Read Chapter 36: The Heart's Truth

The dawn came grey through the bedchamber windows, softening the sharp edges of the furniture into pale ghosts. Cordelia had not slept. She had sat in the window seat since the first hint of light, watching Roderick breathe in the tangle of sheets, his dark hair falling across his brow in a way that made her chest ache with something she refused to name.

He stirred now, his eyes finding her with that immediate wakefulness she had come to know—the soldier's alertness that never quite left him, even in sleep.

"You are up early," he said, his voice rough with the remnants of night.

"I have been thinking."

He rose, crossing to her in three long strides, and lowered himself to the window seat beside her. He did not touch her. He had learned, these past weeks, to wait for her to reach for him first.

"And what have you been thinking about, Cordelia?"

She looked at her hands, folded in her lap. The emerald brooch lay on the small table beside the window, catching the first true light of the dawn. Her mother's talisman. Her mother's protection. Not a curse at all.

"I have been thinking about the wedding," she said. "Our true wedding. The one we must still have, if we are to be properly bound."

"At the registry office, as you wished. No magic. No church."

"Yes." She paused. "But that is not what I have been thinking about."

Roderick waited. He was very good at waiting. It was one of the things she had come to admire about him—that patient stillness, the way he gave her space to find her own words rather than pressing her into corners.

She turned to face him fully. The morning light caught the lines of his face, the scar that ran from his brow to his cheekbone, the grey in his hair that had not been there when they first met. He was not a handsome man, not in the conventional way. But he was *real*. More real than anyone she had ever known.

"Roderick," she said, and her voice trembled despite herself. "I need to ask you something. And I need you to answer me truly."

"Ask."

"Do you love me?"

The words hung between them, fragile as spun glass. She watched his face, searching for any flicker of hesitation, any sign that he was calculating his response. He was too honest for that, she knew. But she had to ask anyway. She had to know.

He did not answer immediately. Instead, he reached out and took her hand—slowly, deliberately, giving her every chance to pull away. She did not.

"I loved you," he said, "the first time I saw you at the Ashworth ball, standing beside your grandmother with that look on your face that said you would rather be anywhere else on earth. I loved you when you argued with me about the fall of the Perceval ministry as though the fate of the nation rested on your opinion. I loved you when you told me you would not use your magic on me, even though it would have made everything easier, because you wanted honesty more than comfort."

Her breath caught.

"I loved you in the lighthouse when you were brave enough to face the dark, and in the chapel when you stood against Hugh without flinching. I loved you when you cried for a housemaid's grief and did not lift a finger to change it, because you honored her sorrow too much to tamper with it."

He lifted her hand to his lips and pressed a kiss to her knuckles. His eyes never left hers.

"I have loved you so long now that I cannot remember what it felt like not to. So yes, Cordelia. I love you."

She was trembling. She could feel it—a fine tremor running through her like a plucked string. And beneath it, that familiar emptiness where her magic used to live, that hollow space she had carried since the night she had first met him.

She reached for it now, the way she had learned to do these past weeks, and found nothing. No spark. No warmth. No whisper of compulsion that might have slipped past her guard if she had not been so careful.

But there was something else.

His heartbeat. She could feel it through his palm where his hand still held hers, a steady rhythm against her skin. And as she listened to it, she felt something rise in her chest—not magic, not power, but something far more fragile.

Honesty.

She looked at him, this man who had seen her at her worst and loved her anyway. This man who had never once been touched by her gift, who had never once been swayed by anything but her own sharp tongue and stubborn heart.

"Say it again," she whispered. "Without the reasons. Just say it."

He smiled—that rare, crooked smile that transformed his severe face into something almost boyish.

"I love you, Cordelia."

"No magic," she said. The words came out broken, caught between a sob and a laugh. "I felt no magic. I used nothing. And still—"

"Still," he agreed. "I have never had need of magic to know that I want you for all my days."

The tears came then, sudden and hot, spilling down her cheeks before she could stop them. She had not wept like this since she was a child—great heaving sobs that shook her whole body, that she could not contain or disguise.

Roderick pulled her into his arms without a word. She buried her face in his shoulder, breathing in the clean scent of him, feeling his hands move in slow circles across her back.

"I thought—" she began, but the words came out as a gulp.

"Shh," he murmured against her hair. "I know what you thought."

"I thought I would never know if it was real. I thought I would always wonder if any man who loved me was only reacting to my power, and that I would be forced to choose between using it and being alone."

"And now?"

She pulled back just enough to look at him. His eyes were soft, gentler than she had ever seen them. He reached up and brushed a tear from her cheek with his thumb.

"Now," she said, and her voice was steadier than it had been in months, "now I know that this is mine. Ours. No spell, no curse, no bargain. Just you, and me, and the choice we keep making to stay."

He kissed her forehead, soft and reverent.

"Then let us make that choice again," he said. "Before the magistrate, before God, before whatever family dares to witness it. And this time, Cordelia, there will be no shadow between us."

She laughed—a watery, broken sound—and leaned into him as the dawn light spilled across the room, gilding them both in gold.

For the first time since she could remember, Cordelia Ashworth felt entirely, completely whole.