Page 59 of This Haunted Heart

“Well, it should change something!” I snapped, and my words echoed off the damp stones. “That’s not an excuse you can use now! You’re a grown man!”

“If you weren’t going to marry me, then you had no right to take it,” he growled.

“I know!”

“You could have turned me down!”

“I didn’t want to turn you down!” I roared. “I wanted to wear your ring on my finger every day for the rest of my life, but I knew it wasn’t mine.”

“Then why’d you steal it?” he shouted.

“Because I couldn’t stand the thought of any other woman having it!” I shouted back, gesturing so passionately I nearly sent the lantern’s glass chimney toppling. “And yes, I know how dreadful that makes me. I know I’m the serpent here, but I’m not alone in that, you fucking pirate! Neither of us are innocent.”

“What’d you do with it?” he rumbled.

Tired of this conversation, I attempted to shove past him. He pulled me to a halt, his large hand swallowing up my shoulder. It was flustering how big he was. I’d stood a chance when we were young but not now.

“Where is it, Rynn? I know it wasn’t in your safe. If it was truly something meaningful to you, then what’d you do with it?”

“I buried it.”

He scoffed, and the sound shot through me like an arrow. He could have slapped me, and that would have hurt less. “A likely story. Nearly impossible to prove, too.”

I shook his hand off. “I’m not listening to this. If you’re not even going to believe me anyway . . .”

“I need to know,” he said quietly. His sad eyes darkened by shadows pleaded with me. “What’d you do with the ring?”

I bit my lip to keep it from trembling. My throat burned, and it took a full minute for me to recover before I could answer him. “I wrapped it up in the beautiful letters you used to write me, and I buried it at the covered bridge in Light Lily. That’s why I can’t stand to go there. Being near it again, being back in that place where I behaved so wickedly . . . I just can’t . . .”

He stared at me for a long time, like a math equation had appeared on my forehead and he was trying to puzzle it out. “Why there?”

“That’s how far I got before I knew I would never be able to look at any of it again. Not without breaking my heart all over. It felt like an anvil in my pocket while I was running away. I had to get rid of all of it.”

“You had to get rid of the thing I prized the very most? The only piece of my blood family I had then?” His tawny eyes went glassy. “You could have sent it back to me. You have noidea how much pain you would have spared me over the years if you’d done me that small courtesy.”

“Leave it alone, Loch,” I begged, feeling like he’d kicked me in the stomach. “My heart was broken when you wouldn’t run away with me, when you chose to be a good son over protecting us. Then you went and stole everything from me too, including my freedom, before you bothered to tell me who you were!”

He exhaled sharply, and the candle flame guttered before righting again. “If I gave you back your freedom, what would you do with it?”

The loaded questioned weighed on me so heavily I felt like I was being flattened into the ground. “I don’t even know anymore.”

I wanted to make right all of the horrible things I’d done to him, but I was growing more and more worried that such a thing wasn’t possible. Whatever remained of him, I would always love him. But what if I couldn’t ever get him back? Not fully. What if I couldn’t save him from the pain I’d caused?

I had another question of my own, but I was frightened of the answer. More stubborn than scared, I dared to ask anyway. “Does any part of you still want to see me in that cell?”

“Yes,” he said, swift and sure and without a moment’s hesitation.

My heart dropped, my spirits with it. I lowered the lantern until the light shined across the stone floor, igniting the polish of his boots. “Say what you want about what I did, but by your own logic, you belong in that cell right next to me.”

“I’m already there, Rynn,” he said somberly, then he turned on his heels and trudged back up the stairs, candlelight flickering.

* **

That night, I dreamt about iron cells and that horrid house in the mire with the steep gables and the lattices full of winding ivy. I dreamt about Lochlan.

I hadn’t known the proper way to keep wounds clean back then. Washing wasn’t done as thoroughly as it was later in my life. I was only twelve, and that foul baron had taken a switch to Lochlan’s back.

“A good thrashing builds character.” That had been the baron’s reasoning. He opened up his son’s back, then sent him to work with the pigs.

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