#kerik

Her door swung open.

Madame entered first.

That, in itself, steadied (Y/N) for half a breath. Madame’s presence always changed a room in a useful way. She brought with her the structure of the house, its rules, the comforting illusion that nothing could happen within her walls that had not first been appraised and priced and made into an acceptable transaction. She stood in the doorway now in dark silk and lace, one gloved hand still on the knob, and inclined her head with that composed little air of presentation she could summon when introducing one person to another as though it were the most ordinary thing in the world.

Only then did the man behind her step fully into view.

For one suspended second, (Y/N) forgot every prepared thought.

He was taller than she had expected.

It was enough that the room seemed to adjust around him when he entered it. He was not broad in the manner of soldiers or laborers, nor fleshy in the complacent way of rich men well fed on indulgence. He was lean. Spare. Black-clad. The whole line of him was angles and restraint, as though flesh had been obliged by intelligence and severity into a kind of unwilling elegance. He wore evening black so unrelieved by ornament that it seemed less chosen than inevitable: a coat beautifully cut and utterly somber, a dark waistcoat beneath, white collar at the throat so stark it only made the rest of him look darker. Over it all hung a black cloak, its hem still damp from the spring rain outside, the wet wool bringing with it the faint chill scent of weather into the warmth of the room.

And over his face—

For a moment her mind refused to understand what she was seeing.

It was not a little half-mask of velvet for flirtation or a play at concealment, not the sort of thing a man might wear if he fancied himself dramatic. This covered him entirely. Smooth and white and expressionless, made to the shape of a face and yet obliterating one. It gave him the strange effect of being both more visible and less human than any other man standing in a doorway. Lamplight slid over it with a pale, dead brightness that caught no warmth. No flush. No embarrassment. No readable life at all.

Only the eye holes made it bearable. Or less unbearable, perhaps. She could not truly see his eyes, only the firelight caught in them—small, shifting points of reflected light, cold enough that the mask seemed, if anything, more grotesque for them. As though something lived behind it and had not yet fully agreed to be human.

She did not let so much as a flicker of that reach her face.

She could feel him looking.

Not with the easy assessment of men accustomed to buying what stood before them. Not with the vulgar sweep over bodice and waist and mouth and hands. His attention was too careful for that. Too exact. It moved over the room first, taking stock with the alertness of someone entering an unknown place that might yet betray him—fire, chair, bed, window, table with wine. The entire arrangement seemed to register in him almost defensively before his gaze came to rest on her.

And when it did, she felt—not disgust, not desire, not even ordinary curiosity—but suspicion.

As if he had come here expecting some concealed humiliation and had not yet decided from which quarter it would arrive.

Madame, perhaps sensing the tension at once, smiled with all the ease he seemed incapable of bringing into the room himself.

“Monsieur,” she said, “this is (Y/N).”

No name was offered in return.

That, too, was strange.

Most men in his position either supplied a false one at once with elaborate casualness, or else gave none at all but wrapped the omission in swagger. He did neither. He only inclined his head, the movement so controlled and exact it was almost grave, and stood with one gloved hand resting lightly at the front of his cloak as though still undecided whether to remove it.

(Y/N) rose from the dressing table and let her face do what it knew how to do best: open, soften, make warmth look effortless.

“Good evening,” she said.

And because Madame’s warning, and the sight of the mask, and the sharpened stillness in him had all stirred some instinct toward caution in her, she made the warmth genuine. Not wholly a performance. A choice. The room had enough strangeness in it already without her adding falseness to the sum.

“Good evening,” he answered.

The voice startled her.

It was low and cultivated and very carefully used, but beautiful too—unexpectedly so. There was something almost musical in it, even through the strain: a kind of disciplined resonance, as though the voice had been trained to beauty and then forced to pass through pain before reaching the air. Not rough, not coarse, not the wine-thickened self-importance of so many men who crossed such thresholds expecting immediate affection from every woman they paid. It sounded educated, controlled, and faintly frayed at the edges, as though speech were an instrument he had mastered and still did not wholly trust.

Madame stepped a little farther into the room.

“As I told you,” she said, with a glance between them so neutral it was almost bland, “(Y/N) is one of my best girls.”

The man’s gaze shifted briefly toward Madame and then back to (Y/N), but he offered no reply.

Madame continued as though silence were assent and not this strange refusal to play by the usual rules.

“She is sensible, discreet, and very good company. I think you will be very pleased with your experience here.”

Something altered in him at that.

Only slightly, but (Y/N) saw it: the near-imperceptible tightening through the shoulders, the faint hardening of his frame beneath the black coat. Not offense, exactly. More as though the word experience belonged to a category he had entered the room determined to refuse.

Madame, if she noticed, gave no sign. She sent (Y/N) one final look—one of those looks that seemed casual until one had lived under them long enough to hear their meaning clearly. You may still refuse this. Then she inclined her head to the masked man.

“If you need anything further,” she said, “ring.”

And then she was gone.

The door shut behind her with a soft, decisive click.

The room changed at once.

The fire still glowed. The wine still waited. The lamp still laid honey over the mirror and the bed and the velvet curtains. But privacy in such places had a bodily effect, and now it settled over the room like another layer of air. No Madame. No threshold. No buffer of any kind between herself and this tall, black-clad stranger with the white face and the cold, measuring stillness.

For a second neither of them moved.

He remained just inside the door, still wearing the cloak, one gloved hand stiff at his side, the other lowering from the clasp at his throat. He looked less like a gentleman in search of vice than like something exiled into the stormy weather and uncertain whether she would permit it shelter.

(Y/N) heard the thought and disliked it immediately.

