Page 18 of Ravished By the Revenant

ALDRIC

I’ve been standing outside the master bedroom for the better part of an hour, rehearsing.

This is a new low, even for me. I once addressed three thousand men before the siege of Falkenberg without a moment’s preparation. Now I pace the hallway of my own keep, muttering apologies to a door.

“Clara. I have come to express my regret—no. Too stiff.” I pivot on my heel, my boots stomping. “Clara, I behaved like a… like an asshole.” I test the word she used on me. “Yes. Surely modern.”

The door opens before I finish my next rotation. There she is, her cheek creased from sleep, her silver hair tangled on one side, a chair leg visible behind her where she barricaded herself in. Against me. In my own home.

“Oh good,” Clara says, her voice rough from sleep. “You’re lurking.”

“I am not lurking. I’m standing. In my hallway.”

“Outside my door.”

“It’s my door. Everything here is—” I stop myself. Poorly begun. I inhale, though I have little need of air, and start again. “Clara. I wish to apologize.”

Her eyebrows climb. She leans against the doorframe and crosses her arms, and I do not look at the way the motion presses her breasts together. I am a lord. I have discipline. I look for two full seconds, then drag my gaze back to her face.

“I’m listening,” she says.

“Last night, in the library, I spoke to you as a commander speaks to territory.” This feels like extracting a tooth. “You are not territory.”

“Wow.” She blinks. “That’s almost a real apology. Keep going.”

“I frightened you. That was not my intent. My intent was to keep you, which I understand now is—” I search for her word. “Rapey.”

Clara’s lip curls in disgust. “Aldric.”

“You said⁠—”

“I know what I said. Hearing you say it in that voice is like hearing my grandfather say ‘twerking.’ Please never again.”

“I don’t know what twerking is, and based on your expression, I will not ask.” I straighten my waistcoat, gathering the tattered remains of my dignity. “The point stands. I will not force you. I have never forced a woman, and I will not begin with the only one who matters.”

Something flickers across her face, and she blinks hard.

“But you’re still not going to help me leave,” she says after a moment.

“No.” One word, the meaning very clear.

Clara sighs, the motion making her chest move. “So we’re just repackaging the same captivity with better manners.”

I cross my arms and force myself to look at her face. “I am apologizing, woman, which I have not done once, and you are making it remarkably difficult.”

My little intruder’s nostrils flare in a most fetching way. “You’re apologizing while refusing to change the thing you’re apologizing for! That’s not an apology, that’s a customer service script!”

“I don’t know what customer service is, but I resent being compared to it.” I step closer, and to her credit, she holds her ground. Schmetterling inserts himself between our feet like a furred chaperone. “Clara. I cannot help you abandon me. Ask me for anything else. Food, warmth, safety, books, the finest chambers⁠—”

“Freedom.”

“Anything else.”

“You’re doing it again.”

“I am aware!” The words crack against the stone walls, and I force my voice down. Seven hundred years of command do not unmake themselves in one hallway conversation. “I am… aware. I am trying, Clara. I’m centuries out of practice at wanting something I cannot simply take.”

She studies me for a long moment. The morning light through the high window brightens her eyes, blue shading into violet, and I would burn down another town for the privilege of drowning in them.