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MacAlasdair, but nothing has.”
    He was still tense, but far less so than he had been after MacAlasdair’s previous visit or during the week just before it. Watching him, Mina wondered suddenly if the difference might have had to do with secrecy, or even with worry over her welfare. Perhaps they’d each been trying to protect the other all along.

Eight
    Although Mina hated to admit as much even to herself, and although the proverbial wild horses couldn’t have dragged the confession out of her anywhere near MacAlasdair, the first few days of her captivity were actually a jolly good time. She slept until nine, as she’d not done since she was sixteen and laid up with influenza; she managed to finish all of the mending that she’d been putting off, and even added a new collar to her second-best blouse; and she finished reading King Solomon’s Mines , which she’d been working on since the new year.
    She became almost used to breakfast with MacAlasdair. It was generally a silent affair, but as Mina had suspected, a less uncomfortable one than the similarly quiet meal she’d had below stairs. She didn’t get the same sense of suppressed conversation or of scrutiny, only of a man who wasn’t often up to speech before noon. Mostly, the two of them read the paper.
    The first time Mina picked up a section, MacAlasdair hadn’t been able to completely suppress his surprised look, and Mina had bristled inwardly. “I’m very fond of the Times ,” she had said in her most polished, clipped voice. “I’m glad to see you get it.”
    “Always happy to oblige a lady,” he’d said, recovering quickly.
    To his credit, MacAlasdair didn’t put even the slightest irony on lady , nor did he ask whether she’d started reading the Times after she’d come to work for Professor Carter. Mina was slightly disappointed about the latter. She’d prepared an indignant response, and MacAlasdair never had to know that she had started reading that particular paper about the same time as she’d begun looking for secretarial posts, with an eye toward impressing her employers.
    After all, she’d quickly started being interested for other reasons—and perhaps the other reasons had been there all along, just looking for an excuse.
    Mina took her other meals with Mrs. Hastings, volunteering to take the cook a tray while her knee mended. It was a good excuse to get out of dinner and supper without making much more work for the servants, and MacAlasdair hadn’t invited her to join him for those meals. He ate them out at his club, more often than not, and ate supper very late indeed. So, while the rest of the servants sought their own amusements for the hours between sunset and starlight, Mina sat upstairs, talked with the cook, and tried not to think about the creature penned in some room downstairs.
    She wasn’t entirely sure what MacAlasdair did when he wasn’t eating breakfast or being a dragon. Neither was Mrs. Hennings when Mina very casually brought the conversation around to that subject. He went out a lot these days. He hadn’t back when he’d first arrived. He didn’t really tell anyone where or why.
    Mina hoped that at least some of his trips had to do with hunting down Ward. She wasn’t completely comfortable sharing a house with a sometimes-dragon. She was even less easy knowing that somewhere in the city was a man who hated both her host and Professor Carter, and who could summon shadow demons and conjure mists. If she’d been the kind of woman who lost sleep over anything, she would have spent a few restless nights on that account.
    As it was, she took shameless advantage of both free time and food, and managed to enjoy herself tolerably well—for the first three days or so. (It helped that the first two were rainy.) Then came an evening when she’d finished both her book and her mending, when Mrs. Hennings was down in the kitchen again and not inclined toward conversation, and when Mina was certain she couldn’t have