“Don’t need to light a lamp.” Bram glanced at her. “You illuminate.”

“I always have important knowledge to convey.” She smiled, however, seeing how her ghostly radiance bathed the room. “Think of all the lamp oil that can be saved.”

“Very economical.”

They drifted from the kitchen, down a cramped corridor. An empty storeroom and an even more cramped closet lay off the passage. Judging by the cot and battered chest in the closet, it once served as a servant’s chamber. They ascended a staircase to the main floor. One room was empty of everything but a broken mirror leaning against the wall and a dented metal serving platter. At some point, the room might have served as a place for dining. Now, one would receive a mouthful of grime for a meal. The other, larger room still had furniture, but dust filmed everything. Bram discovered a nest of mice within a chair’s stuffing, a mother and her wriggling pink young. Pellets were scattered across the floor, evidence that other creatures called this place home, and spiders presided in the corners.

“The world goes wild so easily,” Bram murmured. To her surprise, he did not disturb the spiderwebs, nor toss out the mice. He left them as they were. At Livia’s questioning glance, he said, “I’d be a terrible landlord if I threw out the only occupants with nary a warning of eviction.”

She shook her head, and glided up the narrow stairs. He followed, the steps groaning beneath his weight. Shadows were thick here, scarcely pushed back by her glow. More cracks threaded up the plastered walls. Something scuttled across the floorboards as Bram reached the top of the stairs. Two doors led off the hallway.

Before he could open the first door, Livia glided straight through it. Bram made a soft snort of amusement. He entered the chamber in a more customary fashion. They didn’t linger in the chamber—moth-eaten curtains covered the windows, and more broken bits of furniture were scattered around like the bones of slow-moving herd animals.

The front-facing room revealed its purpose by the presence of a canopied bed. The canopy itself had been removed, leaving behind the bare wooden posts like trees in winter. No blankets covered the mattress. Bits of horsehair poked through the ticking. Bram gave the mattress a shove. Apart from a cloud of dust that made him cough, nothing else came out.

“Don’t want to share my bed with rats,” he said.

Aside from the bare bed, the chamber’s only other furnishing was a small table that listed on a splintered leg and a few piles of debris huddled in the corners. Bram toed through the debris, shoving aside rags and broken ceramics, but seemed to find nothing of value.

“A poor protector, your father,” Livia murmured, peering through the grime-streaked window. It looked out onto the street. After the chaos and noise of the earlier fight with the demons, the utter absence of sound and movement here felt yet more ominous, as though in suspension, awaiting a greater threat.

“This place has fallen into disrepair since Mrs. Dance’s time. He kept her in fine style. A live-in servant, and a maid. A line of credit at the mantua maker’s. She never complained.” He stared at the sagging bed. “She may have even cared for him. Arthur said she went into mourning after Father died, and didn’t live much longer beyond that.”

“You might’ve installed your own woman here, when the house became available.”

“I never had a mistress. As well you know.”

That, she did. She did not know what humor provoked her to make such a comment. Untrue. She knew precisely why she had mentioned his nonexistent concubine. They were in a small bedchamber, utterly alone in this narrow house, and had fought side-by-side this night. Were she flesh, she would have pushed him back to the bed—though she suspected he would allow her to push him to the bed—and put her hips to his hips, her mouth to his mouth. Felt him. Tasted him.

Impossibilities.

Her desire understood nothing of what was impossible. It—she—wanted, without thought, without considering realities.

He must have seen the hunger in her gaze, for his own blazed hotter, and he took a step toward her.

She could not feel the warmth of his body, nor could he span the distance between them and take hold of her. Yet she moved away. An instinctively protective act.

“I’ve never known such frustration.” She could not look away from him, though she kept herself as far from him as she could. They faced one another across the bare expanse of floor. “I thought that over a thousand years trapped with the Dark One was the greatest torment I’d ever known. To watch the world slip past, all the experiences of life that I could never have. Condemned to be a pair of eyes only.” She now shut her eyes. “It was agony. Cost me my reason. But, in time, I regained my sense. I believed myself entirely sane.”

