“I want,” she said quietly, “for you to try.”
“I am trying.”
“Are you? Because from where I stand, you are doing everything in your power to maintain distance. To preserve control. To ensure that nothing—no one—ever truly reaches you.” Her gaze held his without wavering. “And Oliver pays the price for your fear. I pay the price. Even you pay it, though you refuse to acknowledge the cost.”
“You do not understand?—”
“Then help me understand.” The plea in her voice undid something in his chest. “Tell me about Nicholas. Tell me about your mother. Tell me what happened to make you believe that caring for people is dangerous rather than...” She hesitated. “Rather than the only thing that makes any of this bearable.”
He could not. The words were there—had always been there, locked behind eight years of silence and grief too vast to name—but releasing them would require dismantling every defence he had built against the world’s casual cruelties.
And he was not certain he would survive what came after.
“I should see to estate matters,” he said instead, retreating into the familiar rhythms of duty and distance. “If you will excuse me.”
He saw the disappointment cross her face. Saw the way her shoulders sagged slightly, the way her hands folded together as though seeking comfort from their own grip.
“Of course, Your Grace,” she said. The formality cut deeper than any accusation. “Do not let me keep you from your responsibilities.”
He left her standing in the morning room—left her with cold tea and abandoned breakfast and all the questions he could not bear to answer.
But as he walked down the corridor toward his study, Julian’s words followed like ghosts at his heels:
He is not as cold as he pretends to be. He has simply forgotten how to be anything else.
And from somewhere in the house above: Oliver’s voice, speaking to Maribel in tones too quiet to distinguish words, seeking comfort from the one person in this vast, cold house who knew how to provide it.
Thaddeus closed his study door and pressed his back against it, his eyes shut against the ache building behind them.
Julian was right. About everything.
CHAPTER 9
“It’s raining again.”
Oliver’s voice drifted from the nursery window, flat with the particular disappointment only a child denied outdoor play could muster. Maribel looked up from the watercolour she’d been helping him mix—a muddy brown that was meant to be grass but had gone rather spectacularly wrong.
“So it is, sweetheart.” She set down her brush and crossed to stand beside him. Beyond the glass, the October sky hung low and grey, releasing sheets of rain that turned the grounds into a watercolour of their own—all blurred edges and running colours, the landscape dissolving beneath autumn’s relentless weeping.
It had been raining for two days now. The third storm in as many weeks, trapping them all indoors whilst the house creaked and settled around them like an old woman complaining of her joints.
“I’m bored,” Oliver announced, pressing his forehead against the cool glass. “Very, very, horribly bored.”
“I can see that.”
“And my soldiers are tired of being soldiers. They want to do something else.”
Maribel bit back a smile. “What would they prefer to be?”
“I don’t know.” He turned from the window, his small face scrunched in thought.
“What if,” Maribel said slowly, an idea forming, “they weren’t soldiers at all today? What if they were knights defending a castle?”
Oliver’s eyes brightened. “A proper castle? With towers and everything?”
“The very best sort. But we’d need to build it first.” She glanced toward the drawing room down the corridor—that vast, pristine space Thaddeus never used, filled with furniture arranged in perfect symmetry. “I think I know just the place.”
Twenty minutes later, the drawing room had been transformed.
