Read Chapter 29: The Lost Gift

The wind tore at Cordelia’s hair as she scrambled down the slick rocks toward Roderick, her slippers useless on the wet stone. He was bound to the iron post at the lighthouse’s base, his wrists raw and bleeding, his coat torn.

“You came,” he said, and his voice cracked on the words.

She did not answer. Her hands shook as she worked the knots, the rope coarse and unforgiving. The sea roared below them, hungry and white, and somewhere in that churn Sir Hugh’s body was already nothing but memory.

“He’s gone,” she said. “I made sure of it.”

Roderick’s jaw tightened. “How?”

“The way he taught me.” Cordelia’s fingers slipped on the final knot and she swore, low and vicious. “I used the last of it. Every scrap. I pulled his own cruelty out of him until there was nothing left but a hollow man, and the sea took him.”

The rope fell away. Roderick caught her wrists before she could pull back, and she flinched—not from him, but from the emptiness inside her. That familiar hum, the warmth that had always curled behind her ribs when she read a room or bent a will, was gone. Silence where her gift had lived.

“Your hands are freezing,” he said.

“That’s not why I’m shaking.”

He studied her face, his eyes dark with concern she could no longer feel. She tried to reach for it—tried to sense his fear, his relief, his love—and found only the cold, hollow ring of absence.

“Cordelia.” His voice was soft. “What did you do?”

“Everything.” The word came out a sob. She pulled her hands free and pressed them to her chest, as if she could hold in what was lost. “I had nothing left to give him but myself. I spent it all. Every thread of it. The gift is gone, Roderick. Whatever it was the Ashworth women have carried for generations—it ended with me.”

He took a step toward her. She stepped back.

“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t comfort me. Don’t pretend this is anything but what it is.”

“And what is it?”

“I am worthless.” The words fell from her like stones. “You know what I am now. Just a woman. A ruined heiress with a dead father, a stolen book, and a brother who may or may not be alive. No magic. No leverage. No reason for anyone to love me.”

Roderick went very still. The wind tore between them, salt and cold.

“Say that again,” he said quietly.

“I am worthless.”

“No.” He closed the distance between them in two strides, and this time when his hands came up to her face, she did not pull away. “Say that you believe I love you. Say that you have spent every day since we married wondering if it was my own feeling or your charm that put warmth in my eyes.”

She opened her mouth. Nothing came out.

“You have,” he said. “I know you have. Because I have watched you watch me, Cordelia. I have seen you search my face for tells, for the flicker of compulsion I could not have resisted. You have never trusted a single word I said, because how could you? Your own blood turned affection into a weapon. Why would you believe I was any different?”

Her eyes burned. The first tear slipped free, hot against the wind-cold skin.

“But now.” He pressed his forehead to hers. “Now there is no magic left in you. No charm, no pull, no spell to bend my heart. And I am still here. I am still standing in the wind, staring at the most stubborn, sharp-tongued, magnificent woman I have ever met, and I am still in love with her.”

“You cannot know that,” she whispered.

“I can.” His thumb traced the tear down her cheek. “Because you cannot compel me anymore. There is no Ashworth magic in you to make me stay. So if I stay—and I will—it can only be because I choose to. Because my feelings are real.”

She sobbed then, ugly and broken, the kind of crying she had never allowed herself in front of anyone. He held her against his chest, one hand in her hair, and let her fall apart in his arms.

“Now you will never doubt my feelings,” he murmured against her temple. “For they must be real. I have none to compel you to stay.”

The words were a balm and a wound at once. She clung to him, her fingers fisted in the ruined wool of his coat, and for a long moment there was nothing but the sea and the wind and the steady beat of his heart under her ear.

When the tears finally slowed, she pulled back just enough to look at him. His face was raw with sympathy and something deeper—something she no longer needed magic to recognize.

“I don’t know what I am now,” she said. “Without the gift.”

“Then we will find out together.” He cupped her face once more, gentle as a promise. “You are still Cordelia. Still my wife. Still the woman who walked into Marlow End armed with nothing but courage and a torn page. The magic was never what made you formidable.”

She laughed, wet and broken. “That is a generous lie.”

“It is not a lie.” He kissed her forehead, then her nose, then lingered at her lips—a question, not a demand. “It is the truth I have known since the night you told me you would not use your gift on me, because you wanted one honest thing in your life.”

She closed her eyes. The void inside her still ached, an amputated limb she could not stop reaching for. But beneath the grief, something else stirred—something small and green, like the first shoot after a fire.

“What do we do now?” she asked.

Roderick looked past her, toward the dark road that climbed away from the coast. “We go home. We find Benedict. We bury Sir Hugh’s lies and build something new on top of them.”

“And if there is nothing left to build with?”

He took her hand, lacing his fingers through hers. “Then we build with what we are instead of what we had.”

She looked down at their joined hands—her pale, bare fingers against his scarred ones, no charm humming beneath her skin, no secret weapon in her blood. Just Cordelia. Just a woman who had chosen to be powerless rather than be cruel.

For the first time in her life, that felt like enough.