Read Chapter 25: The Grimoire's Leap

The bookcase shuddered against Cordelia’s spine, old leather spines rattling in their sockets as Sir Hugh’s boots thundered down the corridor beyond. Roderick’s hand was a brand on her wrist, pulling her deeper into the study’s shadows, but the room had no other door—only the tall windows overlooking the moonlit gardens and the single entrance now filling with dark purpose.

“There,” she breathed, pointing. A folio shelf stood proud of the wall by a hand’s breadth, its base scarred where it had been dragged across the floor before. Not built-in. Moveable.

Roderick saw it in the same instant. He shoved her, hard, and she stumbled behind the bookcase as the study door slammed open. The shelf caught her, hidden in the narrow gap between oak and plaster, and her fingers found what her eyes could not—a recessed iron ring set into the wall.

Behind her, Sir Hugh’s voice was silk over steel. “Lord Ashworth. How admirable of you to return my hospitality so promptly. I had thought the invitation lost on you.”

“You invited us to steal from you?” Roderick’s voice came from somewhere to Cordelia’s left, deliberately drawing the man’s attention away from her hiding place. “Forgive me. I mistook your ambush for a welcome.”

The ring gave way with a groan of rusted iron, and a section of wainscoting swung inward, revealing stone steps descending into blackness. The torn page crumpled in Cordelia’s bodice—one page, ripped from the grimoire’s spine in their desperate flight, the ink still legible in the sliver of moonlight.

“Where is your wife, Lord Ashworth?” Sir Hugh’s footsteps crossed the room, slow and deliberate. “I confess I expected her beside you. The performance is so much richer with an audience.”

“She is gone. You frightened her off with your little parlor tricks.” Roderick’s voice was steady, but Cordelia heard the lie strain against its seams. “She has no stomach for your company.”

The bookcase shifted. Cordelia froze, one foot already on the stair, as Sir Hugh laughed—a low, pleased sound that crawled along her skin.

“My dear boy. I have studied the Ashworth gift for decades.” His voice moved closer, and she heard the whisper of his palm against the bookshelf. “Did you imagine I would not smell her fear on the air? It is sweeter than jasmine.”

The bookcase lurched again, and Cordelia made her choice. She stepped onto the stair, catching only the briefest glimpse between leather-bound volumes of Roderick’s face—set, resigned, and utterly unafraid—before Sir Hugh’s hand closed on his shoulder and the bookcase slid home, sealing her in darkness.

“No—” she gasped, but the oak was a foot thick and the sound of her voice died in the stone throat of the stair.

She pressed her palm against the wood, feeling the vibration of movement beyond, the scrape of a struggle, and then Sir Hugh’s voice, muffled but unmistakable: “The lady may run. But she will return when she learns what I will teach you about Marlow blood.”

Cordelia’s hands fisted against the panels. The stairwell was cold around her, smelling of damp and old stone, and somewhere in the dark below, something shifted with the patience of buried things. She had no lantern. No light. Only the torn page in her bodice and the fading echo of her husband’s steadiness.

She forced herself down. The steps were uneven, slick with moisture, and she counted them against the beat of her heart until the dark became absolute and her outstretched hand found a second door—this one rusted, unlocked, opening onto the moon-silvered ruins of a forgotten garden.

The house rose behind her like a monument to accusations. Somewhere inside, Roderick was Sir Hugh’s prisoner, and she had escaped with a page torn from a book he had studied for years, at the cost of her husband’s freedom.

The page shook in her fingers as she unfolded it in the moonlight. The ink was old, cramped, written in a hand she recognized from the grimoire’s margins—her great-grandmother’s, if the records were true. The spell for breaking the curse was not long. It occupied barely half the page, its incantation crude and functional, the work of women who had no time for beauty.

She read it twice before the meaning settled into her like a stone into still water.

*To sever the binding of blood and curse, the caster must offer the one thing the curse feeds upon—the gift itself. The glamour of Ashworth, the threaded empathy that lets the bearer feel every heart but her own, must be undone at the root. There is no reclaiming it. There is no growing it back. The woman who casts this spell will walk the world deaf to the music of other souls, and she will never wonder at the cost because she will have forgotten what she lost.*

The compensation was the cruelty of it. She would not suffer the loss of her gift, because she would lose the very capacity to feel it missing.

She gripped the page until the edges crumpled. Behind her, through the stone, she imagined she heard her husband’s voice again—steady, resolute, asking nothing of her.

*I can never feel what you feel, but I can choose to—*

The sentence had never been finished.

Cordelia folded the page carefully and pressed it into her bodice beside her torn dress and her mother’s ring. Then she began to walk, away from Marlow End, toward the distant lights of the village, where Old Meg would know what the spell demanded and whether the sacrifice was one she could make with open eyes.

Behind her, the house watched her go with dark windows like the empty sockets of a skull. Roderick had chosen to walk into Sir Hugh’s hands so that she might escape with the page. He had made the trade freely, without hesitation, without counting the cost.

Which meant the choice was now hers.

And the price was written on the page in her great-grandmother’s hand, as plain as a debt.