This Haunted Heart

Chapter 17

Lochlan Finley

T he next evening, a great crash of wood resounded from down below, and I abandoned my business correspondence in the office to go and inspect the cause of the commotion. I sensed that the cause had a name and that the name was Rynn.

I climbed down the main staircase, and a chuckle rumbled out of me as I reached the bottom, entering the foyer. Rynn had given up on trying to pick the lock to the central room. She’d removed the hinges instead, and the heavy doors had fallen inward, revealing the great library.

The space had once been a ballroom. A grand piano still sat in the western corner where the floor was marble tile and the wall was one large gilt-framed mirror, but now the back walls were floor-to-ceiling shelves of books. Wheeled ladders were built out from the shelves to roll across gleaming hardwood floors. Plush furniture was situated along massive windows in the east to catch the morning sunlight.

Rynn stood beside a carved writing desk, holding a cold lantern in her hands. Her floral tea gown was so long it draped the floor behind her. She craned her neck, taking in the great room. The domed ceiling was painted to resemble a night sky and included all her favorite constellations, like Cassiopeia and Orion. The central window was a stained-glass image of her favorite fairytale: Hansel and Gretel after they bested the wicked witch. Everything smelled like lacquer and that brilliant book smell. The curtains were a color of violet she loved. There was no denying that this room had been built for one singular purpose.

“There was never another woman,” she said, awe in her hushed voice. Quietly, she set the lantern down on the desktop as though it had gotten too heavy for her to hold aloft.

“There never was,” I said, stepping fully into the library around the fallen doors. “What a silly notion. Me in love with anyone but you . . . What do you think of your library?”

“It’s exactly like what we used to talk about. Every. Single. Detail. It’s like you reached into my brain and pulled this brilliant room out of it. I’m astonished, Loch.” She turned to face me, brow furrowed. But why’d you tell me your lover had died?”

“Because I thought you had,” I said sadly, still struck by grief at the thought, even though she was right here with me alive and well. “All I knew from that night was that you’d stolen from the safe and fled into the woods. Father gave chase. Then he came back. You didn’t. You never came back.”

“You thought . . .” Horror rounded her eyes .

“I thought he murdered you, Rynn. Everyone did. He didn’t even deny it when I confronted him later, demanding to know what he’d done with you. He was such a proud man, he’d rather people believed he killed you then think some young kitchen maid had bested him at anything.”

She grabbed at the fabric of her floral tea gown, just above her heart, then she cast a glance around the room I had crafted with such intricate care to be a beacon for her lost spirit. “Oh, Loch . . .” she murmured.

“I built all of it for you. Nightingale House is yours,” I confessed.

She squinted at me like she was struggling to make sense of my words. “Because you thought I was dead?”

“Dead and lost. I believed that if this home was perfect enough, I’d draw your soul out of the mire. If it was exactly what you’d always wanted, you’d come to me and haunt this place, haunt this library, haunt my bed.”

She worked her throat. “I would have.”

My mouth tugged up at the corner. “Yes?” I’d loved it when she’d said that the first time in the lavatory. I loved it even more now.

“Yes! Oh, yes,” she said with a contented sigh.

Her words were earnest, but doubt lingered within me, sullying my joy. “I know that you have a talent for telling men what they want to hear . . .”

Rynn rounded the desk to stand in front of me. She grabbed up my hand in both of hers. Eyes shut, she kissed each of my knuckles one at a time, her lips warm and sincere. “I truly, truly love it. I’m not telling you what you want to hear, Loch. I don’t do that with you. I’ve never seen you as a client, even when I thought you were only Finley. I told you that. Remember?”

Every part of me that was warm, optimistic, and prone to foolishness believed her implicitly. Because I couldn’t help myself, I pressed a light kiss to her brow. “Tell me more. Tell me how much you like your library.”

“It’s perfect.” She bit her lip, stopping it from quivering. Then she squeezed my hand between hers. “I went on and on about wanting a place like this, and you made it for me. I can hardly believe I’m standing here. If I was a ghost, I’d never be able to resist this house. I’d squeeze myself inside every book. Haunt every beautiful corner. I would name every nail and every floorboard.”

