“I needed air.” His voice was level.
“I know.” She kept her hand where it was, despite the way her whole body focused on those few inches of contact. “Are you all right?”
“Perfectly.”
She looked out at the dark garden and chose not to press him.
“She loves you,” she said instead. “Your aunt.”
The tendons in his forearm tightened beneath her hand.
“Her love for me is not in question.” He pushed off the railing and turned away from the view, though he didn’t move far.
His profile was sharp against the low light from the castle—the angle of his jaw, the line of his mouth, the slight tension at the corners.
“You must think me a fool,” he said. “To have been manipulated so easily by my own family.”
The bitterness in his voice stopped her. She turned to look at him properly.
“I think nothing of the sort,” she said plainly, because this was not a moment for careful diplomacy. “Being deceived by someone who loves you is not foolishness, Theodore. It says something aboutthem, not aboutyou.”
Theodore obviously did not agree. “It says I was not paying sufficient attention.”
“Or it says that you allowed yourself to trust someone, and she used that trust without asking your permission.” She held his gaze. “I understand why you’re angry. I am somewhat angry myself, but what your aunt did… I think it came from a place of genuine care. No, I’m certain of that.” She paused. “But I do agree that she was wrong to act without consulting either of us.”
Theodore’s eyes snapped to her face, sharp and bright. “You are more charitable than the situation warrants,” he remarked, his tone strung with an emotion that sounded very close to surprised admiration.
Cressida decided not to take issue with that and instead pushed ahead.
“Perhaps. Or perhaps I am simply more practiced at forgiving the people who manage me without my consent,” she said with quiet steadiness that held no resentment, only clarity. “I spent two years having my life arranged by others who were quite certain they knew what was best for me. I spent most of my life that way, truly. The last two years were merely… harsher.” She watched his expression shift. “It does not make what Lady Seymore did right. But I recognize the shape of it, and I can tell the difference between someone who acts out of calculation and someone who acts out of love.”
Theodore fell quiet. He turned back to the railing but didn’t grip it this time. His hands simply rested there, loose.
“Why are you so convinced,” Cressida asked carefully, “that everyone intends to betray you?”
The question settled into the night air between them.
She had turned the question over all the way through the castle, debating the wisdom of asking it. But when he had said “manipulated by my own family,” his voice had not been that of a man in the grip of a fresh injury. There had been something worn into it, the particular flatness of a wound that had long since stopped being acute.
He exhaled through his nose, a low, frustrated sound. “Because Ihavebeen betrayed,” he said flatly.
“Oh…”
She did not know the specifics, since he had never revealed them, and she had not asked. What she had was a single sentence, given in the heat of a corridor argument and never returned to:
“I’ve watched passion destroy everything it touches. I swore I’d never become the man who destroyed his family.”
She had held those words carefully ever since, turning them over without forcing them into a shape he had not yet chosen to give her.
“But knowing that betrayal is possible is different from deciding it is inevitable.”
Theodore snorted. “The distinction hasn’t offered much protection in practice.”
“No,” she murmured. “I imagine it hasn’t.”
He was quiet for longer this time. A late owl called somewhere in the trees below the terrace, and the air moved briefly over the flagstones, carrying the smell of the garden.
“Trusting people,” he said eventually, looking toward the dark horizon rather than at her, “feels dangerous to me. Trustingyoufeels dangerous.”
