Page 79 of His Auctioned Duchess
He said nothing. The wind rattled the tower windows again, scattering a few embers from the hearth.
Sophia rose slowly, watching him with a mixture of pity and fierce affection. “I brought you this not to torture you, but to make you choose. Either you let this version of yourself consume what’s left of your heart—or you fight for her.”
He did not answer.
She turned toward the door, pausing only once to look back. “I know which choice she would make, if she believed you still cared.”
When the door closed behind her, the silence returned. But it was no longer empty—it was weighted with the echo of her words.
Richard sat back slowly, the charred paper trembling in his fingers. The fire cast its glow across his face, painting him in alternating gold and shadow.
He thought of Caroline’s voice, soft and defiant, of the way she had looked at him not with horror but with challenge. Of the way she had trembled beneath his touch, not out of fear but because she had felt something too.
He pressed the ruined drawing to his chest. The pain in his palm was sharp, real, grounding.
“Caroline,” he whispered, her name breaking like prayer.
The wind rose outside, tearing through the trees. The candles flickered.
For a long time he sat there, motionless, staring into the dying fire until his reflection blurred into the embers.
When he spoke again, his voice was barely audible.
“I can’t lose her.”
The admission hung in the air, soft but absolute, the first truth he had spoken aloud in months.
He bowed his head, the paper still clutched against his heart, and for the first time since returning from war, the Duke of Ashwood wept.
The dawn that broke over Ashwood Hall was thin and pale, casting a brittle light through the windows of the tower. Richard had not moved from his seat. The hearth still glowed faintly, its embers cooling into gray dust. The ruined sketch lay before him, blackened at the edges like a relic from a fire that refused to die.
He stared at it as though it were a mirror.
Sophia’s words still echoed in his head, cruel in their truth.You made her believe this was all you were.
All his life he had been praised for control—over his estate, over men, over every impulse that might betray weakness. But what had that mastery brought him? A hollow title, a house full of ghosts, and a woman who had walked away because he had been too proud to tell her he loved her.
The pain in his hand throbbed dully, but he welcomed it. It reminded him he still lived—that his body, at least, had not yet surrendered to the numbness consuming his heart.
He rose slowly, the chair scraping against the floor. The hall outside was silent, though somewhere below he heard the faint stirrings of servants beginning their morning rounds. When he stepped to the window, the rain had eased. The grounds lay drenched, glistening like glass, the air sharp with the scent of wet earth.
He had sent her away with words he did not mean, and she had believed him. He had told her she was free, that she would not need to marry him. It had been meant as protection — a desperate, self-inflicted wound to spare her from his own darkness. But all he had done was teach her to doubt his heart.
And now, she was to be auctioned again.
The thought hit like a blade between his ribs.
He closed his eyes, gripping the window ledge so hard his knuckles whitened.Another auction. Another round of leering men, counting her dowry, measuring her worth in coin.
A low sound escaped him—something between a growl and a groan. His reflection in the glass looked back, the scar across his face catching the light like a brand. For the first time, he saw not the Devil, not the beast Caroline had drawn—but a man standing on the brink of ruin, about to let the only good thing left in his world slip through his fingers.
He turned sharply, striding toward the door.
But he stopped halfway across the room, his hand at the latch.
What if she did not want him? What if all he saw in her eyes had been pity—or worse, fear?
He swallowed hard, jaw tightening. “Better fear than indifference,” he muttered. “Better anger than silence.”
