Page 37 of Darkest at Dusk (Revenant Roses)

Chapter Sixteen

R hys did not let go of Isabella’s hand.

By unspoken agreement, they moved together through the house, her fingers cold in his, his thumb fitting the notch of her knuckles.

He told himself it was for her steadiness, not his, though the lie sat poorly.

Where she walked beside him, the needles of sound dulled to a tolerable prickle.

He felt her shiver but did not look at her.

If he looked at her now, he might gather her in his arms and the restraint that had just saved her would go to pieces.

He saw again the mouth unhinge, the black seep smoking where it struck the carpet.

He had said Catrin’s name and the cousin he remembered from their childhood, a shy creature in pink with jam smeared on her cheeks, had looked through him like ice.

Not for the first time, he wondered how that child had become a monster, wondered if she always had been.

They reached his rooms. He pushed the door with his shoulder and guided Isabella in. The coals were banked to a low red, the air warm and quiet. He left the lamp on the sideboard and, without ceremony, drew Isabella toward the hearth.

“Sit,” he managed, indicating the sofa before the fire. He set the lamp lower, as if gentler light could soften the look of confusion and dismay that drew her features taut. He poured brandy, let the glass warm in his hand for a breath, then pressed it to her hand.

She glanced at the brandy and made a face. “I have no liking for spirits. They make me cough.”

“It will warm you. Small sips. Let it sit on your tongue. Don’t chase it,” he said, and was gratified that she trusted him enough to do as he bid and took a tiny sip.

“Are you hurt?” The question scraped his throat.

“I don’t think so.” She flexed her fingers then lifted her foot and moved it this way and that, testing her ankle. “No, not hurt,” she said, but he heard all she did not say, all the questions she ached to ask.

“I’ve never seen it that strong,” he said, the admission quiet and plain.

Her mouth trembled, then steadied. “All my life they’ve been—” She searched for the word, found one that fit. “Harmless. No weight. No hands. They cannot move a cup, let alone…me. But she—” She swallowed. “She has grown stronger since I arrived.”

“She is not like the others,” he said.

“Why?” Her voice did not rise. It thinned. “Why is she so strong?”

He met her eyes then, because there was no honest answer he could give that did not paint him the villain and he wanted one more moment where she looked at him as if he were the hero. The illusion, brief as a candle’s flicker, was more dangerous to her than any wraith.

“Because of all she did while still living, and the things she has done since death. The house remembers. She feeds on that remembering, and it feeds on her.”

She stared at him, dark eyes wide, cheeks pale, pulse a fast flutter at her throat, beautiful even in her distress. She should have recoiled. Instead, she leaned nearer and that was his undoing. In St. Jude’s he had been no one—watched, judged, locked away, an animal in a cage.

Here, with her, he was seen, understood. That thread bound tighter than any rope.

Their silence was not empty. Her quick breaths, the snap of fire, his own heart behaving badly…

the room held it all. He sat beside her, close enough that the hem of her skirt brushed his boot.

He did not move away. Where their knees nearly touched, the house’s cacophony sank, as if their nearness tamped the sound down with a palm.

“Thank you,” she said, and the words shook. “For coming.”

He did not deserve her thanks. “I took too long.”

Her lips tipped, not quite a smile; the expression undid him more than tears would have. She glanced toward the door, then back at him—as if choosing—and leaned a fraction nearer. The quiet between them tightened, warm now instead of cold. Gratitude brightened to something more dangerous.

“Rhys,” she whispered, testing his name like sugar on her tongue.

Desire skated through him, inappropriate in this moment, but there nonetheless.

The smallest shiver went through her. He reached, slowly, so she might refuse, and brushed the backs of his fingers against her cheek. Her eyes widened, dark and deep.

Turning her face, she caught his touch against the corner of her mouth.

He forced himself to drop his hand and look away. He was not a good man; he had never claimed he was. But he was not such a ruffian as to take advantage of the moment.

Beside him, she took a slow breath and said, “I have questions. About the house. About…all of it. But one first.” Her throat moved. “Catrin. What happened to her?”

