“I loved Marta, Cassian,” he said, his voice dropping to a barely audible murmur. “I truly did. I know you have every reason to doubt it. I know what it must have looked like… what it still looks like. But I loved her.” He pressed his fist to his chest, briefly. “When I heard she and our baby had died, something in me broke. I lost all interest in living. I lost myself. I told myself the debts, the gambling, and the danger were just the way things were, but the truth is I did not particularly care what happened to me.” He paused. “I know that is not an excuse, and there is nothing I can say that will undo any of it. I know that.”
He stopped, as if he had run out of breath. His hand went to his chest, rubbing the spot there. He looked at both Juliana and Cassian. His eyes pleaded in a way his words no longer could,and Juliana could not help the small sound that escaped her. Was this another performance, more polished than the rest? She did not think so. She had known this man her entire life, and she knew the difference between Kit performing remorse and Kit feeling it.
“Please,” he said quietly. “Give me a second chance. Not to be who I was. I know that man is not worth another chance. But to try to be something better. For you, Juliana.” He hesitated. “And for Marta.”
Cassian stared at him for a long moment. His jaw was still clenched. His knuckles were still white. Juliana held her breath.
Then Cassian looked at her, and something in his expression softened by a degree that only she would have known to look for.
“I am leaving the decision to Juliana,” he said, his voice quiet and controlled. “You have hurt her more than anyone else in this room, and she is your flesh and blood. She will decide what to do with you.”
She stood there and let it all move through her. The irresponsibility, the debts, the errors, the years spent cleaning up after him, the night he had looked her in the eye in that place and told a room full of strangers he did not know her. All of it. She let herself feel it fully, for perhaps the first time, without rushing past it or tucking it away for later.
And then the memories came, the way they always did whenever she thought she had made up her mind about Kit. Him lifting her onto his shoulders at the village fair so she could see over the crowd. Him sitting outside her door the night their mother died, not saying a word, simply being there because he did not know what to say.
He had never been wise. He had not always been kind. But he had loved her in the clumsy, insufficient, entirely his own way that Kit loved people, and she had loved him back.
She reached for his hand.
“Do not make me regret this, Kit,” she said softly.
Like most Stonevale carriage journeys, this one was silent. Cassian could not help it. His leg felt as if it had been torn apart by devils. He tried not to grunt in pain, not wanting to worry his wife. She sat next to him, her hands clutching his as she rested her cheek on his shoulder. A tear might have slid down to wet his shirt, but he could not be certain. She did not want him to think she was weak. In that, they were similar.
He looked down at the top of her head and thought about what she had been through tonight, what she had put herself through for a brother who had given her very little reason to, and felt something move through him, equal parts exasperation and a tenderness so profound it bordered on pain.
He tightened his grip on hers, and she pressed closer. Neither of them said anything, because nothing needed to be said.
Across from Cassian sat the man he had hated for years.
He was also the man who had once been his friend. He looked at Kit now and tried to reconcile the two versions of him. The friend and the betrayer. The man who had made Marta laugh and the one who had left her to grieve alone.
He did not know yet whether to trust him. He suspected he would not know for some time.
But he would try.
Kit stared out the window at the passing darkness, his expression unreadable. He had not spoken since they left the tavern. Cassian had not encouraged him to.
The question that sat heaviest in his chest was not about Kit at all.
It was about Marta.
He could still hear her in the low hours of certain nights, the sound she had made when the midwife told her the child was gone. It was not a sound he had known a person could make. It was the sound of something fundamental breaking, and he had stood outside her door, entirely useless, and had not forgiven himself for it since. He had built the walls of the West Tower around her grief because it was the only thing he knew how to do, and he had told himself it was protection.
Would she forgive Kit? He could not imagine it. He could not imagine looking at the person who had caused such pain and feeling anything other than what he himself felt, a cold and abiding fury that five years had done very little to diminish.
But then, he had not loved Christopher Hawthorne. And perhaps that was the difference. Perhaps loving someone gave you a capacity for forgiveness that hatred foreclosed entirely. Or perhaps it made the wound so much deeper that forgiveness became the only way to survive it.
He did not know. He had never been good at forgiveness.
He looked at Juliana’s hand in his and reconsidered that.
Perhaps he was learning.
When the carriage finally reached Stonevale, the trio moved quietly through the house and up the spiral stairs of the West Tower. Cassian’s leg protested with every step, but he said nothing. He was wary of disturbing Marta’s fragile peace, knowing how precarious it still was and how easily it could be shattered. But Kit could not wait until morning. They all knew that.
He pushed the door open.
Marta stood by the window, her silhouette outlined by moonlight, her sketchbook open on the table behind her as if she had been trying to work and had given it up. She looked beautiful and vulnerable, and a lump in Cassian’s throat made it hard to breathe. He thought of her at twelve, following him through the grounds of Stonevale with her sketchbook tucked under her arm, pestering him with questions he had been too old and too impatient to answer properly.
