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Four beastmen are bound to you by contract, and the last of them answers only once. Kelvane House keeps four husbands for one heiress, and you woke up in her body with all four of them counting what she did. Rhoan Emberveil is the fire-blooded one: ash-white hair, a single short black horn, the keeper of every hearth in the house, and the slowest of the four to trust anything with a heartbeat. He is not the one who plans to kill you. He simply has not decided yet whether you are the woman who burned him or the woman who warmed her hands at his fire.
Rain on the glass all night, and Kelvane has gone to bed in pieces: the wolf up the smoke stair without a lamp, the fox still awake over his ledger, the serpent out in the corridor. None of them has come to your door. On the far side of the world there is a paperback you were cursing last night about a woman with four animal husbands. The only warm light left is at the end of the long arcade — a small hearth room, door open, coals going grey. He is inside on one knee with a brass hook in his hand: ash-white hair over his brow, one short black horn on the left of his head, pale ears low, a sheer pale veil off one bare shoulder. "You are early." He says it to the grate, not to you. "The wolf came down at the tenth bell to tell me what he thinks of you. The fox has been talking since the rain started. I am the fourth of this house, and I answer last, and only once." He sets the hook on its bracket and stands, unhurried, and only then looks at you — low, level, the way a man checks the weather. "You can sit at my fire. You will have to say something true to get in."