Read Chapter 24: Hunting the Grimoire

The road to Marlow End was a scar across the countryside, a neglected track of mud and brambles that the map called a carriageway and God called a mistake. Cordelia held her mother’s ring against her palm, the modest gold band warm from her grip, as the hired chaise lurched through another rut.

Roderick sat across from her, his jaw tight, his eyes fixed on the grey horizon beyond the rain-spattered window. He had not argued when she proposed the journey. That was perhaps the most frightening thing of all.

“You understand what we are walking into,” she said.

“A forgotten estate of a man who wishes to own you.” He did not look at her. “I understand.”

“And you understand he may be more than he appears.”

Now he turned. His gaze, that steady, unenchanted gaze that had never once wavered under her gift, held hers for a long moment. “I understand that if he has your family’s grimoire, he has been waiting for you to come for it.”

The chaise crested a rise, and there it was—Marlow End. It was not a grand manor but a gaunt, three-storey pile of grey stone, its windows boarded like closed eyes, its once-fine portico sagging under a mantle of ivy. A house forgotten by time and deliberately abandoned by man.

And yet, as they drew closer, Cordelia saw the smoke.

Thin, pale, rising from a chimney at the rear of the house.

“He’s here,” she breathed.

Roderick’s hand moved to the pistol at his belt. “Then we don’t knock.”

They left the chaise on the overgrown drive and approached on foot, the wet grass soaking through their boots. The front door was swollen in its frame, but a side entrance—a servants’ door, half-hidden behind a tangle of rosehips—hung ajar, its lock forced years ago by weather or thieves.

Roderick went first, his broad shoulders filling the narrow passage, and Cordelia followed close enough to feel the faint warmth of him, the solid anchor of his presence in a world made of shadows and ill omens.

Inside, the air was thick with dust and the smell of old rot. Furniture sat under grey shrouds like mourners at a wake. Their footsteps echoed too loud on the flagstones.

“If the grimoire is here,” Cordelia whispered, “Meg said it would be kept somewhere protected. Warded.”

Roderick glanced at her. “Can you feel it?”

She closed her eyes, reaching out with the part of herself she had been trained to suppress—that subtle, shimmering sense of other hearts beating, other minds turning. The house was cold. Empty of pulse. But beneath her feet, deeper than the stone, something hummed. A low, discordant thrum, like a violin string wound too tight.

“Below,” she said. “The cellar.”

They found the stairs behind a frayed tapestry in the library—a servant’s stair, narrow and treacherous, spiralling into darkness. Roderick lit a lantern from his coat, and the flame threw their shadows long and monstrous against the walls.

The cellar was not what Cordelia expected. Not a wine vault or a root store, but a chamber of dressed stone, its walls carved with symbols she did not know but felt—each one a small, cold pressure against her skin, like the touch of a dead hand.

And in the centre of the room, on a stone plinth, sat a book.

It was bound in dark leather, cracked with age, and chained to the plinth with iron links that seemed too new, too bright. The Ashworth grimoire. Her family’s stolen legacy. Her grandmother’s voice in her head, sharp as a slap: *You will never be worthy of it.*

She stepped toward it, her hand outstretched—

“I would not.”

The voice came from the shadows beyond the lantern’s reach. Sir Hugh Marlowe stepped into the light, and Cordelia saw him properly for the first time since he had stood in her drawing room and named her price. He was not a large man, but he moved with the coiled stillness of something that had learned patience in the dark. His coat was plain, his boots scuffed, but his eyes held a gleam that had nothing to do with candlelight.

Roderick drew his pistol. “Stand aside, Marlowe.”

Sir Hugh smiled, and it was not a pleasant expression. “You trespass on my land, break into my house, and threaten me with a weapon?” He tilted his head, a bird considering a worm. “Lord Ashworth. Or should I say, the man who married a witch for her fortune and found her fortune already spent.”

“The debt is between us,” Roderick said, his voice flat. “Leave my wife out of it.”

“Your wife.” Sir Hugh laughed, a dry, rustling sound. “Oh, she is very much in it. She has been in it since the day she was born.” He turned his gaze to Cordelia, and something in his eyes shifted—not lust, not greed, but a cold, clinical appraisal. “You look like your grandmother, you know. The same mouth. The same stubborn chin. She wore that same expression when she cursed my family.”

Cordelia’s blood went cold. “What?”

