Anchoring me.
“Stop talking like this.”
“You’d take away your love, wouldn’t you? Because love isn’t a promise, Abigail. It can’t be broken or kept. Real love just is. It exists without consent. It consumes. You’re just like everyone else. Love is something to forget. Love is something to break.”
He wasn’t yelling, but that was scarier. His anger was a razor-sharp blade slicing my veins.
So. Fucking. Angry.
And something else, too. Something like sorrow.
I tried to move away, but his grip on my wrist was steel, and he pulled me closer. His pale green eyes were shadowed under his dark brow, churning with some dark emotion.
“You won’t,” I said again, uncertain if I was telling him or myself. I searched his eyes back and forth, trying to find what happened. Where this went wrong. He searched back.
We were lost to each other.
“You make promises now because everything smells like fucking roses, but when the fire starts, all you’re going to smell is smoke. It will choke you. You won’t remember your promise.”
He let me go. This time, I let him leave.
Back in my wing, I lay in bed for maybe an hour before my phone buzzed with a new email. I didn’t quite register the shock at first. I stared at the information in the message: a response from the private investigator I’d hired.
Theo’s mother. He’d found Theo’s mother.
Just like I thought, the diary was unique enough he was able to trace it to the shop where it was made and find the owner. He was still trying to find where she lived, but he had a picture.
She looked a little like him. She had the same pale green eyes, and the same silky chocolate hair. Her name was Elizabeth, and she looked kind of familiar… and I wondered if I’d seen her in town.
With the weird distance between me and Theo, I didn’t know what to do with this information,
Hours passed, and it was soon dinner time. Flanked by my new four bodyguards, I spotted Theo about to enter the hall.
“Theo?” I called out.
He barely turned his head, how he acknowledged me now, and yet another reminder of the bulwark separating us.
But it was his mother… his mother.
He held his arm out for my sister to pass, and a knife speared my heart.
“Um… never mind.”
Twenty-Five
ABIGAIL
The flight home from Switzerland was stifling. There’s a wedge between me and Theo now, and I can’t remove it. He was back on my guard, but so were the four new ones. He never strayed past the line of bodyguard. I never pushed him to.
Now we were home, the engagement party is tonight, and the only silver lining was Ned and all the Harlingtons weren’t staying with us. I lay in bed well past the hour I woke, face planted into my pillow, breathing in silky fibers.
I would tell the world I was marrying Ned tonight.
I’d found Theo’s mother.
Theo still wasn’t talking to me…
My bed shook and jostled beneath me, followed by, “Get up.”