She stepped back at last. “Good night, Mama.”
“Good night, my darling.”
She left the room quietly, turning the key back in the lock as she went.
The corridor felt colder than earlier. The house seemed to listen as she passed, the portraits on the walls watching with painted indifference.
She walked back to her chamber on legs that felt oddly detached from her body. Once inside, she shut the door and leaned againstit for a moment, pressing her head back until the wood dug into her scalp.
So, that was that.
Her mother would not run with her.
All the plans she had spun with Arabella and Eleanor. All the money she had stashed away, the bargains she had thought through, the routes she had considered. She had told herself she did it for both of them. That she could endure anything, even sin and scandal, if it meant her mother’s freedom.
But her mother chose her cage.
Gwen crossed to the small table by the window and set down her cloak with clumsy fingers. The room felt wrong. Too small. The bed was too neatly turned back. The little stack of books on her trunk was absurdly innocent. Only the folded note from Victor in her pocket seemed real, its weight an incessant reminder of another decision she had made that evening.
He had been all about business, at first. An opportunity seized with cold desperation. Seven nights for money. A calculation. A ledger.
She had walked into that quiet lodge tonight already shaken by the thought that she might not be able to pay what she owed. She had left knowing she had paid far more than money.
He was all about business now. He had reminded her with such cruel precision.
“This is an arrangement, Gwendoline.”
She heard the words again, his voice clipped and distant as he fussed with cuffs that did not need straightening.
The memory burned hotter than the pleasure. Hotter than the tenderness. Hotter than the way he had held her afterward, his arm heavy and careful around her, his voice low in the dark when he spoke of his father and a childhood filled with silence.
How foolish she had been.
Foolish to think that seven nights might mean anything other than what he named them. Foolish to believe, even for a moment, that the warmth she felt when he looked at her, the terrible rightness when his hands found the places that made her melt, could weigh anything against the walls he had spent his life building.
He had warned her. From the beginning, he had called it an arrangement. She had been the one to breathe meaning between his words.
Anger rose, sharp and hot. Mostly at herself.
For letting Howard’s tyranny push her into such a bargain.
For stepping willingly into a stranger’s house and inviting his touch.
For letting that touch become not only relief but also longing.
For letting herself want more.
For feeling humiliation now, when she had known from the start what she was.
She pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes. Tears threatened again, from exhaustion and frustration and some bruised tenderness for a man who clearly could not afford to care andwould not, even if he could.
It did not matter.
Her feelings did not matter. The ache in her bones, the ghost of his kiss, the betrayal of her traitorous heart, none of it would change what waited for her here: a stepfather determined to send her to a convent and a mother who had chosen to stay with him.
She moved to the small chest at the foot of her bed and knelt beside it. Her fingers found the key beneath the edge of the carpet, the place she had hidden it years ago for childish treasures.
She opened the lid and looked at what lay inside: a small pouch of coins, a pair of modest earrings her father had given herfor her thirteenth birthday, a folded list of distant relations and places they lived.
