Read Chapter 28: A Race Against Tide

The lighthouse rose from the headland like a white bone snapped against the sky, its lamp dark, its gallery rail rusted to the color of dried blood. Cordelia pressed herself against the wind-scoured rocks at the cliff's base and counted the windows. Three lit. Third floor. A figure moved past the glass—broad-shouldered, unhurried. Sir Hugh.

And somewhere above him, in the lantern room, a second shadow stood motionless with its hands bound to the central column.

Roderick.

The tide was coming in. She could hear it grinding against the stone below, a patient animal licking its teeth. By midnight the rocks she stood on would be underwater. By dawn, the lighthouse would be an island.

She did not have until dawn.

Cordelia touched the torn page in her bodice—the spell that could break the Ashworth curse forever, if she was willing to pay its price—and began to climb.

The door at the base was unlocked. That should have frightened her more than it did. Sir Hugh had known she would come. He had known she would follow Roderick's trail to this place, had left the door open like an invitation to a feast, and she was walking in with her throat bared.

The spiral stairs wound upward in tight, breathless circles. Cordelia counted them as she climbed, the way her nursemaid had taught her to count heartbeats when fear threatened to swallow her whole. Forty. Fifty. Sixty. The air grew warmer, salt-thick, heavy with the smell of oil and old rope. Voices drifted down from the gallery above—two of them, one silk-smooth, one raw.

"—still believe she loved you? That she chose you over me?" Sir Hugh's voice, almost gentle. "Amelia never loved anyone but herself, boy. You were a game. A way to wound me. You were always a way to wound me."

Roderick's answer was too low to catch. The gallery door stood ajar. Cordelia pressed herself flat against the wall and listened.

"You found the dying twin, then," Sir Hugh continued. "Good. I hoped you would. It saved me the trouble of convincing you. She told you the truth, didn't she? Amelia loved me. Amelia ran from me. Amelia died because she could not be trusted to keep what was mine." A pause. The creak of a boot on iron grating. "But you did not come for Amelia, did you? You came for the page. The one torn from my grimoire."

Cordelia's blood chilled. He knew. Of course he knew—he had let her escape Marlow End with it.

"You think that spell will save her," Sir Hugh said softly. "But you have not read it, have you? You cannot read it. Only an Ashworth can speak those words. Only an Ashworth can pay the price."

"I can make her pay no price," Roderick said, his voice raw from shouting. "I would sooner die."

"That is precisely the problem with you, boy." The voice moved closer to the door. "You would sooner die. You are so eager for sacrifice, so noble in your suffering. You never once considered that perhaps she wishes to make her own choices. That perhaps she has already chosen."

Cordelia stepped through the door.

The lantern room was circular, its glass panes streaked with salt and birdlime. Roderick stood bound to the central pillar, his wrists lashed above his head with rope that glistened darkly—wet with something that was not seawater. His face was bruised, one eye swollen nearly shut, but he saw her and went pale with fury.

"Cordelia, no. Go back—"

"Too late, I fear." Sir Hugh turned from the window, arms spread in welcome. He was sleek in his dark coat, unscathed, unruffled, as though he had merely invited them both for tea. "Lady Cordelia. How kind of you to join us. I did so hope you would find my little page sufficiently persuasive."

"You have what you want," she said, and her voice did not shake. "You have the estate. The title. The magic. Let him go."

"Have I?" Sir Hugh tilted his head. "I have the estate, yes. The title—a matter of some dispute, but yes, in name. The magic, however…" He let the word hang. "The magic is the difficulty. You see, I have spent years studying the grimoire. Years attempting to break the Ashworth line, to claim its power for myself. And I have learned a great deal." He stepped closer, and Roderick strained against his bonds with a sound of pure animal fury. "A great deal. For instance: the curse on your children is not a curse at all. It is a seal. A lock designed to keep the Ashworth magic within the blood." He smiled. "And every lock has a key."

The dying woman's confession burned in Cordelia's memory. Amelia is alive, she had said. The servant. The one Sir Hugh transformed. He had chosen the servant of both bloodlines for a reason.

"The child," Cordelia said. "The hidden child."

"Ah." Sir Hugh's smile widened. "You are quick after all. Yes. The key to the seal lies in the blood created at the joining of Ashworth and Marlow. A child neither house could claim. A child who should not exist." He looked at Roderick, and there was something almost like affection in his eyes. "I have been waiting many years for that child to be delivered to me. And now—" He spread his hands. "Here you are."

Roderick stopped struggling.

The ropes. The binding. The word *prisoner* taking on a shape Cordelia had not allowed herself to see.

"You're not holding him for ransom," she breathed. "You're holding him for sacrifice."

