“With your peasant manners and your dirt-eaten hands. I made you a lady.”
“I don’t want to be a lady.”
Her answers came faster now. Clearer.
“I want my people to live.”
Behind him, there was movement.
The room shifted with the quiet gathering of bodies, the weight of watching eyes, but Aoife didn’t turn her head.
Clara had returned.
The others were with her.
Halverton didn’t notice.
Clarity slowly replaced the fear that had been gripping her. This was her only chance, right here, right now. Perhaps she couldn’t change him, but he wasn’t the only person in this house.
“I have kept this county fed,” he said. “Do you think a peasant could do better? No. Without me, the whole place would fall apart.”
Aoife shook her head.
“It’s falling apart because of you.”
A breath.
“Not despite you. Because of you.”
She raised her voice a fraction. It wasn’t the man in front of her she was talking to anymore, not really.
“I agreed to come here because I was certain there was goodness in you,” she said.
Her gaze didn’t leave his, but she was aware of every set of eyes in the room watching her.
“I thought there had to be.”
The crack of the whip outside almost made her falter.
“All my life,” she went on, slower now, as if she were finding the thought even as she spoke it, “I believed there was no such thing as evil. That every man must see himself as the hero of his own story. That he must be fighting for what’s right in his own mind.”
She faltered for a moment before lifting her chin.
“I see it now. Evil is not fire and fury,” she said. “It’s emptiness.”
Her hands were steady at her sides now as the truth of her words settled over her.
“It’s the absence of any goodness at all.”
A breath.
“And that’s what you are.”
She locked eyes with him.
“Empty.”
Halverton was silent; behind him, the staff were frozen in place. Aoife’s breathing quickened as he continued to stand there in silence. After seconds that felt like minutes, Lord Halverton gave a mocking smile, a thin stretch of the lips, almost pleased with itself.