“Good, good.” Warmth shot through my chest. “I wanted so much for you to love it.”

“I wouldn’t be like the other ghosts here, though. They clean.” Her lips quirked. “You’d know I was around because I’d leave you messes.”

I chuckled, but the humor in it was bittersweet. My lashes lowered. I shifted forward, hovering closer. “And when I was sad that you were dead, you’d come and sing for me until I felt better, like you do in my dreams. My nightingale.”

“Always.”

“You’d visit my bed to ravish me in my sleep.”

“Every morning and every night.” She leaned in and rested her palm high on my chest. My heart thumped under her touch. “You should have known I couldn’t possibly be dead. Of course I would haunt this place.”

“Father burned your things in a rage after you were gone,” I told her, and she released my hand, eyes wide in shocked sympathy. “That’s the moment I still cannot conquer. That’s the moment all went dark and dead within me. The first time my heart was shattered.”

I’d tried to save what I could when I found Father starting that fire. He’d ignited her clothing and the few paltry things she’d left behind. I’d wanted them all, and he’d beaten me for trying to put out the blaze. He’d broken off a branch from the pyre. It was so hot the end smoked, and he’d struck me wildly, scarring my face.

I hadn’t registered the pain from his attacks. My dear Rynn was dead—that was all I could feel—but a mark had been left on my soul to match my face.

And even though she wasn’t truly, even though I had her here with me now, the grief of that horrid moment had rooted in me devastatingly deep. I couldn’t separate from it. I was drowning in it.

“I refused to believe ill of you,” I said, that old ache clawing at the cage of my ribs, trying to land another blow on my battered heart. “I told myself you took my ring because you planned to marry me. I thought you’d left those stolen things in my room for safekeeping . . . I believed I’d lost you because you’d been taken from me.”

“Oh Loch—”

“One word!” I moaned. “One letter from you could have spared me so much torment.”

“What would I have said?” she argued. “‘Dear Loch, sorry about all that horrible betrayal business. I managed to escape your terrible father and move to the city. By the way, I’m a whore now. Still want to get married?’”

“Yes!” I roared.

“Oh, come on!” Backing away from me, she threw her hands up into the air. “Be reasonable!”

“I’m never reasonable when it comes to you, Rynn. You should know that by now! I still would have married you. Twenty years I searched for your body, for whatever remained of you. I’d have taken anything: A lock of hair. A piece of your clothing. The smallest bone of your tiniest finger.”

“Oh, dear God!” She covered her mouth with her hand, silencing her gasp.

“I was desperate for any token, and I came to know the mire very well looking for you.”

“What you endured is dreadful, Loch. I can’t even imagine it. I have no words.” She buried her face in her hands. “But I didn’t know, I didn’t know, I didn’t know! How could I have? I thought surely you hated me, not that you thought I was dead! If I had, of course I would have come back for you, whatever the consequences!”

In my mind’s eye, I saw myself hunting the mire. Winter and spring, summer and fall, I searched and scoured every inch for some piece of Rynn.

“I left offerings for the weaver women.” I stared off at the shelves, seeing trees and rain and snow instead of books. “I was afraid they’d collected you that night or that animals had carried you off or that he’d dumped your body in a sinking spot. Twenty years, I begged the witches for some token. Finally, Hulda took pity on me and told me the truth. I had fallen asleep in the parlor the night a black fog rolled over the grounds, and a light snow began to fall even though it was early autumn. She visited me in my dreams. And that’s when you shattered my heart the second time, Rynn,” I said, and her face crumpled. “That’s when I learned that there had never been a dead girl in their woods. That the witches would never have allowed such a thing. The grief and anger I felt was so potent, wrathful spirits flooded the parlor. I called them to me, though I didn’t mean to, straight out of the mire.”

“You locked away the room with the black door, and you came for me,” she said, swiping at her eyes. “Because you still blame me fully. Even for the things that wicked man was responsible for. He was horrid and he let you think he killed me. You came to settle the score. I know that the ring I stole was precious to you and—”

“You took more than that from me!”

“A few dollars—”

“And my heart ,” I growled, clutching at my breast. “You ripped it right out of my chest!”

