Read Chapter 27: The Broken Promise

The trail was easy enough to follow once she knew what to look for.

Cordelia had spent three days on the road, sleeping in posting houses with her hand wrapped around the torn grimoire page tucked into her bodice, and every mile of it had been spent in a slow, simmering fury. Roderick had left her. Not captured, not dragged away by Sir Hugh's men—no, he had broken his own chains and chosen to walk out into the night on some rumor, some *hope*, and he had done it without a word to her.

The ring on her finger caught the grey light of the coastal morning. She looked down at it, at the modest gold band that had belonged to her mother, and felt the weight of his absence like a stone in her chest.

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

He had not finished the sentence. He had not needed to. And now he had chosen her over his own freedom, and she was meant to sit quietly and let him make that sacrifice for her?

No.

The village appeared around a bend in the road—a huddle of whitewashed cottages facing a slate-grey sea. Salt hung thick in the air, and gulls wheeled overhead, their cries sharp and unfamiliar to a woman raised inland. Cordelia reined in her horse at the edge of the settlement and studied it with the same careful attention she had given Marlow End's hidden stair.

A fishing town. Small. Poor. The kind of place where strangers were noticed and remembered.

She had a name now, at least. Roderick had left a note with the innkeeper at their last stop—not for her, of course, but the man had been eager enough to share when Cordelia pressed a coin into his palm. *The Widow Thorne's cottage, past the salt flats.*

The salt flats stretched east of the village, a pale, cracked expanse that shimmered in the weak sunlight. Cordelia walked her horse along the edge of them, her cloak pulled tight against the wind, and found the cottage exactly where the innkeeper had said it would be.

But she was not the first to arrive.

Fresh tracks marked the mud before the door—a horse, recently tethered and led away. Roderick's horse. She would have known the odd gait of it anywhere, the way the gelding favored its left foreleg.

Cordelia dismounted and approached the cottage with her heart hammering against her ribs. The door was slightly ajar. A thin voice drifted through the gap, too faint to make out words, but unmistakably female.

She pushed the door open.

The interior was dim, lit only by a single tallow candle that guttered in the draft. A woman lay in a narrow bed against the far wall, her face the colour of old parchment, her breath coming in shallow, rattling gasps. She was older than Cordelia had expected—perhaps forty, though hardship could age a woman beyond her years—and her features were sharp, angular, nothing like the soft roundness she might have imagined for Amelia.

Roderick knelt beside the bed, his back to the door. His coat was torn at the shoulder, and there was a fresh bruise along his jaw. He had not been gentle with his escape, then.

"Again," the woman whispered. "Tell me again."

"There is no more to tell." His voice was rough, scraped raw by guilt or exhaustion or both. "I came as soon as I heard. I thought you were—I thought she might—"

"She is dead." The woman's words were flat. Final. "My sister has been dead for seven years."

Cordelia stepped forward, and the floorboard creaked beneath her boot.

Roderick turned sharply. His eyes widened when he saw her—genuine surprise, she noted, not the calculated blankness of a man who had expected her. He rose to his feet, and something flickered across his face. Relief, perhaps. Or regret.

"Cordelia. You should not be here."

"Clearly." She kept her voice cool, though the sight of him—alive, whole, but with that new bruise darkening his jaw—sent a strange, unwelcome ache through her chest. "You left a husband's bed without a word, chased a ghost to the coast, and now you tell me I should not be here? I think I shall stay."

The woman on the bed laughed—a thin, broken sound. "You have his measure, then. He came chasing a ghost indeed."

"Margaret," Roderick said, a warning in his tone.

"Margaret?" Cordelia looked between them. "Not Amelia?"

The woman's lips curved into a smile that did not reach her eyes. "Amelia was my twin. We were identical in face, but not in fortune. She caught Sir Hugh's eye. I, thank God, did not."

Cordelia crossed the room slowly, her gaze fixed on the dying woman—on the sharp hollows of her cheeks, the way her hands plucked at the blanket as if searching for something already lost. "Sir Hugh told the world she died of fever, seven years ago."

"She did die of fever. But not the kind that comes from illness." Margaret's voice dropped to a whisper. "She died of him. Of what he did to her when she tried to leave."

The room seemed to grow colder. Cordelia was aware of Roderick moving closer, of the heat of him at her shoulder, but she could not look away from Margaret's face.

