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Instead, it made her bold.

She clung to him, and heard him murmur her name. A sound of joy and torment combined, echoing the chaos within her own chest. His kisses grew more tender, and Isolde felt as if she stood at the edge of some great precipice, about to tumble into unknown depths.

Yes, she thought recklessly. Whatever this is, wherever it leads … yes.

CHAPTER 14

“She wept to think of what her parents would have suffered, could they have foreseen the events of her future life.”

Ann Radcliffe

* * *

Isolde knew this moment would come. In the deepest, most protected chambers of her heart, she had understood that the illusion could not last. That reality would intrude, as it always did, shattering the fragile fantasy she had allowed herself to construct.

She had simply not expected it to happen tonight.

Her feet flew over the familiar passages, carrying her through the hidden arteries of Grimsfell Hall. She did not need to think about where she was going. Her body knew the way up the narrow stairs behind the kitchen, through the passage that ran parallel to the servants’ quarters, past the grates that looked into empty rooms, up and up and up until she reached the winding staircase that led to her tower.

To smooth the appearance of⁠—

The words echoed in her mind, each repetition a fresh wound. She had been such a fool. Such a desperate, pathetic fool, allowing herself to believe, even for a moment, that Angelo might be different. That his kisses meant something beyond pity. That his tender touch upon her marks was anything other than a healer’s clinical assessment of a condition to be treated.

To smooth the appearance of your disfigurement. To hide what you are. To make you acceptable.

She had thought … nay, she had hoped …

But hope was a cruel mistress, and Isolde should have known better than to court her.

The door to her tower bedchamber swung open at her touch, and she stumbled inside, not bothering to light a candle. The moon provided illumination enough through the tall windows, silvering the familiar shapes of her furniture, her books, her lonely life. The fire had burned low in the grate, casting flickering shadows across the tapestries that lined the walls. There rode knights on horseback, frozen forever in their heroic quests, journeying toward victories she would never know.

Isolde threw herself onto the bed and wept.

Great, heaving sobs tore from her chest, muffled by the pillow she smothered against her face. She wept as she had not wept since the day Papa died. Ugly, violent tears that seemed to come from some bottomless well of grief she had not known she possessed. Her whole body shook with the force of it, trembling against the coverlet like a leaf in a storm.

I wanted to imagine for as long as possible.

And she had. Oh, she had. She had allowed herself to dream of breakfast conversations and shared laughter, of walks through the garden discussing botany and medicine, of practicing her Italian while Angelo corrected her pronunciation with that warm, teasing smile of his.

She had imagined introducing him to her tower, showing him her books, playing the organ while he listened with that rapt attention she had glimpsed in the Hall of Reflections.

She had imagined, deluded as she was, what it might feel like to be his wife.

Stupid girl. Stupid, foolish girl.

The kisses they had shared rose unbidden in her memory, and rather than providing comfort, they only deepened the wound. The tenderness of him. The feel of his hands in her hair. The way he had murmured bellissima so softly, as if he truly believed it. The impossible tenderness with which he had touched her marks, tracing their edges with his fingertips as if they were something precious rather than something shameful.

Had it all been calculation? Had he been assessing the extent of the damage even as he kissed her, mentally cataloguing the ingredients he would need to compound his corrective cream? Beeswax, rice powder, soothing herbs. The formula of her inadequacy reduced to a recipe.

A fresh wave of sobs overtook her, and Isolde curled into herself on the bed, arms wrapped around her middle as if she could hold her shattered heart together by force of will alone.

She wished she were a child again.

The thought surfaced through the grief, sharp and plaintive. She wished she could return to those early years, before the vicar’s family had come to call, before she had understood what the marks upon her face meant to the world. In those innocent days, she had run through the halls of Grimsfell without shame, had played in the gardens without hiding, had spoken to their staff without flinching. She had been happy then. Blissfully, ignorantly happy.

But that child was gone, buried beneath years of accumulated pain, and she could never be resurrected.

I wish Papa were here.