Page 48 of This Haunted Heart

I fed the lonely walls my soprano, gifted the melancholy floorboards and the neglected furniture a song about springtime and love that feels like it won’t ever end. I sang about growth and new friendships. I sang about suffering and a heartache that endures before finally finding its happy ending.

I sang until my throat hurt a little and my hair was startingto dry.

A noise in the hall caught my notice, and I fell quiet to listen.

“Is that you, Finley . . . ? Or the ghosts?” I called.

“It’s me,” he said somberly through the door, then he let himself in.

“Good that you’re here,” I said, putting on an aggravated tone I couldn’t fully feel in the deliciously hot water. “You were reckless outside. I’m doubling my fee. You now owe me twice what you stole from my safe and—”

“You can have whatever of mine you want,” he said, and his voice was so gloomy it brought me up short. Deep frown lines bracketed his mouth.

He lingered near the threshold, rubbing at some imperfection in the plaster. Sunlight bathed him through the high window. It caught in his hair and lightened it to a shade more auburn than brown. His short beard too had grown so light in the glow that I almost couldn’t see it at all.

Then he pressed his cheek to the wall, cooling his face, concealing his scarred side from my view, and recognition hit me like a freight train.

I stopped breathing. My heart leapt into my throat. It was several fleshy thumps later before I could speak at all.

“Loch,” I gasped.

There was no doubt about who he was. There stood the young man I had loved with my whole soul. The one whom I’d given my heart and then betrayed so horrendously.

“Oh my God,” I breathed. “Loch, is that really you?”

He didn’t answer me, but he didn’t need to. His cheek remained soundlessly pressed to the wall, just like when we were young. Our tears were dangerous things—they brought out the baron’s wrath quick as a lightning strike—and so when we needed to hide them, we’d press our hot faces to the wall. The coolness against our skin eased the sting of our misery and helped to smother the evidence of our sadness.

“You were singing,” he rasped, “just like you do in my dreams.”

A sob caught in my throat. I sprang from the tub, splashing the floors with water, and flung his housecoat over myself, still sopping wet.

He put his back to the wall and slid down it all the way to the marble tiles. I tied the housecoat briskly, dropping to my knees at his side. I reached for him with a hand that had gone pruney in the bathwater, stopping just short of touching him. It hung there between us, afraid to caress his scars in that casual manner I had before. I was dying inside to heal the thing I’d hurt so badly, dying to grab him up, to hold him, to squeeze him to my chest until I burst.

How could I fix the things I’d clearly broken?

I wanted to help like I had when we were young. That had always been my instinct when his father was cruel. Fix Lochlan. Make it better. Make him smile. I could always make it better if I tried hard enough. I could stopper his tears, heal his pain, clean and fix his injuries. No wonder his sadness had impacted me so profoundly when I’d seen him in my room that day.

I should have known. I should have recognized him. He didn’t look anything like he had twenty years ago, but I should have recognized the impact that haunted heart of his always had on me.

I swallowed, still reaching uselessly toward his battered cheek. “Did the baron do this to you after I—”

“Yes,” he whispered.

“Because I—”

“Yes.” Menace flavored that singular word, and one tear streaked down his face, soaking into his beard.

I wiped the trail of it away with the baggy sleeve of his housecoat. “Saying I’m sorry isn’t enough, but I am so sorry. Oh God, Loch, I’m so terribly sorry!” I pushed the words out of my tightening throat. “I . . . I didn’t know he’d hurt you like this. I didn’twanthim to hurt you this way.”

His malicious laugh turned my blood cold. “Did you forget who he was? No, I don’t believe you could have. You and I were the only ones who knew how truly wicked he could be. We were who he took his wrath out on.”

“Of course I didn’t forget! I just thought that once you were his heir officially and we were so much older than when he used to beat us—”

“Did you forget how he used to turn us into his furniture to humiliate us?” His gilded brown eyes lit with a fire that burned through me. “Did you forget the way he made you bend over his knee so he could eat a plate of food off your back? How he turned me into his footstool?”

My nostrils flared. “I didn’t fucking forget!”

“How he’d pretend to be in a decent mood until we dropped our guards? Then he’d surprise us with a horse crop and—”

---