Page 101 of The Duke's Forbidden Bride
“No,” she agreed. “I did not think it mattered. Lord Belgrave told me I would perform for all his acquaintances as often as he wanted. In hindsight, that should have been a warning, but back then, I thought it was good because my mother would be happy. My father would be proud. That was all I knew: to make them proud. In the end, it does not matter. They never would, and never will.”
“They ought to,” Spencer said, unable to keep the anger from his tone. “They ought to be proud of you. What you have gone through…” His hand clenched around the stem of his wine glass. “The things you have faced alone, Eleanor—not a lot of people would have survived.”
There was a vacant look in her eyes, as if she didn’t quite acknowledge what he said.
Spencer reached over to take her hand. “When you were in that cauldron—no, even before that—I saw a fight in you. It burned in your eyes. Flames devour, Eleanor, but not as fiercely as what you burned with. There was vengeance,hatred, and a spirit they had not broken. I could see that they tried, but you fought against it all.”
“And if you had seen a more broken girl that day,” she whispered, her breath hitching with more emotion, “would you have still rescued her?”
“Yes,” he answered without hesitation. “I would have. Broken or not, I would have taken you out of there no matter what.”
What he didn’t admit was that he had needed to save her back then.
“Eleanor,” he murmured, trying to gather his wits.
He was about to dredge up something he had shut away in a box, locked it, and then buried it in several other locked boxes in his mind.
“Eleanor, I needed to save you that day. I needed to give the fire in your eyes a chance to burn. I needed to give you the chance nobody was giving you to fight. I needed to—” He cut himself off, lifted his wine glass to his lips, and drank deeply.
Spencer took a moment to steady his breathing, to close his eyes and begin again.
“I could not see another girl die beneath a cruel hand. I could not see another girl go down fighting when she deserved a chance.”
Before Eleanor could ask, he pried the words from his throat. They were stubborn, so used to being locked inside of him, so used to not being acknowledged.
“I had a twin sister named Anna, and she was murdered when we were seven-and-ten.”
That statement left him in a hard rush. There was no softening it, no making it pretty or tolerable. He had not been able to stomach it foryears.
Slowly, he lifted his gaze to her.
“She was murdered, and I could not save her.” He felt himself tensing up, but he fought against that silent pull that tried to take him back to a place where he was silent. “I have—I have buried Anna’s memory in a box for so many years, never thinking of her for too long, hiding her portrait. Every thought I have of her hurts, and sometimes I fear there is nothing good left to think about because all I see when I think of her is-is the blood, the violence, thescreams.”
He shook his head.
“I saw her portrait,” Eleanor confessed quietly. “I went into the music room at Everdawn Hall once. The housekeeper didn’t tell me a lot out of respect, but she told me enough that I knew something had happened.”
Spencer nodded, his grip on his glass tightening. His eyes fixed on a point just past her. He had planned to bring all of this up with her tonight, and that was why he had wanted to dine on the terrace. The sky above, endless and calming, settled him. It made him feel less suffocated.
“My father happened.”
“Your father?”
Spencer nodded, trying to find the right words, trying to bat his way through the memories.
Fists pounding on my skull. A hand clenched around my throat. Screams, screams, screams…
“His temper was… merciless,” he forced out, trying to keep himself grounded, squeezing Eleanor’s hand.
He had not realized he had reached for her.
He let go of his wine glass and took both of her hands in his own. “I do not know what went foul in him. He drank. Sometimes that made him jovial in a way that set us all on edge, distrustful of the mood. Sometimes it made his anger worse. But his temper was out of control even before the drink hit.
“I became the target for his blows. At first, it was accidental. I was merely in the way. My mother had learned to hide well, to bury her head in the sand when the screams of her children filled the air.” Spencer swallowed down his revulsion. “She never wanted children, yet my father needed an heir, but she was cursed with two. Having twins sent her into a depression so terrible she could not climb out of it.”
“That is no excuse for turning her back on you,” Eleanor said, sharper and angrier than he had thought she would be.
He had expected pity—that would have irritated him. But his wife met him with a fire like his own.
