“Perhaps not,” Marianne replied, her own composure fraying. “But in the short time I’ve known you both, I’ve seen more truth between you than you’ve shared in five years.” Marianne rounded on her sister-in-law, letting her own anger show. “You want to know what I see? A brother and sister who love each other so much that it’s destroying them. Who’ve built walls of guilt and blame so high they can’t remember what it was like before. Who are so busy bleeding from old wounds they can’t see they’re making new ones.”
“There is no before,” Adrian said flatly, his voice dead as winter earth. “There’s only after.”
“Then make after worth something!” The words burst out of her with force that surprised them all, rattling the crystal and making the footmen shift nervously. “Stop treating that accident like it ended your lives. You survived. Honour that by actually living instead of this... this half-existence you’ve both chosen. This careful dance around each other where every word is weighted with five years of things unsaid.”
“You don’t know what you’re asking,” Catherine whispered, her eyes swimming with fresh tears.
“I’m asking you to try. One meal. One conversation. One moment where you’re siblings instead of walking reminders of tragedy.”
The breakfast room fell silent except for the ticking of the mantle clock, marking seconds that felt like hours. Adrian and Catherine looked at each other—really looked—perhaps for the first time since she’d arrived. Marianne held her breath, watching years of pain and silence wage war with love and longing on both their faces.
“Do you still take three sugars in your tea?” Adrian asked suddenly, the mundane question falling into the silence like a stone into still water.
Catherine blinked, thrown by the unexpected ordinariness of it. “Two now. I found Italian coffee so bitter that it reformed my sweet tooth entirely. Though I still can’t drink it black like the Romans do.”
“Coffee.” He grimaced with genuine disgust. “Hideous stuff. Tastes like burnt disappointment. Though I suppose Italy has its charms beyond beverages.”
“The art is magnificent. I spent hours in the Uffizi, days in the Vatican museums.” She paused, seeming to gather courage, then added tentatively, “I thought of you there. They have a painting of Saint Sebastian that... the expression reminded me of your portraits. That same sense of noble suffering.”
“The ones where I look as though I’ve swallowed a poker?” Adrian’s tone was suddenly dry, almost amused.
Catherine choked on a laugh, covering her mouth with her napkin. “Adrian! You can’t say such things!”
“Well, they’re dreadful. All that noble suffering and stoic endurance. Father commissioned them, of course. Said a duke should look imposing, as if I needed help being forbidding.”
“You do look imposing in them.”
“I look like I’ve swallowed a lemon dipped in arsenic while someone tells me my favourite horse has died.”
This time Catherine’s laugh was real, bright and startled, the sound filling the breakfast room like sudden sunshine. Adrian’s mouth quirked—not quite a smile, but the ghost of one, like the promise of spring in winter.
“I brought you something,” Catherine said suddenly, as if the laughter had given her courage. “From Rome. I wasn’t sure if... but I saw it and thought...”
She reached into her reticule, the beaded bag she’d been clutching like a talisman, and withdrew a small wrapped package. The paper was expensive, Italian, with a pattern of tiny flowers that caught the morning light.
Adrian took it with visible reluctance, his fingers careful as if the package might bite. Inside was a small bronze figurine—a wolf, exquisitely detailed, fierce but somehow protective in its posture. The craftsmanship was extraordinary, every hairsuggested in the metal, the eyes somehow conveying both wildness and wisdom.
“The Capitoline Wolf,” Catherine explained nervously, words tumbling over each other in her anxiety. “The one who nursed Romulus and Remus. I thought... You always protected me like that. Fierce and careful at once. Even when we were children, you were always standing between me and anything that might hurt me. And I thought... well, it seemed appropriate.”
Adrian stared at the figurine, his throat working as if words were fighting to escape but couldn’t find the way. His thumb traced the wolf’s form, following the curve of its protective stance.
“Catherine—” His voice cracked on her name.
“I know you probably hate it. It’s presumptuous and sentimental and not at all the sort of thing a duke should display—”
“It’s perfect.” The words were rough, barely audible, torn from somewhere deep inside him. “Thank you.”
Their eyes met across the table, and for a moment, Marianne saw them—not the duke and the damaged sister, but Adrian and Catherine as they must have been. Siblings who’d shared nursery jokes and childhood secrets, who’d stood together against the world before the world won. The connection was still there, buried under scar tissue and silence, but present, waiting.
Then Adrian cleared his throat, the sound sharp in the softness of the moment, and the walls slid back into place like shutters closing against a storm. But not all the way. Not completely.
“I have correspondence to attend to.” He stood, his movements careful and controlled, but he cradled the wolf in his palm like something infinitely precious.
He paused at the door, his back to them, shoulders rigid with some internal struggle. “The Weatherbies. Tomorrow. Two o’clock.”
Then he was gone, his footsteps echoing down the hall, leaving the two women staring at each other in stunned silence.
Catherine slumped in her chair the moment he was out of sight, as if his presence had been the only thing holding her upright. “That was... more than I expected. More than I’ve gotten from him in five years of letters.”
