The Beast of Thornwick,he thought bitterly.At last, I look the part.
The servants whispered. He heard them through the walls, through the doors, their voices carrying in the stillness of the castle. They worried about him. They feared for his sanity. They wondered, in hushed tones, whether the Duke had finally succumbed to the madness that had always lurked beneath his surface.
Let them wonder. He did not care. He did not care about anything anymore.
One night—he had lost track of which night, lost track of everything—he found himself in the library, holding a glass of brandy and staring at the spot where he had once kissed her. The bookshelves still bore the marks of his destruction, books scattered across the floor, spines cracked and pages torn. He had not allowed the servants to clean it up. He wanted the reminder. He wanted to see, every day, the physical manifestation of what he had become without her.
A monster. A beast. A man who destroyed everything he touched.
He raised the glass to his lips and drank deeply, feeling the brandy burn its way down his throat. It was not his first glass of the evening. It would not be his last.
“To Miss Fiona Hart,” he said aloud, his voice echoing in the empty room. “The only woman who ever loved me. The only woman I ever loved. The woman I was too cowardly to keep.”
He drained the glass and hurled it at the fireplace, watching it shatter against the marble.
“To the Beast of Thornwick,” he continued, pouring another glass. “The monster who convinced himself that loneliness was safety. The fool who believed he was protecting her by pushing her away. The coward who—”
His voice broke.
He pressed a hand to his eyes, feeling the sting of tears he had thought he no longer possessed. He had wept so much in the days after her departure that he had assumed the well had run dry. But the grief, it seemed, was inexhaustible. It renewed itself constantly, fed by memories and regrets and the inescapable knowledge that he had done this to himself.
He had chosen this. Chosen the loneliness, the quiet misery, the slow unravelling of the fragile happiness he had only just begun to believe in. He might have kept her. He might have fought for her. He might have written to her father and defiedthe consequences, married her despite the scandal and let the world think what it pleased.
But he had not.
Because he was afraid. Because he had spent his entire life learning how to retreat, how to endure, how to surrender before hope could betray him.
“I am sorry,” he murmured to the empty room. “Fiona… I am so very sorry.”
But sorrow changed nothing. It never had.
Several days after her departure—or perhaps it was weeks; time had lost all proper shape—Christian ventured outside for the first time.
The day was grey, the sky low with clouds that threatened rain but never quite delivered it. He walked the grounds of Thornwick without direction, his feet carrying him along paths he had trodden a hundred times before. The gardens were bedraggled, the hedges overgrown. The whole place seemed abandoned. Neglected. Dying.
Like him.
He found himself at the cliff’s edge before he realised where his feet were taking him.
The sea churned below, grey and restless, waves striking the rocks with a relentless force that echoed the turmoil within his chest. The wind tugged at his hair and coat, stinging his eyesuntil the tears that gathered there could not be distinguished from the salt air.
He stood at the very brink and looked down.
He felt nothing.
No fear. No vertigo. No instinctive impulse to step back from the precipice.
Only emptiness.
I could do it,he thought.One step forward, and it would be finished. The pain, the grief, the long procession of days without her. All of it—ended in an instant.
He had stood here before, on the night she followed him, the night they quarrelled and he drove her away. Even then, the thought had lingered somewhere at the edge of his mind—the dark, persuasive promise of oblivion.
It was louder now.
More insistent.
She is gone. She will not come back. What purpose is there in continuing?
