Closer to the bed’s foot than the little table with her notes, Silas stands a beat with poise pent up clean across his shoulders and behind his ears. Watching her watching him on the fringes of lamplight, hazy with want until an abrupt wrestle and twist sees him divested of his tunic, linen dropped aside. Any sense of order about him is undone as easily as that: underpants taxman gone wild.

The channel meat-hooked up his near flank is familiar, scar tissue twisting where it pinches in behind the blade of his shoulder.

"Should he have?" He’s sly as he turns again to sink onto the edge of the bed beside her, one hand snuck behind her knee to lift the edge of her coat as if testing the wealth of the fabric.

What a strange question to ask a colleague. Are people even allowed to turn into dogs here?