Dominic, age fourteen.
Lorraine forgot how to breathe.
The boy in the painting bore almost no resemblance to the man she knew. That was the first shock—and it struck with physical force, a sharp tightening beneath her ribs, as though a tuning fork had been set vibrating against her sternum.
He was laughing.
Not smiling—laughing. His head thrown back, mouth open, eyes nearly closed with the force of it. His dark hair was uncombed, falling across his brow in a manner that would have scandalised any valet. He wore no coat, only a linen shirt with the sleeves pushed to his elbows, revealing forearms tanned and unscarred. A faint smudge marked his jaw—mud, perhaps, or charcoal.
And his eyes—those pale grey eyes Lorraine knew as guarded, watchful, capable of freezing a room at twenty paces—were alight with unguarded joy.
This is who you were, she thought, her throat tightening.Before Spain. Before Badajoz. Before the ravine—and the three seconds—and the twenty-one letters you write each year to families who will never read them.This was the boy who brought Mrs Potter crushed flowers. Who watched kestrels from the folly. Who laughed as though the world had been made for his delight.
What became of him?
She knew. War. William. A ravine in Spain, a moment’s hesitation that cost twenty-one lives—and turned a laughing boy into a man who carried himself like a wound that had never properly healed.
“You have found it, then.”
Lorraine started. Dominic stood at the far end of the gallery, one shoulder resting against the doorframe, his arms loosely crossed. His posture was indolent; his gaze was not. It was fixed upon her with a quiet intensity that suggested he had been observing her for longer than he admitted.
How did a man of his size move so silently? she thought, her pulse quickening. Four years of learning invisibility, perhaps.
“I was not snooping,” she said, which was technically true and wholly unconvincing.
“I did not say you were.”
“You were thinking it.”
“I was thinking that you are standing before the only painting in this house I have ever considered destroying—and you look as though you have been struck.” He pushed himself away from the frame and crossed toward her, his footsteps echoing softly against the stone. “So either the portrait offends your sensibilities, or you are having a remarkably strong reaction to a version of me long since vanished—which, I confess, I do not find especially reassuring.”
The dry delivery nearly undid her. A laugh escaped—unsteady, damp at the edges, and impossible to disguise.
“You were beautiful,” she said.
He halted a few feet away. “I was filthy. It was painted shortly before my mother died—after I had spent the entire morning in the stables. The artist had been engaged for a formal portrait, but I refused to change. He painted what he saw.”
“You were laughing.”
“I had put a frog in my tutor’s desk. The memory was still fresh.”
“Dominic…” She turned back to the portrait, studying the wild-haired boy, the smudge upon his jaw, the unguarded light in his face. “Why would you wish to destroy this?”
The silence that followed was not of the gentle kind they had grown accustomed to. It had edges.
“Because he does not exist anymore,” Dominic said at last. His voice was low—not the composed restraint of the Duke, but something rougher, closer to the bone. “That boy died in Spain. What returned was something else.” He paused. “Each time I pass this corridor, he is here—laughing. As though he does not know what awaits him. As though, in a future he cannot yet conceive, he will stand frozen in a ravine while twenty-one men die because he could not move his damned feet.”
Lorraine turned to him. He was not looking at the portrait, but at the floor, his jaw rigid, his hands thrust deep into his pockets in a gesture so uncharacteristic of the Duke of Ravenswood that something in her chest tightened painfully.
“He is not dead,” she said.
“Lorraine—”
“He still watches kestrels. He lifts a little boy upon his shoulders and pretends he is not smiling.” She stepped closer—close enough to see the faint scar at his brow, the tension along his throat. “He teaches a child the structure of wings, and gives of himself in quiet ways when he believes no one is paying attention.”
“That is not—”
“He brought me to his bed and touched me as though I were the first beautiful thing he had seen in years.” Her voice lowered, steady and fierce. “He held me afterward and asked me to remain. That is not a dead man, Dominic. That is not a ghost.”
