Page 39 of Ruthless, But for Her

CHAPTER 22

Cassia

Someone had wrapped her in wool.

She didn’t remember most of the walk up from the landing, just pieces of it. The wet path. Margot’s voice, low, close to her ear. A door, and then a fire she sat beside.

She remembered being cold. It wasn’t from the walk or the mist from the sea her husband had fallen into. The cold had come after, on the climb, and it hadn’t left her since.

Her gown lay where she’d stepped out of it, heaped by the hearth.

Roland was dead.

She turned the word over and over again, like a line of Latin, waiting for it to give up its meaning.

Widow.

She was a widow.

Her father would have to be told. There would be a Mass somewhere, said by a priest who had never met the man and would call Roland good even though that wasn’t true.

She waited for grief to settle in. It was the proper thing, and she had been raised to do the proper thing.

So far, it hadn’t come.

What came instead was her memory of the water. The dark shape of him going down into it. The sound, which hadn’t been loud.

And his head.

She kept returning to Roland’s head breaking the surface, Ashton above it. Had he reached out to him? No matter how hard she tried, Cassia couldn’t conjure the answer.

Ashton would know. He’d been right there, bent down and close enough to see it all.

He hadn’t reached out.

Earlier, when the path turned to loose stone and she’d stumbled, Ashton had given her his hand, guiding her arm, without her asking.

He’d not given it to Roland, though.

The fall was hers. She wouldn’t pretend otherwise, not even here, alone, where no one could hear her think it. Roland had taken her arm, she had pulled away and he’d stumbled, falling into the sea.

She could go to Ashton and ask. He would answer, too. He didn’t lie… Cassia had learned that much, even when the truth served him poorly.

But did she want the truth?

That she might not was something she could never confess to her father, or to a priest, or to the serving girl who would knock soon and gather her gown from the floor.

Margot had come back once. She’d stood in the doorway, looking at Cassia, taking her measure.

“I thought you might still be awake. Try, at least, to close your eyes.”

“How could I? My husband is dead. I’m a widow.”

“’Tis surprising, the things we are capable of,” she’d responded. “Sleep, my lady.”

And she was gone.

Now, Cassia lay back on a bed that wasn’t hers, in a house kept by a woman who sold what men would pay for, in a town where her husband had drowned that night.