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She put her palms to her cheeks and felt the mark beneath the fingers of her right hand as if sight could live in skin. How was she to guard anything when she could not face a glass? When she barely knew what the guard was for?

What would Papa have done?

He had left her half taught. He had spoken of duty, of a charge, of why the role mattered. He had never said what they kept. Never walked her through the Hall of Reflections as a key rather than a refuge. Never laid out Matteo’s larger design.

He had treated her as a child with years ahead. Decades to learn by inches. He had not planned on dying in his sleep and leaving her the whole weight with no map.

Why had he not taught her more? Why leave her here, marked and alone, to keep what he had never fully named?

And a worse thought, one that scared her even as it formed. What if the charge was empty? What if this family had sat on a Cornish cliff for three centuries because the dead had dreamed too hard?

The idea felt like sin. A betrayal of every lesson. It opened in her anyway, bright and wrong.

What if she simply went?

Packed. Bought a passage. Tried powder or a veil or a turn of the head. Saw Florence, Angelo’s city. Walked streets where no one knew Fairfax or the stain. Anonymous, not hidden.

Lived, instead of keeping watch on life.

She slid down the passage wall until stone met her back and dropped her face into her hands. The space was too tight to stretch. She needed the rock. Needed one thing that did not move while the rest of the ground seemed to give.

Below, the party left the dining room. Lorenzo’s quick Italian with Angelo. Nicholas snapping at some remark. Gabriel and Henri, quieter, moving off.

All of them in the world. All of them at work on a thing they believed worth the work.

And Isolde in the walls, watching other people’s hours, kept out by a mark and by her own fear.

Was this the life she wanted? The one she was owed? Decades more of this dark, old age with no one to bury her, a name no one spoke?

Or was there another way? Some thin road to company, to a share of joy, to a life that counted as a life?

She saw Angelo in the kitchen garden again. The lift in his face at yarrow and thyme. The care in his hands. Respect for what the beds knew.

What would it be to speak to him? To talk physic and plants. To give him what Papa had taught and ask for Italy in return. Mediterranean stock. Methods she had only met on a page.

What would it be to hear Florence from a mouth that had breathed its air? Art. Markets. Music. A city where the sun had weight and people walked in the open.

The want rose. She put her heel on it.

He would see her face and pull back. Kindness would come out as pity. Anything less than kindness would come out as shock. He would not look at her as he had looked at her garden.

Gardens did not wear the devil’s writing on the skin.

She was bound to the walls. Bound to watch a man like Angelo from a grate. Wanting. Never reaching.

Unless …

Unless she found a way to give them the next step. Help them read Matteo’s riddle and send them on, away from Grimsfell. Away from her.

If they left she could have her quiet back. Stop bruising herself with hopes that had no body. Take her lot without his voice in the flues.

Her hands fisted in her skirts. Breath shortened. The panic of not knowing which way to turn closed on her throat.

She could not. She could not live the minute his warmth went to pity or to recoil. Could not watch openness turn into the careful blank people wore around a ruined face.

Better hidden. Better they struggle. Better some knots stay tied.

The resolve felt thin even as she made it. Every part of her wanted to help. To put knowledge in the pot instead of only an ear to the wall. To be of use. To be seen as useful.