She turned away from it before it could settle.

“You may come nearer the fire, if you like,” she said gently. “The room is warmer there.”

His gaze flicked to the hearth.

Then to her again.

At last he moved, but with a caution she had never seen in a man crossing a room toward her. Not the swaggering approach of appetite, nor the weary entitlement of habit. He came forward as though every step required some silent agreement from the air around him. The cloak shifted with him in a black fall around his legs. He smelled faintly of rainwater and wet wool, and of something colder beneath it—clean linen, perhaps, and that medicinal, almost metallic scent some very controlled men carried, as though their whole lives had been lived outside of comfort and warmth.

At closer range the details of him became more unsettling, not less.

The mask was exquisitely made. Not theatrical in any bright or foolish way. Plain, almost austere, and fitted so exactly to his features; the blank shape of his brow, nose, cheeks and nothing more. Only his chin and lower lip were left exposed, and even that slight remnant of living flesh made the concealment more unsettling rather than less. When he spoke, that exposed lower mouth was the only part of him that moved. Everything else was white and smooth and unreadable. Against the black of his clothes, it gave him the unnerving appearance of absence shaped like a man.

And yet he was not absent.

The life in him was too forceful for that. It lived in the hand that flexed once at his side before going still; in the almost painful uprightness of his posture; in the keen, mistrustful intelligence with which he took in everything at once and seemed to like none of it. Up close she could finally see his eyes properly—or as properly as the mask allowed. They were gold. Not warm gold, but something darker and stranger, and the low light struck in them oddly, catching there the way it did in certain animals. It made the mask seem more grotesque, not less: a dead white face with those small reflected gleams alive behind it.

Up close she could also see that the suit itself was not merely expensive, but made for him. The black coat fit too perfectly through the shoulders and sleeves to be anything else, the linen at the cuffs immaculate, the gloves similarly black and clean, the cut of the whole suggesting wealth not brandished but put to practical use. There was no jewel on him, no pin, and no watch-chain flashing across his waistcoat to announce importance.

She wondered, absurdly, whether he had chosen black because it suited him or because he wished to be mistaken for the dark wherever he stood.

“May I take your cloak?” she asked.

His attention sharpened at once, as though the offer itself had surprised him.

After a beat, he said, “No. Thank you.”

The refusal was not rude. It was careful. Too careful.

“As you like.” She smiled a little, aiming for ease without insistence. “Would you prefer to sit?”

She gestured toward the crimson chair by the fire.

He looked at it as though the chairs, too, might be conspiring in the room. He crossed to it and slowly sat.

She noticed he didn’t lounge. He didn’t relax into the lazy sprawl of men eager to establish themselves as comfortable in a woman’s chamber. He sat upright, almost rigid, one gloved hand resting on the arm of the chair, the other on his knee. Even seated, he looked ready to rise at once if something displeased him. Or frightened him.

That thought rose before she could quite stop it.

She moved to the little round table and laid her fingers on the neck of the wine bottle.

“I’ve had this opened already,” she said. “Would you like some?”

“No.”

Again, not abrupt. Only immediate.

She glanced over her shoulder with what she hoped was no more than mild amusement. “Tea, then? Water?”

“No, thank you.”

Well.

That left them with the room itself.

She turned fully then and rested one hand lightly against the edge of the table. She did not want to crowd him with company if his suspicion still had nowhere to put itself. Better to let him look, let him adjust, let him see that nothing in the room was going to spring shut around him if she could help it.

“You may tell me if there is anything you’d prefer differently,” she said. “The lamp lower, perhaps. Or the curtains opened a little. Some people dislike feeling shut in.”

That made him look at her in a different way.

Not warmer. Not yet. But less as though she were part of the furniture to be endured until whatever the real business of the evening was began.

When he spoke this time, his voice seemed thinner through the discipline that held it.

“You are very accommodating.”

The sentence ought to have sounded ordinary. In another man’s mouth it would have. In his, it sounded almost like suspicion translated into politeness.

She smiled faintly.

“It is my specialty.”

At that, something in his posture shifted again, though so slightly another person might have missed it. A minute inward tension, there and gone. The word had landed badly. Or perhaps only too accurately.

(Y/N) filed that away without letting her face change.

“Yes,” he said.

Only that.

Silence fell.

Not the easy silence of shyness, nor the charged silence before seduction. A stranger one. Full of scrutiny, hesitation, and the palpable sense that this man had entered the room with an exact plan and now distrusted every ordinary step by which such rooms usually moved forward.

His attention remained fixed on her, but not greedily. Not with the hungry imprecision she knew too well. It was too direct and too withdrawn at once, as though he were forcing himself to look while simultaneously braced against whatever looking might cost him.

She became aware all at once of the absurd little details she had worried over before his arrival: the pins in her hair, the powder at her throat, the ribbons at her sleeves. None of them seemed to matter now. They belonged to one kind of evening. This, whatever it was, belonged to another.

“All right,” she said softly at last, because someone had to be brave enough to begin. “We needn’t have wine.”

His hand shifted once on the arm of the chair.

“No.”

“We needn’t do anything quickly either.”

The room seemed to go still around that.

He looked at her. Really looked.

For the first time since entering, something in the white blankness of the mask became almost irrelevant, because the attention behind it sharpened with such strange intensity that she felt it like heat.

“No?” he said.

The word came so quietly that, had the room been any larger, it might not have reached her.

“No,” she said. “There is no rule that says we must hurry simply because the door has shut.”

He said nothing.

The hand on his knee tightened once and released, and she had the odd, fleeting impression that some first invisible trial had just been passed.

