EXCERPT: Henry was smiling to himself as he entered Monmouth House, though anyone who saw him would not know it. Only those familiar with him would have, with effort, noticed the minute upturning of his lips, the absorbed look of daydreams glazed over his eyes, and the ease of his relaxed pace. His mind wandered, as it often did, back to the classics and back to Homer. Only, now, the epics were colored by the lens of the night he’d spent with Camilla, and his mind took strange, uncharacteristic leaps, running through the poems and stories he knew better than the back of his hand, looking through them to find her . He looked for her in the abandoned bedchamber of Helen, and he traversed through temples till he stood beside Athena and gazed below Mount Olympus. And he looked and he looked till he found her at last, in the lush island of Ogygia, calling to him with Calypso’s songs from within the deep blue waters.

Because no matter how big, bad, mean and ugly he got, at the end of the day, a rabbit is simply that: prey.

There was a simple charm to that girl. She didn’t need to try very hard to be charming, or interesting, or alluring. It was so effortless, her magnetism, that sometimes Henry wondered if she had some kind of supernatural ability to reel others in. Like a succubus? A siren?  No, no.  For those were supernatural, inexplicable phenomenon. And Camilla Macaulay’s allure was as clear and as compelling as the wisps of distant smoke in an unchartered forest, or the gathering of crows around a fellow deceased, or the foreign chants heard among trees in the dead of night. Tangible, yes, but only just. Out of reach, but only just.