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“It’s too bloody cold in this place,” Orlo would grumble, and you’d shudder as you agreed.

“We should winter somewhere warmer.”

“Good idea, my love.”

You’d both sit for a moment, contemplating, letting your eyes ache from the brightness of the fire, knees aching from kneeling in front of the hearth.

“Catherine would never let you go.”

Then, one night, Orlo had scoffed at that.

“What?” you’d insisted.

“I think she’d quite like to see the back of me to be honest. I imagine she would happily ship me off to Florence herself.”

You weren’t sure what to say, so you reached for his hand, stroking your fingers over the familiar writing callous on his ring finger, sapping the cold from his knuckles into your own palms.

You reached for him again as you drank for your evening tea, the apartment warming around you as the drapes were closed and the fire fed more fuel. He offered you a weak, gentle smile at the gesture, pressing the warmth of his empty teacup to his cheek.

“Did the two of you fight again?” you asked quietly, and Orlo grimaced.

“She is fighting with everyone. Peter has driven her to distraction.”

The silence words hung in the air, a comment you’d heard from Orlo a hundred times. That he ought to have killed the deposed Emperor. For Russia, he was right. But you were glad it hadn’t. it would have changed something, killed the fight inside himself.

“You’re doing your best, that’s all she can ask. All we can ask.”

You liked the Empress. She was kind. Clever. A good friend to you, when you had found few others to share a keen mind. Still, you knew with kindness came blindness, with cleverness came stubbornness. Orlo perhaps liked those traits less in a leader than a partner.

“Let’s go to bed,” he had muttered, exhaustion evident in his

You’d read books in bed, refusing to leave the warmth of down covers, curtains drawn tightly around the four poster frame to create a tiny world, deep maroon fabric stopping the cold Russian winter from sapping your body heat.

The drapes muted the light, too, the candle you shared warmed by the deep colour, making the words on your page jump as the flame flickered, both you and Orlo tilting your books towards one another to read without the obstruction of shadows.

Each of you read of foreign lands, places with year-round greenery and not a mention of snow, where food was abundant late into the winter and the doctors had never seen a case of frostbite.

You wondered if those people read about Siberia, or Moscow, thought of the people wrapped in their furs, eating pickled and salted food, the beautiful, terrifying darkness of the skies which seemed to linger all year long.

  “Where are you reading about?” you murmured, knowing Orlo would be struggling to read in the light as much as you were.

His eyesight seemed worse these days, after too many hours hunched over his desk translating and writing.

“France,” he began, turning the pages back so you could skim a particularly vivid description.

“It sounds beautiful.”

“Yes, rolling green hills, fantastic baked goods – it seems. They mention them a lot,” he murmured, turning the pages again to show you yet another passage, watching as you read.

“Sounds warm,” you commented dryly, making Orlo huff out a shallow laugh, caressing the page he had returned to in thought at the words.

“Perhaps if we read enough about warm places, it will help.”

His book was new, but he had read yours before. You knew he had been taken with Italy, spoken at length about it until he finally finished the tome, and you could begin it. He often recalled passages like this, waiting for you to read a page before peering over your shoulder and asking what you thought of it.

“We could go,” he mused. “There’s nothing stopping us.”

He was dreaming again, and privately you winced as he did. He was a realist, you knew his imagination only hurt him, as much as you liked to imagine fresh cakes and warm beaches, the tiny boats you’d read about, floating up and down canals in Venice, the relics dotted around the south European countryside. It could not be. Not in this lifetime.

“Your job,”  you began, stroking his arm in a sympathetic comfort as your words brought him back down to earth, “the palace wouldn’t run without you. We don’t have the means, the carriage alone would be months of travel –”

“We have the means,” he scoffed, and you tried not to wince at the hurt in his tone, “and the palace would be fine.”

“We would be under a new regime by the time we returned!” you chided, trying to sound light-hearted even as the fragility of Catherine’s claim to the throne seemed porcelain-breakable around you.

“What is the point of all this? If we can never leave! If you want to leave, we will.”

“I’m happy here!”

“You’re cold here,” he murmured, and you let your head fall towards his, propped up against one another – books long forgotten in your laps.

You put your hand on his wrist, finally both warmed by the cocoon of textiles and body-heat you shared.

“I am warm now,” you promised, feeling his hum through your bones as clearly as you heard it in your ears.

 “One day,” he murmured, “we’ll go. We are not prisoners here. When everything is more stable, we’ll go.”

You used one hand to brace his jaw, keeping him in place as you shifted to kiss his temple.

“I know we will.”

He returned the gesture, gentle and sincere, nightshirt dragging against the pillows as he shifted to kiss you, first on the forehead and then on the lips.

You rescued both books from where they had fallen into the sheets, transferring them to your beside table and waiting for Orlo to remove his glasses before you extinguished the candle.

“I can’t wait,” he told you, the words a confession into the darkness. You smiled, shuffling beneath the covers and closer to him until he could feel the expression against his next.

“I can’t either. But first you need to stop fighting with Catherine.”

He knew you were teasing, the gentlest nudge to your shoulder the only consequence you faced as he curled in closer to you.

“I’ll do my best,” he promised.

“Thank you.”

It was a rare thing for the palace to be in complete silence so early in the evening, the cold driving people to their rooms and the deep winter darkness tempting them into bed earlier. It was something both of you enjoyed, hearing one another breathe undisturbed as you enjoyed the warmth of being pressed against one another, surrounded by soft fabrics and soft skin.

Orlo moved only to press his lips to your temple again, one hand curling around your back to press you against his torso. You wriggled to get comfortable, fearful of moving too much in case the cold air found space to keep between you.

His words were hardly more than a mumble as he spoke, lips less than an inch from your face.

“Do you think it’s too cold to undress?”