“Then start small. Have dinner together. Speak of safe things. Build from there.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Nothing worth healing ever is.” She cupped his cheek, thumb brushing the rough edge of his scar. “But it’s still worth trying.”
For a moment, the study held only the sound of their breathing and the rhythmic tick of the clock on the mantle. Hesearched her eyes, seeking something—absolution, perhaps, or a reason to believe in one.
“I don’t want to be human,” he said finally, the words scarcely a whisper. “Humans feel too much—guilt, fear, pain. I was better as a monster.”
“No,” she said gently. “You were merely surviving as a monster. Now you’re living.”
“Living hurts.”
“Yes,” she said, her voice breaking with compassion. “But it’s still better than the alternative.”
He kissed her then—desperate, hungry, a plea more than a claim. His hands tangled in her hair, undoing the careful order of the morning. “Make me forget,” he whispered against her mouth. “Just for today.”
She understood. He wasn’t asking for passion; he was asking for peace. “I can’t make you forget,” she whispered back. “But I can remind you why remembering matters.”
What followed was unlike any of their encounters so far. It was slower, deeper, with an emotional intensity that left them both shaking. Every touch was reverent, every kiss a promise.
Adrian clung to her like she was the only solid thing in a collapsing world, and perhaps for him, she was. His hands mapped her body with desperate precision, as if trying to memorise every curve, every response.
When at last they lay tangled together in the shadows of his study, he pressed his face into her hair and spoke in a voice barely audible.
“I’m broken, Marianne. Fundamentally, irretrievably broken.”
“Then we’ll be broken together,” she whispered back, her fingers tracing soothing patterns on his chest.
“That’s not a marriage.”
“It’sourmarriage.”
Chapter Eleven
The pianoforte’s melody drifted through Harrowmere’s corridors like smoke from a dying fire—beautiful, ephemeral, edged with ash.
Marianne followed the sound through the pre-dawn dark, her wrapper clutched tight against the chill that seeped from the old stone. She had woken to find Adrian’s side of the bed cold again, the sheets bearing only the faintest impression of his body and the lingering trace of sandalwood. But this morning, instead of the familiar ache of his absence, she had been drawn by music—an impossibility, for she had never heard him play.
The marble was ice beneath her bare feet as she crossed the portrait gallery, ancestral Blackwells watching with painted, unblinking eyes. She had forgone slippers in her haste, lured by the haunting line that seemed to turn pain into beauty. Adrian had not touched the instrument at any time during their marriage; in truth, he had done little of late beyond prowling the estate like a caged beast—magnificent, dangerous, and utterly unreachable.
The music-room door stood ajar. Lamplight pooled across the carpets in amber and gold, like spilled honey in the dark. Beeswax and lemon oil scented the air, the servants having done the polishing the day before. Marianne approached on silent feet, a skill she had perfected in the short weeks of their marriage, when his moods proved as changeable as English weather and twice as treacherous.
But she wasn’t the only moth drawn to this particular flame.
Catherine stood just outside the threshold, a pale spectre in white cotton, her night-rail so fine it seemed to float. A Kashmiri shawl—one of those dear India pieces—was flung about her shoulders as if seized in haste. Her golden hair, so unlike Adrian’s midnight, fell loose in waves that caught the lamplight like spun sunlight. Tears tracked silver paths down her cheeks and vanished into the delicate lace at her neckline.
She listened to her brother play—a Mozart sonata, though Adrian had made it something else. The familiar clarity remained, the mathematical poise Mozart demands, yet Adrian had threaded his own sorrow through it like black silk through white. K. 310, Marianne realised—the A-minor written after Mozart’s mother died. Trust Adrian to choose a piece touched by grief and render it more haunting still.
The women’s eyes met across the threshold. Catherine’s gaze was the same as her brother’s, but without the shadows that lived in his. Her lips parted as if to speak, perhaps to explain her presence or apologise for intruding, then closed again with a soft click of teeth. What was there to say? They were both women who loved Adrian Blackwell. They both couldn’t reach him. They stood together in their separate loneliness, watching Adrian pour his soul into the ivory keys.
He sat in profile, the tufted bench taking his disciplined weight. A single oil lamp upon the case threw his scarred face into chiaroscuro worthy of an Old Master. The scar was pale tonight—it shifted with his moods, she had noticed, from tender rose when he was calm to angry red when fury took him. Hiseyes were closed, lashes shadowing his cheekbones; his body swayed a fraction with the rhythm like a tree in a gentle wind.
Those hands—elegant, powerful, capable of pleasure and pain—moved over the keys with a lover’s care. She knew them intimately now: the callus on the trigger finger, the small white line across the left palm, the span that easily covered an octave and a half. To see them coax such beauty from suffering tightened her chest with feelings she could not name.
In unguarded moments such as this, when he thought himself alone, Marianne could see the man he might have been—the artist, the brother, the person who’d existed before sacrifice carved him into something harder, sharper, more dangerous. This was the Adrian who’d played duets with Catherine in their childhood music room, who’d dreamed of things beyond duty and title.
The sonata built to its crest; his whole body leaned into the fortissimo with barely contained violence—then fell into a silence louder than any chord, a silence with weight. His hands rested on the keys, trembling faintly in the aftermath. A bead of sweat traced his temple, followed the line of the scar, and disappeared into his collar.
