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“I don’t care if you say no,” he tells me, his voice frighteningly calm. “I’ll tie you like this and drag you to the altar.”

That terrifies me more than what just happened.

Because once Lucien marries me, no one in the village will step between a man and his husband. Not here. Not when that husband is Lucien, whose family has enough money and influence that people lower their voices when they speak his name.

I shake my head weakly, the movement barely more than a tremor.

He strokes my cheek with one long, well-manicured finger. “And because you give me such a hard time, Boone, I’m not releasing your father. He can rot in the cells beneath the magistrate’s hall for all I care.”

Lucien pushes himself off me and stands, leaving me bound and broken on the floor of the home I tried so hard to get back to.

35

Rhys

The motions are the same, but loneliness has closed in around them, filling every room of the castle until even Soleil seems to recognize the change. Since I rescued her from under that tree, she has never willingly climbed into my lap. Yet this morning she jumps up without invitation and curls against me, apparently deciding I’m preferable to an empty chair.

It does nothing to alleviate how I feel.

Summer has settled completely over the mountain, and most of the snow has disappeared, lingering only in the deepest shadows and along the highest peaks. The days remain cool enough that I still light the fire some evenings, but the castle feels colder now than it ever did during winter. I miss Boone no longer wandering its corridors complaining incessantly about the temperature while refusing to dress appropriately for it.

I sigh and stand, forcing Soleil from my lap. She meows indignantly, then trots away with her tail held high and disappears through the doorway. I remain where I am without remembering why I stood.

That has been happening frequently.

The days pass, and I continue doing everything I have always done. I wake at the same hour, eat at the same table, tend the greenhouse, walk the grounds, work until evening and retire when there is nothing left worth staying awake for. Somewhere along the way, the routine I spent so long carefully building has stopped making sense to me.

I enter rooms and forget what I intended to do there. I prepare too much food because some part of me still expects another person at the table, then become irritated when I realize what I have done. More than once, I find myself glancing toward the clock near seven, expecting Boone to appear late for dinner with some excuse already spilling from his mouth.

He never does.

I stopped going into his bedroom after the third time I found myself standing in the doorway.

The greenhouse is worse.

The cherry tree grows steadily in its little pot, another leaf appearing and then another. Every morning I check it even though Boone should be the one doing that. He should be crouched beside it, covered in dirt and talking to me about a plant that has accomplished nothing particularly remarkable beyond surviving.

Instead, I water it.

Days become a week, then another, and I lose track because there is nothing here anymore that requires me to distinguish one from the next.

By the time I make my way down to the stable one afternoon, clouds have gathered around the mountain, turning the sky a dull gray. A cool wind moves through the open doors. Étoile shifts when I enter her stall, pushing her nose against my shoulder as I run the brush down her side in long, steady strokes.

“At least you don’t talk,” I mutter.

Her ear flicks backward.

I continue brushing her, working my way across her flank, then crouch to inspect one of her legs. For several minutes, there is nothing except the soft scrape of the brush, the occasional stamp of a hoof and the wind moving through the trees outside.

Then I hear it.

Hoofbeats.

I stop.

At first, I think I imagined them. No one comes this far up the mountain. There are no maintained roads and no reason for anyone to venture through these woods. The old trails have been abandoned long enough that most people below have forgotten they ever existed.

Another hoofbeat carries through the trees.