“Your haunted heart was never stolen,” she said, voice wobbly and hollow with threatening tears. “You gave me that willingly and took mine in return!”

“When did all of it stop being real for you?” My voice went cold and hard, and my hands balled into fists. Anger was a much sturdier emotion, a thing I could grab at that hurt so much less than the ugly monster still trying to tear at the organ in my chest. “That’s what I still don’t understand.”

She blinked at me, and her jaw set. “I beg your pardon?”

“When did I become a mark to you? A thing to trick and toy with until you had what you wanted so you could run away?”

Her next breath was a shallow rasp. “How dare you say that to me!”

“I want to know!”

“Fuck what you want to know! How dare you! All we endured together,” she said, doe eyes glistening with welling tears, “all that pain and torment . . . I protected you. I cared for you. I loved you! I love you still! I couldn’t stop loving you even if I wanted to. I was never pretending with you. One night, I did a stupid, impulsive, selfish thing. A dreadful thing that I will loathe until I breathe my last. Twenty years you searched for me? Well, for twenty years I’ve carried the shame of that terrible night on my back. It will remain there with me, weighing me down until it finally wins and crushes the life out of me. Is that what you want to hear?”

“The last twenty years were your choice!” I flung at her.

“I know!” she screamed in my face, her hands in fists. “And they were the wrong choice! The wretched one, the worst one! The one that I can’t ever get away from. Can’t run fast enough from. Nothing I do, it doesn’t matter. I won’t ever escape it.”

“When are you going to stop running?” I begged her.

She wrung her hands in her dress, creasing the fabric. “When are you going to stop blaming me and finally, finally , blame the monster who raised you for all of it?”

“I murdered that monster, Rynn!” I rumbled. “I choked the life out of him, I blamed him so.”

“Then why can’t we blame him for all of it?” she shouted. “That’s what I mean! Let all the blame die with him. Instead, you insist on burdening me and Martha and Gertrude and Boren! Everyone but yourself.”

I shoved my hands into my pockets, unsure what to do with them. My heart had cracked open, and I couldn’t stop any of the words from coming out now. “You left me with no warning to face the consequences of what you’d done alone. You left me when one single word from you could have spared me two decades of grief-stricken torment without you.”

“Stop it!” She pressed her palms to her ears. “Just stop! I don’t need your help to feel more wretched than I already do!”

“Only you could have spared me from the most devastating loss of my life, but you lacked the care for even the smallest gesture. My ring, sent back to me in an envelope. That’s all it would have taken!”

“I didn’t know you thought I was dead! And I didn’t know that monster was gone!” she cried. “I didn’t dare come back for you even in my weakest moments when I desperately wanted to because I was certain doing so would . . .”

“Would what?” I demanded.

“I knew you would punish me, and I knew I would deserve it . . .” She licked her lips. “Sometimes I’m certain you want me to love you still.”

“I do,” I breathed, my anger cooling like a hot coal dropped in a bank of snow. “I will always want that.”

“Then sometimes I think you just want to ruin me. You want to break my heart and carry the shattered remains around in your pocket. It feels like you want me to let you punish me forevermore.”

“I want that, too,” I confessed.

She hung her head, and her black curls curtained her face. “But you can’t have both, Loch! You just can’t. Eventually—”

“No,” I said, shaking my head because I already knew what she was going to say.

“Eventually,” she pressed, catching my sleeve and fisting her fingers into it, “you have to forgive me. You have to let what happened go.”

“You mean I have to let you go. You want me to watch you run away from me again. I’ve already endured the loss of you, Rynn. It destroyed me. There’s hardly anything left. I won’t survive more of that.”

She released my shirt, and her shoulders slumped. “I don’t want to run away from you. But I don’t want to be ruined by you either. I’m already ruined. Don’t you see? I lost you. I lost you because I left you, and it ruined me. It destroyed me.”

I knew the thoughts whirling in my head would hurt her, but I needed to let them out of me. “It would be easier to pick between my revenge and your love if I could feel certain you were capable of the emotion.”

