The music softens.
Callum opens his eyes.
Inside the music room, the door is still closed.He could turn away.Walk out and down the corridor.Pretend he never heard this moment.
He doesn’t.
Because the next notes aren’t just beautiful.
They’re devastating.
They carry loss, not Keir’s, not even Isla’s, but something deeper.The grief of a child who waited too long for someone who never came.The quiet, aching loneliness of hotel rooms and rehearsals and applause that never quite filled the hollow.
Callum feels it settle in his chest like a weight.
He remembers Isla at the funeral, sitting rigid and composed, voice steady as she sang words that cut clean through the chapel.He remembers thinking she was made of steel.
He was wrong.
She’s made of fire and fracture and something that refuses to break cleanly.
The music crescendos, hands moving faster now, confidence replacing hesitation.The melody doesn’t resolve neatly.It refuses closure.It demands space.
Callum’s fingers curl into a fist.
How is he supposed to hate her?
Callum knows that with brutal clarity.
Wanting her is a liability.And yet it’s all he can do to keep from rushing over to the piano and pulling her into his arms and whispering he feels it too.
Desire makes men careless.Soft.It makes them hesitate when they should stand firm.He’s seen it destroy livelihoods, families, and entire legacies.Keir himself had been proof of that.
And yet?—
Isla sits at the piano like she belongs to the room, like the castle shaped itself around her sound.Like she could dismantle everything Callum has protected simply by staying.
If he lets himself want her, he won’t fight hard enough.
If he doesn’t fight hard enough, he loses the castle.
And if he loses the castle?—
He loses the last place he was ever chosen.The last place to accept him.
How is he supposed to protect the castle from a woman who sounds like she understands its soul better than anyone alive?
The final chord rings out, vibrating through the stone, lingering in the air like a held breath.
Silence follows.
Callum waits for her to stand.To move.To acknowledge his presence.
She doesn’t.
Instead, she sets her fingers back on the keys.
Not to perform.