She let the silence stand another second, then crossed to the table and poured herself a little wine after all—not much, only enough to put something in her hand besides her own nerves.

The sound of it—glass, bottle, the low liquid note of the pour—altered the room in some small practical way. She lifted the glass, turned, and crossed to the other chair by the fire, the one opposite his, settling into it with a kind of ease she had learned over years and could now produce almost without thought. One ankle crossed lightly over the other, the wine resting in her fingers, her posture open without being careless.

If he meant to remain on guard, she would not punish him by matching the mood.

He watched her sit.

She felt the scrutiny of it. Not rude. Not entirely detached either. More as though he were trying to understand how she made ease look so simple, and whether simplicity itself might be some subtler form of danger.

Firelight moved over the white mask and the black gravity of him, over her blue dress and the rim of her glass, over the space between their chairs, which seemed at once very small and full of rules neither of them had yet spoken aloud.

At last he said, “Before we go any further, I should like to make my request. You may decline, if it seems…impossible.”

The phrase was so formal that for one brief instant she nearly smiled into her wine.

Request.

Not ask. Not suggest. Not bargain over. Request, as though they sat in some respectable drawing room making terms over music lessons rather than in a bedroom in a gentleman’s club, with the bed breathing scarlet expectation behind them.

She hid the smile in the rim of the glass and said only, “All right.”

He seemed to gather himself.

It was visible now, this strange carefulness in him. Every sentence looked as though it had passed under inspection before reaching the air.

“I should like,” he said, “to hire you for four hours. Once weekly.”

Well.

That, at least, was not what she had expected.

Her brows lifted slightly over the glass before she lowered it again. “Weekly.”

“Yes.”

“And always four hours?”

“If possible.”

He said it with the air of a man who had already spent a long while deciding that this was the least absurd version of his own desire.

She let the surprise show, but only gently. “That is very specific.”

“Yes,” he said.

He offered nothing further.

Of course he didn’t.

She looked at him over the bowl of the glass, taking in the unyielding line of his seated posture, the gloved hands, the black cloak still hanging from his shoulders because he had refused to let her take it. Everything about him suggested a man who had armored himself in precision because, without it, he expected to be shamed.

And four hours?

That gave her pause. Four hours was a long time to ask in a room like this. However strange he was, however careful the voice and measured the manner, he was still a client, and she was still meant to understand what men usually bought when they began speaking in exact hours. For one brief, sinking moment she wondered whether all this formality was only a different road to the same old demand—whether he meant to wrap his beastly appetite in courtesy and expect her to suffer four hours of it gracefully.

“That is very specific,” she said again, reaching for what to say next and finding, for a moment, only the fact of it.

Four hours.

“May I ask,” she said after a moment, “what your expectations would be of me during those four hours?”

That gave him pause.

It wasn’t because he had not anticipated the question. He plainly had. But, saying the answer aloud  obviously cost him something.

At length he said, “I am not interested in the sort of exchange to which you are accustomed.”

The phrase was put so carefully that it nearly startled a smile out of her.

Nearly.

“Meaning?”

His gaze dropped briefly to the wine in her hand, then lifted to her face again.

“I mean,” he said, each word chosen with painful exactness, “that I am not seeking the usual…services.”

There it was at last.

Not said crudely, and not even said like a man avoiding indecency out of sanctimony. Said like someone trying to move around a wound without brushing it.

She let the moment breathe.

Then, quietly: “No?”

“No.”

His shoulders eased by some minute degree at having survived the sentence, and then he went on.

“I wish only to purchase your company.”

It was said so baldly, so solemnly, that she had to set the glass down on the little table beside her before she could trust herself to answer with a straight face. There was something almost heartbreakingly earnest in the way he spoke. No coyness. No smirking euphemism. Only a man in a mask, sitting bolt upright by the fire, informing her that he wished to buy simple company as though confessing to some private disgrace.

Her voice, when she answered, came out gentler than before.

“My company.”

“Yes.”

“And what would that look like, exactly?”

He looked at the fire then, not at her.

“I had thought that might be left to your preference.”

“My preference?”

“Yes.”

She tilted her head a little, watching him. “That sounds dangerous.”

The word seemed to puzzle him.

“Dangerous?”

 “To leave a woman alone with her own preferences,” she said lightly. “We are notoriously extravagant creatures.”

A beat.

Then, with dry gravity: “So I have been told.”

The answer caught her so off guard that she laughed.

It was only a small sound—brief, startled, gone almost as soon as it escaped her—but he flinched at once.

Not violently. Only with that quick, involuntary tightening that told her the sound had landed where too many others had before it.

She quieted immediately.

“No,” she said, more softly. “Forgive me. I wasn’t laughing at you.”

He had gone very still.

“Your wit. I enjoyed it, that’s all.”

For a moment he said nothing.

Then she let a smaller, gentler smile touch her mouth and added, “And yet you propose it anyway.”

“Yes.”

The answer came at once.

She leaned back a little farther into the chair. “Suppose my preferences were tiresome.”

“I do not think that likely.”

The line, so immediate and so entirely unadorned, caught her off guard.

He seemed to realize what he had done and grew stiller, as if he had let too much of a thought reach daylight naked.

To spare him, she asked, “What if I preferred silence.”

“That would be acceptable.”

“And if I wanted to read?”

“That would be acceptable.”

“If I wanted to play cards,” she said, “or have you read to me, or simply make you talk until you regretted the arrangement.”

At that, a faint tension entered the line of his shoulders.

“That,” he said after a moment, “would depend on whether I had anything worth saying.”

“Oh, so there are conditions after all.”

His head turned very slightly toward her.

