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He couldn’t shake the fact that it was he who had brought those tears to her eyes.

He opened his hand and looked at the ring. It glinted at him, smug and silent, just as it must have glinted at her that first morning at the inn.

He could go to her. He open the door, kneel on the cold floor beside her, and… and tell her what? That he hadn’t meant it?

He had. Every word.

He’d watched his father hollow himself out over a dead woman until nothing was left but a man who’d send twenty-three crofters into the mud over a laugh at Beltane.

Love was a door that opened onto that. He’d sworn, bleeding through his shirt on the ride out of this very castle, that he’d never walk through it.

He had tried very hard not to end up like the man his father had turned into. He was a far cry from the man he had been growing up. It was one of the vows that he clung to, even today. A vow he wasn’t able to simply shrug off as easily as Freya wanted him to, though she had never said it.

He’d not break that vow because a lass sang sadly through a wall. It wasn’t through any fault of her own. Let her grieve, let her have her heartbreak, but it wasn’t going to change a damned thing as far as he was concerned.

Even if the sound of it was flaying him alive.

He pressed his palm to the stone as if he could reach her through it.

I cannae give ye what ye need, lass. I’m sorrier for it than ye’ll ever ken. But I willnae change.

Freya would never want for anything. She would have her freedom as he had promised and would be taken care of. She would be able to come and go. It was the least he could do, he supposed, after breaking her heart.

But the one thing he wasn’t able to give was his heart. He would not change. Could not change, even for Freya, the one woman who had proved to be something else entirely.

Evander was so lost in his thoughts that he failed to hear the footsteps approaching the door. This wasn’t like him. He was always ready to jump to attention, but this time he was too lost in his thoughts and grief.

A knock at the door followed the footsteps, making him look up.

He was on his feet before he’d decided to be, the ring shoved into his belt. For one wild moment, he thought it might be her.

It would be a terrible idea if it was Freya. They shouldn’t speak so soon. She was still hurt, and he didn’t know what she might say, but he ached to speak with her. Though nothing he could say would be able to ease what she was feeling.

Then the knock came again, two short raps of a man’s knuckles, and the hope went out of him so fast it left him cold.

He wasn’t disappointed. No, he wasn’t. Evander didn’t feel disappointed, not because of a woman who caused him so much grief by merely existing.

He didn’t want to ease her pain, not at all. He wasn’t, God help him, tempted to hope.

It was easy to picture her on the nursery floor with Archer asleep against her shoulder. Of her chin lifting every time someone doubted her. Of the way she had laughed the first night they met at the inn as if the whole world were a fine joke and she’d been let in on it.

Grief, that was what he’d call it. But it wasn’t grief. It was wanting. And no amount of scowling at the walls was going to make it go away.

“Enter.”

Jack stood in the corridor with a candle, still in his feast clothes, his face set in its usual lines of disapproval. He looked past Evander at the empty bed, at the dead fire, at the brooch flung onto the chest. He said nothing about any of it.

For him, that was a kindness.

“It’s late, Jack,” Evander snapped.

He regretted the sharp words the moment they left him. None of this was Jack’s doing. The man had done nothing tonight but knock on a door.

But Evander had hoped, for one foolish heartbeat, that it would be Freya on the other side. That she’d come back to shout at him some more, or throw something, or simply stand there with those wild eyes and tell him he was wrong.

He’d have taken any of it. Instead, he had Jack, and a cold room, and a ring biting into his palm.

He found he didn’t much care for the trade.