Page 43 of Darkest at Dusk (Revenant Roses)

Chapter Nineteen

T he corridor was quiet as they passed.

When they reached Isabella’s chamber, she paused and drew a deep breath before opening the door.

The room was still and silent, a strange thing, that.

The quiet should have felt like a reprieve.

Instead, it felt like a threat, the calm before the storm.

Papa’s trunk sat in the corner, the iron-banded oak scuffed at the corners.

She knelt and set her palm on the lid as she had done a dozen times alone, feeling the echo of her father’s hand beneath her own.

Rhys remained a step back, present, but careful not to crowd.

“Once I open it,” she said, surprised by how calm her voice sounded, “we won’t be able to pretend we are two people who merely share a house.”

“We stopped pretending last night,” he said gently. “We are partners.”

The word struck her harder than any vow of devotion.

Partners. Not employee and master. Not lover and lord.

Not a woman tolerated in a man’s design.

Partners. From his lips it was not courtesy but conviction, the scandalous belief that she stood beside him, not behind.

Heat gathered beneath her ribs, so fierce her breath was stolen and returned all at once.

She pulled the key from around her neck and fitted it into the lock.

The bit turned with a soft, stubborn click and the lid gave.

Leather and paper breathed up: starch, dust, the faint ghost of tobacco from nights when Papa had bent long over a page.

She lifted out oilcloth-wrapped books and folios.

Beneath, wrapped with care, lay the book.

Even swaddled, it seemed to hum.

She set it on the rug and sat before it, peeling the cloth aside.

The binding had been cleft clean down its spine, so that one board and half the gatherings remained.

Brass flared dully in the hearthlight, the inlay fitting like mosaic along a broken edge, a curve that promised and a second curve missing.

The design was like a broken coin, its halves once whole.

The leather was the sober brown of a gentleman’s ledger, but the tooling at the border told a different story.

Thorns and lilies twined, peril and beauty braided so close that to reach for one was to bleed on the other.

The vellum leaves clung to their cords, notes scrawled in a small, cramped hand in the margins.

Circles within circles. Words struck out and written again.

Rhys eased to the floor opposite her, a wince twisting his features as he forced his leg into submission. For a long breath he did not touch the book.

“You’ve been carrying a church under your arm,” he said at last, voice rough.

Isabella gave a wan smile. “It has felt like a tomb.”

A church. A place of ritual, of voices raised, of thresholds crossed. A tomb. A place of sealed silence and the weight of the dead. She supposed they were speaking of the same thing, only from different sides of the stone they both bore.

He lifted his eyes to hers. “You do not carry it alone, my Isabella. I have the other half.” His hand hovered over the broken spine. “I found it after the fire, in Catrin’s chamber, swaddled in muslin, hidden beneath her bed. Her diary makes me wonder…perhaps it chose her.”

“And she welcomed that choice,” Isabella murmured. “She opened her arms to the darkness like a lover.”

She pressed her palm flat to the book, steadying her own pulse as much as its hum. Had it felt so alive when she had touched it before, or was it the combined presence of Rhys and herself that made it do so now?

“Tell me the truth, Rhys. Did you come to my father’s house that day for me? For this half of the book? Or for something else altogether?” she asked, quiet but fierce.

His jaw tightened but he did not look away. “For all of it,” he said. “For the book because I had hunted the twin to my own for years. For you. And for something else beside. For help.”

She searched his face, the swell of his lips, the dark stubble along his jaw, the weight in his gray eyes. Her throat closed on Papa’s old warnings. Never say it. Never show it. She swallowed them down. “What did you say to Papa that morning to drive him to such anger?”

“I told him my truth. All of it. The voices. The visions. St. Jude’s.

And for a moment, he wavered. He told me more than he meant to.

About your own voices and visions, about the things he feared for you.

That he had spent years gathering every volume he could, every tract and scrap, searching for a way to banish the wraiths. He wanted to free you.”

The words gouged her composure. All her life she had thoughts Papa’s rules meant doubt, that his silence was denial. In truth, it had been a shield. Her eyes stung.

“He wanted to save me,” she whispered.

“Yes,” Rhys said. “As do I. I want to save us all. You. Me. The ghosts of my family.”

