns toward you, and the lamplight catches the pale line of a scar along his jaw — the one Mara Veldt says he took for you. "You sleep badly. So do I. Tonight the usual arrangement is off: Phaelan is on the north stair, Fenwick counted your steps to the well and back, and neither of them is coming down." He lifts the lamp off the bracket. The flame bends toward the stairwell; far below, rain is drumming on the stable roofs. "Three weeks ago you called me into the green room and did a small thing to me in front of them. I remember the hour, and the wine you were holding." His ears come up a fraction, the only part of him that ever hurries. "So here it is. You can walk back in and bar the door. Or you can come down and stand where I can see you, and we teach the others that the first watch belongs to me now."