Page 80 of The Cruel Heir
Zara Johnston stood at the room’s center, beneath the stained-glass rose window, curls plastered to her scalp, brown skin slick with rainwater that glowed in candlelight like obsidian lacquer. The violin I resurrected rested beneath her chin, the gold engraving along its base; Z.E.K. sparked like an ember each time lightning strobed beyond the glass.
She drew the bow, a single note unfurled raw, imperfect, living. It quivered in the cathedral air, reverberating against velvet sound panels, until the room itself seemed to sigh. She let it hang, let it bleed into the quiet, before lowering the fiddle with hands that trembled.
“Why are you here?” My voice broke on the question.
She turned, slow, rain-heavy, regal, despite the way her silk clung to generous hips, and raindrops clung to lashes. She swallowed, throat bobbing, then breathed out one long exhale, as if emptying her body of excuses.
“I tried to leave,” she began, voice husky from cold and withheld tears. “I made it to the interstate, Sterling. Pulled off on the shoulder when the sky opened up. I told myself I’d drive until the odometer forgot this zip code. But the rain kept saying your name.”
She drifted a fingertip over the violin’s scroll. “I sat there behind the wheel, thunder shaking the windows, arguing withmyself like a fool. You’re poison, Zara. Drive. But every time lightning lit the road, I saw your hands on that bow bridge, sanding it smooth, trying to right a wrong you’d carved.”
She laughed, soft, self-mocking. “Tell me why the hell forgiveness feels heavier than hate.”
I stepped inside the candlelit circle, the scent of wet silk and night-jasmine, wrapping around us. “Because hate is easy,” I rasped. “It doesn’t require faith.”
Her chin lifted, rain gemstones glittering at the corners of her eyes. “Faith in a beast. How cliché.”
I braced my hands behind my back, fingers digging into my wrists, to keep from touching her. “Faith in a man,” I corrected, though my voice faltered halfway through the word ‘man’.
She watched me a moment, assessing, weighing. Then she moved closer, rainwater dripping from her curls onto the parquet like a metronome. “I thought about everything you took,” she said, tone quiet, but flint-sharp. “My father’s last breath. My own choices. My goddamn name.” Her lips quivered, but she steadied them with a breath. “Then I thought about everything you gave back, without me asking. The trust. The violin. The locked door you left open.”
Her gaze dropped to the gold initials. “I parked on the shoulder for twenty minutes, Sterling, rain battering the roof so loud I couldn’t hear my own heartbeat, trying to talk myself into driving on. I wrapped my hands around the steering wheel, until my knuckles blanched against my skin, repeating ‘leave him, leave him, leave him’.”
Her voice cracked, grief and confession braided into one soft ruin. “But the thought of never hearing you say my name again, of never stepping inside this music room you built with your bare, blood-stained hands, hollowed me out.”
She lifted her eyes, blazing. “That’s what terrifies me. Not your power. Not your sins. The fact that my soul leaned toward you in a storm, and wouldn’t lean back.”
I exhaled a sound that was half prayer, half surrender. My chest felt too small, ribs splintering against a love too enormous for its cage.
She hugged the violin to her chest, like a child clutching a plush toy. Candlelight turned the water on her collarbones into molten topaz. “So I came back,” she whispered. “Soaked through. Shoes ruined. Heart shaking itself apart. And I walked these halls like they might swallow me whole.”
Her palm pressed over the engraving. “Then I found this room. You branded my initials onto a gift you destroyed, rebuilt, and tried to give back. You carved space for my sound, in a mansion built from silence and steel.”
Tears slipped free, the kind born from bone-deep ache, not weakness. “I realized I don’t want a life that never hears my own music resonate in your chest.”
I closed the distance. She didn’t flinch. Inches apart, the storm’s chill still haloing her skin. I lifted trembling fingers, sliding a damp curl behind her ear. “You shouldn’t stay,” I murmured. “I can’t be the light you deserve.”
Her smile was ache and wonder. “Maybe I don’t want light. Maybe I want gravity.”
A tremor ran through me. Every instinct begged to claim her, chain her, bleed the world dry for her safety. But her confession nailed my own coffin: love isn’t possession, it’s pilgrimage.
My voice was ragged steel. “You came home in the rain, little bird, but this castle still reeks of monsters. Go. Save yourself from the darkness you see in my eyes.”
An invisible fist punched my sternum when those dark, wet eyes glistened. “The darkness doesn’t scare me,” she said. “Whatscares me is a future where I never find out if shadows can grow roses.”
I choked on breath, tipping our foreheads together. Rainwater cooled my skin, her lips trembling under my own. “One kiss,” I commanded myself, not her. “One kiss then you leave, alive, unburned.”
She answered by fisting the lapels of my shirt, and bringing our mouths crashing together.
The kiss was worship and undoing, storm surge and shoreline, all at once. Rainwater and jasmine. Salt tears and Lagavulin smoke. Her curves softened against my frame, and my hands finally closed around her, palms spanning the small of her back, where wet silk clung to velvet-rich skin. The room tilted, stained glass melting hues of ruby and midnight over our brown bodies. Violin strings hummed under her breath, like they remembered the melody of her pulse.
I tasted thunder on her tongue.
She inhaled my ragged groan like oxygen. Fingers slipping into my locs, nails grazing scalp, in a promise more dangerous than any bullet.
When air became currency we couldn’t afford, I tore myself away, foreheads still pressed, breath sawing between us.
“Go,” I whispered, though it felt like ripping my heart out, and laying it on the parquet. “Before I lock every door again.”
