Chapter 3
Sayla
The door creaked open and I gripped the stone wall for support as I stood. Every muscle protested. The man who answered—servant, butler, valet, rich person’s slave, I genuinely couldn’t decide—held the door without comment, which was either professional courtesy or pity. Possibly both.
I shivered as I stepped into the warmth.
It hit me all at once. The kind of heat that makes you realise how cold you’ve been.
As we walked, I glanced around at the dark wooden floors and panelling.
Nothing had changed. It was all exactly the same as it had been two years ago—same portraits watching from the walls, same heavy silence that big houses wore like a coat.
The kind of silence that had been purchased and maintained.
The man—I settled on butler, it seemed the least loaded—showed me into a sage green drawing room. Reception room. Sitting room. Whatever they called it here. As soon as he left I sank onto the couch, and the cushions received me like they’d been waiting.
So warm.
Soft.
Soothing.
My eyes drifted closed.
I forced them open.
They swayed again.
Just for a moment, I told myself.
Just one moment.
?
?
?
“Mrs Kersey?”
I opened my good eye.
A woman. Kind face, careful eyes, the stillness of someone used to walking into difficult rooms.
“Her name is Sayla.”
I closed my good eye.
It was him.
That low deep voice was still as cold as the harshest winter in the highlands. No warmth in it. No softness. Just the flat certainty of a man who corrected things as a matter of habit rather than kindness.
He was here though.
That was something.
“Sayla, I’m Dr Montgomery. Mr Kersey asked me to document your injuries.”
Both eyes flew open and I instantly winced.
Document.
Not treat. Not assess.
Document.
I heard his footsteps. The door closed behind him.
The doctor patted my hand.
I allowed myself the luxury of tears. Her arm curled around my shoulder and in that moment I wished that I could speak to my mum.
Her voice alone would have undone me completely.
But the utter shame of being this—this thing—was more bearable to divulge to my abuser’s father than to my own family.
The people who had loved me my entire life.
The people who had watched me walk down an aisle and smile like I knew what I was doing.
This couldn’t be my life.
This couldn’t be what I became.
A statistic. A woman with a black eye and cracked ribs sitting on someone else’s couch because she had nowhere else to go.
“It’s okay,” the doctor whispered. “You’re safe now.”
Lies.
Everything about the Kerseys was lies.
I let the doctor poke and prod me. She took pictures, scribbled notes, wrote a prescription in that careful unhurried way that suggested she’d done this before. That this wasn’t the first time Asher Kersey had called her to document something he didn’t want on record anywhere else.
Before she left she gave me a sedative.
And I slept.
Longer and deeper than I had in such a long time that it almost didn’t feel real.
This time with someone placing a warm blanket over me.
Someone touching my cheek.
Someone rubbing my forehead.
Or it was all a dream and Dr Montgomery had some damn good drugs.
?
?
?
When I woke up, it wasn’t to my nightmare, but to a beautiful cornflower blue bed.
A four poster, with canopies of the same colour falling around me like something from a different century.
The walls were blue too, but not plain—covered in delicate painted branches, blossoming things that reminded me of bonsai trees mid-bloom.
The kind of detail that took time. The kind of room that had been loved into existence by someone who cared deeply about beauty.
As I followed the patterns upward I saw the large gold mirror hanging on one side of the room. Then I gasped.
The entire ceiling was gold.
My head hurt.
I tried to rub the pain away but it was relentless, a low insistent throbbing that sat behind my eye and refused to be reasoned with.
Had he moved me here?
Was it his wife’s room?
Gabriel had told me his mother died when he was thirteen. His father had never remarried. I remembered thinking at the time—back when I was soft and foolish and believed that love looked like loyalty—how tragic yet romantic that was. One great love. Irreplaceable.
I understood grief better now. It didn’t always look romantic from the inside.
If I was in his dead wife’s room that was admittedly a little creepy. I considered the alternatives and decided not to be ungrateful.
I pulled the covers down and sighed in relief. I still wore my sweater and trousers from—what day was it? Today or yesterday? The curtains were drawn tight against whatever light existed outside, which was no help at all.
I lay back down and pulled the covers around my shoulders.
Asher would protect his son. They may not be close, but that was his blood. His only blood. Whatever cold calculation lived behind those eyes, it would land on Gabriel’s side of the ledger before it landed on mine.
It was a mistake coming here.
I didn’t sit up or attempt to leave.
I closed my eyes and tried to forget the last two years.