My Roxelana was an entirely different beast. She met me, waiting on a bridge made from rough-hewn logs in one of the gardens attached to the harem at Yıldız. Her burgundy gown was the latest Western fashion—high collar, fitted waist, skirts flowing gently over her hips—her dark hair upswept and held in place by a comb encrusted with rubies. Enormous pearls bobbed on her ears, and she parted her full lips, licking them to glistening perfection as she started to speak once I’d introduced myself.

“I don’t see how I can be of any possible use.” Her voice, thinner than her beauty suggested, shook as she spoke.

“I know well how awful what’s happened has been for you,” I said. “I lost a friend last year in Vienna. He was murdered and I found his body. It affects you in unimaginable ways, and I’m so terribly sorry you’re suffering for it.”

While working the previous winter to clear Robert Brandon in the death of Lord Fortescue, the most odious human I’d ever met, I’d become tenuous friends with a man who was both an asset to me and an adversary. Mutual enemies had brought us together, and he’d ended up aiding my investigation. Finding his brutalized body in Vienna’s beautiful Stephansdom cathedral was worse than any nightmare, and I hoped never again to witness such a violent scene.

“Then you do understand,” she said. “Everyone wants me to push the memory aside, but no matter what I do it comes back in my dreams.”

“There are some things that never leave you entirely.”

“I wish this would,” she said. “I can’t bear seeing it over and over.”

I reached for her hand. “I know. There’s no real comfort to be had, but perhaps helping us find Ceyden’s murderer will bring some small measure of relief.”