//CLARA//
Aunt Cornelia’s bedroom door remained silent. A countdown I wasn’t prepared to finish.
"I need air, Hattie," I snapped, ignoring her worried look as she offered to brush my hair.
I didn’t want to be pampered. Instead, I grabbed my shawl and steered clear of the sprawling woodland where we used to raced the horses.
That mory felt like it belonged to a different life—well, this is a different life, one where the rules were still a ga I thought I could win.
Instead, I pushed past the manicured gardens until the wild undergrowth took over, leading into a part of the woodlands that felt ancient. The trees grew thick here, their canopy swallowing the sky until the light was nothing but a bruised grey.
The undergrowth pulled at my hem and I let it, walking faster, deeper, until the sound of my own breathing matched the rhythm of my steps. I wasn’t running toward anything. I was running away from a house that had started to feel like a cage.
Deep in the woods, where the creek was swollen into a muddy, aggressive rush from the spring thaw, I found him.
He stood with his back to .
His morning coat was gone. White linen sleeves gathered at his elbows, damp at the cuffs where he had kneeled or reached into the current. His cravat lay discarded on a stone beside him. His hair stood in disordered peaks, as if his hands had been plowing through it since dawn.
I should have retraced my steps and returned to the house imdiately. But my foot found the branch. The crack echoed above the creek’s thunder.
His eyes found mine.
"Clara."
I gave him a tentative smile and stepped closer, finding footholds on stones slick with moss, crossing to his side of the creek. The cold spray misted my face.
"You look like hell," I said finally.
He made a sound that might have been a laugh. "So do you."
"Charming."
We stood side by side, watching the water carry its burden toward so eventual calm. The damp had penetrated my shawl. I pulled it tighter and felt no warmth. Beside , Casimir’s breath moved in and out with the rhythm.
"I owe you thanks...for yesterday."
His jaw tightened. "You don’t need to thank ."
"Maybe not. But I’m doing it anyway."
"For what? Doing my duty?"
Oh, for fuck’s sake. There’s that word again. His favorite shield, his go-to excuse, the thing he hid behind every ti things got too real. Duty.
"You know that’s not what it was." I stepped closer. "You can’t say that when you just threatened to send your own aunt to an asylum. You—"
"I was protecting you." His voice was flat. "Nothing more."
"Is that really what you believe?"
"It doesn’t matter what I believe."
"Why not?" The word ca out sharper than I intended. "What, gratitude doesn’t fit into your carefully curated list of acceptable emotions? Right next to duty and restraint and whatever else you use to convince yourself you’re not drowning?"
His laugh was brief and broken. "Because it implies you believe I had a choice."
I watched his fingers curl into fists, release, curl again. The stone he had dropped had left a pale mark on his palm.
"You did have a choice," I said. "You chose to threaten her with the asylum. You chose to ruin your investnts, your connections, whatever arrangent you had with the Vanderbilt’s."
I was guessing now, but his stillness told I had guessed right.
"You keep making these choices and then acting as if they’re chains around your neck. As if I’m the one who locked you up."
"Because you are." He turned to face fully, and I saw the exhaustion I had mistaken for coldness, running beneath his skin like the water beneath ice.
"Every ti I turn around, you’re in the fire. Every ti I build sothing that might actually last, you find the match."
His voice cracked.
"Do you have any idea what that does to ? To watch you burn and know that if I pull you out, I’m the one who set the blaze? To know that every ti I choose you, I’m choosing to lose everything else I’ve ever built? Do you have any conception of what that costs?"
"I didn’t ask you to—"
"You never ask. That’s the point, isn’t it? You simply exist in this state of permanent combustion, and I’m expected to either burn with you or drag you out."
He was breathing hard, the controlled cadence I had always associated with him shattered.
"I’m tired, Clara. I’m so goddamn tired of standing on the edge of your fire, trying to figure out if I’m supposed to be the one who saves you or the one who burns with you. I don’t know how to do both. I don’t know how to want you this much and not hate myself for wanting."
The creek threw spray between us like punctuation. I felt my hands curl into shapes I didn’t recognize, fingers bending toward claws.
"Then stop." My voice was shaking now. "Stop acting like I’m so difficult asset you’ve been assigned to protect."
I stepped closer, close enough to see the flecks of storm clouds in his eyes, the shadows underneath from sleepless nights.
"You didn’t save because you care. You saved because you couldn’t stand the thought of another man touching what you’d already decided was yours."
His nostrils flared. "That’s absurd."
"Is it? You threatened him with scandal and legal consequences. You treated my assault like a property dispute." I was shouting, my voice tearing itself against the water’s roar. "And then you co here to wash yourself clean in this creek, to walk off your noble sacrifice like a soldier after battle, when the only difference between you and him is the price of your gloves and the elegance of your threats."
"How dare you." The words ca out soft, each syllable precise as a scalpel. "How dare you compare to that—"
"Why not? You both wanted to possess . You both decided my body was a transaction to be negotiated, my will sothing to be overco."
I was trembling, the cold and the fury indistinguishable from each other.
"At least Bartholow was honest about being a bastard." I forced a hollow laugh. "He wanted to put his hands on , so he did. No pretense. No moral high ground. But you? You wrap yours in duty and call it protection. You’d rather silence than admit that I might want sothing you didn’t pre-approve. "
The muscle in his jaw had stopped jumping. It stood now like iron beneath the skin, his whole face having achieved a stillness more terrible than his anger.
"You think you know what you want. You think your defiance is choice, your chaos is freedom." His voice was barely audible, each word separate as stones.
"You want to know what I see when I look at you?"
He stepped toward , close enough that the spray wet us both equally.
"I see soone who only lets close enough to use . Who takes everything I give and twists it into sothing ugly. Who plays the victim while holding all the damn cards. Isn’t that right? That you’ve been manipulating from the start? That every ti I try to pull back, you reel in? That every ti I try to protect you, you make the villain?"
His hand ca up. I flinched. He didn’t touch .
"Tell I’m wrong." He was breathing hard now, the control he wore like armor finally cracking, splintering, falling away.
"Tell you haven’t been playing from the mont you stepped into my house. Tell you don’t know exactly what you’re doing every ti you smile at another man. Every ti you look at like I’m the one who’s broken. And yet, you have the gall to stand here and tell I’m no better than the man who tried to rape you."
I struck him.
My palm connected with his cheek and the sound was lost to the creek, but I felt it in my own bones, the shock of impact traveling up my wrist, the sting of his stubble against my skin.
He didn’t move. Didn’t raise his hand to the mark I had left, red and rising on his pale face.
"Do it again," he said.
I hit him with my other hand, the angle awkward, my knuckles catching his jaw. He caught my wrist before I could withdraw, his fingers closing like a chanism, and I felt the full strength of him for the first ti. Not the restraint he had always practiced, but the thing beneath it, coiled and patient and vast.
"You want to know the difference between Bartholow and ?" He pulled closer, close enough that his breath ward my cheek despite the cold spray.
"He wanted to break you. I want to—"
He stopped, the words lodged sowhere in his throat, his grip tightening until I felt my own pulse against his thumb.
"To what?" I was breathing in gasps, each intake full of him, of the mist, of the pine-scented air that seed suddenly insufficient.
"Finish the sentence, Casimir. You want to what? Control ? Correct ? Cultivate like so exotic species you acquired until I finally produce the bloom you’ve designed?"
"I want—"
His other hand rose, tangled in the wet hair at my nape, and I felt the shudder run through him like current through wire.
"God help , what I want—"
He kissed .
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