49
FINN
When he arrived at Veyron Hall, Finn found his father in the counting room.
Alard was at his desk, working through correspondence, and did not look up when Finn entered.
This was deliberate. Finn knew it and stood quietly, hands at his sides, waiting.
Outside, someone was splitting wood. The rhythmic crack of the axe drifted through the window.
After a long moment, Alard set down his pen. He looked at Finn the way he always looked at him: measuring, assessing, always seeming to find him insufficient.
“You’re back,” he said.
“Yes.”
Alard raised an eyebrow. “Three days.”
“Four,” Finn said. “I went north. Hunting. I stayed longer than I intended.”
“You stayed with friends?”
“Yes.”
Alard’s gaze didn’t waver. “I see.” He let the silence stretch just long enough to make clear he didn’t entirely believe it. “You might have sent word.”
“Yes, Father. I should have.”
It was the correct answer. Not an apology—Alard considered those a weakness—but an acknowledgment.
Finn held himself still, letting the silence be his father’s to break.
He had learned early to offer the shape of submission without the substance, a kind of deference that cost him nothing and ended these interrogations sooner.
Alard studied him a moment longer, then leaned back in his chair. “I’ll wager you were with a woman.” Alard delivered his statement with a thin, knowing smile.
Finn’s jaw tightened. “I was not.”
“There’s no shame in it.” Alard waved a hand. “All men do.”
Finn steadied his breathing. “Yes, Father.”
But Finn was thinking of his mother, of the way she’d stood at the window in her last months, looking out at nothing, her hands folded in her lap. Silent and accepting, until acceptance put her in her grave.
All men do.
Finn kept his face neutral, but bitterness rose in his throat.
Alard had already moved on. He rose from his chair and crossed to the window, looking out over the yard with the proprietary satisfaction of a man surveying what belongs to him.
“While you were away,” he said, “I’ve continued negotiations on a matter of some importance.” He paused. “The de Malet girl.”
Finn held his breath.
“She’s the finest young woman in the county,” Alard continued. “Beautiful. Well-formed. Good blood on both sides.” He turned slightly, as though sharing something of value. “Our children will be something to look at.”
A cold hand seemed to clench around Finn’s heart as the words sank in. Our children. Not Cecily’s happiness. Not Cecily’s wishes. Just the product she might produce, assessed and found satisfactory.
Not Finn and Cecily’s children.
Again he recalled his mother. He had been too young then to understand what he was seeing. But he was not too young now.
“Her father is hesitant, but I believe he can be convinced,” Alard went on. “The mother has reservations, but women always do. It comes to nothing in the end.” He smiled faintly. “These things resolve themselves.”
Finn recognized the phrase, but he knew his father never relied on chance for things to resolve. He resolved all things to his own satisfaction.
Finn seized the opportunity. “I’ve heard things about her,” he said. He forced a casual tone, offhand, as though it had just occurred to him.
Alard glanced at him. “What things?”
“That she’s willful.” Finn kept his voice mild. “Difficult to manage. She’s argumentative.” He paused. “And she rode out alone recently without telling anyone where she was going. She disappeared for days. Her parents were frantic.”
Something shifted in Alard’s expression, a slight tightening of his brows, a narrowing of the eyes, a brief recalibration. Finn watched it happen and felt a careful hope stir within him.
Then Alard shook his head.
“What she needs,” he said, with the calm certainty of a man who has never doubted his own conclusions, “is a firm hand.”
He said it the way one might say the weather will clear, or the harvest will come. As though it were simply a matter of applying the correct remedy to a manageable problem.
Finn looked at him, at the set of his shoulders, the quiet authority in his face. He knew that there was nothing more to say. Not today. He’d planted the seed of doubt. Whether it would grow was not something he could force.
“Perhaps,” Finn said, giving a slight, noncommittal nod. He had said enough. To press the point now would be to show his own hand.
Alard turned back to his correspondence, already done with the conversation. “Don’t disappear again without word,” he said, without looking up. “It reflects poorly on this house.”
“Yes, Father.”
When Finn left, he stood in the corridor for a moment, his back against the wall, the sound of his father’s pen resuming its scratch on parchment just audible through the door.
He’d seen the flicker of unease in his father’s eyes, brief as it was.
A compliant wife, an orderly household. That was what Alard valued.
The idea of Cecily as anything other than manageable was a stone in the smooth path of his ambition.
It was not enough to stop him, Finn knew. But it was a beginning.
Finn walked back down the corridor toward the stairs.
Through the window at the far end he could see the edge of the east yard, the gate, and beyond it the road that ran south toward Malethurst Hall, Cecily’s home.
He knew exactly how long it would take to ride there.
He knew which fields he’d pass, which bend in the road gave him the first glimpse of the estate’s roofline through the trees.
His first instinct was to go to the stables, to ride for Malethurst now. But he had a part to play, and showing diligence was crucial. The steward had left a pile of accounts unreviewed for a week.
He turned from the window and the southern road, forcing his steps toward the steward’s office. He felt the pull of that other path all the same.
It was the path to Cecily.