The damp air of the woods lunged at my lungs as I ran. I didn't care about the briars catching on my hem or the mud ruining my shoes. I moved through the weeping willows and the hedge maze like a shadow, my breath coming in jagged, burning stabs.
I slipped through the servant's entrance, the smell of burnt grease still hanging faintly in the kitchen air, Claire's distraction had worked. I found her in the pantry, staring at the floor and twisting a dish towel between her hands. When the door creaked, she nearly hit the ceiling, her face drained of all color.
"Raven!" she hissed, rushing over to grab my shoulders. "You're white as a sheet. Did you get it? Did you see?"
I didn't speak. I couldn't. My throat felt like it was lined with sand. I just reached into the front of my dress and pulled out the silver ring. My hands were shaking so violently that the keys rattled like teeth against the metal.
"Take it," I managed to choke out, thrusting it toward her. "He knows it's gone, Claire. He's losing his mind. You have to get this back onto the valet stand in his room now. Please."
Claire snatched the key, her face setting into a mask of pure terror. "How? How did he find out so fast? I thought the garden meeting would last for hours."
"His mother," I said, leaning my weight against a shelf of canned goods to keep from collapsing. The room was spinning. "She saw me. She told him I was in his room. I had to hide in the guest house closet... Adrian helped me. He lied to Cyprian's face for me, Claire. He told him I went to the woods."
Claire's eyes softened for a fraction of a second at the mention of Adrian, a flicker of something complicated crossing her face, but the urgency took over.
"I'll go. If I'm caught, I'll say I found it dropped in the hallway while I was dusting. Just get to your room. Get in bed. Pretend you've been sleeping off a headache since they went to the garden."
She didn't wait for a response. She tucked the key into her apron and vanished into the servant's corridor with the speed of someone who had spent her life learning how to be invisible.
I forced my legs to move, though they felt like lead. I climbed the back stairs, my mind a chaotic whirlpool of the images I'd just seen, the photos, the medical files, the word Terminated.
I reached my bedroom, stripped off my soiled shoes and dress, and shoved them deep into the bottom of the laundry hamper under a pile of towels. I threw on a silk robe, splashed cold water on my face to wash away the salt of my tears, and climbed under the covers.
The house was silent, but it was a heavy, suffocating silence.
I lay there in the dark, staring at the ornate molding on the ceiling. My heart was still hammering, but the rhythm had changed. It wasn't just adrenaline anymore. It was a slow, pulsing ache that centered right in the middle of my chest, making it hard to take a full breath.
"I love her."
The words played over and over in my head, echoing in Cyprian's raw, broken voice. I could still see him through the crack in that curtain, the way his shoulders had slumped, the raw vulnerability in his eyes when he looked at the photos of my mother. He hadn't been the cold, untouchable master of the estate in that moment. He had been a man falling apart.
He loved me.
It was a terrifying realization. I wanted it to be a lie. I wanted him to be a cold-blooded villain through and through, because that would make it easy to hate him. It would make it easy to burn this house down and never look back. But knowing that there was a heart beating inside that monster made everything a thousand times worse.
It was a sick, twisted kind of love, a love that built cages and called them sanctuaries. A love that kept secrets buried in the dirt and expected a family to grow on top of them.
He loved me, and yet he was part of the machinery that had erased my parents. He loved me, but he was terrified of me knowing who he actually was. He was willing to lie to me every single day just to keep me standing by his side.
I rolled onto my side, clutching the pillow to my chest, trying to stop the shivering. The baby kicked, a small, rhythmic thump against my ribs, as if demanding to be acknowledged.
"He loves us," I whispered into the dark, the words feeling like a betrayal of my own blood.
The tragedy wasn't that he was a monster. The tragedy was that he was a man who loved me, and I was the woman who was going to have to destroy him to survive. I stayed awake for hours, listening for the sound of his boots in the hall, wondering if the man who loved me would be the one to tuck me in, or the one to lock the door from the outside.
Every creak of the floorboards felt like a question I wasn't ready to answer.