Gasps rippled through the nuns, scandalized whispers spreading like fire. Matilda rose abruptly from her place before the altar. Her expression was one of utter disbelief and fury.
“What are you doing?” she demanded, her voice low but shaking with anger. “Have you lost your senses?”
“Entirely,” Jasper said without hesitation. “But I’ll not stand by and watch you throw away your life in some stone prison!”
Her eyes flashed. “Howdareyou!” The sisters murmured, scandal rippling through their ranks as she took a step toward him, every line of her posture blazing with indignation. “You barge into a holy place, shouting like a madman, interrupting vows that are none of your concern!”
“They are very much my concern!” he countered, with his voice echoing against the stone walls. “Youare my concern, Matilda!”
Her chin lifted, proud and trembling. “You forfeited that right when you broke me. When you made me believe—” Her breath hitched, but she pressed on. “When you made me believe I mattered, only to speak of me as if I were nothing!”
Jasper’s voice softened, strained. “I was wrong. Every word I said to Aberon that day was a lie born of fear, not truth.”
“Fear?” she repeated bitterly. “Fear is no excuse for cruelty.”
He took another step forward. “Then let it not excuse cowardice either. I cannot let you do this. You think peace lies in silence and in solitude, but it doesn’t. It’s only another kind of prison.”
Matilda’s eyes flashed again, furious now, but there was a tremor in her voice when she spoke. “And what would you know of peace? You, who have never known restraint in your life!”
“I know what it is to live in fear of myself,” he said, his voice rising despite himself. “I know what it is to destroy the only good thing I’ve ever touched because I was too afraid to believe I could love without turning into my father!”
He pressed forward, his words tumbling out now. “I let you think I did not care! God help me, I let you think you were just another of my mistakes, but you never were. You are the only thing I’ve ever done right. And I will not let you disappear into silence because of me.”
“Your Grace!” the abbess’s voice cracked like a whip, cutting through the moment. “You will leavenow,or I shall call the groundskeeper to escort you out.”
But Jasper didn’t move. He barely seemed to hear her. His gaze was fixed entirely on Matilda, who was now pale, trembling and caught between fury and disbelief.
“Please,” he said softly now, the fight leaving his voice. “If you take that vow today, it will not be for peace. It will be to punish yourself for my sins. Don’t do it. Don’t let me be the reason you give up the world.”
The sisters stood frozen in place, scandalized yet spellbound.
Matilda stared at him, her breath shallow, her hands clenched tightly at her sides. “You should not have come,” she said again, but this time her voice broke on the last word.
Jasper took one more step toward her. “And yet I did. Because I cannot live knowing I said nothing when I might have changed everything.”
The abbess moved forward as if to intervene, but neither of them noticed. For the first time since he entered, silence truly filled the chapel. It was thick, trembling and alive with the weight of all that had been said, and all that still hung between them.
Chapter Forty-Two
Matilda could not move. The sound of the bell still reverberated through the chapel, mingling with the hush that followed his words. Every eye was on them, the abbess, the sisters, Sister Agnes hovering near the altar, but all she saw washim.
He looked nothing like the composed Duke of Harrow she had once known. His coat was damp and wrinkled, his cravat undone, his expression stripped of all the calm elegance that had once infuriated her. He looked human and broken, and she didn’t know what to feel.
Her chest rose and fell too quickly. Anger came first, bright and fierce.How dare he.How dare he come here, into this place of solemnity, after all he had said, after the humiliation she had endured.
And yet, there it was. That dangerous flicker of warmth beneath the fury. He had come for her. He hadfollowedher.
Her voice failed her. Her lips parted but no words came. The room seemed to tilt around her. The sisters were murmuring in alarm, and the abbess stood frozen in scandalized disbelief.
“Matilda,” he said, “you deserve to know why I pushed you away, why I said the things I did.”
She looked at him with eyes that were sharp despite the tremor in her hands. “I know why. You were cruel. And afraid.”
He winced at the word. “Afraid, yes. Cruel, never by choice. I was a coward, Matilda, a fool who mistook fear for control.”
Sister Agnes made a soft, uncertain noise, but no one dared interrupt him.
He drew a slow, unsteady breath. “You know some of what my father was. But not all.”
