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None of it mattered.
None of it could break through the dreary fog that had enveloped her, skewing the very world around her until it was familiar, but unrecognizable to her senses.
Food didn’t taste on her tongue. Laughter didn’t bubble forth. Feelings—any of them—refused to surface.
Numb from toe to tip.
She’d drifted off to the south tower at Seahorn, again and again during the last two days since they arrived back at the castle. The happy chatter of her many cousins and aunts and uncles too much to bear at times.
All were safe, all were well enough, save for Eva’s broken ankle that had been reset and was healing. And for once, her father and Reiner had both looked at her with modicum of admiration—as an actual, capable adult—for how she’d managed to break her, Torrie and Eva out of the undercroft of Falsted castle.
It was all she had wanted, everyone safe and healthy.
She had been willing to die for that.
Death, she had been ready for. Being broken…that she hadn’t seen coming.
Everyone safe and healthy.
Yet none of it mattered.
Rafe had been ripped away from her without a word and she didn’t know if he was alive or dead.
She’d begged herself blue in the face to her father, to Reiner, to Sloane, and to Jules, to find out what happened to Rafe. No one would say a word on the matter of Lord Winfred.
In her world—in the world of these brutal, beautiful, complicated men where loyalty was paramount—that meant Rafe was dead.
There was no other course of action.
This, the south tower, had been her only solace.
Used mainly for storage, it had never been renovated past the chilly walls of heavy cut stone like the rest of the castle. The simplicity and the coldness of it, along with the blessed emptiness of people, had made it the perfect place to escape her family.
In the solar on the second level, Victoria leaned forward, pressing her forehead to the cool touch of the diamond-patterned lead glass. She could hear the howling of the wind whipping along the edges of the window, so much so that the noise of it almost sounded like wailing.
She pulled her head away from the window and the sound drifted off.
With a sigh, she tilted her brow toward the glass once more. The wail. There it was again, drifting into her ears. The faintest agonized scream.
Except that wasn’t the wind.
She jabbed a step backward away from the window and cocked her head, her ears searching for the sound.
There. Then gone. There again.
What would be wailing? It didn’t sound like one of the children or an animal.
But something was in trouble.
Her feet quick out of the solar, she paused in the corridor, waiting for the sound to bounce along the stone walls again.
It did. And it was coming from below.
She darted toward the spiral stone staircase, her right hand running along the worn stone on the outside wall as she descended.
The sound would start and stop, again and again. Louder the farther she descended down the stairs until she was in the undercroft of Seahorn.
She looked around at the arched brickwork and was met with silence. This area was used for storage and she had played hide-and-seek down here many times with her young cousins.
