Page 118 of Auctioned to the Cruel Highlander
Music had left him. Either that, or perhaps he had driven it off the same way he had driven off everything else.
He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and looked at the stone floor. The tower had once been the place where his thoughts came cleanly. He could play there. Look through the telescope. Sit in silence and still let his thoughts flow. Now, even silence had become foul company.
He saw Ava wherever he looked.
At the piano. On the floor beside it. At the telescope with her face bright over the comet. By the loch with tears on her cheeks. In the yard with her hand on the saddle as she left him behind.
He had told himself for a week that time would flatten it. That the castle would settle, and that work would help him get over her. He had been wrong every day since.
A knock sounded at the door at that moment, interrupting his thoughts. He did not answer.
A second knock came, and then Hector let himself in.
He stood just inside the door with a folded letter in one hand. A band of firelight caught the edge of the seal. Ciaran looked at it and felt something heavy coil in his gut before a word had been spoken.
“Hector.”
“It came from MacKenna.”
Ciaran said nothing.
Hector crossed the room and held out the letter. He did not speak in comfort or in warning. He had long since learned there was little use in either where Ciaran was concerned.
Ciaran took it.
The parchment felt ordinary as he broke the seal with his thumb and unfolded it slowly, though he had no clear reason for thedelay except dread. He kept staring at the page while Hector watched him from the fireplace.
“What does it say?”
His voice sounded distant to his own ears when he answered. “She arrived safely.”
He paused, and Hector waited.
Ciaran looked down again, though there was nothing new to be found in the ink. His grip tightened on the paper until it gave a little under his fingers.
“And…?”
The next words stuck halfway up his throat. He forced them out anyway because leaving them unspoken would change nothing. “The marriage is annulled.”
Saying it aloud thickened the air. It was as if the tower held its breath.
For a week, Ciaran had lived inside delay, misery, and the stupid half-belief that misery itself meant something was still unfinished. Now, there was nothing else to think about for long.
Ava was no longer his wife. That was the end of their relationship.
He read the line once more, though his eyes had begun to blur with something hewouldnot name. He had spoken of an annulment often enough, and he had held it up like a remedy, a kindness, a way to return to the status quo if he ever needed to.
For some reason, he had never thought that would happen, but it did. Here he was, in the middle of his tower, reading the confirmation that his last bond with Ava had been severed.
Hector said nothing for several moments. Then, carefully, he exhaled. “I thought that’s what ye wanted.”
Ciaran lowered the letter. He opened his mouth to answer and found there was no lie left within reach.
His voice came out rough. “Nay.”
The word hung between them, and the paper crackled once more between his fingers. Then he crushed it and flung it into the fire. It caught at once, edge first, curling black as the flames took hold. The ink vanished, and the seal darkened and split.
In a few breaths, there was nothing left of it that could be read.
