Chapter 234 --234
He was also fairly certain he didn’t need to. Understanding wasn’t the point.
A smile crossed his face — slow, private, not meant for anyone. The particular smile of someone sitting with something they didn’t have a name for yet but recognized as significant.
He had served in three noble households before this one. Had been valued, fed, clothed, assigned rotations. Had done his work correctly and been acknowledged for it correctly and felt, at the end of every day, more or less the same as he’d felt at the beginning.
He had not felt like this.
This specific quality — the settled thing, the strange peace, the sense of fitting into a space that had been the exact shape of him all along without him knowing — he had not felt this before. Not once. Not in thirty-two years of living or twelve years of service.
He looked at her sleeping face.
His bottom ached. His thighs burned. His spine was sending steady unhappy reports upward. He had slept on a waiting sofa at an angle designed for sitting, not sleeping, and his neck had opinions about that.
He was, by most objective measures, not comfortable.
He was also — and this was the part he couldn’t quite account for — more content than he had been in years.
Maybe ever.
The dawn light was strengthening, grey turning gold at the window edges. He could hear the first distant sounds of the palace waking up — the kitchen beginning its morning routines far below, boots on stone in some far corridor, a door opening somewhere.
He had maybe twenty minutes before the outer office door would show the first servant or clerk.