He had not meant to reveal it so plainly. He had meant to measure it out, careful as medicine. But she had asked, and the truth had sat in him for years like a stone.

His gaze flashed to her, and he did not look away.

“I killed her,” he said, voice steady as stone. And in the silence that followed, he waited for her to pull away, to see him for what he was. Not a savior, but a murderer.

Isabella lifted the glass to her lips and took a tiny sip, letting herself absorb Rhys’s words before she spoke.

The brandy burned a small sun in her throat.

Then she set the glass on the small side table because her fingers had begun to shake.

He sat very straight, the brights and darks cast by the fire dancing over him.

He had neither lied nor omitted. He had placed a boulder between them and named it, trusted her with it.

Relief and dread braided tight inside her—relief that she was no longer alone in what she knew; dread of what truth might demand of her.

And under it, a warmth she did not dare yet name for he had put the worst of himself in her keeping, and still she did not look away.

“Tell me.” She did not know if she invited punishment or absolution or simply the truth, but she would hear the tale because not knowing was making a maze of her mind. “From the beginning.”

His gaze flicked to her hands, to where they knotted in her skirt, and the corners of his mouth tightened. He did not move closer but neither did he shift away. His restraint pressed on her as heavy as a touch, as if he held himself taut against the pull between them.

“Catrin was my cousin. My father’s brother’s daughter.

She would visit when we were children, quiet, watchful.

She came to live at Harrowgate after my aunt’s fall and my uncle’s apoplexy.

I was away at school, but when I visited, I saw her careful grief and mild manners.

She was ever agreeable, sometimes so precisely agreeable it felt learned, as if she fashioned herself into whatever shape the room required.

“Something about her felt wrong. I spoke with Mother. She said that Catrin had lost everything and was afraid of losing even more, that she was careful lest she be cast out, lest everyone desert her. She said only must I show her compassion.”

He paused. The room sighed around them, lamp glass ticking as heat touched it. Isabella could not help noticing his hands, the long fingers, the strength of them she had felt when he pulled her from danger. She brought her gaze back to his face.

“Then my brother, Ned, drowned. Seven years old, he was, and barely that. His birthday only three days before…” He clenched his jaw and stared into the fire.

“Then Will took sick. Mother did not leave his side until Catrin offered to sit with him. Even then, Mother only went as far as the chair at the foot of his bed. She dozed, and when she woke, his breathing was slow and faint and then gone altogether. You know all this from the letters.” His mouth flattened.

“The ordinary catastrophes of a house, one might say. But they were not ordinary.”

“Catrin,” Isabella said because the name sat cold on her tongue and would not be swallowed.

“Catrin,” he agreed. “She was clever in the way that looks like gentleness if you want it to. And they wanted it to, Mother and Father. One believes what one must to keep the world square.”

“Because believing she was a monster was more than they could bear,” Isabella said, understanding what it meant to choose not to see, because to do anything else was inconceivable.

Rhys shook his head. “Because believing she was a monster was more than they could imagine . She learned to match action to expectation so the eye would see only what she wished while her hands were busy elsewhere.” He paused.

“Mother fell and broke her neck. Fell down the stairs she had walked for decades. Odd, isn’t it, that she died the same way as my aunt? ”

The fine hairs at Isabella’s nape prickled and rose. In her pocket, the singed bit of pink ribbon lay, a coiled serpent.

On instinct, she reached for him, taking his hand between her own.

His skin was warm, his palms rougher than her own.

He did not pull away. Instead, he placed his other hand atop hers.

The weight of it was a vow pressed to her skin, protective, claiming, intimate.

The pulse at her wrist fluttered against his thumb.

“Father brought me home from school,” he continued.

“That first night, I heard them, whispers that sounded like my brothers weeping, my mother sobbing. Grief, I told myself. And then I saw him by the pond, little Ned. And I saw the willow clear through him.” He looked around.

“Will came to me in this very room. Sat by my bedside, eyes dark and fathomless, face translucent gray.

Mother did not come, but I heard her weeping, always weeping. I hear her still.