“And now?” His voice was a rumble.

She forced her eyes to open. “Now I verge on madness again. So many things I want and cannot have. Because of this.” She glided toward the bed and passed her hand through the post. “Without my flesh, my magic is only a shadow of what it needs to be. But I want more than my magic.” She turned her gaze to his.

Hunger shaped the contours of his face, honing him to impossible sharpness. “You can have whatever you desire.”

He strode to her. There was no thief’s silence or cunning. His step was bold, direct. Only a few inches separated them, and she imagined what his heat must be like, the scent of his skin. Yet those few inches may as well have been miles, for it was a distance that couldn’t be breached.

“You can have me,” he said, husky and low. “Because, of a certain, I want you.”

“More of your cruelty.” She pressed her lips tightly together to keep from kissing him—ludicrous.

“The truth. I’ve never wanted a woman more.”

His words were an agonizing caress. “Because you have not—what is the word you used—swived anyone in days.”

“It’s not desperation that makes me want you. It’s you.” He smiled, faintly mocking himself. “The first woman I cannot touch is the one that I need to have. It’s not your body I desire, though,” he added, with an appreciative glance, “that has its temptations.”

He shook his head. “I thought I was finished with firsts, that I’d done everything and all things. Yet it turns out that there are still unknowns for me. A woman I want for herself.”

Aside from the wound she’d sustained in the battle, she thought herself incapable of physical pain. As he spoke, however, she felt a bodily ache of loss. “Look at me, Bram.” Staring down at herself, she noted that the floorboards were plainly visible through her translucent body. “I’ve no way to touch you, no means of feeling.”

“If that is your challenge,” he said, “I accept.”

She deliberately moved through him. “Enough. We’ll speak of other things. We should—”

“Get on the bed.”

Turning to face him, she raised her brows. “What?”

“I said”—he drew off his coat and tossed it to the floor—“get on the bed.”

For a moment, she did not move. Instinct and self-preservation made her want to disobey his direct command. She bent her will to no one.

They stared at one another. She felt the tug and pull between them, the continuous will and desire. Neither of them obeyed readily or ceded control.

Yet she would do this for him now. He would be hers to command another time.

With deliberate concentration, she made herself sit on the bed.

“Lie down.” His throat was revealed as his neckcloth joined the coat upon the floor. The angry line of his scar ran beside the fast beat of his pulse.

Using more concentration, she stretched out on the bed. It felt odd, mimicking of a quotidian action. How long had it been since she had lain upon a bed—both for sleep and for sex? Her memories were both too vivid and shrouded in lost time.

His gaze still holding hers, Bram pulled off his boots. The movement tugged his fine shirt tight along his shoulders, his arms, the supple doeskin of his breeches snug along his thighs and the thick outline of his arousal.

He prowled to the bed, then stretched out long beside her. The ropes beneath the mattress creaked with his weight. But they held.

Propping himself up on his elbow, he stared down at her. “Take off your tunic.”

She did not move, another instinctive fighting of command. Yet deliberate acquiescence took nothing from her. She was unbroken, even in obedience.

She worked the clasps at her shoulders. Yet they grasped at nothing. The tunic was just as formless as she, and part of her, as well. “I can’t.”

“Doesn’t matter. That’s not where I would start. No,” he murmured, half to himself, “the first thing I would do is take those ornaments from your hair. I’d unpin them, and then I’d coil a lock of your hair around my finger. It must feel like coarse silk, your hair. Heavy, soft. And it has a fragrance. Spice and temple smoke. I’d breathe that in, touching only your hair, watching it move as it falls over your shoulders.”

“I used to scent my bathwater with cassia,” she whispered.

A corner of his mouth tilted. “Ah, I was right. Spice. But I’d touch your hair for only so long before I’d need to feel your skin. Here, and here.” He moved his finger to right beneath her ear, at the juncture of her neck, then down her throat to tarry at the hollow between her collarbones. “Like velvet, your skin, and warm.”

She could not feel his touch, yet his words stroked her, drawing forth silken ribbons of sensation. It stunned her. She could not feel, and yet she did.