"Amelia loved him," Margaret continued. "God help her, she loved him with all her heart. It was her gift, you see—she could make anyone feel anything. But with him, she never needed to. He was the one man who felt it all himself, freely, completely." She laughed again, and this time there was blood on her lips. "She thought that made him safe. She thought because his heart was open, it could not be twisted."

Cordelia felt her stomach turn. "He was not immune."

"No. He only pretended to be." Margaret's eyes slid shut for a moment. "He let her believe he was the one man her magic could not touch. Let her believe that his love was freely given, proof that she was worthy. And then, when she had given him everything—her trust, her body, her reputation—he showed her the truth. He had been warding himself from the first night. Every declaration of love had been a lie, carefully calculated to bind her tighter."

"He told me," Roderick said quietly, "that I would learn something of Marlow blood."

"Then he will enjoy this tale." Margaret opened her eyes. "Amelia was not his first conquest. Nor his last. He collects hearts the way other men collect paintings—and when one displeases him, he destroys it rather than return it."

"What happened to her?" Cordelia asked.

"She tried to leave. She had learned enough of his secrets to know she could not stay, that he would use her magic and her body until there was nothing left. So she faked her death—arranged it with me, her twin, the only person she could trust." A tear slid down Margaret's cheek. "We traded names, you see. For the first year, I was Margaret in the family records, dead and buried in the churchyard. She was free. She had run to the coast, to a cottage where no one would find her. And I—I played her part well enough to satisfy the mourners."

"But Sir Hugh discovered the deception," Roderick said.

"He let her believe she had escaped. Let her believe she was safe." Margaret's voice cracked. "He waited three years. Three years, so she would grow careless, grow happy, grow convinced she had outwitted him. And then he came to that cottage, and he—"

She broke off, her body wracked by a cough that left flecks of red on her lips.

"What did he do?" Cordelia asked, though she was not certain she wanted to know.

"He did not kill her quickly." Margaret's eyes were bright with grief and hate. "He made her suffer. He used spells from that book of his—that grimoire he stole from your family—to draw out her pain, to make her feel it all amplified, magnified, until her heart simply gave out. And then he brought her body back to me. Left it on my doorstep like a gift. A warning."

The candle guttered, and Cordelia realized she was shaking. Not from cold.

"He told me," Margaret continued, her voice growing weaker, "that I would suffer the same fate if I ever spoke her name aloud. So I have kept it silent all these years. But I am dying now—fast, faster than he planned—and I will not carry her secret to the grave." She reached out and grasped Cordelia's wrist with surprising strength. "You have his blood running through you, even if you do not know it. And he has taken your husband. He will not kill him—not yet. Hugh likes to play with his prey first. But if you want to save him, you must go to the lighthouse."

"The lighthouse?"

"On the headland east of the village. It has been abandoned for years—no keeper, no light. A perfect place for secrets." Margaret's grip tightened. "He is there now. I saw him from my window this morning, riding along the cliff path with a bound man across his saddle."

Cordelia's blood turned to ice. That explained Roderick's presence here, then—he had not been captured in the cottage. He had come to Margaret for answers, and found Sir Hugh instead.

"You have already done the impossible once," Roderick said softly. "You escaped him at Marlow End because he let you go. He planned for it. He is planning for this too."

"I know." Cordelia looked down at the old woman's hand, at the veins standing out beneath the translucent skin. "But I did not come this far to let him take another Ashworth bride."

Margaret smiled, and there was something almost peaceful in it. "She said the same thing once. Amelia, I mean. When we were girls, she always said she would not be defined by her magic—that she would love whom she chose, and damn the curse." Her eyes found Cordelia's. "She was wrong. But I think you might not be."

The words settled over Cordelia like a cloak of lead. She pressed Margaret's hand once, gently, and then rose.

Roderick was already at the door, his expression grim. "You have the grimoire page."

"Yes."

"And you know what it will cost you."

"I know." She touched her bodice, where the paper rested against her heart. "And I know he will not stop until I use it. That is why he let me escape, is it not? He wants me to have the answer in my hands when he takes everything else away."

Roderick said nothing. He did not need to.

Outside, the tide was rising, and the headland lighthouse stood against the grey sky like a bone stripped of flesh.