Chapter Thirty-one #2
My darling Rhodri, it began in flowing dark blue ink, and I almost choked.
Not how I thought of Rhodri. Must be another one, an earlier family member.
But then I looked at the date at the top of the letter, and…
Oh God, I’d practically memorised those bloody awful records about Dominic, and I knew that date.
It was just days before his mother had died.
And then it hit me, like a wave of cold water, that what I was holding was probably written by Mari.
I turned the paper over, but the letter stopped, apparently unfinished and unsigned—and there were some things no one ever needed to know about their boyfriend’s parents. I slammed my eyes closed and pretended I hadn’t just read what I had.
This was meant only for Rhodri’s eyes, that was very clear. I wondered how it had got here. Dominic’s mother used to spend time in the records room, but I didn’t understand why she’d write a letter to her husband when they lived in the same house.
I thought back to her cause of death, and all I knew about sepsis was how fast it happened.
Had she been sitting here writing to Rhodri, felt unwell and set this aside to finish later?
She’d have believed it would be safe in the room no one except she ever came to.
And then later, when everything had been scooped up in a hurry because of the leak, this had become mixed in with all the other records.
I didn’t know. I never would, but I did know one thing. This shouldn’t be here. This should go to Rhodri. And in the absence of a messenger dragon or an in-house postal system, there was only one way it could get there.
I couldn’t involve Dominic in this. It would be beyond cruel to tell him I’d found an unexpected extra piece of his mother, so long after she was gone, but that he couldn’t read it. Because no one should read this except Rhodri.
Shoving my chair back, I stood, needing to get this to him before Dominic came back.
That impulse carried me all the way down two flights of stairs with icy fluttering in my belly at the thought of bearding the dragon in his den, until I stood outside his study door.
And then it took everything I had to raise my hand and knock.
“Come.” It was deep, it was terse, and it destroyed every hope I’d had that he wasn’t there and I could just sneak in and leave this on his desk. Preferably with an explanatory post-it so he didn’t think he had ghosts.
He was sitting behind the large desk, which somehow underlined his authority even further. Not that it needed any help—his presence filled this room. As I walked over to him, each step more difficult than the last, I thought he knew about the fight last night. He knew, and he was waiting to pounce.
He said absolutely nothing, which didn’t help at all.
“I found something in the records room that belongs to you,” I said. And then I held out the folded letter.
He looked at it, and his face… It changed into that same non-expression that Dominic had when things were too much to bear. When he reached out a hand to take the letter, his fingers were trembling.
He held it and simply stared at it for the longest time. But slowly, he drew himself together again, and then his eyes flicked to mine. There was an echo of shock in them, and something I had no hope of reading.
“The records room, you say.” His voice was low and rough.
“Yes. It was in amongst some older papers. I assume that it got swept up with everything when the emergency move happened.”
“I see.” He looked down again at the paper for so long that I began to feel as though I shouldn’t still be in the room. Especially when he traced her writing with his finger, as gently as if it were the greatest treasure he’d ever held.
Then the feel of the room changed, and my dragon stirred before I understood why. When Rhodri looked up again, his shock had been hidden beneath layers of control so deliberate I could practically see him building them. He was once again Rhodri Bedwyr.
“So your purpose in bringing it to me?”
“Um, because it belongs to you?” My usual calm was beginning to shred under the weight of his sudden hostility.
“The timing is… extraordinary. Did Dominic think this would persuade me into overlooking his excesses?”
Red flashed at the corners of my vision, and for an instant, I actually shook with rage.
“Jesus Christ,” I flung at him. “You don’t know him at all, do you?” I drew a sharp breath. “I found it, I brought it to you because it’s yours and no one else’s.” I closed my mouth before I added, And now I don’t know why I even bothered. Or worse, What the hell did she see in you?
“And you know”—because apparently I wasn’t finished after all—“he doesn’t even know about it. I haven’t told him, because I thought it would upset him.”
I wondered then what Mari had been like. What she’d think of the way Rhodri had treated their son.
“Well, I’ve given it to you,” I said and turned on my heel to walk out.
“Ben.” Dragonish undertones rumbled through his voice, and there was no way I could ignore that from a head of family.
I swung back around, surprised he remembered my name, and also not surprised. I suspected Rhodri would never forget anything that might one day prove useful to him.
“You have no idea,” he said quietly, “how many people have tried to use her against me.”
Bloody hell, was that an apology? And then I thought about his words and how utterly merciless dragon politics could be. I had no lived experience of it, but the records I studied every day made it crystal clear.
“I see,” I said, because I had no clue what to actually say.
He put the letter on the desk in front of him, keeping a finger on it, as if he couldn’t bear to let go.
“Did you read it?” he asked.
“Just enough to realise what I was reading, then I stopped.”
He nodded. Then his face did something entirely unexpected, and I realised—it was like he was smiling and holding back tears at the same time.
All while trying to remain Rhodri Bedwyr.
God, it must be exhausting being him. And then I remembered his cruelty to Dominic, and that flash of empathy was gone as quickly as it had appeared.
“You know, she used to write me these letters and hide them for me to find,” he said. “She even put one in my wallet once, as I discovered at the end of an important dinner.”
He stopped there, but I had a fairly good idea how that story ended. Rhodri abruptly abandoning dignitaries halfway through coffee in his rush to get home to his wife. The image was so wildly at odds with the man sitting in front of me now that it almost didn’t fit in my head.
“She sounds…” I hesitated, because saying unsubtle about Dominic’s dead mother to Rhodri Bedwyr seemed like an excellent way to die. “She sounds fun.”
And to my astonishment, the corners of his mouth moved. “Yes,” he said quietly. “She was.”
His thumb brushed once more over the folded paper.
“She used to love the records room.” His gaze had gone distant again, fixed somewhere years away from this study.
“I’d go upstairs looking for her and find her sitting on the floor and flicking through papers, singing nonsense songs and eating biscuits. ”
I blinked. Mari Bedwyr suddenly became startlingly real in my mind. Not just Dominic’s lost mother or Rhodri’s dead wife, but a living woman with crumbs on her fingers and terrible archival discipline.
“She sounds a lot like Dominic,” I said before I could stop myself.
Rhodri went still.
“Yes,” he said at last.
Just that single word. But it was enough, because now I understood that every time Rhodri looked at his son, he saw echoes of the woman he’d lost. Dominic’s laugh. His recklessness. His impossible ability to fill every room he entered. No wonder the two of them collided like storms.
Rhodri folded the letter carefully, precise movements reasserting themselves. “Thank you for bringing this to me.”
I nodded awkwardly and left him, feeling strangely shaken. My opinion of Rhodri hadn’t changed, but now, against my will, I could see that what made him appear monstrous was armour. There was still a man in there somewhere.
It changed nothing. Dominic was still living beneath the weight of Rhodri’s fear, grief and impossible standards, whether either of them understood that or not.