Her fingers curled into the coverlet, her nails biting the fabric. A small ache bloomed in her chest for an eight-year-old boy forced to grow up in winter.
“Cold,” she echoed. The word tasted awful.
“When I was eight,” he continued, “I mistranslated a passage from Virgil. I had learned the correct line. I knew I had. But my mind slipped for a single moment, and the wrong word came out. He sent me outside—it was snowing then—and made me stand in the courtyard until I could recite the entire passage perfectly from memory.”
Gwen clapped a hand over her mouth. “Victor…”
She could picture him—a thin, serious boy, his small boots half-buried in snow, his breath coming in frightened clouds, trying to remember Latin verbs while his hands went numb. The image made something inside her twist painfully.
“How long?” she whispered.
“I do not know.” He heaved a long sigh. “Children do not count time the way adults do. Long enough that my fingers turned blueand I could no longer feel my feet. Long enough that the steward defied him and dragged me in. I had a fever. A delirium. I woke up three days later, and he told me I had embarrassed him.”
Her breath quivered. “You might have died.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “And he was very nearly furious about that as well. It would have been an inconvenience.”
Her eyes filled with hot tears. She had expected severity. She had expected tales of hard lessons. She had not expected any of this. She ached for the child he had been, desperate for warmth, desperate for approval, desperate for anything but the cold.
She found herself leaning closer, drawn by instinct, not thought.
“And when he died?” she prompted softly.
“I was nineteen,” Victor said. “He collapsed at White’s. A stroke. Men who had known him for decades said he died immediately and without pain. They called it a mercy.”
“And for you?”
He turned his head toward her, his eyes shadowed. “For me, it was a release. I felt no sorrow. Only an uncoiling inside me, as if someone had finally loosened a rope I had worn around my throat for half my life.”
Gwen pressed her fingers to her lips to hold back a gasp. “I am so sorry.”
“Don’t be,” he said. “He had the life he chose. And in time, I inherited the estate he had made impossible but manageable. My mother had peace for the first time in her married life. We all benefited.”
Gwen blinked, surprised. “Your mother… surely she must have found some peace after he died.”
Something shifted in Victor’s expression, subtle at first. Not grief, but something colder. Something wound too tight to name.
“No.” His voice was flat. “Not in the way one hopes.”
Her face fell. “No?”
He shook his head once. “My mother lives quite determinedly so. Her greatest preoccupation is my marriage. Or rather, the speed with which I can enter one. The bride matters little. Heirs, stability, a tidy continuation of the Greystone line—those are her priorities. She calls it honoring my father’s legacy. I call it convenient.”
The bitterness in his tone stung her. She felt it like cold air on her skin.
“She was not unkind,” he continued. “Not the way he was. But she was never warm either. She maintained a distance that nochild could cross. After he died, she retreated into the same rigidity he had taught her to admire. Her version is quieter, more polished, but no less suffocating.”
Gwen’s heart clenched. “You were still very young.”
“Yes.” His voice lowered. “And entirely unprepared. She said the best way to honor him was to excel. At everything. Always. To meet every expectation he had. To keep the estate running smoothly. She never once asked if I grieved, only whether I was ready to perform.”
Gwen felt something inside her twist painfully. She imagined a proud, distant woman dressed in a widow’s silks, nodding to condolences with serene detachment, then turning to her son with nothing but fresh obligations in her hands.
“You missed having someone to comfort you,” she whispered.
His jaw tightened; he looked everywhere but at her. “I mourned her,” he admitted. “That is the truth. I mourned the mother I never had. The one I kept hoping she might become after my father left us… once she had room to be herself. And I hated myself for not making an effort to understand the way an estate is run better before I went abroad. For returning to find nothing but falsified ledgers, tenant disputes, and men twice my age watching to see if I would fail.”
“Oh Victor…” It came out before she could stop it.
