Chapter 2
For several breaths, Sienna could do nothing but stare.
Her mind supplied a dozen explanations, each more desperate than the last.
The funeral had exhausted her. She had eaten almost nothing since morning. Perhaps grief had finally done what sleeplessness and sorrow had failed to accomplish and loosened her mind from reality.
Yet the lantern remained heavy in her hand, the cold remained sharp against her skin, and the man behind the iron bars continued watching her with Cassian Vale's gray eyes.
No. Not quite Cassian's.
That realization disturbed her more than the resemblance itself.
Cassian's eyes had always possessed a peculiar calm. Even when irritated, there had been patience beneath his displeasure, as though every thought passed through some private chamber of reason before he allowed it to become a word.
These eyes possessed none of that restraint. They traveled over Sienna slowly, openly, lingering upon her face and then the black dress fitted around her body with an intimacy that made her grip the lantern tighter.
“Who are you?”
The man's smile deepened. “You know who I am.”
Her stomach turned. The voice was his.
Not merely similar. Cassian had spoken to her for twenty years; she knew every subtle change in his voice, from the crisp formality he used with visitors to the softer tone reserved for nights when they were alone.
She had fallen asleep with that voice murmuring poetry beside her. She had heard it break with grief on the anniversary of his wife's death and tremble with pleasure when their carefully maintained distance finally collapsed between them.
This creature possessed the same voice.
Yet somehow it made Cassian's voice sound… Indecent.
“Lord Vale is dead.”
The figure rose.
Sienna instinctively stepped backward.
He was taller than she had realized. The darkness had hidden much of him, and the clothes he wore were little more than a ruined white shirt and dark trousers, but there could be no denying the resemblance now.
His hair was Cassian's, though longer and carelessly falling across his forehead. His face appeared younger, perhaps resembling Cassian ten or fifteen years ago, before silver had overtaken his temples.
There were differences. His cheeks were sharper. His skin was unnaturally pale. Something about the proportions of his limbs seemed almost imperceptibly wrong, as though a sculptor had recreated a man from memory and made him beautiful without making him entirely human.
He approached the bars.
Sienna retreated another step.
“Cassian is dead,” she repeated, more for herself than him.
“Yes.”
The easy agreement startled her. She had expected deception.
“Then what are you?”
He tilted his head. “Would you believe me if I told you?”
“No.”
A quiet laugh escaped him, and the sound stabbed straight through her.
Cassian used to laugh like that.
Years ago, when Sienna had still been embarrassed by how little she knew compared with him, he had discovered her asleep in the library with a book on Roman history spread across her chest. She had awakened mortified, expecting amusement at her expense.
Instead, Cassian had kissed her forehead.
“You don't have to become me, Sienna.”
“You keep giving me books.”
“Because I enjoy discussing them with you.”
“And when I don't understand them?”
He had smiled. “Then I have the selfish pleasure of teaching you.”
The memory came so vividly that for one terrible instant the cage vanished.
Sienna blinked hard. “Don't.”
The creature's brows lifted. “Don't what?”
“Laugh like him.”
Something flickered across his face. “How else would you have me laugh?”
The question silenced her.
He moved closer until only the bars separated them. She should have been repulsed.
Cassian had told her to end whatever waited beneath the library, and Cassian did not frighten easily. If his final thoughts had been consumed by this thing, she should have obeyed him without hesitation.
Instead, grief committed its quiet treason.
She wanted to touch him.
The thought filled her with shame.
Her fingers curled against her palm as she remembered another Cassian, warm beneath her hands instead of cold beneath funeral silk.
She remembered winter nights when he came to her room long after the household slept, removing his spectacles before lying beside her because he knew she hated when the frames pressed against her cheek. He had always touched her as though she were something precious, even after years had made secrecy familiar.
The creature looked like a corrupted answer to every prayer she had been too sensible to make since Cassian's death.
“What did he do to you?” she asked.
