Read Chapter 33: An Unchained Heart

Cordelia found the maid in the stillroom at dawn, shoulders shaking over a basket of lavender she was meant to be drying. The girl—Polly, seventeen, with freckles like scattered nutmeg—did not hear her enter. Her sobs came in ragged little gasps, the kind that hurt to witness, and Cordelia’s first instinct was to back away and leave the girl her privacy.

But Polly turned, wiping her face with the back of a sleeve, and bobbed a hasty curtsy. “My lady, forgive me. I didn’t hear—I’ll be about my work directly.”

“Stay,” Cordelia said, and the word came out softer than she intended. “You’re grieving.”

Polly’s chin trembled. “My mother passed in the night. The fever took her quick, but—” She broke off, pressing her fist to her mouth.

Cordelia crossed the room without thinking, the way she might have crossed to Roderick in the lighthouse cell. She reached for the girl’s hands, and the touch was ordinary, just skin and bone and the roughness of a servant’s palms. But something else stirred beneath Cordelia’s breastbone—a warmth she had not felt since the waves closed over Sir Hugh’s body.

She felt it distinctly: the shape of Polly’s grief. Not as her own, but as a pressure against her awareness, like a hand pressed to a window from the outside.

Cordelia went still. She had spent six weeks mourning her gift as a limb lost. And yet here it was, rising unbidden, not summoned by need or desperation but by simple human feeling. It pressed against her ribs, waiting to be shaped, to be sent outward.

She could ease this. She knew she could. A gentle push, a soothing tide, and Polly’s sorrow would soften into something bearable. It would not take much. A wisp of her old power, barely a flicker.

She opened her mouth to speak—and closed it again.

No. She had sworn. Not in love. But this was not love, this was mercy, and the distinction rattled in her chest like a stone in a jar. Was the curse real? Her grandmother had said it was likely a lie. But Cordelia had not abandoned her power to satisfy a curse. She had abandoned it to prove something to herself. That she could be trusted. That she could be loved without compulsion.

If she used it now, even in kindness, where would it end? With Roderick, in a moment of insecurity? With herself, when she wanted something badly enough to bend the world to get it?

Polly sniffled and tried to pull her hands away. “I shouldn’t bother you with this, my lady. It ain’t proper.”

“It is proper,” Cordelia said firmly, and squeezed the girl’s hands. “Grief is proper. You needn’t hide it.”

She did not push, did not weave, did not reach for the thread of warmth. She simply held on and let Polly cry, and after a long moment, the girl’s shoulders stopped shaking. The tears still came, but slower. Cordelia’s presence, unmagicked, did its small work.

“Thank you, my lady,” Polly whispered. “I feel a bit steadier.”

Cordelia smiled and released her hands. It was enough. It would have to be enough.

She found Roderick in the library an hour later, staring at a stack of documents Mr. Whitmore had delivered the previous evening. The registry office had confirmed they could perform the ceremony in three days’ time, provided the special license arrived by courier. Cordelia had expected relief. Instead, she felt a strange tautness, as if she stood on the edge of a high cliff again, needing to jump.

“You’re quiet,” Roderick said without looking up from the papers.

“I was thinking about the wedding.”

He turned, one brow raised. “Having second thoughts, Lady Cordelia?”

“No. Only wondering whether I am marrying you as myself, or as the person I was when I made the promise.”

He set down the documents and crossed to her, taking her hands—the same hands that had held Polly’s. “And which person is that?”

“I don’t know yet.” She looked down at their joined fingers. “Something happened this morning. I found one of the maids weeping. Her mother died. And when I touched her, I felt something.”

Roderick’s expression did not change, but his grip tightened. “Your magic?”

“Yes. A stirring, no more. I could have used it. I could have eased her.” Cordelia met his eyes. “I chose not to.”

A long silence settled between them. Roderick’s thumb traced a slow arc across her knuckles. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because I need you to know that it may return. All of it. And if it does, I will face the same temptation again and again. To bend someone to my will, to make them feel what I want them to feel.” Her voice came out steady, but she felt the tremor beneath. “I need you to know what you are binding yourself to, Roderick. A woman who may always carry that weapon, even if she vows never to draw it.”

He let go of her hands, and for a moment her heart seized. Then he cupped her face, palm warm against her cheek.

“Cordelia,” he said, and the word held no magic at all. Just his voice, rough with feeling. “I have stood in that lighthouse. I have been bound by a man who forced feeling from others like water from a stone. And I have watched you give away the very thing that made you powerful, not because you were defeated, but because you would not use it against me.”

He leaned closer, forehead nearly touching hers. “If your gift returns, I will not fear it. Because I have seen what you do when you have power over another person. You set them free.”

Cordelia’s breath shuddered out of her. She wanted to believe him. She wanted to sink into the warmth of his certainty like a hot bath.

But there was a splinter in her mind, sharp and unwelcome. The maid had been steadier after Cordelia’s touch. Calmer. And Cordelia had not used so much as a whisper of the stirring she had felt. But she had known what she could do. The awareness alone had changed the shape of the moment. Was that not itself a kind of compulsion? The knowledge that she could have altered Polly’s grief, even if she had not?

She opened her mouth to voice this doubt, but a knock at the library door interrupted them.

Benedict entered without waiting for permission, his face pale beneath its recent sun-darkening. He carried a folded paper in one hand, and his boots were dusted with road dirt.

“You’re back early,” Cordelia said. “I thought you meant to stay in the village.”

“I did.” He crossed to the desk and set the paper down flat. “Old Meg sent this after me by a boy on horseback. Said she’d found it in her mirror that morning, and it wanted to reach you before Wednesday.”

Cordelia’s blood chilled. Wednesday was the wedding.

She unfolded the paper. The handwriting was cramped and hurried, not Old Meg’s—she had seen the wise woman’s script before, loopy and unhurried. This looked like a copy, made in haste by a shaking hand.

_Marlow, she calls herself still, though she married old Coverdale two years past. The daughter lives. Eleven years old, kept at the Marlow dower house under the name Sarah. The girl’s gift is stronger than any of them. The mother believes the Ashworth line owes her everything, and she means to take it back through the child. If the Marchioness remarries without knowledge of the girl’s true claim, the marriage may yet be undone by a different hand than the church’s._

_Dig for the mother’s first marriage lines. Coverdale is not Sarah’s father._

Cordelia read it twice, then handed it to Roderick without a word.

He scanned it, jaw tightening. “The veiled woman. She has a daughter.”

“And the daughter may have a claim to Ashworth blood,” Cordelia said slowly, the pieces clicking together like a lock turning. “If she is Marlow’s true heir, if the mother can prove her legitimacy through the old lord—my grandmother’s husband—then the estate might not pass to Benedict at all.”

Benedict’s face went stony. “She could contest everything. Including your place in the family.” He looked at Cordelia. “Including the legitimacy of any match you make.”

Roderick folded the paper and tucked it into his coat. “Then we find the mother before Wednesday. And we find those marriage lines.”

Cordelia looked between them, the stirring beneath her breastbone humming like a plucked string. She had a gift again. Even if she never used it, it gave her something she had lacked for weeks: options.

And for the first time since the lighthouse, she was glad of it.

“No,” she said quietly. Both men turned to her. “We don’t find her. She finds us.”

She lifted her chin. “If the girl truly carries the old gift, the mother will want her close when the Ashworth estate is settled. And there is no better bait than a wedding.”