Hadbeen. Now … something was off.
It was the faintest change, almost imperceptible to anyone who had not spent the better part of his life in this precise room, but Mason felt it at once. He narrowed his eyes.
He crossed to the west wall, where a tall glass-fronted cabinet stood tucked between the shelves. It was not locked. It rarely needed to be. His mother had never been much interested in this library, preferring, instead, the one in her chamber with its familiar volumes of poetry and the novels she had read too many times to count.
No one else used this room. No one, except apparentlysomeone.
The cabinet door was ajar by less than an inch, but it was enough. He opened it fully, and there they were.
The folder of heavy paper still lay as he had left it, bound in a faded ribbon with fraying edges. He reached out slowly, as though to touch it too quickly might disturb the air or the memory and lifted it into his hands. Then, he sat down in the armchair.
Untying the ribbon felt like opening a wound one had learned to live with. Inside were sketches, dozens of them. Some were loose while others were bound in thin paper folios, done in pencil and charcoal mostly with a few inked ones. But they were still all elegant, uneven, impulsive in places, and heartbreakingly familiar.
Here was a drawing of their mother, seated at her harp, the outline gentle and spare but somehow managing to capture the serene sorrow of a woman who always smiled a half-second late.
The next one was a small landscape with the river bend behind the woods, the one Isabelle always said looked like a ribbon tossed by the wind. And the third one… he took a breath, for it was his own portrait, unfinished. Only his eyes were fully rendered—and as always, she’d managed to capture the very essence of her object.
He remembered the day she’d begun it.
“You always look like you’re watching the room for a fire,” she’d said not even looking at him because she was too focused on the drawing itself. “Even when it’s calm.”
“Perhaps I’m lookingforcalm,” he had replied, long before he knew what was going to happen.
“No. You’d be miserable with it. You needjust enoughchaos for things to stay interesting.”
He exhaled now, long and slow. His fingers moved through the rest of the drawings. Here was a sketch of Isabelle herself as she had once been: smiling without fear, her hair a wild halo of curls, a book open in her lap, and her feet tucked underneath her as she sat in their father’s old armchair, utterly unbothered by its size or severity. He touched the edge of the page, almost reverently.
He had kept these hidden, not because they were shameful but because they werehis; because they were a fragile relic of a girl who had vanished from the world but never from his life.
That was when he realized that they were not in the right order. He was absolutely certain of it. And he knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that it had not been Hargrave, nor was it his mother.
It wasshe.
Cordelia.
Of course, it was. She was like wind through an open window, entirely uninterested in whether or not the papers were meant to stay where they were.
The fury did not rise at once. No, it crept like smoke beneath a door, filling the corners first before choking the center. It was not the sort of anger that flared and vanished. Rather, it was the familiar, slow-burning kind, the kind he had inherited.
The kind he despised and could not subdue.
He gritted his teeth and breathed through his nose. But it was no use. She had touched them. She had opened the cabinet, the one no one was supposed to touch, the one that bore no lock and key not because it was common but because it was sacred.
What gave her the right? What gave her the audacity to place her hands on something that was not hers?
It did not matter that she had likely meant no harm, that she had probably wandered through the library like a curious cat and opened the first thing that looked interesting. It wasnot hers.And Isabelle was not a curiosity to be perused on a whim.
The fury took him then, full and sharp. He left the library as Hargrave opened a door in passing, wise enough to step aside without inquiry.
“Where is Miss Brookes?” he asked coldly, pausing only long enough to make the question carry the weight of a demand.
“I believe she is?—”
But Mason did not wait for the end of the sentence. Instead, he moved through the corridor like a storm in formalwear.
How dare she? How could someone so slight, so absurdly dressed in mismatched silks and unpinned curls, rattle him with so little effort?
He passed the morning salon. She was not there.
