Not her voice.
The rehearsed sentences dissolved.
Every eye in the room moved to the chair at the head of the long desk — the chair that should have held Eliantra Westing, the territory's mistress, the woman they'd come to bury diplomatically under a mountain of legal paperwork.
What was seated in it instead was a man.
Black hair. Purple eyes.
Very still. Very awake. The kind of awake that had not come from sleep but from the other direction — the far side of a long night, body fully used and fully satisfied, operating with the settled, utter alertness of something that had fed.
He was not wearing his coat.
Shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow. Forearms on the armrests with the relaxed, occupying weight of a man who had decided this was his chair and was simply waiting for the room to catch up.
His eyes moved across them.
One face. Two faces. Three.
Like reading a menu.
