She was exhausted. There had been a pause in the fighting last night when the seemingly inevitable happened, but all of it: sex and sleep had just been different battlefields than his drawing room. She felt herself puffing up reflexively, for all the good it did her when he was still a head taller. His voice cut low, forcing her to quiet to catch his words (she hated that trick), and she didn't bother to restrain the snapped shake of her head, the gesture all she had in the moment. "You are right now. You do every time you avoid telling me why. And stop telling me what you cannot do. You have all the power in the world and you'd use it to cage us both. And I still don't know how I lost you." And that was what hurt the most.

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