"Necessary sacrifice," Sir Hugh corrected. "Without the boy's blood, the seal remains intact. The Ashworth magic cannot be claimed. And your children—" He looked at her with something like pity. "—will continue to wither in the womb, generation after generation, until the line dies out. Unless I take what you cannot keep."

The tide crashed below. Spray struck the glass like thrown gravel.

Cordelia looked at Roderick. His face was a mask of horror and fury, and she understood that he had not known—that Sir Hugh had deliberately held back this revelation, savoring it, waiting until she arrived to play his final card.

She had wanted to protect him. Had imagined sacrificing her magic to save his life, a noble death of the self. But this was not a trade. This was a slaughter.

And she had something he did not expect.

"Let me understand," she said, stepping forward, letting her voice turn cold the way her mother's had before a social obliteration. "You have spent decades studying magic you cannot fully wield. You hide behind charms and wards because you lack the natural gift. You killed the woman you loved for rejecting you." She tilted her chin. "And you believe you are worthy to hold the power of House Ashworth?"

Sir Hugh's pleasant smile froze.

"You are a petty man with a stolen book," Cordelia continued, and she felt the gift stir in her chest—that familiar warmth, the song of emotion she had been taught to wield like a blade. She had forgotten how hungry it was. How eager. "You have never created anything. Only taken. Only broken. You could not make Amelia love you honestly, so you drove her away and called it betrayal. You could not earn a legacy, so you stole one." She took another step. "You are not a sorcerer, Sir Hugh. You are a hoarder. A parasite. A man who has mistaken cruelty for power."

His face twisted.

The gift surged.

Cordelia had never pushed it so far, so hard. It was like reaching into a raging river and grabbing hold of the current itself—violence and compulsion flooding through her, aimed at a single point of iron will. For a moment she felt Sir Hugh's defenses against her, warded and dark and slippery, and she shoved through them with everything she had left.

*Let go,* she commanded, not with words but with the marrow of her bones. *Let go of all that you have twisted. The servant you transformed. The lives you have bound. The magic you have stolen. Let it go. Return it to the world. Return what was never yours.*

The lamp above them exploded. Glass rained down like a glittering shroud. Sir Hugh screamed—a sound that was only barely human—and Cordelia felt something inside her snap, a chord being plucked so hard it broke, flooding her with a sensation she could not name.

He staggered backward. Toward the gallery rail. The door to the outside balcony swung open, and the wind tore in like a living thing, snatching at his coat. He grabbed for the frame, missed, and for a single terrible moment he hung there, suspended between the lighthouse and the void, his eyes locked on Cordelia's.

"You—" he spat, word splitting into something wet and wrong. "You have no idea what you have done—"

The rail gave way.

He fell.

Cordelia heard the sound he made on the rocks below. It was brief. The tide took it, and then the tide took him, black waves closing over the place where he had been like a mouth swallowing a stone.

She stood very still.

The warmth in her chest was gone. Where the gift had sung, there was only silence. An emptiness so complete it felt like the echo of a bell that had rung somewhere else, in someone else's life. She tried to reach for it—the thread of connection that had always hummed between her and every living heart—and found nothing. Nothing at all.

"Cordelia."

Roderick's voice, ragged. The rope at his wrists had begun to fray, the dark sheen of it drying to ordinary fiber. He pulled against it, once, and it came apart in his hands like rotted cloth.

She turned to face him, and the storm light through the broken windows caught her face, and she saw him register it. The change in her.

"Cordelia." He crossed the room in two strides, reaching for her. "What did you do?"

"I let him go," she said, and her voice sounded strange to her own ears, flat and distant. "I let everything go." She looked down at her hands as if she had never seen them before. "It's gone."

"It?"

"The magic. The gift." She laughed, a sound without joy. "The only thing that ever made me worth anything."

Roderick caught her face in his hands, tilting it up. His thumbs traced the line of her cheekbones, and she could not feel it—could not feel *him*, the warm wash of his worry and his want and his terrible devotion. There was only emptiness where his heart should have brushed against hers.

"I'm sorry," she whispered. "I'm so sorry. I know why you wanted me. It was the Ashworth magic, the allure, the charm. Now I'm just—" She swallowed. "I'm just a woman. And there is nothing left to compel you to stay."

The wind howled through the shattered glass. The tide roared below. Roderick looked at her for a long moment, and then he pulled her against his chest and held her there, so tightly she could feel the seams of her dress straining.

"Now," he said against her hair, "you will never doubt my feelings. For they must be real. I have nothing—" His breath caught. "—I have nothing left to compel you to stay but the truth of what I am."

Cordelia closed her eyes. The emptiness inside her did not abate. But for the first time since she had fallen, she felt the warmth of another body pressed against hers, real and solid and utterly her own.

Somewhere beyond the lighthouse, the sea carried what remained of Sir Hugh away.