Her small intake of breath parted her lips and resounded in my ears. She looked like I’d struck her. “Then it’s not that you think I’m lying when I say I love you—when I say I’ve always loved you,” she said, voice full of wintery wrath. “You just think I’m incapable of love altogether?”

“Given the evidence, one can’t help but wonder.”

We stared each other down, neither flinching. Finally, she buckled. Turning on her heels, she fled from the library with brisk steps.

“There you go again,” I groused at her back, dogging her heels, “running away from me once more.”

“I’m not running,” she said through her teeth, stomping over the fallen doors. “I’m walking away from you because you’re being a jackass and I’ve endured more than enough jackassery for one night.”

“I’m not done talking about this,” I grumbled, increasing my pace to keep up with hers. My footsteps echoed down the halls. Her stockinged feet remained silent.

She turned sharply into the drawing room. Beyond the front windows, evening filled the skies with dusky clouds. She made it as far as the nearest end table and she leaned over it, resting her weight on her hands. Her chest heaved.

“I don’t want to be finished,” I said somberly. “Talk to me, Rynn. Please.”

She shot me a glare over her shoulder. “You keep pretending like you were innocent of all wrongdoing. Like it was all us and never you, but you’re not innocent, Loch. If we aren’t going to let the baron carry all the blame, then you must take yours, too.”

“I’m not going to keep your blasted savings,” I growled at her. “I never was. I just needed to get you here, and I knew you’d never come willingly. It’s sitting in my nightstand beside my bed. It’s not even locked. You can go and claim it yourself right now!”

“That’s not what I’m talking about!” Her nostrils flared, then her throat bobbed. “The baron would hurt me, he would call me hideous names, and you would tell me not to be angry with him.”

My eyes dropped to the rug as memories of those words coming out of my young lips returned to me. Shame burned in my cheeks. “I was—”

“You defended him to me! He humiliated us both. He kept me locked up too long, he whipped me until I couldn’t sit down, he called me a crook and a harlot, and there were times that you defended his actions!”

“I shouldn’t have. It was wrong. But I was . . .” I searched for the words that might make things better, and my voice trailed away, because there was no justification to be found. I had done those things, and I could still picture her younger face contorting from the betrayal of it.

“But you were a boy?” she offered, one brow lifting toward her hairline. “Young and na?ve and new to the world?”

With a sigh, I nodded. “He was the only father I knew. In my eyes, he was this big, strong man whom everyone listened to. I thought he must be right about some things.”

She turned to rest her hip against the end table, folding her arms over her breasts. “How come you’re allowed to be young and stupid but I’m not?”

She made a fine point, one that landed in my chest like a dart striking true. I swallowed hard, guilt and anger melding to tighten my gut. “Whatever I’m guilty of, I didn’t leave you. I stayed with you, and I learned to do better. You thought I loved him more, but how could that possibly be true? Just look around you. Every inch of this place is a monument to my love for you.”

“I knew that you loved me . . . I was just worried that you shouldn’t, and I was terrified that he’d turn you against me.” Rynn shook her head. “I couldn’t stay there another minute. I still have nightmares about that house, and you wouldn’t run away with me. How many times had I suggested it by then? Every week since we were ten, at least . . . I don’t know how to convince you that I’m sorry. I don’t know how to fix any of this!”

“I never would have turned you away. I had every intention of marrying you!” My voice rose higher, ringing in the room. “Rynn, there’s no one but you. I’ve been bound to you since the night you crawled into my bed crying about Romeo and Juliet. There is no beauty in the world for me, no grace or sweetness, that could touch yours. Not in art, or the poetry you hate, not in all creation, not even in fiction. There is just you for me. Always you!”

She let out a whimper, then her spine pulled up straight. “It’s easier to believe that now,” she said, matching my volume, “than it was then when we were dependent on that monster and everything felt hopeless!”

“You could have built something with me. You could have built this with me,” I said, gesturing to the elaborately decorated room and choking around the agony of that loss. “ Instead, you left me to go off and sell yourself. And so cheaply, too.”

She huffed at that. “There was nothing cheap about the way I sold myself! Don’t be obtuse. I had no family riches of my own. If I wanted to live well and depend on no one, what other choice did I have? I wasn’t ever going to risk serving another man like the baron. Who would hire a runaway like me? Who would teach me a trade? No one! And don’t forget that I was a wealthy woman before you got your hands on it! You’ve seen it. You know better.”

