"You should have stayed away."
"Yes."
"This won't end well."
"Nothing ever does."
They sat there as the sun rose higher, filling the dusty library with light that revealed everything, the decay, the neglect, the two damaged people clinging to each other while pretending they weren't.
Clara thought about their rose, growing wild somewhere beyond these walls. About grafts that took against all odds. About things that survived even when they shouldn't.
She'd survive this too. She'd survive him, his cruelty, and his coldness. She'd survive because she had no other choice, and because somewhere under all that ice was still the boy who'd taught her that two different things could grow together into something new.
Even if that something was twisted and thorny and nothing like what they'd planned.
"Welcome to Ashbourne Hall, Miss Whitfield," Gabriel said with mock formality. "May your employment be brief and forgettable."
"Thank you, Your Grace," she replied with equal mockery. "May your temper be manageable and your cruelty limited to verbal rather than physical."
"I don't beat women."
“How wonderfully comforting. You merely destroy their consequence with your discourse.”
“Indeed. Diligence ever leads to a proficiency of the tongue.”
Despite everything, Clara found herself almost smiling. This was terrible. He was terrible. The whole situation was a disaster of pride and desperation and unspoken history.
But she was alive. She was warm. She had a position, however strange and abnormal, and a roof over her head.
And somewhere in this ruined house, beneath all his scars, the visible one and the invisible ones, was still Gabriel. Changed, damaged, cruel, but still him.
That would have to be enough.
Her situation was very much improved since she had come here with her stolen boots.
And infinitely more dangerous to her heart.
CHAPTER 4
Clara found herself close to infernal regions as Gabriel would sit idly in his chair, drinking his spirits at all hours of the day, commenting on her inadequacies.
"You're going about it all wrong,” Gabriel informed her for the seventh time that hour.
Clara, balanced precariously on a ladder that had seen better decades, possibly better centuries, gritting her teeth whilst she continued to endeavor dusting the leather-bound volumes that hadn't been touched since approximately the Norman Conquest.
"I'm dusting," she said with forced patience. "One can hardly dust incorrectly."
"And yet, you're managing it."
"Perhaps you'd like to demonstrate the proper technique?"
"I'm the duke. I don't dust."
"No, you just sit there like a particularly judgmental gargoyle and criticize those who do."
"Gargoyles are protective spirits. I'm merely decorative and disapproving."
"At least you're self-aware."
