Page 120 of Twisting Beauty

36

LIATH

The next night, I sat on the edge of Rua’s bed in my nightdress with my hair still damp from the bath, listening for a message that didn’t arrive.

I thought that maybe because Alistair had gone away on business, they would start up again.

After half an hour, I lay back against the pillows, staring at the ornate ceiling, and told myself it was pride. Just the small ugly pride of a girl who’d gotten used to being wanted in a particular way.

The lie barely lasted a minute.

It wasn’t his absence. It was the cold of it. The room had heat when he was in it, a center of gravity I’d been orbiting whether I’d meant to or not.

Stupid. I rolled onto my side, pulled the blanket up to my chin, and refused to examine why.

At some point in the night, the violin started, dragging me out of sleep, the low broken melody vibrating with loneliness as it drifted through the walls.

My feet were on the cold floor and my hand was on the door before I was even fully awake.

I followed it through the dark corridors, padding barefoot along the runner, my fingers tracing against the wallpaper to keep my bearings.

It grew louder as I approached the foot of the forbidden tower stairs. Just like last time. Like a siren, calling me to my doom.

“Miss Rua,” Mervyn hissed from behind me, having stepped out from somewhere, a tightness at the corners of his mouth. “You cannot go up there.”

“I heard music.”

“That tower is not to be entered.” His voice was urgent. “Not since the mistress⁠—”

He stopped, his unfinished sentence hanging heavy in the cold of the stairwell.

“Not since?” I paused, waiting to see if he’d fill it in.

He didn’t.

I turned away and stepped onto the first stair.

He didn’t follow.

The stairs narrowed as I climbed, the stone walls pressing close enough that I could touch both at once if I stretched my arms. The air thickened with dust and cold stone.

The violin grew fainter the higher I went as if it were retreating. As if it knew I was coming and was withdrawing into the walls.

Until it was gone.

By the top of the stairs, I was second-guessing that I’d heard it at all.

The door at the top was partly ajar. I pushed it open with my fingertips and the hinges gave a soft sigh. I stood in the doorway for a long moment before I stepped through.

It was a woman’s room. Heavy velvet curtains were drawn back, letting in silver moonlight, but they couldn’t dispel the stagnant, freezing air that smelled of dried lavender and decades of undisturbed dust.

A four-poster bed sat in the center, the linen yellowed with time but tucked smooth, the narrow dent of a head still on the pillow. A dressing gown had been flung over the back of a chair. A pair of slippers were at the side of the bed.

I stepped farther in, my bare feet shrinking from the icy floorboards, the oppressive silence pressing against my eardrums.

There was a small handsewn pillow on the bed, hand-painted with childish brushwork in a blue that had faded to gray.

Lena.