“Do you?” He finally looked at me—and there it was. The raw hurt beneath the anger, the devastation he’d been holding together through sheer force of will. “Because I keep thinking I must have missed something. Must have done something wrong. And I can’t figure out what, Phee. I’ve been going over every moment of our time with him?—”
“You did nothing wrong.”
Oliver’s breath hitched, his composure fracturing. Not completely—he was too strong for that, too skilled at holding himself together.
“I thought he saw me,” he said quietly. “For the first time in my life, I thought—” He stopped, pressing the heels of his hands against his eyes. “God. I’m pathetic.”
“You’re not.” I leaned in until our shoulders touched. “You’re hurting. We’re both hurting. That’s not pathetic, Oliver. That’s human.”
He dropped his hands and looked at me. In the dim light of my flat, with the remains of untouched Thai food between us, he looked younger than I’d ever seen him. Vulnerable in a way that made my heart ache.
“I don’t know how to do this,” he admitted. “I don’t know how to pretend my life didn’t change in a profound way.”
“Neither do I.”
“So what do we do?”
I didn’t have an answer. The silence stretched between us, heavy with grief and confusion.
Oliver didn’t respond at first. Then he said, “He’s done this before.”
“What do you mean?”
“The way he shut down. Like he flipped a switch.” Oliver’s brow furrowed. “It didn’t feel spontaneous. It felt practiced. Like he knew exactly how to destroy us quickly and completely. Like he knew the most efficient method.”
My breath caught. He was right. It had felt rehearsed.
A knock at the door shattered the silence.
We both went still. It was after midnight. No one knew we were here.
The knock came again—three sharp raps that echoed through my flat like gunshots.
17
KIERNAN
Ididn’t sleep.
When the first gray light crept across the grounds, I was still in the library, still standing at the window where I’d watched the helicopter disappear hours ago. The whiskey decanter was dry, and my body ached with an exhaustion I refused to acknowledge.
The castle felt hollow in a way it hadn’t before. These halls had held laughter and warmth that came from having them here. Ophelia’s voice echoing in the corridors. Oliver’s footsteps on the stairs. The three of us tangled together in spaces that had known only solitude for years.
Now, all that remained was a lingering, painful stillness. Too quiet. Too empty.
I forced myself to put one foot in front of the other, because standing still meant drowning in the absence.
My steps echoed in the cavernous corridors as I made my way to the west tower. I paused at the entrance to my playroom and rested my hand on the doorframe. The equipment waited in the shadows—the St. Andrew’scross, the bench, the restraints. We’d used this space once together, but that single night had mattered more than I could have anticipated. I remembered Ophelia’s trust and Oliver’s surrender when his composure finally cracked. The room smelled like them—perhaps a phantom scent—but I couldn’t bring myself to enter.
I’d made a vow to never use this room with anyone again and had broken it within a week of Oliver and Ophelia arriving.
I shut the door and locked it.
My own bedroom was far worse.
I stood in the doorway of the master suite—the room that had been mine alone for three years, the room I’d opened to them. This was where I’d woken with Ophelia’s head on my chest and Oliver’s arm thrown across my waist. Where we’d talked in the dark about nothing and everything. Where I’d let myself believe, for the first time in years, that I might have this.
The sheets were still tangled from our final hours together, and pillows were scattered where we’d thrown them. This was where I was when Millie’s text arrived. Right before everything fell to pieces.
