Reiner had already claimed a private room by the time they were shown in, sprawled across a low couch with a drink in one hand and the particular loose confidence of a man who considered himself the most interesting person in every room he entered, regardless of the actual evidence available.
"There they are." He didn't get up. He raised the glass instead, a lazy salute. "I was starting to think you'd both died on the way over."
"We got held up." He dropped into the seat across from Reiner without much enthusiasm, and she settled beside him, arranging her skirt with the automatic precision of someone who'd done this in a hundred rooms just like it. "Ilsa needed the right gloves."
"The gloves were important," she said, not looking at either of them, examining the room instead. "He wouldn't understand."
"I understand gloves," Reiner said, wounded. "I have very strong opinions about gloves."
"You have very strong opinions about horses, Reiner. Let's not overreach."
That landed exactly the way she'd meant it to, a small private smile pulling at the corner of her husband's mouth while Reiner sat forward, delighted, entirely missing the joke at his own expense in favour of the topic itself. "Since you mention it — Solvane foaled last week. You should see this thing. Legs like a colt twice her age already, and the temperament, my God, calm as anything, nothing like her mother—"
"Here we go," he murmured, just loud enough for Ilsa to hear, and she pressed her lips together to keep from laughing outright.
"—and the vet says if she keeps growing at this rate she'll be ready for the spring circuit a full season early, which, frankly, hasn't happened in this family in—"
"Reiner." He said it gently, holding up a hand. "I will hear every word of this. I promise you. But can we at least get a drink first?"
Reiner blinked, momentarily derailed, then laughed, loud and easy, waving a hand toward the door. "Fair, fair. Someone get these two something to drink before I bore them into the ground."
A server appeared within the minute, the kind of quiet, practiced efficiency the building prided itself on, and by the time the glasses had been set down Reiner had already circled back to the horse without needing any further encouragement, launching into a description of the foal's coat that neither of them had asked for and both of them settled in to endure with the long-practiced patience of people who genuinely liked the man underneath all the horse talk, even when the horse talk itself tested every ounce of that liking.
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"You're smiling," Ilsa murmured to her husband at some point, low enough that Reiner, deep into a story about a saddle-fitting disaster, didn't catch it.
"I like him. I just don't like his horses."
"You could tell him that."
"And ruin the one thing that makes him happy? Absolutely not." He took a drink, watching Reiner gesture wildly about stirrup length. "Besides. If I stop him talking about horses he'll start talking about the succession again, and I'd rather hear about the foal."
She considered that, and had to admit, silently, that he had a point.
The evening wore on the way these evenings always wore on — Reiner's stories thinning out eventually into more ordinary conversation, other guests drifting through the room to pay their respects and be waved off again, the drinks refilled more out of habit than actual thirst. At some point Reiner excused himself to go find someone he'd apparently been avoiding all week, leaving the two of them alone in the room's low lamplight for the first time all evening.
"I think that went well," she said.
"You think everything went well. You said the tailor's fitting went well and he stuck a pin directly into my side."
"That's because you moved. He told you three times to stand still."
"I was itchy."
"You're always itchy. It's not a defence." She leaned into him, resting her head against his shoulder the way she had in the car, and for a while neither of them said anything at all, content to let the noise of the building carry on without them, the low murmur of other people's evenings happening just beyond the door.
"We should go say goodnight to Reiner before we leave," he said eventually, not moving.
"In a minute."
"You're comfortable."
"I am. Don't ruin it by standing up."
So he didn't, not yet, and the two of them stayed exactly where they were a while longer, the sound of the brothel's evening humming on around them, indifferent to the small, private peace the two of them had managed to carve out in the middle of it.