Page 81 of The Cruel Heir
Lightning pulsed through the stained glass, casting on her plump lips. She touched my cheek, thumb rubbing the tremor at my jaw. “I’m leaving,” she vowed. “I have to. Because if I stay tonight, I’ll never know if you can choose kindness when I’m not here to watch.”
She stepped back. The space between us yawned like an open grave. She set the violin gently in its cradle, caressing the initials as if soothing a sleeping child.
“I’ll keep the trust,” she said, a queen issuing terms. “Not because it binds me to you, but because it frees me from every other man.”
“And the ring?” My voice splintered around the word.
She lifted the white-gold band from my palm, when had I pressed it there? She closed my fingers over it. “Warm it for me,” she said, eyes shimmering. “I’m not finished deciding whether a crown built on ashes can nourish seeds.”
Then she turned, silk rippling like black water, curls dripping constellations down her back, and walked barefoot out of the music room. Rain beaded on her calves, leaving small dark kisses on the parquet. She didn’t look back.
The door clicked. Candle flames shuddered, violin strings vibrated with the ghost of her breath. I fell to my knees in the silence, pressed the ring to my forehead, tasting salt that might be sweat or tears, there was no difference anymore.
The beast roared inside its cage of ribs, but I let him. Tonight he mourned, not the loss of prey, but the departure of a star he had sworn to orbit without devouring.
I let her go, again.
And the castle held its breath, waiting to see if love brave enough to walk into the storm could ever choose to come home.
ZARA
Islid the new key into the lock, on a Tuesday morning that smelled of late-summer rain and peppermint oil, and the silence on the other side hit me like vertigo. No distant hum of Sterling’s servers, no guards murmuring into earpieces, no muted footsteps on Carrara marble, just the hush of a third-floor Brownstone walk-up too old to remember central air. Six hundred square feet, pale plaster walls, spider-veined with settling cracks, floorboards that sighed under even my careful steps. I had prepaid the year’s lease, with an eye-watering chunk of the quarterly trust draw, money laundered by distance and denial, then filled the space with exactly four suitcases, one thrift-store vanity, a scarlet loveseat I bought because it reminded me of the red line in his ledger, and a queen mattress still shrink-wrapped like a sterile apology.
Moving the mattress alone felt like wrestling a waterlogged corpse up Niagara. By the time I flopped it in the living room, my spine screamed, and the baby responded with a slow, rolling kick beneath my navel. Twenty weeks tomorrow, roughly the size of a bell pepper, according to the radiant midwife I’d met last Thursday. She had warm brown hands, spoke in easy metaphors, measured my fundal height, while explaining thatthe anatomy scan looked ‘textbook perfect’. She also hadn’t asked about the father, beyond a single line on the chart: Partner not present. I’d wanted to kiss her for that.
Loneliness fanned itself through the apartment like secondhand smoke. I unpacked plates wrapped in newspaper, set them in mismatched cabinets, and tried to find company in the rattle of copper pipes. By dusk, I perched on the scarlet loveseat, eating ramen straight from the pot, chopsticks clacking, while headlights slid over the ceiling in restless stripes. I told myself the hush was peace. It only sounded like a muzzle.
On Wednesday, I woke at dawn with Sterling’s name half-laundered into a dream, and the low throb of round-ligament pain tugging my right side. The clinic sat six subway stops south. I rode the Q with my earbuds tucked, pretending the island of strangers around me was an ocean, buffering me from the gravity I’d just escaped. The waiting room walls were painted the same sage green as the staff scrubs, and posters of smiling infants promised serenity no Kingsley heir had ever been allowed. When I dipped the test strip into the cup, the nurse joked about pregnancy glow, but the mirror over the sink reflected a different story; brown skin dulled by fluorescent light, hair coiled into a bun, that looked more battlefield than bun. Blood pressure, heart rate, weight ticked into the chart, and the Doppler picked up a whoosh-whoosh heartbeat quick as river rapids, and loneliness eased its choke hold for exactly twenty-eight seconds.
I spent Thursday hunting for furniture on Facebook Marketplace. The seller, Laila Quinn, lived two blocks over and spoke in warm Carolina vowels, her laugh a brass bell in the gloom of her basement shop. She helped me bargain a weathered dining table down to fifty dollars, and insisted on carrying one end up my narrow staircase, despite my protests about her manicure. When we’d slid the table against the farwall, and shared a breathless grin, she cocked her head at the mattress, still plastic-wrapped on the floor.
“Girl, you nesting or squatting?” she teased.
“Maybe both,” I admitted, cheeks hot. I told her about escaping ‘an estate upstate’ the way some women mention leaving a weather system. She raised a brow, but didn’t press.
“I work from home, bag design. If you need company or decaf coffee, knock three times,” she said, tapping the wall for emphasis. The neighborly kindness felt foreign enough to blister. Still, when she left her number scrawled on a grocery receipt, I folded it into my phone case like a charm.
Friday morning, I lingered in bed, mattress finally unwrapped, sheets smelling of lavender, and let the ceiling fan whisper what freedom might feel like, if I’d ever tasted it. I’d carried the violin home that night, leaving the cradle in Sterling’s music room like an empty ribcage. Now the case leaned in the corner, gold initials Z.E.K. winking from the latch, accusing, beloved, impossible to ignore.
Mail slid under the front door around noon, a thin cascade of circulars and one matte-black envelope, sealed in blood-red wax. Kingsley crest, twin eagles, a crown of swords. My pulse skittered. I slit it open to find a single card:
KINGSLEY FOUNDATION ART GALA
Riverside Hall, Friday 8 p.m.
Guest of Honor: Zara Elise Kingsley.
Below,his handwriting. Too decisive, too intimate:
Still your choice. The door remains unlocked. —S
The kettle shrieked behind me,and I startled, crinkling the invitation in my hand. Steam fogged the window, and outside, clouds stacked like bruises over the Hudson.
I carried the invitation to the dining table, staring at the gold embossing until the letters blurred. Guest of Honor. Was it an honor to stand beneath the chandelier, while the board catalogued the width of my hips, and speculated about my womb? The baby fluttered a lazy foot against my bladder, as if knocking for permission.
My phone buzzed.
Laila: Brunch?
