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“Well, maybe not blatant mischief. But Corentine and I were each other’s unfailing rocks.”
“You still deeply feel her death?”
He nodded. “So I can imagine how raw Jacob’s death must be for you. For Lachlan. I understand why you came after me. Corentine’s death is why I’m determined to take down the smuggling scheme and I’ve let nothing get in the way of it. But even at that, I fear it will not be enough.”
“Not enough?” She stared at him for a long moment. “Because you blame yourself. You said that very thing. All that anger that I have, I turned it outward, toward Lord Falsted and then you. But you—you turned all that inward upon yourself, didn’t you? That raw, raging pit in the bottom of your stomach that is determined someone should pay for the death.” She blinked hard, an exhale leaving her mouth. She glanced about for a moment, then her gaze pierced him. “You hate yourself for it, don’t you, Reiner?”
His breath unsteady, the horses continued for twelve more steps before he dared to meet her stare. “For those moments in time. For my stupidity in not calling for her midwife sooner. For not stopping the decrepit old midwife and the doctor from everything they did wrong to her body during the birth. Yes. Yes, I absolutely hate myself. If I had only listened to my sister when she’d first told me to send for her midwife, Corentine would be alive today. If I hadn’t been too busy. Too absorbed in things that didn’t matter, I could have saved her.”
“You cannot ken that.”
“Yet I cannot escape the possibility.”
Silent and with a slight nod, she drew a deep inhale that lifted her chest, the cut of her lavender riding dress rustling against her skin. Silence he was grateful for.
She looked around her and her hands tugged on her reins, stopping her horse.
“This is it.”
Reiner halted his steed and looked about. What looked like ruins of several cottages and barns sat just to the left of the road.
Before he could even think on it, Sloane slid off her saddle, dropping her reins, and started walking into the group of buildings.
He looked closer at the rubble. The overgrown summer grasses hid much of it, but he could just make out the blackened stones. The scorched earth.
All of the buildings had been burned to the ground, possibly in the not too distant past. Weeds snaked up the triangular wooden poles in an abandoned vegetable garden in the center of the buildings. Reiner studied the land from the height of his horse as Sloane walked past the garden. Four—no, five buildings had once stood in this spot. Two cottages, possibly. A couple barns.
Buildings that had been burnt to the ground, only the charred skeletons of stone foundations giving evidence of where they once stood.
His chest heavy with stones he could not shake, Reiner dismounted, following Sloane into the center of the destroyed buildings, his look riveted on her back.
This was it. This was the place.
She paused ten feet from the remains of one of the cottages, her gloved left forefinger pointing to the ground. She didn’t turn back to him, her voice wooden. “This. This was where Jacob dropped us after dragging us from the burning cottage. Where Torrie rolled, screaming, writhing as the flames ate her legs. Where my arm was burned trying to help her.”
She veered to her right, stepping over the low stones that had once marked the foundation of a cottage. As she walked through the rubble, her head remained down, her eyes searching. “This. This was where I searched the earth for Jacob. It was days later when the agony of my arm wasn’t so overwhelming that I had finally ceased retching every hour with the pain. I came here and I stood, railing at myself for hours. What if I had stopped Torrie that day from ever leaving Vinehill? What if I hadn’t agreed with her that it was a good idea to try and stop the clearing? What if I hadn’t run into the cottage after her? What if I had grabbed Jacob’s arm and not let him go back into the inferno in the cottage?”
Her voice drifted off and she spun in a slow circle, her gaze still locked onto the ground, searching. “Lachlan said they couldn’t find any remains, that the fire burned too hot. But I didn’t believe him. So I made him bring me here. And I searched, searched for hours in here and could find nothing. No evidence of any of them.” Her fingers flipped upward into the air. “Like they were just gone. Never even existed. Jacob. Torrie’s parents. Her brother. It was as though the world had refused to acknowledge that any of them ever even set foot on the earth. That they were ever anything—walking, talking, breathing, laughing—loved.”
She drew in a sob, her voice catching. “That they meant something. They were just…gone.”
She shook her head, her face tilting up to the sky as she blinked away tears that had swelled in her eyes. Streaks of wetness clinging to her cheeks glistened in the sunlight. “It wasn’t until it was dark and I was heaving up bile that Lachlan dragged me away. He didn’t ken what to do with me. Leave me or pull me away. And I didn’t ken what to do with him. He wanted to find Jacob just as much as I did. Or maybe he lied to me to spare me of how he looked in the end—I don’t ken.”
Her lips drew inward for a long breath. “That month at Wolfbridge when I believed he was still alive—and then I remembered. It was like losing him all over again. All of it, all over again. All the pain…” A sob choked her words away.
For how brutal the need was to go to her, to gather her into his arms and hold her against all of the terror she’d suffered, Reiner remained rooted to the ground. She had brought him here for a reason, and he was terrified at what that reason was.
Her face still upturned, her eyes closed for agonizing minutes until the tears stopped streaming and her head dropped. She swiped the wetness from her cheeks and looked at him.
“I needed you to see this. To see what happened here.”
His voice as even as he could make it, he took three steps toward her, his toes touching the barrier of fieldstone between them that had long since tumbled from the foundation. “Why are you showing me this, Sloane?”
Her gaze pinned him. “You ken why, Reiner.”
“I didn’t do this. I explained that…unless…unless it is that you don’t believe me?”
She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter whether I believe you or not. You took on this land as your responsibility—how many more lands are there that you don’t ken what is happening upon? I needed you to see this so that you ken—I need you to be responsible for whatever you bring upon these lands. I want you to be a force for good. Not for…” Her left hand lifted, sweeping around her. “Not for this. Not for unleashing terror across the land—erasing innocent people from their homes. Not for destroying lives.”