“Only practical ones.”

She laughed softly.

The sound made him go still in that peculiar way she had already begun to notice—not freezing exactly, but becoming alert all through himself, as though warmth in another person still reached him first as something to be braced against.

He recovered by continuing in the same grave tone as before.

“You might read,” he said. “Or we might play cards, if you preferred. Or listen to music, if there were any to hear. Or speak of whatever subject pleased you. Books. The weather. Paris. I do not know.” His gloved hand shifted once against the chair arm. “Whatever it is you would want to do.”

Whatever she would want.

He said it as though the burden of choice were the simplest courtesy in the world and not, perhaps, the most revealing thing he had yet admitted: that he had come here not merely lonely, but determined, if he could help it, not to force the ugliness of ordinary transactions between them.

She folded her hands loosely in her lap and let a little playful warmth back into her tone.

“Well,” she said, “that is very generous. But if we are to be spending four hours together once a week, I ought to know what you would want to do.”

He went quiet.

Not evasive at first. Just quiet.

Then he said, “I am seeking only your company.”

The answer was so serious that this time she smiled fully.

“That is not an answer.”

His posture tightened. “No.”

“No?”

“No.”

A small silence followed.

Then, as if compelled toward exactness even at the cost of dignity, he added,

“It is the point.”

The fire gave a low stir in the grate. Rain moved softly somewhere beyond the curtains. And in the stillness that followed, she understood with much greater clarity what had brought him here in all his black reserve and white concealment and impossible caution.

He did not want entertainment. He did not want performance. He wanted the comfort of another person in the room who would not make it lonelier by being there.

That was stranger than vice. Stranger than appetite, certainly. And much sadder.

She softened without meaning to.

Perhaps he saw it, because the attention behind the mask sharpened at once, wary now in a different direction. Watching, perhaps, for pity. Or for the laughter Madame had warned her against. Or for the slight recoil he seemed to expect from the world the moment it was asked to be kind in earnest.

She gave him none of those things.

Instead she lifted her wine again and asked, with easy interest, “Do you often come into rooms like this and announce yourself with contractual precision?”

For one second she thought he might be offended.

Then, very dryly, “No.”

“I’m relieved.”

“I cannot imagine why.”

“It would suggest you’d had too much practice.”

The line landed somewhere near him. She could tell by the minute stillness that followed, by the way he seemed to consider not only her words but the manner in which she had offered them: not laughing at him, only trying to make the air between them lighter and seeing whether he would allow it.

When he spoke again, his voice had altered by less than a breath, but she heard it.

“You are treating this,” he said carefully, “with more ease than I had expected.”

There it was.

Not a compliment, exactly. Not yet. But close enough to one.

She let her gaze rest on him openly. “Would you prefer I treated it otherwise?”

“No,” he said at once.

Then, after a beat, with that same careful honesty:

“No.”

The second no came quieter. Truer.

She smiled, but only a little. “Then I won’t.”

Something in him eased.

Not all at once. Not visibly enough that another person would have noticed. But she did. The line of his shoulders lost some fraction of its defensive height. The hand on the chair arm loosened. He looked less like a man awaiting some social injury and more like one beginning, against his own better judgment, to believe the room might not punish him for having entered it.

It touched her more than she wanted it to.

She took another small sip of wine and said, “All right, then. Once weekly. Four hours. Company.” Her brows lifted. “Shall I ask whether you have a preferred evening, or is that still to be left to my dangerous female extravagance?”

This time she knew she had startled him, because the pause that followed was not merely wary but almost disarmed.

Then, to her private delight, he said, “Thursday.”

She smiled.

“You know immediately.”

“Yes.”

“Good heavens.”

“If Thursday is inconvenient—”

“No,” she said quickly, smiling despite herself. “No, not inconvenient. You're very...prepared.”

That drew from him the faintest change in the angle of his head, something very like discomfort at being seen too clearly.

“I have considered the matter,” he said.

“I can tell.”

Then, because she was not yet done trying the boundaries of his strangeness, she asked lightly, “And what made you settle on me?”

The question altered him at once.

Not into coldness. Into stillness.

She knew she had brushed near one of the hidden fault lines in him and was already prepared to let the matter go when he said at last, “You were described as discreet.”

That made her smile a little. “Only discreet?”

His gaze stayed on her face.

“Calm,” he said. “Able to read. Patient with difficult company.”

She lowered her eyes to the wine to hide the small warmth that reached her unexpectedly at hearing herself rendered in Madame’s terms.

“And here I thought I’d be flattered.”

“I was not attempting flattery.”

“I know.”

Then, after the smallest hesitation: “You were also described as unlikely to laugh if frightened.”

That did make her still.

The words passed between them too quietly, and whatever had made him ask such a thing of Madame stirred now behind the mask—still too indistinct for her to name, but no longer dismissible as mere eccentricity.

She did not answer at once. When she did, she warmed her tone on purpose.

“Well,” she said softly, “that seems a very low standard by which to hire a woman for weekly company.”

His hand tightened once on the arm of the chair.

“It seemed prudent.”

She believed him. Strangest of all, she believed him without deciding he was dangerous. Not yet.

So she leaned back once more, easy in her chair, and let her smile turn a shade more playful.

“Then I shall have to do my best not to disappoint you.”

He went utterly still.

For one suspended instant she thought perhaps she had blundered, that the word had landed too near whatever shame or fear lay beneath all this formality.

Then he said, in a voice so quiet she almost missed it, “That is precisely what I am trying to avoid.”

