Page 112 of A Mother for the Blind Duke’s Orphans

But it meant nothing to him.

Hector broke the silence again, “Tell me what you would have me do.”

The question exhausted her. “I cannot keep telling you.”

His expression shuttered in pain. “I do not want you unhappy.”

Poppy smiled faintly. It felt like a thing drawn with a dull blade. “I know.”

He recoiled from the repetition, or from what it had come to mean.

She curtsied again, because form was the only mercy left to them both. “Good day, Your Grace.”

This time he did not stop her.

She left before her composure failed.

Only when she was out of sight did she allow herself to press a hand to her mouth.

She had wanted a real family with him. Not a household arranged around wounds, and most definitely not a life spent waiting for him to forgive himself long enough to hold out his hand.

Behind her, somewhere beyond the walls and closed doors, Hector remained where she had left him, but Poppy kept walking.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Sleep eluded Poppy as she sat near the window with her wrapper drawn close around her, watching nothing in particular. Beyond the glass, there was only darkness and the blurred grounds. Somewhere in that darkness stood the fortress where Aurora and Princess slept under the nanny’s care. And she knew that Hector was awake too.

Poppy endured his silence and all the things he refused to say, as well as all the things she had been too cautious to ask. She had spent the day telling herself that patience was kindness. But by midnight, the thought had curdled into cowardice.

Poppy deserved at least one honest conversation. She deserved it because she had stood beside him, and he had let her stand there without ever telling her whether he meant to remain.

She rose from her bed with a huff. Her feet found the floorboards quietly. She had not decided what she would say first. Perhaps nothing prepared would survive the sight of him. Hector had a way of reducing speech to its barest truth, even when he himself spoke around his own.

She reached the door and set her fingers on the latch when a scream resounded. It was high, jagged, and unmistakably Aurora’s.

Poppy moved before she fully understood. The door struck the wall behind her, and she gathered her skirts in both hands and ran into the passage. The house, moments ago, was heavy with silence, but now it seemed to fracture around the sound.

Another scream tore through the night.

“Aurora!” Poppy called, though the child could not possibly hear her from here.

A door opened ahead, and Hector emerged from the dark, tall and disordered, his cane already in his hand. He turned toward the sound with the instant focus of a man who had spent years learning to listen for danger.

“Poppy?” he called.

“It is Aurora.”

He did not ask any questions. He just ran beside her.

Poppy followed him through the corridors. Hector moved quickly despite the dark, his cane tapping hard, his body angled forward.

The chamber doors opened before they reached them, and a servant stood pale in lamplight. Inside, the urgency sharpened. Footsteps shuffled, and low voices followed by the thin, frightened cry of Princess filled her ears. Annabelle then appeared from a side passage with the baby held close against her shoulder.

“She woke them both,” she said, breathless. “I have Princess, Your Grace. Miss Aurora is⁠—”

Another sobbing cry came from the room beyond.

Poppy slipped past her, with Hector following her.