Chapter 24
Callum wakes to light.
Ashen and thin, filtering through the tall windows like it’s unsure whether it belongs. The castle always wakes before he does, pipes shifting, stone settling, the distant movement of staff beginning their routines.
This morning, something feels… muted.
Not silent. The castle is never silent.
But subdued. As if it’s holding its breath. Waiting to see what happens between him and Isla.
Callum lies still for a moment, staring at the ceiling, letting consciousness return slowly. His body remembers before his mind does, the warmth of another person, the weight of connection, the sense that something had shifted irrevocably the night before.
Isla.
He sits up, rubbing a hand over his face. The bed is rumpled from his sleep. They had slept in her bedroom, and now he feels like he’s sleeping in the wrong room.
Still, unease coils low in his gut.
He listens.
No movement in the corridor. No faint sound of a door opening or closing. No distant music drifted through the stone the way it had the morning before. The way it had every morning since she’d been here.
Yesterday morning.
The word yesterday feels heavier than it should.
Callum swings his legs over the side of the bed and stands, pulling on a shirt as he crosses the room. He tells himself she went for a walk because she needed air. That she needed distance after everything they’d uncovered.
That she’ll come back.
He moves through the castle with measured steps, not rushing, not yet willing to acknowledge what his instincts are already whispering.
The music room is empty. There is no scattered music on the stand.
The piano lid is closed. The bench pushed neatly into place, as if no one had sat there laughing, improvising, sharing something unguarded less than twenty-four hours ago.
The dining room is set, but only for one.
That’s when his chest tightens.
Isla isn’t careless. She doesn’t leave traces unintentionally. She doesn’t half-finish things. If she were here, there would be some sign, an interruption, a disruption, a sense of her presence lingering in the air.
There is nothing.
Callum turns back toward the stairs slowly, dread threading deeper with each step. He takes them two at a time, not running, but no longer pretending this is nothing.
When he reaches her bedroom, he stops short.
The room looks…cold and uninviting.
Not lived in.
Not empty in the way a room is when someone simply steps out, but stripped of the small, human disruptions that mark temporary belonging. The sweater she’d tossed over the chair is gone. The book she’d left on the nightstand is gone.
And then he sees it.
The letter.
It rests on the bed, centered with deliberate care, like a period placed at the end of a sentence that had once promised continuation. Beneath it, a neat stack of documents.
Callum’s name.
He stands there for a long moment, unable to move.
This is not impulse.
This is intention.
His hand shakes slightly as he picks up the letter. He doesn’t sit. He doesn’t brace himself. He just opens it and reads.
Once.
Twice.
Each word lands with devastating clarity.
If I stayed, I would disappear.
Callum presses his thumb into the paper, breathing hard. The room feels suddenly too small, the air too thin.
She knew exactly what she was doing.
She loved him enough to leave.
The realization cuts deeper than anger ever could.
His gaze drops to the documents beneath the letter, legal language stark and unyielding. The castle. The land. Everything.
Given to him.
Left behind.
“No,” he whispers, the word useless against ink and signature. He wants her, not the castle.
He sinks onto the edge of the bed, the weight of the letter pressing into his chest like a physical thing. The castle creaks softly around him, the sound winding through stone and beam until it settles in his bones.
It feels wrong now.
Too big. Too quiet.
Like a body without a pulse.
He thinks of her laugh in the music room. The way she teased him when he missed a chord. The look in her eyes when she trusted him, really trusted him, to hold something fragile without breaking it.
He’d wanted to be worthy of that.
Instead, he hesitated.
The castle exhales, a low sound rising through the walls, ancient and mournful. Callum feels it echo through him, grief layered on grief, absence piled atop inheritance.
For the first time, the place does not feel like shelter.
It feels like a monument.
He rises slowly and crosses to the window. Fog lingers over the land, damp and gray, the road leading away already empty.
She’s gone.
Not in anger.
Not in haste.
But with resolve.
Keir stayed away and called it mercy.
Isla left and called it survival.
And Callum—
Callum stayed.
The truth settles heavy and unavoidable.
He grips the window frame, jaw tightening as something sharp and bright cuts through the devastation.
No.
He will not repeat the same mistake.
Stone does not love you back.
Walls do not choose you.
People do.
And for the first time in his life, Callum understands that what kept him safe once is not what will save him now.
He turns from the window, letter still clenched in his hand, heart pounding with something that finally feels like clarity.
This is not the end.