As night fell over the estate, the stables grew still, except for the restless shifting of one powerful black stallion pacing his stall, ears flicking toward the sound of soft, familiar footsteps approaching in the dark.
The footsteps belonged to Elsie. She slipped out of the servants' quarters after everyone else had gone to sleep, moving through the dark courtyard with practiced silence. This was not the first time she had visited the stables at night, though no one in the house knew it. She had been coming here for months, ever since she first laid eyes on Tempest and felt something inside her chest recognize him, the way you recognize an old friend across a crowded room.
Few people knew the truth about Elsie Pharaoh. Before she wore the plain gray dress of a maid, she had grown up on a small horse farm far from this grand estate, raised by a father who trained horses for a living and a mother who sang to the foals until they fell asleep standing up. Elsie had learned to ride before she could properly walk, and by the age of ten, she was calming horses that grown men refused to approach. It was a quiet, ordinary happiness until a terrible debt swallowed everything her family owned. Her father fell ill soon after, and within two years, the farm was gone, her parents were gone, and Elsie found herself alone in the world with nothing but the clothes on her back and hands that remembered every lesson her father had taught her.
She had come to work for the Duke because it was the only position available to a girl with no family and no name worth mentioning. She scrubbed floors and carried trays and kept her head down, burying the girl who once rode horses bareback across open fields. But some things cannot stay buried forever.
Tonight, as she approached Tempest's stall, the stallion turned his great head toward her and let out a soft breath through his nose—a sound of recognition rather than alarm.