YARA The Ashfords host what they call a “salon evening,” which really just means cocktails and old money showing off whatever hobby it’s currently fashionable to have mastered.
This year it’s fencing.
Mr.
Ashford had a proper strip laid down in the ballroom months ago, foils mounted on the wall like art, and half of Savannah’s young men have taken it up as an excuse to look dashing in front of an audience.
I go because Nola insists, because everyone who’s anyone will be there, and because avoiding it would draw more attention than attending ever could.
Dean’s there too.
I don’t know if Beau invited him or if he invited himself, but he’s leaning against the far wall in a borrowed jacket that doesn’t quite fit him right, arms crossed, the mild, unimpressed expression of a man who’s seen real violence and finds this version of it faintly ridiculous.
Rhett fences first, against one of the Pemberton boys, and it’s exactly what you’d expect, careful, polite, more choreography than combat, the kind of bout that ends in applause and nobody’s pride particularly at stake.
“You any good at this?” Dean asks, appearing at my elbow sometime during the third match, his voice pitched low.
“I used to be.
Fencing master came twice a week when I was younger.
Nola thought it would teach me poise.” I watch the strip, arms crossed.
“It taught me how to hit people legally instead.” A low laugh escapes him, real this time, not the polite kind these evenings usually produce.
“I’d like to see that.” “You wouldn’t,” I say, glancing sideways at him.
“Try me,” he counters, voice edged with challenge.
I don’t know what possesses me to say yes.
Maybe it’s the jacket still folded in my dresser drawer, the memory of his hand at my collarbone still sitting under my skin two days later.
Maybe it’s simpler than that, just the itch of being looked at like I’m something other than the difficult twin for once, and wanting, badly, to prove it.
Mr.
Ashford is delighted to arrange it.
A crowd gathers fast once word spreads that the St.
Claire girl is fencing the stranger from Texas, and I catch Yasmin’s face among them, curious, assessing, the way she looks at anything she hasn’t yet decided how to use.
We suit up.
Masks, jackets, the dull practice foils with their blunted tips.
Dean moves into position across from me with none of the careful showmanship the other men brought to the strip tonight, no flourish, just a low, ready stillness that makes my pulse pick up before we’ve even crossed blades.
“En garde,” Mr.
Ashford calls, and the room quiets.
The first few exchanges are almost polite, testing, the kind of feeling-out period any two fencers do before committing to anything real.
I score first, a clean touch to his shoulder, and the crowd gives a scattered ripple of applause.
Dean’s gaze sharpens.
His stance drops lower, weight shifting forward, and I know before he moves again that the match just stopped being polite.
The bout stops being sport somewhere in the next exchange.
His attacks come faster, sharper, driven by something that has nothing to do with scoring points anymore, and I find myself matching it without deciding to, my own blade moving faster than I’ve ever moved it, faster than any fencing master ever taught me, some older, wilder instinct taking over where my training runs out.
We’re not playing anymore.
We both know it.
The room seems to know it too, conversation dying around the edges of the strip, every eye locked on the two of us circling each other like the exhibition rules stopped applying several exchanges back.
He comes at me hard, a lunge with real weight behind it, and I parry late, too late, and the tip of his foil catches me across the ribs harder than any blunted practice blade should ever land, hard enough to steal the breath clean out of my chest and send me stumbling back a full step.
The room gasps.
Somewhere behind me, Nola’s voice cuts through, sharp with alarm.
Dean freezes instantly, foil dropping, mask coming off in one motion.
“Yara.
God, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to hit that hard,” he says, voice cracking with genuine worry.
“Are you hurt?” “I’m fine.” And I am, more than fine, my whole body humming, alive in a way I haven’t felt in years, breath coming fast and my blood singing underneath the ache blooming across my ribs.
I pull my own mask off, grinning before I can stop myself.
“That was incredible.” He stares at me, brow furrowed, as though I’ve spoken a language he wasn’t prepared to understand.
Around us, the room is scandalized in that particular Savannah way, hushed murmurs, a few pointed looks toward Nola, someone’s aunt fanning herself like she’s witnessed something indecent instead of a fencing bout that ran too hot.
But I don’t care.
Every nerve in my body feels lit from the inside, and looking at Dean, breathing hard on the other side of the strip, I can tell he feels some version of the same thing, even if he’s better at hiding it.
“You’re bleeding,” he says quietly, nodding at a thin scratch along my forearm I hadn’t even noticed.
“It’s nothing,” I say, waving it off.
“It’s something.” He crosses the strip toward me, and for a second I think he might actually reach for my arm, check the scratch himself, but he stops just short of it, hand hovering, some line he won’t let himself cross in front of this many watching eyes.
Mr.
Ashford calls the match, laughing it off as good sport, herding the crowd’s attention back toward drinks and conversation the way a good host does when something’s gone slightly too far.
The room exhales, the tension breaking apart into scattered chatter, and slowly the moment folds itself back into the ordinary shape of the evening.
Dean offers his hand once we’re both fully unmasked, formal, proper, the kind of gesture meant to put the room at ease.
“Good match,” he says, tone carefully neutral.
“Good match,” I echo, and take it.
His grip is warm, steady, and the contact sends a jolt up my arm, the same heat I felt the first time we touched.
For one instant, just as our hands meet, his eyes flash gold.
Not brown gone lighter in the ballroom’s chandelier light.
Gold, sudden and total, the same impossible color I imagined flickering across my own palm the night we first touched at dinner, there and gone so fast that if I blinked I would have missed it entirely.
Then it’s brown again.
Ordinary.
Human.
Dean drops my hand like it’s burned him.
He doesn’t say anything else.
He turns and walks straight through the crowd toward the doors, not looking back once.
Yasmin finds me before I’ve even had the chance to catch my breath, materializing at my elbow with a glass of lemonade she didn’t have a moment ago, offering it like a peace treaty I never asked for.
“Well,” she says, voice light and amused, watching the door Dean just disappeared through, an edge of something sharper and more measuring underneath.
“That was quite a display.” She looks at me sideways, a small, considering smile playing at her mouth.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you fight for something like that, Yara.
Not once in nineteen years.” She delivers it like a casual observation, sisterly, harmless.
It doesn’t feel harmless.
It feels like she’s just filed something away, cataloguing exactly how much this stranger from Texas is worth to me, and exactly how she might use that later.
I’m left standing alone on the strip with my pulse hammering, a scratch on my arm, and the absolute, bone-deep certainty that I did not imagine what I just saw.
That night, I open the bottom drawer of my dresser and take out his jacket, still folded the way I left it days ago.
I hold it up to the lamplight, searching the fabric like it might explain something the man himself won’t.
Cedar.
Dust.
Something wild underneath, the same scent that clung to him in the stable during the storm, the same scent I caught across the fencing strip tonight, sharper now, more urgent, like it had been waiting all along for me to understand what it meant.
I don’t have a name for what I saw in that ballroom, the same way I never had one for the bird, or the letter, or the scarf still resting in this same drawer beside his jacket now.
I fold the jacket back into its careful square and set it down beside a monogram that spells out a dead man’s initials.
Whatever Dean Callahan is, he isn’t only what he’s shown this house so far.