For the first time, the smile disappeared.
“What makes you think he did something to me?”
“Because he locked you here.”
“He locked away many things.”
His gaze drifted toward the shelves.
Sienna followed it.
Hundreds of journals occupied the chamber, far more than she had noticed upon entering.
They differed from the elegant books in Cassian's library upstairs. These were practical things, bound in black or brown leather, many marked with dates spanning decades. Some were so old that their spines had cracked.
Her attention returned to the enormous brass mechanism. “What is that machine?”
The creature remained silent.
“Answer me.”
“You were always more commanding when frightened.”
Sienna went still. “What?”
His fingers curled around the bars. *Your left hand trembles first. Then you lift your chin because you don't want anyone noticing.”
Her eyes dropped involuntarily. Her left hand was trembling.
He smiled again. “Cassian noticed it the first winter you came here.”
Cold traveled down her spine.
“You could have heard him speak about me.”
“Perhaps.”
“Or read his journals.”
“Perhaps.”
“Stop playing with me.”
“But he loved that about you.”
Sienna's throat tightened.
The creature leaned closer.
“That temper hidden beneath all those sensible dresses. The way you would argue with him when everyone else nodded because Lord Vale was supposedly the cleverest man in the room.”
“Stop.”
“He admired you for it.”
“Stop.”
“He loved you for it.”
“Enough!” Her voice echoed through the chamber.
Silence followed.
Sienna hated herself for the tears burning her eyes.
The creature's expression changed, and for one dangerous moment the cruelty vanished. Something almost tender replaced it.
“He should have married you.”
Her breath caught.
Those five words found the wound she had spent years pretending did not exist.
“You know nothing about that.”
“I know you waited.”
She couldn't answer.
“I know you told yourself you understood. Lucien had lost his mother. Cassian feared his son would see marriage as a betrayal of her memory. You agreed because loving him mattered more than possessing his title.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I remember.”
Sienna stared at him.
Not he told me. Not I read it. I remember.
She approached before common sense could stop her.
The creature did not move.
She stopped an arm's length from the cage. Up close, the resemblance became unbearable. There was even a faint scar near his eyebrow, the same one Cassian had received falling from a horse as a boy.
“What are you?” she whispered.
His gaze lowered to her mouth before returning to her eyes.
“A question he spent half his life trying to answer.”
A faint metallic click sounded somewhere behind her.
Sienna spun around.
One of the machine's brass wheels had shifted.
She watched it, but nothing else happened.
When she looked back, the creature was smiling.
“Read his work.”
“You expect me to trust you?”
“No.” He stepped away from the bars. “I expect you to trust him.”
That hurt because it was precisely what she wanted to do.
Sienna carried the lantern toward the shelves. Cassian had always documented everything. Garden yields, household expenditures, observations of birds, passages from books, thoughts he feared forgetting. If he had created whatever stood behind her, there would be an explanation somewhere.
But searching hundreds of volumes could take days.
Then she noticed one journal lying separately upon a narrow writing table.
Unlike the others, it was bound in dark green leather.
Sienna recognized it immediately.
Cassian's personal journals had always been green.
She had teased him about them once, asking whether they contained scandalous confessions.
Certainly, he'd replied.
About whom?
Cassian had looked over his spectacles at her.
Mostly my housekeeper.
She had laughed and stolen a kiss before he could return to his book.
The memory almost broke her.
Sienna sat in Cassian's abandoned chair and placed the journal before her. Her fingers rested upon the cover for several seconds.
“What will I find?”
The answer came quietly from the cage.
“The man you loved.”
She looked over her shoulder.
“And you?”
His smile returned, beautiful and profoundly wrong. “The man he never allowed you to meet.”
Sienna turned away. Her hands were shaking again.
She opened the journal.
Cassian's familiar handwriting covered the first page, neat and elegant despite the faded ink.
At the top was her name.
Sienna.
Her heart stopped.
She lowered the lantern closer and began to read.