Then I heard it.
Not the shuffle of her boots across the floorboards.Not the hum she often let slip when she worked.
A gasp.Quick, sharp, cut off like it had been stolen from her lungs.
And then—silence.
A silence so taut it sliced through the walls, settled heavy in my chest.My body knew before my mind caught up: she’d found something.
I moved before I thought, the old floor groaning under my steps.The air in the library hit different, colder somehow, as if it knew what had been unearthed.
Belle stood by the desk, sunlight pooling across the wood like a spotlight.In her hands she held a page so brittle it looked like it might crumble at her touch.But it didn’t—it cut, and I saw it cut her.
Her eyes were wide, wounded, locked on the words scrawled in her father’s hand.Words I’d hidden, guarded, prayed she’d never see.
She looked up at me; her face pale, lips parted but no sound coming out.The paper trembled in her grip, not from fragility but from the storm shaking her to the core.
And in that moment, I knew.
The fortress I’d built, the walls I’d clung to, the silence I’d thought might protect us both—none of it mattered now.The truth was in her hands, and it was poison.
And I was the man who’d let her drink it.
She held the page like it might burn her fingers.Her voice trembled, jagged at the edges, when she finally spoke.
“Tell me this isn’t true.”
I swallowed hard, throat dry, words snagging in my chest.“Belle?—”
Her eyes flashed, wet and wide, and she cut me off.“He didn’t die.”Her breath came in a shudder.“He left.With her.”
The letter shook in her hands, and she shook with it, piecing together shards of betrayal faster than I could pull them away.I didn’t need to confirm it—hell; I didn’t have the strength to deny it.My silence was answer enough, and I saw the way it crushed her.
“All this time…” Her voice cracked, raw and disbelieving.“All this time, you knew.And you let me believe he was a hero.That he?—”
Her words tore into me like bayonet steel, sharp and merciless.I tried to reach her, to find something to say that would pull her back from the edge.“I wanted to protect you,” I rasped.
But even to my own ears, it sounded hollow.Protect her—or protect myself?From reopening the wound, from the night it all went to ash, from admitting that her father’s betrayal and her mother’s silence had left me gutted.
Her tears came then, cutting paths down her cheeks, and I felt each one like shrapnel tearing through my ribs.
“You were supposed to be different,” she whispered, softer than before, and somehow that quiet broke me worse than her shouting ever could.
I reached for her, but she was already moving, shoving past me with a strength born of pain.The door creaked wide, spilling pale morning light across the floor, and then she was gone—boots crunching in the snow, her sobs carried off by the wind.
I stood there like a fool; the library yawning open behind me, her father’s words still burning in her wake.My legs wouldn’t move, no matter how hard I willed them.Not to chase her.Not to fall.Not to do a damned thing.
The truth had been in my hands for years, and I’d told myself silence was mercy.But mercy had turned to rot, and now it was bleeding out in her tears.
The door banged shut, rattling the old walls, and the house went still.Too still.
I pressed a scarred hand to the edge of the desk where she’d stood, where her warmth lingered faintly in the wood.My palm shook, useless, empty.
She was gone.And I had no one to blame but myself.
Chapter17
Belle
