The garden doors yielded quietly beneath her hand.
Outside, the night was sharp and clear. Snow dusted the ground in pale patches, catching moonlight like scattered glass. The air bit her cheeks, stealing her breath and leaving her lungs aching in a way that felt almost welcome.
She stood very still, letting it settle her.
The gardens lay dormant, hedges stripped bare, stone paths half-hidden beneath frost. Everything waited. Everything endured.
Charlotte took a few careful steps along the path, her slippers whispering softly against the ground. She had gone no farther than the edge of the east wing when a sound stopped her short.
A voice.
Low. Broken.
It cut through the stillness like a blade.
Charlotte froze.
The sound came again—sharper this time, torn free of sleep and restraint alike. A word followed, slurred and desperate.
“No—”
Then another. A name.
“Thomas—”
Her heart lurched painfully.
The voice came from above—from the darkened windows she had passed earlier. From the duke’s chambers.
Charlotte’s first instinct was to retreat at once. This was not her place. This was not something she ought to hear.
But the sound came again.
A cry—raw, anguished, stripped of authority and control.
Charlotte pressed her hand to her mouth as her breath caught painfully in her chest.
The Duke of Averleigh did not sound cold at that moment. He did not sound severe, distant, or composed.
He sounded afraid.
Fragments followed—half-formed words tangled together, breathless and disordered. Retreat. Smoke. A command shouted too late. His brother’s name again, hoarse and breaking.
Charlotte felt her eyes sting.
She stood rooted to the path, unable to look away from the dark window above. The man she had met in daylight—controlled, imperious, carefully sealed behind duty—was nowhere to be found.
In his place was something wounded. Exposed.
Her thoughts drifted unbidden to the night her parents had died—the carriage lurching, the scream of tearing wood, the sudden weightlessness before the impact. The scar beneath her sleeve throbbed faintly, as it always did when memory stirred too close.
She remembered waking afterward, disoriented and alone, the sound of her own voice calling out into the darkness.
Loss recognized loss.
She did not know how long she stood there, listening. Long enough for pity to bloom into something deeper—something like understanding.
The duke carried his grief differently than she carried hers, but the shape of it felt achingly familiar.