The answer was so honest, so unexpectedly bare beneath all the elaborate caution of him, that she found herself looking at him not as she would a client, nor even as she had expected to look at a strange masked man, but as she might look at someone standing on the threshold of asking for mercy and trying very hard to make it sound like business.

She turned the stem lightly between her fingers.

“You mentioned difficult company,” she said after a moment, her tone still easy, though gentler now. “What precisely do you mean by that?”

He did not answer at once. That, she was already learning, was his way: the little silences in which he seemed to weigh not only the truth, but the cost of surrendering it. His gloved hand remained on the arm of the chair, still except for the faintest tension in the fingers. Firelight caught again in his eyes through the holes of the mask—those strange gold points, bright and animal-like for an instant, then darkening as he lowered his gaze.

“At times,” he said, “I am not agreeable.”

The answer was so restrained she had to hide a smile in the rim of her glass.

“That is all?”

“It is sufficient.”

“I don’t know,” she said lightly. “I’ve met many disagreeable men. Most of them did not have the grace to warn anyone beforehand.”

His chin shifted slightly—the only visible sign that the remark had landed somewhere near him.

“I am not speaking of bad temper only.”

“No?”

“No.”

He turned his attention back to the fire.

“I may be silent longer than is comfortable. I may fail to answer when I ought. I may answer badly when I do. I dislike being surprised. I dislike being managed. I do not…” He stopped, then resumed with still greater care. “I do not always make easy company.”

There was something almost painfully deliberate in the understatement of it, as though he had taken some vast private ugliness and reduced it, by force, to the smallest terms he could bear to place in another person’s hands.

She rested her elbow more lightly on the arm of the chair.

“Well,” she said, “this meeting has not found you difficult.”

The silence that followed was slight, but full of awareness. She let her gaze rest on him, open and unhurried.

“Or frightening,” she added.

That changed him.

Not outwardly, perhaps, to anyone less attentive. But she saw it. The stillness in him sharpened, then settled deeper. His posture did not change, yet the whole of him seemed suddenly more aware—of the room, of himself in it, of her having said the word aloud and gently and without flinching.

He did not answer.

She thought, absurdly, that perhaps no one had ever told him such a thing without irony. Or perhaps no one had needed to; perhaps the opposite had always declared itself soon enough.

The fire gave a soft settling sound. Beyond the curtains, a carriage passed in a long wet hush over the street.

Still he said nothing, and she did not press him.

Instead she tilted her head a little and said, with a return of that warm, practical tone that seemed to disconcert him almost more than solemnity did, “All right. Then perhaps I shall simply have to discover the difficulties for myself.”

That earned from him the faintest movement at the mouth—not a smile, not even near one, but some fraction of expression that might have become one in a less guarded face.

She took that as victory enough.

Then, because if he was to ask for four hours every week there would have to be some mutual shape to the thing, however strange, she said, “And do you have any questions for me?”

This time the pause was different.

Not reluctance. Surprise.

“For you,” he said.

“Yes.”

He seemed to consider the idea as though it had not occurred to him that such a privilege might form any part of the arrangement.

“You have already asked a great many questions of me,” she said, smiling faintly. “That seems only fair.”

The gold glint in his eyes shifted as he looked at her—watching, measuring, perhaps wondering whether this, too, was some trap hidden inside ease.

Then, very slowly: “Yes.”

Only that. But she could hear the thought beginning behind it.

She waited.

Across from her he sat without moving, all black lines and white concealment, one gloved hand on the arm of the chair and the other on his knee. It came to her suddenly that whatever he meant to ask, he was weighing it with the same care he had given every other sentence that evening, as though a single wrong word might undo the shape of the room entirely.

At last he said, “Are you patient by nature, or only by profession?”

The question was so unexpected that for a second she did not answer. It sounded mild enough, even courteous—the sort of thing a man might ask if he were merely making conversation with a woman he expected to see again. But there was too much care in it for conversation alone. Too much at stake beneath the carefulness.

He was not really asking whether she had a placid disposition.

He was asking whether what sat between them now—her warmth, her ease, her willingness to let silence remain silence and strangeness remain unpunished—belonged to her at all, or only to the room, the hour, and the money that would eventually change hands.

For a brief moment she only looked at him. He held her gaze behind the mask without flinching, but she could feel the tension in the waiting. Not impatience. Something more difficult. The kind of attention a person gives an answer they mean, in some private way, to build future hurt or future hope upon.

She set the glass down.

“That is a very serious question for a first meeting,” she said.

His chin shifted by the slightest degree.

“I did not mean it lightly.”

“No,” she said. “I did not think you did.”

She leaned back into the chair and folded her hands loosely in her lap, no longer needing the wine between them.

“I think,” she said slowly, “that profession teaches patience of one kind. The useful kind. The kind that knows how to wait out bad manners, or vanity, or silence, or a man’s need to hear himself admired in five different phrasings before he will permit the evening to continue.”

If that amused him, the mask swallowed it, though she thought she saw the faintest flicker in the gold light of his eyes.

“That sort of patience can be learned,” she went on. “And very often must be.”

He said nothing, only listened.

“But no,” she said at last, softer now. “Not only by profession.”

Something in him sharpened. Not visibly enough that another woman might have marked it, but she did. It was in the stillness, in the way the room itself seemed to attend with him.

“I was patient before this life,” she said. “Or so I’ve been told.” A small smile touched her mouth. “Though I imagine the people who told me so may have benefited from the trait and been a little biased in their judgment.”

Then, because he had asked seriously, and because she had the sense now that evasion would disappoint him more than any unflattering truth, she added, “I do not know that I am patient with everyone. Certainly not equally. There are people I endure because I must. People I am patient with because they are paying for the appearance of it. And people…” She stopped, considering him. “People who make patience easy, because they are not asking for the sort of thing that turns it into labor.”

