Page 83 of Accidental Alliance

I am sorry I left.

I am sorry I believed them.

I am sorry I let your grief become inconvenient.

I am sorry I did not come back.

The list is endless.

No apology will ever be good enough to give to her. And yet some selfish part of me still wants her to understand, to look at me and see that I did not know the full weight of my actions and the consequences they would have on her future.

But ignorance is not innocence, and I am done hiding behind it. I don’t deserve to.

I rise slowly and step back from the stain, careful not to put my shoe over it. A ridiculous courtesy, maybe. Or an empty one. But I give it anyway because there are so few decent things left in me that haven’t already been tainted.

I move around the side of the house, pushing through wet branches and overgrown rose canes that snag at my coat with thorned fingers.

Their petals are dark red, almost black where dampness clings to them, and the sight sends a twist of nostalgia curling in my chest. Beauty surviving neglect, softness armed with thorns. It reminds me of Isabella.

She would hate the comparison if I ever said it to her.

The service entrance is where I remember it being, half hidden behind ivy crawling up the stone wall.

The narrow door is weathered, paint peeled in strips, brass handle darkened with age. I take one step back and give the door a solid kick near the jamb. The sound rips through the quiet like a gunshot as the wood splinters from the siding.

I freeze, one hand dropping instinctively toward the weapon at my side, listening for movement inside the house or on the grounds. But there is nothing.

I breathe out slowly before pushing the door open fully. It gives way with a groan that sounds too loud and foreboding against the eerie quiet.

Inside, dust hangs in the weak light slanting through the cracked windows. Each slow-moving particle suspends for a brief moment frozen in time, like the house is still trying to exhale the last breath it took eight years ago.

The halls are colder inside and it seeps beneath my coat through the fabric of my shirt, sending a shiver rolling up my spine.

Sheets cover furniture in soft, ghostly shapes like bodies arranged for viewing.

My flashlight cuts across them, and the shadows bend strangely, making it seem for one second as though the house is full of people who have turned their backs to me. I pass a narrow table where a silver tray still sits tarnished beneath the grime. Beside it, a crystal decanter rests empty, its stopper missing.

I pause there for a second too long, staring at it before forcing myself to move on.

The war room sits exactly how it was left years ago. Maps are still pinned to walls with routes marked in faded ink. Long strings sag between pins that connect through all of the territories surrounding this one.

Amos’s heavy oak desk sits beneath a thick layer of dust, looking like an altar no one has dared disturb since his death. The chair behind it remains pushed back at an angle as though he rose quickly and expected to return to it soon.

I stand in the doorway for a long moment and can almost see him there in this room, sharp-eyed and patient as always with one hand resting on the ledger Giovano told me about.

The picture of a man who knew betrayal would come one day and still let the wrong allies get too close anyway.

Or perhaps not.

Perhaps he never saw it and simply ran out of time.

Letting out a slow breath, I cross to the desk to search it first. Dust coats my hands the moment my palms settle on the old wood. It clings to my skin and gathers in the creases of my knuckles as I pull open the drawers one by one, each of them groaning softly on swollen tracks.

What I find first is nothing of importance, just old records from years past of invoices and shipping manifests that are now nothing more than wrinkled paper creating clutter.

I try the drawer below it and find much the same, all of it one useless document after another.

Frustration starts to crawl beneath my skin the longer I sift through it.