"You're doing it again," she said, not looking up from the mirror.
"Doing what."
"That thing where you go quiet and stare at nothing for ten minutes and then act surprised when I ask if you're alright." She turned the earring in her hand, frowning at the clasp. "You've been doing it since breakfast."
"I was thinking."
"About?"
"Things." He was standing by the window with his hands in his pockets, watching the gardeners below argue about something to do with the hedges. "Boring things. Family things."
"So the meeting." She got the clasp finally and set the earring in place, tilting her head to check it. "You could just say the meeting."
"I could just say the meeting," he agreed, and didn't say anything else about it.
She let it go, because pressing him about it never got her anywhere faster than just waiting did, and instead held up two different pairs of gloves, one pale, one darker, turning to him with an expression that made clear this was a real question and not a formality. "Which."
"The dark ones."
"You always say the dark ones."
"Because they always look better."
"You said the pale ones looked better last week."
"Last week you were wearing the blue dress. Context matters." He came away from the window finally and dropped into the chair by her dressing table, the one that technically belonged to her lady's maid and that he sat in anyway whenever the room was empty of anyone who'd tell him not to. "Are we really doing this again tonight?"
"Doing what."
"The brothel. Reiner's thing." He rubbed a hand over his face. "I don't even like Reiner."
"Nobody likes Reiner. That's not the point of going." She pulled the dark gloves on, working her fingers into them one at a time. "The point of going is that if we don't, Grandfather hears about it from someone else and decides we're avoiding the family, and then we spend an entire month having a much worse conversation than one evening at Reiner's absurd little gathering."
"I know why we're going. I'm allowed to complain about it."
"You're allowed to complain about it quietly, in this room, to me. Not at the actual event." She said it lightly, but there was an old warning folded into it, the kind that had been said enough times before to not need saying harshly anymore.
"I have never once complained at the actual event."
"You complained with your face. Last time. The entire time Reiner was talking about his horses."
"His horses are boring, Ilsa."
"His horses," she said, standing now and smoothing her skirt, "are the only thing that man has ever successfully cared for in his entire life, so unless you'd like to be the one telling him that, you're going to smile and let him talk about the horses."
He groaned, properly, the sound of a grown man being defeated by logic he couldn't argue with, and got up out of the maid's chair. "Fine. Horses. I can do horses."
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"You can do horses." She checked herself once more in the mirror, adjusted nothing, and turned to face him properly. "How do I look."
"You always ask that like there's a chance I'll say something other than beautiful."
"One day I want you to actually look before you answer."
He looked. Properly, this time, taking a second longer than the reflex required, and something in his face shifted from the easy teasing of a moment ago into something quieter. "You look beautiful," he said again, and this time it landed differently, and she rolled her eyes at him anyway because that was easier than admitting it had worked.
The afternoon went the way most of their afternoons went when there wasn't an actual crisis demanding attention — visits that felt more like errands than obligations, a tailor who needed twenty minutes to say what could have been said in two, a stop at his grandfather's study that turned into forty-five minutes of politics neither of them had asked for. By the time evening came around they were both tired in the specific, low-grade way that came from being polite all day rather than from doing anything, and the car ride out to the brothel passed mostly in silence, her head resting against his shoulder, his eyes half-closed.
"Tell me again why Reiner insists on meeting at a brothel," she said eventually, more to break the quiet than because she'd forgotten the answer.
"Because Reiner thinks it makes him seem dangerous and interesting instead of a man who talks about horses for forty minutes at a time."
"That's not an answer, that's just an insult."
"It's both. I contain multitudes."
She laughed despite herself, quiet, and he felt it more than heard it, her shoulder shaking once against his arm.
The convoy slowed as it always did on the approach, the driver easing them around the last corner with the same practiced care he used every time, mindful of exactly how much of a turn the two of them could sleep through without complaint. Ahead, the lanterns of the place were already lit red against the dark, throwing their familiar stain of colour across the wet street, and the same four guards who always rode with them stood ready by the doors before the cars had even fully stopped, falling into their line without needing instruction.
"Here we are, then," he said, straightening his jacket, some of the earlier tiredness folding itself away as easily as it had arrived. "Horses. Reiner. An evening of profound suffering."
"You'll survive it," she said, already reaching for the door handle. "You always do."
The four guards took their places either side of the entrance the moment the doors opened, falling in with the ease of men who had done this exact walk more times than either of them could count, and beyond them, at the gate itself, stood the same tall, silent shape that stood there most nights — unmoving, uninterested, a fixture of the street they'd long since stopped consciously noticing at all.