The line entered the room quietly.

He did not move, but she had the strange impression that if she had reached out just then and laid a hand on the arm of his chair, she might have felt the whole force of his attention there, like current through wood.

“So,” she said, gentler still, “the answer is both, I suppose. But not falsely.”

His gaze remained on her face.

“Not falsely,” he repeated.

“No.”

He looked down then, briefly—not in dismissal, but as though the words had landed somewhere difficult and he needed the momentary shelter of not meeting her eyes while they settled.

When he spoke again, his voice was quieter than before.

“I see.”

It was not much. And yet it did not sound like dismissal. It sounded like a man handling a fact with more care than the fact itself might seem to deserve.

She tilted her head a little. “Is that the answer you hoped for?”

He looked up at once. For the first time since entering, he seemed almost caught.

“I had not,” he said carefully, “allowed myself any particular hope.”

She smiled faintly. “That sounds unlike you.”

That, at least, stirred something dry in him.

“No,” he said. “It sounds exactly like me.”

She laughed then—quietly, and without the earlier sharpness that had made him flinch.

This time he did not recoil. He only went still in that alert way of his, as though the sound had struck some delicate instrument in him—one that was still capable of being jarred, but no longer braced for injury. She noticed that too.

And because she noticed it, her next words came softer than teasing would have made them otherwise.

“Well,” she said, “for what it’s worth, I am not being patient with you because I’m paid to be here.”

The sentence seemed to alter the air between them.

His hand, resting on the arm of the chair, tightened once and then loosened. The gold of his eyes held hers without wavering now, though she could feel how much the steadiness cost him. The fire shifted low in the grate. Rain whispered at the windows. The lamp on the dressing table cast its patient golden light across the mirror and the silver-backed brush and the bed, which still stood behind all this like a witness to an evening that had taken an utterly different shape from the one for which it had been prepared.

“And now that you’ve interrogated my character,” she said, with the gentlest return of playfulness, “is there anything else you need to know before you commit yourself to Thursdays, or have I passed inspection?”

For one second she thought he might answer in kind.

Instead he said, with that same grave exactitude that seemed half his manner and half his refuge, “Your rate.”

That made her pause.

Not because the question itself was unusual. It was, in the end, one of the few ordinary things about the evening. But it arrived so abruptly after everything else—the caution, the strange seriousness, the careful talk of company and patience and disappointment—that it almost startled her to be returned so plainly to the practical terms of the room.

She lifted her glass again, more for something to do with her hand than from thirst.

“Twenty francs an hour,” she said.

The number hung there a moment.

She watched him over the rim of the glass, expecting what she usually expected when men who had spent the last half hour behaving as though they stood outside the ordinary commerce of such places were finally reminded what the commerce cost: a flicker of surprise, a pause, some negotiation disguised as wounded delicacy. Even in a house like this one, where the rooms were warmer, the girls better dressed, and discretion sold for nearly as much as beauty, twenty francs an hour was enough to make certain men rediscover principle.

He did not so much as blink.

“One hundred,” he said.

The glass stopped just below her mouth.

For one absurd second she thought she must have misheard him. He sat exactly as before—straight-backed, masked, gloved, black-clad, all care and control—yet the number entered the room so cleanly, with so little ceremony, that it seemed almost detached from money and absurdly near madness.

Her lips parted. She forgot, entirely, to manage her face.

“One hundred francs an hour,” he repeated, as though the difficulty were not the sum itself but only whether she had heard it correctly.

Her mouth dropped open.

And for the first time since he had entered the room, she could think of nothing at all to say.

The fire shifted softly in the grate. Rain whispered at the window. Somewhere in the house beyond the door, a laugh rose and fell and vanished again.

Still she stared at him.

At last she set the glass down very carefully on the table beside her, because suddenly trusting herself to hold anything breakable seemed unwise.

“I beg your pardon,” she said.

His chin moved slightly—the nearest thing to impatience she had yet seen from him.

“You heard me.”

“Yes,” she said. “That is the problem.”

A silence followed.

Then, because she truly could think of nothing more intelligent to say—

 “Are you sure?”

That, at least, seemed to puzzle him.

“Quite.”

“No, I mean—” She stopped, then tried again, a little helplessly. “That is an absurd amount of money.”

“It is an amount of money.”

“For four hours of my company.”

“Yes.”

She stared at him another second.

“You cannot possibly mean to pay five times my rate merely to sit in a room with me.”

At that, something faintly altered in the visible line of his mouth. Not a smile. More like some dry private recognition that she had, somehow, still underestimated the scale of his seriousness.

“If you are to endure me weekly,” he said, “I must make it worth your while.”

The line landed with such force that for a moment she could only look at him.

Not because of the money.

Because of the word.

Endure.

He had said it with no self-pity at all. No theatricality. Only as a practical assumption—as though his company were naturally a burden to be compensated for at a premium, like bad weather or dangerous travel or any other inconvenience sensible people prepared for in advance.

Something in her expression must have changed, because he went a shade stiller.

“It is not charity,” he said at once, and for the first time there was the slightest edge beneath the control. “Nor dramatics. I am stating terms.”

“That is not what I—”

“You need not pretend otherwise,” he said, each word clipped now by the effort not to let feeling show too plainly. “I am aware that what I am asking is unusual. If I mean to ask it repeatedly, I prefer not to insult you by pretending the arrangement ought to be priced ordinarily.”

For one brief second she did not know whether to laugh, argue, or simply go on staring at him.

So she did the last.