“You didn’t know?” Sir Hugh spread his hands, as if offering her a gift. “The Ashworth grudge against the Marlowe line did not begin with a debt or a broken betrothal. It began with your grandmother, who stood in this very room forty years ago and pronounced that no Marlow would ever know love without paying for it in blood.”

Roderick’s pistol did not waver. “You’re mad.”

“I am learned.” Sir Hugh’s smile widened. “That is a far more dangerous thing.” He raised his hand, and the lantern flame guttered, then burned green. The symbols on the walls began to glow with a sickly light, and the air grew thick, heavy, pressing against Cordelia’s lungs.

She felt it then—the dark pulse of his magic, a mirror of her own gift but turned inward, feeding on itself. He was not warded against Ashworth magic because he had purchased a charm. He was warded because he practiced a magic of his own, old and hungry, and it had eaten the softer parts of him until only this remained.

“The grimoire is not here for you to retrieve,” Sir Hugh said, walking slowly toward the plinth. “It is here for you to bargain for.” He laid his hand on the book, and the chain seemed to writhe at his touch. “I have kept it safe for many years. I have studied it. I have learned what your family’s magic costs, Lady Ashworth. And I know what it will cost you to break your curse.”

Cordelia forced her voice steady. “Name your price.”

“You,” he said simply. “Not as payment for the debt—that is merely business. I want you as a student. As an heir. Your grandmother robbed my family of love. I will take from hers the only thing that matters more: legacy.”

Roderick fired.

The shot rang out, deafening in the stone chamber, and the bullet struck Sir Hugh square in the chest. He staggered back a step—and then straightened, the ball dropping from his coat with a small, metallic *clink*.

“That,” Sir Hugh said, his voice barely a whisper, “was unwise.”

The green light flared, and Roderick was thrown backward as if by an invisible hand. He crashed against the stone wall and slid down, gasping.

“Roderick!” Cordelia started toward him, but Sir Hugh’s magic lashed out—not a blow, but a grip. Invisible fingers closed around her wrists, her ankles, holding her in place as he walked toward her with the measured tread of a collector approaching a prized painting.

“Your grandmother should have finished what she started,” he murmured. “Instead, she left me alive. She left me a son. And she left me the means to ensure that your line ends exactly as mine did—in silence, and in grief.”

He reached down and picked up the grimoire, still chained to the plinth, and Cordelia saw that the chain was not iron at all but a braid of something dark and organic, like fossilised hair. He did not break it. He simply lifted it, and the chain fell away as if it had never been.

“Did you truly think it was here for the taking?” he said softly. “It has always been here. It has always been *mine*. I was merely waiting for you to come and claim it, so I could show you exactly what you have lost.”

The green light swelled. The walls groaned. And in the corner of her vision, Cordelia saw Roderick move.

He was not unconscious. He was crawling, silent, along the base of the wall, his hand reaching toward something in the shadows—a loose flagstone, a gap in the stonework, a way out she could not see.

Sir Hugh did not notice. His attention was fixed on her, on the fear he thought he saw in her eyes.

And Cordelia, daughter of the Ashworth line, witch by blood and by choice, did what she had been trained to do since childhood. She smiled, cold and sharp as a blade.

“You have studied the grimoire,” she said. “But you have never faced a woman who knows what it costs to use it.”

She did not use her gift. She did not need to. She simply held his gaze while, behind him, Roderick rose like a shadow and swung the iron chain—the chain that had bound the book—in a wide, singing arc.

The blow caught Sir Hugh across the back of the skull. He staggered, the green light guttering, and Cordelia’s invisible bonds snapped like cut threads.

She ran.

Roderick was already at the stairs, his hand outstretched, and she took it—his warmth, his solidity, the only anchor she had ever known. Behind them, Sir Hugh roared, and the cellar trembled with the force of his fury.

They fled up the spiral stairs, through the library, through the shrouded halls, the house itself seeming to fight them, doors slamming shut only to burst open at Roderick’s shoulder. They burst out into the grey daylight, gasping, and did not stop running until they reached the chaise, the driver already sawing at the reins, the horses wild-eyed and stamping.

They threw themselves inside, and the chaise lurched forward.

Cordelia’s heart pounded. Her breath came in ragged gasps. She looked at Roderick, at the blood trickling from a cut on his brow, and she did not know whether to laugh or weep.

“We failed,” she said. “He has the grimoire.”

Roderick opened his fist. In his palm lay a single page, torn and ragged-edged, covered in faded script and diagrams drawn in a hand she knew as well as her own—the hand of the grandmother who had cursed a family and then married her into another.

“Not entirely,” he said.