His wife.
Thaddeus watched her through grimy conservatory glass, and his heart sped up ever so slightly.
She moved with quiet purpose, trimming dead wood, clearing space for new growth. There was peace in her movements—a contentment he had never seen her display within the house itself. Here, alone in his mother’s abandoned garden, she had found something he had denied her everywhere else.
Freedom. Purpose. The simple pleasure of nurturing beauty from neglect.
He should go down to her. Should demand explanation for this intrusion into spaces he had expressly forbidden. Shouldreassert his authority, remind her of the boundaries they had agreed upon.
Instead, he stood frozen, watching her work, and felt the last of his carefully constructed justifications crumble to dust.
Julian was right. About everything.
The realisation should have brought panic. Instead, Thaddeus felt only exhaustion—bone-deep weariness of the sort that comes when a war finally ends and one can lower weapons that have been held ready for far too long.
He was tired of fighting. Tired of walls and distance and the terrible isolation of his own making. Tired of standing in doorways watching life happen beyond his reach whilst he remained locked in rooms of his own sealing.
A sound drew his attention—voices from below, near the stables. High, bright, unmistakably Oliver’s laughter cutting through the afternoon air.
Thaddeus descended without thought, moving toward that sound like a man following a beacon through fog.
The stableyard came into view, and he stopped at its edge.
Through the open stable doors, he could see them—Oliver and the red-haired boy, Thomas, sprawled amongst straw in the tack room, building something from whatever materials they hadscavenged. Their voices carried, full of the particular intensity of children engaged in serious imaginary work.
“—and this wall here stops the dragon?—”
“But what if he breathes fire? Straw burns?—”
“Then we need water. From the trough?—”
“Too heavy. We need buckets?—”
They problem-solved together with perfect seriousness, their differences in station utterly forgotten in the face of shared purpose. Thomas said something Thaddeus couldn’t catch, and Oliver threw back his head and laughed—that pure, unrestrained sound Thaddeus had not heard since before Nicholas died.
The boy was happy.
Genuinely, wholly happy in a way he had not been in months. And it was because Maribel had defied Thaddeus’s explicit commands. Had made decisions based on what the child needed rather than what fear dictated.
Had chosen Oliver’s joy over Thaddeus’s comfort.
“Your Grace.”
He turned to find her standing several paces away, her dress muddy at the hem, her hands stained with earth, her hair falling in dark waves around her face. She looked like a woman who had been working in gardens—utterly inappropriate for a duchess, entirely beautiful in ways that had nothing to do with propriety.
“I permitted them to play,” she said quietly, her eyes meeting his in a fierce, proud gaze. “Oliver has been in the stables for nearly an hour with Thomas. I made the decision. If you wish to punish anyone, then take it out on me.”
Thaddeus looked at her—truly looked—and saw not defiance but determination. Saw a woman who had made a choice she knew would anger him and had made it anyway because she believed it right.
Because she loved the child enough to risk his displeasure.
“You opened the east wing,” he said.
She went very still. “Yes.”
“Without my permission.”
“Yes.” No apology in the word. No retreat. “Someone needed to.”
