Then he sat, lowered his face into his hands, and attempted to remember how to breathe.
The middle of February.
Then Thomas would be gone. Claimed by grandparents he had never met, carried across an ocean to a country he had never seen, raised by strangers who shared his blood but not his life. The boy who painted kestrels and named wooden horses after dead fathers and slept with a brass compass at his bedside would be placed into a carriage and driven away from Rovewood Hall—and Dominic would stand in the doorway and watch him go, powerless to intervene.
Because he had no legal claim. No moral authority. No right—save a dead man’s trust and the belated, insufficient love of a guardian who had already wasted too much of the time he had been given.”
And Lorraine.
Lorraine.
His mind recoiled from the thought—the same instinct that had once made him flinch from cannon fire, the reflex to shutter itself before the damage could fully land. Because when she left—and she would leave, she must leave, for a governess without a charge was a governess without a position—the silence that would settle over Rovewood Hall would not be the quiet of peace.
It would be the quiet that kills.
Not swiftly. Slowly. The way frost kills—seeping inward, crystallising, rendering everything brittle until the slightest pressure reduces it to ruin.
This is what you do,whispered the voice he knew best—the cold one, the one that had kept him alive through four years of frozen grief.You let them in. You let them matter. And then the world takes them, and you’re left standing in the wreckage wondering why you thought this time would be different.
He opened his desk drawer, took out the bottle of brandy he kept for emergencies, poured two fingers, and drank it in one swallow.
Then he poured two more and drank those as well.
***
She did not come to him that night—because he had ensured that she would not.
The note had been brief. Civil. Written in the careful, impersonal hand of the Duke of Ravenswood rather than the man who had held her the night before. A request that she not attend him. No explanation offered. None invited.
He told himself it was for the best—that he had drunk too much, that his temper was dark, that she deserved better than a man who would draw her close only to cling as though to wreckage. He told himself it was consideration.
He knew it for what it was.
Retreat.
The ice was forming again. He could feel it—the slow, insidious cold spreading through his chest, just as it had after Badajoz. The numbness that passed for peace. The merciful anaesthesia of feeling nothing at all. And some part of him—the part that had endured by choosing distance over connection, solitude over risk, ice over fire—welcomed it.
This is safer, that part said.This is how you survive.
This is how you were surviving before she came, answered another voice—quieter, newer.And it was killing you.
He dismissed them both.
He remained in his study until the fire sank to embers, then climbed the stairs to his bed—empty now, save for the faint trace of her upon the sheets. He lay there, staring into the darkness, and did not sleep until dawn.
***
The second day was worse.
He kept to his study. Took his meals at his desk. Instructed Graves that he was not to be disturbed—which was the coward’s way of sayingdo not admit Miss Weston, because if she crossed that threshold, he would either tell her everything or nothing at all, and he did not know which would prove the greater injury.
At half past three, a knock.
“I said I was not to be disturbed, Graves.”
“It is not Graves.”
Lorraine’s voice—cool, composed—carried through the oak. Dominic’s hand tightened around his pen until the nib scored the paper.