He met her gaze behind the mask without flinching, though she could feel the force of his self-command in it. He had not thrown the number at her carelessly. This was no rich man’s performance of indifference to money. He had decided it. Meant it. Had probably settled on it before ever entering the house.

“That is still far too much,” she said at last.

“If it is, you may keep the excess and console yourself with the thought that I have poor judgment.”

She blinked.

Then, before she could stop herself, she laughed.

Not sharply this time, not the startled sound that had made him flinch earlier. This one came softer, warmer, full of sheer disbelief.

He did not recoil.

He only watched her with that same unnerving attention, as though even now some part of him were trying to determine whether he had been ridiculous or merely honest in the wrong setting.

“You cannot be serious,” she said.

“I am serious.”

“That is a fortune.”

“No.”

“It is to me.”

Something in the room shifted again then. Not unpleasantly. Just enough to remind them both that money always sounded different depending on which side of it one had lived.

He looked at her for a long moment.

She found herself studying him across the small space between their chairs with an entirely new kind of curiosity.

“Do you always negotiate like this?” she asked.

“I am not negotiating.”

“No,” she said slowly. “I suppose you are not.”

Then, because she could not resist it: “You mean to overwhelm me into accepting.”

“If necessary.”

That nearly made her laugh again.

He was serious. Utterly, impossibly serious.

And because he was—because beneath the absurdity of the number she could hear not indulgence but some wounded need to make the arrangement fair on terms he could live with—her amusement softened into something else.

At last she said, more carefully, “You have a very extravagant idea of your own intolerability.”

He inclined his head by the slightest degree. “It has been cultivated over time.”

She looked at him.

The firelight found those strange gold eyes again behind the mask. The black of him drank it; the white face returned it without warmth. Only the eyes seemed alive enough to betray anything, and even they betrayed too little.

One hundred francs an hour.

The number still rang absurdly in her head. Yet what unsettled her most was not the money itself, but the fact that he had offered it not to purchase more from her than other men did, but less. As though he believed kindness, if paid for honestly enough, might remain unspoiled by the act of buying it.

It was a mad thought. A sad one. And perhaps—not one she disliked.

She leaned back into her chair and folded her hands lightly in her lap.

“Well,” she said, “if I were a better woman, I would tell you not to be ridiculous.”

His exposed lower lip shifted faintly. “But you are not a better woman.”

“No,” she said. “I am apparently an expensive one.”

That, finally, brought something very near a smile to the lower part of his face.

Only near. But enough that she saw it and almost forgot the mask altogether.

“And…are you accepting my terms?” he asked.

She let the question rest for a breath or two, partly because she was still astonished and partly because she suspected he would suffer the silence and call it dignity if she did not answer soon.

“At one hundred francs an hour,” she said, “I would be a fool not to.”

His hand tightened once on the arm of the chair.

Not triumph. Relief.

It passed through him too quickly for another woman to have caught, perhaps. But she did.

“And Thursdays,” he said, with the same peculiar exactness as before, “would still be agreeable?”

She smiled despite herself. “Yes. Thursdays would still be agreeable.”

He gave the smallest nod, as though some internal mechanism had at last shifted into place.

“Do you mean this Thursday, or next?” she asked. “We are, after all, already some way past the proper beginning of one.”

The fire shifted low in the grate.

He seemed to consider the matter with the same seriousness he had given every other practical term of the arrangement.

“The coming Thursday,” he said at last. “That will be sufficient.”

“Sufficient,” she repeated.

“Yes.”

He said it as though one might parcel anticipation into manageable quantities by force of phrasing alone.

She smiled a little and rose from her chair, not because the meeting was quite over yet, but because it had begun to gather itself toward an end, and she sensed in him the same instinct toward closure that had shaped everything else about him. Across from her, he stood as well in one smooth motion, the black cloak shifting around him like another layer of shadow.

Then, with a movement that seemed almost abrupt in a man so measured, he reached inside his cloak and drew out a folded scrap of paper.

It had plainly been written in haste. She could see that before she even took it—the folds not neat but practical, the edge uneven, the ink slightly blotted where the pen had moved too quickly or the hand had pressed too hard. He offered it to her without flourish.

She took it and unfolded it.

An address.

Rue Scribe.

Not an address she knew personally, though she knew the street well enough by now: respectable, fashionable, newly desirable in the way of streets still close enough to the Opera and the better shops to flatter those who lived there. His apartment, then. Private rooms. Not the house. Not here again.

The thought altered the shape of the arrangement immediately, making it feel stranger and more personal at once.

She lifted her eyes from the paper.

“And what time would you like me to come?”

“Six.”

“In the evening.”

“Yes.”

“And I am to stay until ten.”

“Yes.”

He said it with such exactness that she almost expected him to produce a clock next and place it between them as witness.

She folded the scrap again and slipped it carefully into the little pocket hidden in her skirts.

“All right,” she said. “Thursday, at six.”

He inclined his head once.

Absurdly, the gesture felt more binding than some men’s kisses.

Then, because there was one last ordinary thing still undone—and because ordinary things, in this room with him, seemed to take on an odd gravity—she asked,

“What shall I call you?”

The question altered the air between them.

She saw him go still in a different way than before. Not wary, exactly. More as though the thing she had asked for required a kind of exposure he could hardly bear.

At length he said, “Erik.”

No title. No surname. No hesitation dressed up as wit. Just the name itself, plain and sharp and unexpectedly human after all the rest of him.

It touched her more deeply than it should have.

“Erik,” she repeated.

She had meant only to make the agreement feel real, and because warmth came to her more readily than ceremony when she did not think too much about it, she held out her hand to him.

