Page 79 of The Cruel Heir
Outside, thunder drummed one last approval, rolling west toward the river. Inside, the clock ticked on, each beat carrying me toward a dawn where hunger would never again dictate my choices.
I closed my eyes and, for the first time since the crash, slept without dreaming of coffins. The funeral had been brutal in its speed. Money and power moved mountains, even coffins, and it left me hollow enough to finally rest.
STERLING
Ilet her go.
Firelight clawed the walls, and painted restless shadows across shelves swollen with first editions, that suddenly felt like tombstones. The Lagavulin sat untouched at my elbow, peat smoke seeping into the air the way grief seeps into bone.
I’d told myself it was mercy. Letting her walk away.
But now, sitting in the study after midnight, with the hearth dying low and the clock bleeding seconds I’d never get back, all I could feel was the shape of her absence.
She’d kissed me goodbye.
Fucked me like forgiveness wasn’t coming, but something else, something holy, still could. And I hadn’t deserved it. Not a single moan. Not the way her hands trembled in my hair. Not the way she gasped when I pressed my mouth to the ache between her thighs, and gave her every prayer I never learned how to say out loud.
I remembered the sound of her breath as she came, high and sharp, breaking apart on my name, like it was both a curse and a benediction. I remembered her whispering, “Make me forgetthis is goodbye,” while her thighs gripped my hips, and her tears slicked my chest.
I had tasted her sorrow. Had swallowed her anger. Had buried myself in her like it was the last honest thing I’d ever do.
And still, I let her go.
Now, it was cold. My hands were empty. The guest wing felt haunted. And the only thing I could smell was her.
Jasmine and rain, and the faintest trace of something sweeter, something that had bloomed for me, even when it shouldn’t have. My chest cracked at the memory of her eyes, swollen and red-rimmed, when she said she couldn’t forgive me yet, and kissed me anyway.
That kiss…
It wasn’t permission. It wasn’t peace.
It was her ruin. And mine.
She’d touched my jaw with the gentlest reverence. Climbed into my lap with a kind of grace that turned every shattered piece of me into something new. We didn’t speak when I slid into her again, there was nothing left to say. Only the raw sound of skin against skin. Only the heat of her body wrapping around mine, drawing me back from the edge, like she hadn’t already bled for me.
She held my face when I came. Not like a lover. Like a eulogy.
As if she knew I would never ask her to stay.
And now…
Now I sat in a chair too grand for a man this hollow, replaying every second of the storm-lit hours, when her body curled against mine, and we pretended love alone could rebuild something we’d already burned.
I didn’t deserve to remember her like that. But I did.
Every kiss. Every sob. Every second she stayed wrapped in my arms, until the tremors passed, and silence claimed her bones.
I should’ve begged.
I should’ve locked every door.
Instead, I left the card on the desk, and a lamp on in the hall, like she was coming back.
The motion sensor blinked red.
My heart forgot how to beat.
I reached the arched doorway, soaked in sweat, lungs scraping like rusted hinges. The door was ajar. Rain had written a dark question mark on the marble, water sluicing from the hem of a silk dress, and the soles of bare feet.
