I wanted to believe her.
Rising to my feet, I felt the pull of our strange connection, a force unseen yet undeniable.The gravity of it pressed against my chest, threatening to crack something open inside me.
I had no right to her trust.
No right to this moment.
But I took it anyway.
“Stay safe, Lady Alexander.”
Her name left my lips in a whisper, a ghost of something I did not deserve.
Gently, I lifted her hand to my mouth, my lips barely grazing the silk of her glove.
A fleeting promise.
A sin waiting to be committed.
As I released her hand and stepped back, the tremor coursing through me unsettled me.
Because in that moment?—
I knew.
I had just made a choice.
A choice that would change everything.
A choice that could save us both?—
Or doom us completely.
ChapterSeven
ELIZABETH
My fingers worked methodically, pinching off the withered blooms of my mother’s roses—as if I could discard my worries just as easily.
Petal by petal, they fell, a soft rain of decay littering the soil beneath my feet.
The air was thick with their lingering perfume, but it could not mask the stench of despair that clung to me since that night?—
Since that disastrous betrothal dinner.
With each dying flower I cast away, it felt as if a part of my soul fluttered to the ground alongside it, crushed beneath the weight of inevitability.
I was amidst a splendor of color and life, yet inside?—
I was a garden wilting in drought.
My hands moved from one rose bush to another, deadheading the spent flowers, coaxing life where it no longer wished to remain.
But there was no delaying the death sentence that loomed over me.
No removing the rot of fate.
I was to be chained to Lord Winston?——