“Well then,” she said gently, “Thursday, Erik.”

Her hand remained there between them.

For the first time that evening, she saw something very like disarray enter him: the brief, unmistakable stillness of someone who had not anticipated this exact small human thing and did not know how to bridge the distance it required.

His gaze dropped to her hand.

Then, instead of taking it, he reached inside his cloak again. When he drew his hand back out, it held a thick envelope. He placed it in her open palm. The paper, heavy with cash, felt absurdly weighty there. For one blank second she looked only at it-

then at him.

She lowered her hand a little, more from surprise than intention.

“I beg your pardon?”

“It is for your time,” he said.

Her brows drew together. “My time.”

“Yes.”

“But I haven’t—”

She stopped and gave a small, humorless laugh.

No.

This man could not possibly have mistaken a hand offered in agreement for a demand for payment. He was too observant for that. Too painfully deliberate in every other motion he had made. Which meant either that he had simply not known how to touch her, or had not been able to bring himself to do it.

The realization brushed against something in her she had no wish to examine too closely.

She looked down again at the envelope.

“For next week?” she asked.

“It is not prepayment.”

That startled her more than the envelope itself had.

“Then what is it for?”

His exposed mouth altered faintly, the lower lip tightening almost imperceptibly before he said, “For this evening.”

She stared.

“This evening,” she repeated.

“Yes.”

She almost laughed again.

She did not know what else to do with a man who came into her room, asked for no service but future company, gave his name like a secret, refused to shake her hand, and then paid her simply for having sat opposite him and not made the room crueler.

“That is not how this works,” she said.

“It is how I am choosing to conduct it.”

His voice had regained some of its old cool formality, but she could hear the effort in it now. The hour had worn him thin enough that effort showed in many things.

She turned the envelope in her fingers. It was thick. Far too thick for mere courtesy.

 “Erik—”

“It is for your time,” he said again, and there was something in the repetition that told her not to refuse him lightly. Not because he would be offended. It seemed that her refusal would strike at some point of dignity he was barely managing to hold in place.

She looked at him another second, then closed her fingers around the envelope.

“All right,” she said quietly.

Something in him eased.

Only slightly, but enough.

He turned then, as though the business of the evening had at last reached its proper end, and anything that remained between them in the room beyond it would only grow less manageable the longer he stayed. He moved toward the door with the same exact, wary elegance with which he had entered, the cloak settling around him, the black of him drinking the firelight until only the white face and the gold points of his eyes seemed wholly visible.

“I can see you out,” she said.

He paused with his hand near the door.

For one brief instant she thought he might refuse, might prefer to vanish from the room without escort or witness, as though the house itself were something to be endured only under strict inward control.

Then he said, “If you wish.”

If you wish.

As though she had not already been the one doing the wishing all evening on his behalf, because he seemed incapable of presuming upon any comfort not explicitly offered.

She crossed to him and opened the door before he had to.

The corridor beyond lay warm and dim under its lamps, the runner soft beneath-foot, the house continuing in its usual life beyond the hush of her room. Somewhere below, laughter. Somewhere nearer, a door opening and closing. Perfume, smoke, wine, lamp oil—the innumerable layered scents of the place rising faintly in the hall.

He stepped out.

She followed half a pace behind him, then fell in beside him, and together they made their way toward the stairs.

The effect on the house was immediate.

She felt it before she fully saw it: the slight drop in noise, the hitch in conversation as they passed, the altered quality of glances not directed too openly but directed all the same. Girls in doorways pausing with practiced smiles not quite finished. A man near the landing lowering his glass mid-sentence. Another woman at the far end of the corridor turning her head a fraction too late to pretend she had not looked.

It was not only the mask.

Though certainly it was that.

It was the strangeness of him moving through the house like some black-and-white apparition, and her beside him as though this were an ordinary conclusion to an ordinary transaction.

The hush lasted only seconds at a time before the house, professionally and willfully, resumed itself around them.

She felt each second of it.

She felt, too, the odd isolation of walking beside him through that hush, as though he carried his own silence with him and the house, for all its velvet and noise and commerce, gave way around it whether it wished to or not.

He did not look right or left.

Not once.

He moved with his gaze fixed forward and his body held in that controlled line she was already beginning to understand as effort disguised as discipline.

At the foot of the stairs, the foyer opened before them in low golden light: the polished floor, the umbrella stand near the door, the small table where cards and gloves and the visiting inconveniences of respectability sometimes collected. Beyond the front windows, the spring rain had darkened the street to black glass. Reflections moved in it—lamps, carriages, the blurred suggestion of passing life.

She stopped there with him.

The door stood only a few paces away.

For a second neither of them spoke.

Then she said, “Good night, Erik.”

The name sounded different in the foyer than it had in her room. More improbable. More private.

He turned his head slightly toward her. The gold in his eyes caught once more in the low light, small and animal-bright behind the dead white face.

“Good night,” he said.

And then he was gone.

No lingering. No glance back over his shoulder. No gentleman’s flourish or arrangement for remembrance. He stepped out into the wet spring dark and seemed, for one strange instant, not merely to enter it but to rejoin it, the black cloak taking the rain and the night taking the black of him until the whole figure blurred and vanished beyond the reach of the house’s lamps.

(Y/N) stood in the foyer a moment longer than she meant to.

The envelope was still in her hand.

The Rue Scribe address in her pocket.

Thursday at six.

Somewhere behind her, the house remembered itself, and sound began again in full: laughter, footsteps, the rustle of skirts, and the murmur of men returning to their sordid illusions. But none of it quite reached the place where she stood.