no interest in it. If you asked me back then, I would’ve told you she would be a mediocre fighter at best. Today, I’m running out of things I can teach her. She developed the killer instinct, she’s ruthless, and I worry about her lack of restraint. Something drives her.”
“Do you think she wants to go after slavers?”
“I don’t know. I told you about my brother. I have,
“You think that by killing the slavers you can heal her?” Charlotte asked.
“No. But I can spare her the need to take revenge herself. She’s a good fighter, but she’s still a child. If she goes after the slavers, she will die. Even if she doesn’t, seeking vengeance will damage her more. Slavery is an aberration. It shouldn’t exist in our time, yet it does, and I decided I won’t permit it. I can’t stop it on the entire continent, but I will stop it here in Adrianglia. Sophie will never have to see what I saw. I won’t let their atrocities scar her any further.” His voice degenerated into a snarl. He caught himself. “I let her go on that boat. I was the one who said, ‘I don’t see any harm in it. Go ahead.’”
“You couldn’t have known.”
“It doesn’t change the fact that it happened.”
“Richard, it’s not your fault. It’s not her fault either. I can take her to Lady Augustine. She is my surrogate mother at Ganer College. She’s a mind soother, and she’s as good at healing the soul as I am at healing the body. If anyone can assist Sophie, she can, and she will.”
“I’m not certain she wants help.” It wasn’t their way. One didn’t rely on strangers.
Charlotte raised her arms. “Of course she doesn’t want help. None of us want help when we’re fifteen and the world has victimized us. That’s why we have adults in our lives who make that decision for us. She may not want it, but she needs it. Promise me that once we’re done, one way or the other, you will take her to the College. If neither of us survives, her sister or Rose should make sure she visits there. I will write a letter. If you take it with you, Lady Augustine will see you. Promise me?”
“I promise,” Richard said.
“I’ll hold you to it.”
A sad whine echoed through the house.
Charlotte blinked. “Is that the dog?”
“Couldn’t be. We left him with the boys.” Richard slid off the bed. “I’ll be right back.”
He went down the ladder and opened the door. A black shape shot by him, smelling of wet fur and dripping rainwater.
“I thought I was rid of you,” he growled.
The dog shook, causing the fire pit to hiss.
“He’s decided he’s ours,” Charlotte called from the loft.
Richard took the towel she had left on the couch and spread it down for the dog. The big mutt flopped on it.
Richard climbed back up the stairs, stretched out on the bed, and pulled her closer. “Your turn.”
She raised her eyebrows.
“Tell me why you wanted to kill your ex-husband.”
Charlotte turned on her back, looked at the ceiling, and sighed. “Turnabout is fair play?”
“Yes.”
“I was taken to the College when I was seven. It’s the only life I knew until I was twenty-seven years old. I’ve read books about adventures and love. I flirted. I even made out with boys.”
“Shocking.”
“Oh, it was. In the last years of my being there, I couldn’t wait to escape. I was going to travel. I would have all the adventures I could possibly want.” She sighed again. “At twenty-seven, I received my land grant, my house, and my noble title for my decade of service. I moved in, and soon I realized that I had no idea how big the world really was. I was going to travel, I really was, but the house needed work and the garden needed to be tended, and there were good books . . .”
She made big eyes at him.
“You were scared,” he guessed.
She nodded. “I had all the training and confidence I would ever need, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do anything with it. And then Elvei Leremine walked into my life. He was a blueblood, flawless, handsome . . .”
“I hate him already,” he said.
Charlotte smiled, a sad parting of lips without humor. “I was besotted with the idea of falling in love and having a family. Here was my prince, so considerate, so together. The whole thing seemed like a perfect shortcut to happiness. Instead of combing through men and dealing with rejection, I found the ideal husband right away, and I married him because I was so utterly stupid. He stood in line to inherit his family’s lands, but until then we decided it would be best if he came to live with me. He started speaking of children right away. We tried for six months, and he grew more and more alarmed when I didn’t conceive. Then, finally, I went to be diagnosed. For another year and a half I denied the inevitable. I went to the best healers I knew. I underwent procedure after procedure—the memories still give me nightmares. I refused to give up. I was always taught that if you strive hard enough, you will achieve what you desire. I’d read all those romantic books, where a woman can’t conceive, then she meets the right man, and the power of love or his magic virility or what have you overcomes her problems, and she has gorgeous triplets. My magic cure was just around the corner, I was sure of it.”
She turned to look at him. “I’m barren, Richard. Irreversibly. I will never have a child. There is no cure.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She hesitated. “Does it matter to you? I can never give you a child.”
She was thinking of staying with him. Don’t read too much into it, he warned himself. They came from completely different worlds. She was a blueblood, and he was a fraud, with hardly anything to his name.
“There are sixteen adults in my family, all that remains of over fifty, and almost twenty children, most of them with one dead parent or both,” he told her. “I have many children to take care of. My worth isn’t tied to having one specifically my own.”
Charlotte sighed and caressed his cheek. Her finger traced his lips. “Funny, had you asked me that before I’d married Elvei, I would’ve told you the same thing. But somehow the quest to have a child became the most important thing in my life. I felt deficient. Almost as if I were somehow not female if I couldn’t conceive. Somewhere in the middle of all of this, I realized that Elvei required a child so he could inherit the family estate. He was in competition with his younger brother, and he was trying to race to the finish line and produce a bouncing baby to claim his land, house, and leadership of the family with it.”
“He sounds like an idiot.”
Charlotte gave a one-shouldered shrug. “I was very naive. And my blinders were firmly in place. Elvei was always attentive. He came with me on some of my procedures. This journey toward getting a child was something we took together. It was a quest we had in common, and I thought it would bring us closer. Really, we were both at fault. He should’ve made his position clear before the wedding, and I shouldn’t have mistaken his courtesy and attention for love. I think it took a toll on him as well. He’d grown obsessive. We had to have sex in a specific position because someone had told him it was most likely to result in conception. He’d help me chart my ovulation. It was a kind of insanity that took over both of us. Looking back at it, all of that seems . . . creepy.”
Richard stared at her, speechless. Her husband was an ass. He wanted to find him and skin him alive. Saying it out loud, however, probably wasn’t the best strategy.
“In the end, when all options were exhausted, I came to him with the news. I had expected him to hug me and tell me it would all be fine and that he loved me anyway. He presented me with an annulment.”
Charlotte laughed bitterly. “My world had collapsed. I wanted to hurt him, and I almost did. I came this close.” She held her index finger and thumb a hair apart.
“What stopped you?” he asked.
“It was wrong,” she said simply. “I was a healer. I was meant to heal people, not to hurt them because they crushed my heart.”
And that’s why she would always be the ray of light in his darkness. He had to hold on to her. He couldn’t let
