For a moment, even the cemetery seemed to go quieter around them. There were still murmurs nearby, still movement from mourners repositioning themselves around the grave, still the distant sound of shoes on gravel and low prayer from the front of the gathering, but within the small circle of tension that now existed between the three of them, everything had sharpened. Damian simply stared. He had not expected resistance. That much was plain. He had expected awkwardness, perhaps embarrassment, perhaps defensive politeness from a man dragged into some social arrangement above his station. What he had received instead was the kind of flat, clean dismantling that men like him never saw coming because they spent their lives being surrounded by people who measured every word around them carefully. Raymond had not merely answered him. He had stripped the scene of its social costume and left Damian standing there in the full, unflattering truth of his own pettiness. The effect of it show