Chapter 16 Marriage #2
For a while he simply held the pages to his face, as if the paper might deliver warmth through its fibres.
The room around him thinned—the hearth’s roar, the velvet chaise, Heston’s cautious footfall outside the door—everything reduced to the small, bright ache between his fingers.
He thought of how Valemont had looked with Clyde’s shadow at his shoulder: less grand maybe, but steadier, less lonely.
How absurd it was that a man who dressed in jewels could be undone by a single line of ink.
He sat, and then he wrote. Not the witty, barbed trifle that charmed the salons, but a raw thing that would have read like a confession if it ever reached a hand that did not know him.
The quill trembled a little where his fingers held it; the ink thrummed onto the page like blood onto snow.
He tried three drafts—mockery, pleading, a brittle, half-mad dare—and burned each in turn, watching the edges curl and blacken until they blossom into smoke and nothing remained but the memory of the words.
The fourth letter he set down sealed, then kissed with a serious, private devotion that felt indecent.
He meant to send it; to send the rawness out into the cold the way one sends a torch ahead of a rider.
But when the flame of the single candle licked the red wax at his fingertips, he found himself holding the wax over the flame until it sagged, until the seal softened and the parchment browned.
The flame took the name first, the neat, dangerous curl of Clyde’s letters, and the sound of ink and paper burning was the sort of small, private sacrilege that makes a man feel unmoored.
He watched ash fall into the palms of his hands, watched lines he had bled over unmake themselves into nothing.
He told himself he was burning what he must—softness, weakness, the part of him that might topple the duchy by existing—but his chest clenched as if whatever he sacrificed were not an idea but a living thing.
He lay the last scraps into the hearth and leaned forward until the heat warmed his face.
“Enough,” he told the emptiness, throat thick. “Enough.”
Then, because habit is the only law some men obey, he collected the remaining, unburned pages, tucked the memory of Clyde’s voice under his pillow, and dressed himself in the lavish garments of an Archduke.
He walked out into the night with the new title like a foreign weight around his shoulders, and though his face was composed, his hands still smelled faintly of ash.
He told himself, aloud, that he would be what they wanted: prudent, resolute, unyielding.
He told himself he could wear the mantle of duty and bury the rest. But when he lay down that night, the emptiness where Clyde should have been yawned large as the sea, and the smell of smoke lingered on his fingers like a promise he had not yet kept.
The great hall smelled of beeswax and roses, polished to a mirror sheen in anticipation of her arrival.
Aerion entered last, the weight of his new title stitched into every thread of his black-and-red cloak.
He moved like a man to be admired, not approached; chin high, smile sharp, each gesture too deliberate to be careless.
She was already there.
Lady Evelyne of Drelmere. Barely nineteen. Sweet-faced, modestly dressed in pale silk that seemed to shrink from the grandeur of the chamber. Her hands trembled where they clutched her skirts, but her eyes lit like dawn when they found him.
She curtseyed low, nearly to the ground. “Your Grace,” she breathed, her voice soft with reverence. “It is the greatest honour of my life to stand before you.”
Aerion’s lips curved into something that could pass for warmth. He extended his hand, drew her gently to her feet. “And mine to meet the lady who will keep Valemont company.” His tone was gracious, polished, utterly faultless.
She blushed at the compliment, eyes shining as though she’d been handed the sun.
Every glance at him was adoration made flesh—her gaze hungry not for power, but for him.
She laughed nervously at his smallest quip, and when he offered her his arm, she took it as though afraid he might vanish if she held too lightly.
He smiled as kindly as he could. He asked her about her family, her studies, whether she liked music. She answered every question as though every word he spoke was a gift she might press between the pages of her memory forever.
And even then, even as she glowed with the simple joy of being near him, Aerion knew.
He would never love her.
Not for lack of charm, or sweetness, or devotion. She was all of those things, and she looked at him as though he were a man worth worship. But his heart was already locked. Sealed behind iron and silence. It had been carved by another hand, and he had burned the key.
So, he gave her the only mercy he had left. A smile. A gentle word. Enough to keep her glowing, enough to make the court sigh at his courtesy.
And in the marrow of him, in the place he never let them see, he thought only of Clyde.
His heart was closed forever.