He crossed the room, more slowly now, measuring his approach the way a man might approach a wounded dog. She pressed herself back against the window, her knuckles white on the book’s spine.
Her face was blotchy, red, and raw, and she made a furious attempt to dash away the evidence with the back of her hand.
“You’ve had four days to say what you came to say,” she said, her voice quivering between defiance and dread. “You needn’t?—”
“Don’t pretend you’ve read a word of that,” he cut in, nodding toward the book. “You hate Werther.”
She glared, but the lie died on her lips. The book slipped to the floor, thudding open at the midpoint.
Rhys let the silence stretch out for a second, just long enough to count her ragged breaths.
“I was told,” she said, after a moment, “that the only reason you married me was because it would enrage your dead father, and?—”
“And you believed it.” He said it flatly, without inflection, but it hurt more than any slap.
She swallowed, her blue eyes narrowing. “You gave me no reason not to.”
He looked at her then—reallylooked—and saw not the Duchess, or the adversary, or even the clever, impossible woman he had married. Just Celine, small and shaking, braced against a world that had never given her a fair fight.
“I did,” he said. “I just wasn’t brave enough to mean it.”
He turned away, ran a hand through his hair, and tried to find the right place to begin. The room was too bright, too filled with memories. He wanted to smash something, but instead, he walked to the fireplace and stared at the coals until his vision blurred.
“My father was a monster,” he began after a minute. “He kept his cruelty so well-polished that no one ever held him to account. Not the family, not the servants, not even God. He said that I was weak, that I’d ruin the family line if I didn’t learn to kill off my softness. So he took it upon himself to do it for me.”
He smiled, a jagged thing.
“Every day, he would mete out a new punishment. Once, when I misquoted a date in the family bible, he locked me in the mausoleum for a night. It was February. The stone was colder than his heart.”
He looked at her, waiting for the pity, but her expression was unreadable, her jaw locked, her gaze fixed somewhere over his shoulder.
“He told me I’d never be fit to lead. That I’d marry a painted doll and ruin the bloodline with madness or children too stupid to draw breath. So when he died, I thought: finally, I could prove him wrong. I made a thousand vows to never be like him, but all it did was chain me to his memory tighter than before.”
Celine didn’t speak. She sat as if cast in wax, only the rhythm of her breathing showing that she was not a statue.
“I wanted to defy him,” Rhys continued. “It wasn’t even about you at first. It was about doing the one thing he told me never to do—marry for myself, not for the damned title or the estate. I thought if I picked the lady who would scandalize him most, it would be a kind of victory.”
A muscle twitched in her jaw.
“But it wasn’t a victory. It was just more of the same. More cruelty, more running away.” He turned, stalking the length of the hearth, energy vibrating through his arms like a fever. “You were never an embarrassment, Celine. You were a challenge. From the first night in the library, when you corrected my Latin and refused to let me win an argument, I wanted you.”
The words came out raw, stripping him of pretense.
“I wanted you so much that it made me angry, because I knew wanting anything was a sure path to loss.”
She looked down at her hands, twisting them in her lap.
He stepped closer and lowered his voice. “I never meant to make you the villain in this. I was just so damn afraid of becoming him, of becoming the next link in a chain of monsters, that I let myself believe you’d be better off with half a husband than a whole one. If I could keep my distance, maybe I’d do less harm.”
She laughed, a brittle sound. “You did a splendid job of keeping your distance, Rhys.”
He winced, but pressed on. “I know. But after you left, after I had no one to keep the rooms warm or the staff in order, after the echo of your voice was gone from the halls, I realized I’d already lost everything I was trying to protect.”
He dropped to one knee, reckless, undignified.
“I’m sorry, Celine. I’m so damn sorry. Not for marrying you, not for wanting you, but for letting the past dictate our future. I am tired of being afraid. I am tired of carrying him around like a plague.”
She stared at him, her lips parted, her eyes glassy with a fresh threat of tears.