She swiped at her eyes with the back of her hand.

“May I?” he asked, gesturing at the book.

“Yes,” she managed.

He opened the cover, the hinges complaining softly, like the creak of an old woman’s joints.

The first pages were half text, half diagrams: shapes that were not quite circles, not quite chains; lines that beckoned the eye and then refused to let it rest. Marginalia marched in a steady, exacting hand—Latin, Aramaic, a smattering of crabbed English.

The more Isabella looked, the more she felt the press of meaning, as tangible as a palm at the base of her skull.

Rhys turned the pages, pausing on a plate where the two semicircles nestled, not married but yearning toward each other. Between them, a slim figure was sketched—no name, only a notation in the margin that made Isabella’s skin prickle. Conduit. Voluntas, duplex visus.

“Willing,” she translated, breath thin. “Two who…see.”

He exhaled, the sound like something he had kept caged. “Yes. Two halves joined, two seers joined. One must be a willing conduit. Not a sacrifice, the text is clear on that point. Not blood in a bowl. Willing consent. The gate is not an instrument. It is a pact.”

“The gate,” she repeated, throat tight.

He met her eyes and did not look away. “To passage. To crossing. The grimoire calls it a way of easing what clings. It lets what’s bound pass through, if those who stand at the threshold can bear the weight of letting go.”

“The serpent eating its own tail,” Isabella murmured, thinking of her conversation with Mrs. Abernathy when first she had arrived at Harrowgate.

Rhys sent her a questioning look, then his expression cleared with understanding. “The circle that devours itself eternally.” He paused. “We will break the circle and free them.”

“Your family,” she said.

“My mother. My brothers.” He was silent for an instant.

“I hear them, but I have not seen them in years, not truly.

Once, long ago, I saw Ned by the pond, his pinafore caught on a reed, his hair slick and dark.

Will sat by my bed the first week I was home, more shadow than boy.

They are caught in what was done to them, and she drinks the little strength they have. I must end their suffering.

“Every turn of the wheel in this house is a grindstone. I will not have them ground down any further. The grimoire says two willing halves, two who see, one of them a conduit who consents. It does not promise ease. It does not promise safety.” He swallowed. “But it promises an end.”

“For them,” she whispered.

“And perhaps for me. Perhaps for you as well, my Isabella. I want to be clear on that. If you choose to do this, you are choosing danger.” He squeezed her hand. “You have carried your seeing like a sin. I would be quit of making you wear it like penance.”

Somewhere far away a pipe sang, one thin note. Isabella looked down at the page again. Voluntas. Will. Choice.

“You think I am—” She broke off, because the word that wanted to come felt too much like vanity, too much like doom.

“I think you are what the gate requires,” he said. “And I will not ask it of you unless you ask it first of yourself. If the answer is no, I will find another way to break her without breaking you.”

Another way. She didn’t believe one existed; neither, by the flicker of pain in his eyes, did he. But he offered it because he would not coerce her, not even with desperation on his side.

Papa’s words from that long ago morning rang in her thoughts. It is not safe. You would open a gate that can never be closed. One that might well swallow her whole.

Choice blooming like a bruise. That was what this felt like. It hurt because it was real.

She let her fingertips skim the curve of brass. The cold of the metal went through her skin, down to bone.

“If the gate opens,” she said, careful with each word, “and they pass…what happens to us?”

He didn’t look away. “We stand in a door between grief and what comes after. The text says it takes strength… endurance. There will be a pull. One of us must bear it while the other steadies. When it is done—” his mouth tipped, wry “—it does not promise ‘happily ever after.’”

She almost laughed, the sound strangled. “But we might wake in a quiet house. Imagine.”

“I do,” he said, and for a breath his face was a boy’s, sunlit and unscorched, before the years and fire marked him. “Every hour.”

The words lingered between them, heavy as grief, bright as hope. And beneath both lay a warning: if they failed, there would be no second chance.

For a heartbeat, she only looked at him, struck by the image of the boy he must have been and the man who had survived.

They sat together on the floor, the grimoire closed between them. Their gazes met and held, his gray eyes sparking with both hunger and reverence. Desire flared there, but so too did tenderness.