Chapter Thirteen #2
“The firing began from three sides at once. They had us surrounded—above on the ridgeline, ahead at the mouth, and behind where we had entered. Crossfire. The worst possible position.” His voice dropped to nearly nothing, the words dragged from him like stones from the earth.
“Men began to fall. Screaming. I could hear them calling for help, calling for their mothers, and I—”
His hands trembled. He clasped them tightly together, as though he might force them into stillness.
“I froze. The sounds—I had been in battle before, had fought hand to hand, had killed at close quarters—but this was different. This was chaos. Utter, unrelenting chaos. And my mind went blank. Empty. As though someone had reached inside my skull and stripped it bare—every thought, every instinct, every scrap of training. I stood there in the dark while my men died around me, and I could not move.”
“How long?”
“Three seconds. Perhaps four.” He opened his eyes and looked at her. “Three seconds. That is what the official report states. That is what I tell myself in the daylight—that it might have happened to any man, that it was the shock of the ambush, that anyone might have faltered.”
“But in the dark?”
“In the dark, I know it was longer.” The admission seemed to cost him something vital—some final fragment of the fragile illusion he had clung to for years.
“It felt like hours. As though I stood at the bottom of a well, watching the light diminish, inch by inch. And by the time I came back to myself—by the time I could think, could move, could give the order to retreat—”
He stopped.
“Twenty-one,” he said at last. “Out of thirty-two.” His voice broke. “I brought eleven out. I fought to the mouth of the ravine, dragged them through, carried those who could not walk, and I—
” He pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes, as though he might stem the burning there. “They gave me a commendation. For the eleven. They called me a hero.”
“You were a hero. You saved eleven men.”
“I lost twenty-one.” He lowered his hands.
His face was wet, and he no longer cared—had no strength left to care.
“William was the last. He had been hit—a gut wound. The worst kind. There was nothing to be done. I found him against the ravine wall. He was… trying to hold himself together. Quite literally. His hands were pressed to his abdomen, there was blood everywhere, and when he saw me, he smiled. He smiled, Lorraine. As though he were glad to see me. As though I had not just condemned him.”
Lorraine’s hand rose to her mouth. Her eyes shone in the firelight.
“He spoke to me while he died. Told me about Thomas, about how clever he was. Told me to make certain his wife knew he loved her. And then he caught my hand, and he said—” Dominic’s voice fractured entirely. “Take care of him. Promise me. Promise.”
The words lingered in the air, raw and unbearable.
“And I promised. I held his hand while the life left him, and I promised. And then I carried him back to camp, and they pinned a medal upon my chest, and I came home a hero.”
He gave a hollow, broken laugh. “A hero. I dream of it every night. I drink more than I ought. I can scarcely meet the eyes of the child I swore to protect. I write letters to the families of dead men and never send them, because there are no words sufficient for what I have done. I am the furthest thing from a hero a man could ever be.”
The silence that followed was vast. It filled the library, pressed against the walls, stretched to every corner of Rovewood Hall.
Then Lorraine rose. She crossed the space between them and knelt before him. She took his hands—shaking, burdened—and held them gently between her own.
“You froze for three seconds,” she said, her voice steady as stone. “And you have punished yourself for four years.”
“It was longer than that. I told you—”
“I do not care if it was three seconds or three minutes.” Her grip tightened, not harshly, but with quiet conviction.
“You were human, Dominic. In the worst moment of your life, you were human. You froze because you were afraid—and then you returned, and you fought, and you saved eleven men, and you held your friend as he died. That is not failure. That is not cowardice. That is a man doing all that could be done in an impossible moment.”
“The best I could do was not enough.”
“It never is,” she said softly. “Not for anyone. And that is no reason to cease living.” She lifted his hands and pressed her lips to his knuckles—the battered knuckles that had held William’s hand, and Thomas’s small toys, and the wooden horse carved by his grandfather.
“You are not broken, Dominic. You are wounded. There is a difference.”
The words undid him.
The last barrier gave way. The final shard of ice splintered and dissolved. And Dominic Vane, Duke of Ravenswood—who had not wept, truly wept, since the night his friend died in his arms—came apart.
He pulled her to him and held her fast, his body shaking as the grief tore free—great, wrenching sobs drawn from some deep and long-buried place within him.
Four years of silence, of restraint, of sleepless nights and too much whisky—four years of bearing the weight of one-and-twenty ghosts—all of it broke loose within the shelter of her arms.
She held him.
She did not speak. Did not hush him. Did not attempt to still the storm. She only held him—her arms about him, her cheek pressed to his hair, her presence steady and warm against his trembling frame.
He wept for the men he had lost. For William. For the child who would grow without a father. For the letters never sent. For the man he had once been—the one who laughed easily, who danced, who brought flowers to Mrs Potter—and for the man he had become.
And when at last the storm abated—when the tears ran dry and left him hollow, shaken, spent—he did not release her. Could not. She was the only fixed point in a world that had long since come unmoored, and he clung to her as a drowning man clings to shore.
“Stay,” he whispered against her hair. “Please. I cannot—I cannot be alone tonight.”
“I am not going anywhere.” Her voice was thick with tears, her hold tightening about him. “I am here.”
They shifted without words, moving together to the settee by the fire, where there was room for them both. He lay with his head in her lap, her fingers threading gently through his hair, and she leaned back against the cushions, watching as the fire burned low.
He told her of the letters—one-and-twenty, written each October, sealed and never sent. She listened, and when he finished, she said softly, “Send them. They deserve to know they are remembered.”
He told her of the nightmares—the ravine, the crossfire, William’s face. The newer dreams, where Thomas stood in the darkness, and Dominic could not reach him. She listened, and when he finished, she said, “You are reaching him now. Every day. He knows.”
He told her of the boy he had once been—the child who collected wooden horses, who watched kestrels wheel in the sky, who believed the world to be a place where goodness was rewarded. She listened, and when he finished, she said, “He is still there. I see him whenever you smile.”
The fire sank to embers. The wind outside fell still. And slowly—so slowly he scarcely dared trust it—the trembling eased, the tightness in his chest loosened, and something that felt perilously like peace settled over him.
“Lorraine.” Her name, spoken into the dimness, soft as a breath.
“Yes?”
“I do not deserve you.”
Her fingers stilled briefly in his hair, then resumed their gentle motion.
“That,” she said quietly, “is not yours to decide.”
He closed his eyes. Her heartbeat was steady beneath his ear, her breath warm against his temple, her touch gentle and unyielding.
And for the first time in four years, the silence of Rovewood Hall did not feel like emptiness.
It felt like shelter.
They remained thus—entwined, breathing as one, suspended in that fragile space between grief and hope—until the pale light of dawn crept through the library windows, and the fire faded at last to ash.