“Not even the smallest bone on your tiniest finger is worth only $35. Not to me,” I bit out. “You are priceless.”

“Priceless,” she said softly. “Then why won’t you forgive me?”

Silence.

She was that and more to me, and yet it wasn’t in me to give her the one thing she continued to beg for. I didn’t know where to even begin to give her something like that.

“I can’t,” I whispered.

Her hands went back to her hair, fisting the curls. She made a frustrated noise in her throat. “Goddamn it, Loch!” she shouted. “Do you have any idea how it feels to listen to you tell me that I broke your heart twice ? That I left you and then had the audacity to still be alive after all this time!”

“That’s not what I said!”

“That’s how it feels! Like you want me to apologize for not being a ghost!” she howled. Tears fell in rivulets down her reddened cheeks.

“Stop crying at me,” I begged her, my own gaze clouding with moisture.

“I can’t help it,” she sobbed, pressing her palms to her eyes. “ I’m not doing it to hurt you! My tears aren’t weapons!”

“Well, they feel like arrows!” I rubbed my chest and yanked my collar loose. It was strangling me.

Ghosts pressed in around us, attracted to our anger and grief. They chilled the room, frosting the windows. I could see my breath mingling with Rynn’s.

“Get out!” I shouted at them.

“Gladly,” Rynn snapped, marching for the archway.

“Not you.” I caught her arm and swung her around, drawing her deeper into the room. “You stay right where you are.”

The ghosts departed, and the air began to warm once more. A fire caught in the hearth, as it did every evening at this time. Darkness had fallen while we argued, and the lone gaslight wasn’t enough to illuminate the large space by itself.

“Thank you, Gertrude,” I said, then I felt the prickle down my neck as her spirit passed by.

“Yes, thank you, Gertrude,” Rynn said grudgingly.

In silence, we stared at the flames, our own anger finally burned out, leaving us hollow wrecks.

Rynn rubbed a hand down her face. “I’ve got nothing left to say, Loch. Nothing that will make any difference.” She marched for the archway and stopped. “Drat.”

“What’s wrong?”

Rynn stared at the line of shadows that separated the threshold from the lit drawing room. “I left my lantern back in the library.”

“There’s one in— Oh.” I realized a moment too late that she’d carried the drawing room lantern with her earlier. I moved in as close to that line of darkness as I dared, and I peeked through the doorway down the hall.

A long stretch of night separated us from the dull, distant glow of the torchier in the foyer.

“It’s too dark,” she whispered.

“Too dark and too many ghosts,” I added.

She peered up at me. “Would the spirits tethered to you fetch it for us if you asked?”

I shook my head. “They stick to tasks that became habits for them when they were alive. I have to be careful where I put things. If it’s not where they expect, they can’t use it.”

“That’s a shame.” She nodded absent-mindedly as her arms came up around herself, her whole focus on that gaping dark, and I saw the love of my youth facing the terror years of torture had instilled in her.

I held out my hand. “Rynn.” My throat was hoarse from all the yelling.

Tearing her gaze from the hallway, she looked at my hand as though it were a foreign object. And then she came to me.

I led her to the small sofa, the only one in the whole room. I lay down on it, and she let go my hand to remove her floral tea gown, throwing it over a chair to prevent wrinkles—a wasted effort. It was full of creases already. With a great sigh, she came to my end of the sofa.

Rynn stretched out over me, laying her cheek on my chest. My heart still hurt, but our battle had dulled the ache. Letting all that out of me had felt good, and her weight was like a warm compress pressed against the parts of me that were wounded and sore. I craned my neck and kissed the top of her head. Her hair smelled like rose water.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered a little later.

“I know,” I whispered back.

“I’ll be sorry forevermore.”

I pressed another, longer kiss into her hair. “Get some sleep. ”

“What if the fire goes out?” she asked softly.

“The sconce will stay lit, and I won’t let the fire go out.”

“Promise?”

“I’d never leave you in the dark, Rynn. I promise.”