Chapter 6: Locked Wings and Lying Portraits

The morning after Roman Blackthorne kissed her as if he meant to ruin her, Elara woke to the sound of wings beating against glass.

For one disoriented breath, she thought she was back in the Vale townhouse, in the narrow blue bedroom where gulls used to gather on the balcony rail before storms, shrieking like old women warning of death. Then the room sharpened around her: black silk canopy, carved bedposts twisted into thorned vines, a ceiling painted with a night sky so detailed she could almost count the stars between the bruised clouds. Rain crawled down the windows in silver veins. Beyond them, the cliffs dropped into a white fury of sea.

The wings struck again.

Elara sat up, hand flying to her throat. Not fear, she told herself. Irritation. But her pulse had climbed into the hollow beneath her jaw, where Roman’s fingers had rested last night before he kissed her.

Not kissed. Claimed a battlefield.

She pressed her mouth into a hard line and threw back the covers.

At the far window, a blackbird battered itself against the pane, feathers slick with rain, eyes bright as drops of ink. It struck once, twice, then clung to the stone ledge, trembling. One wing hung at an angle that made Elara’s stomach clench.

“Stupid thing,” she whispered, crossing the cold floor. “There are less dramatic ways to die.”

The latch on the casement was old and stubborn, the metal cold enough to bite. She forced it open a crack, and wind rushed in like a living thing, flinging rain against her face and tearing at the loose sleeves of her nightdress. The blackbird staggered. Elara caught it before it could fall.

It weighed almost nothing in her hands.

A tremor went through its body. Its tiny claws pricked her palm. The injured wing twitched uselessly, and a bead of dark blood formed beneath the wet feathers.

“There now,” she murmured, softer than she meant to be. “I know. This house does that to people.”

The bird’s head snapped toward her. For a foolish second, it seemed to understand.

A knock sounded at the bedroom door.

Elara closed the window with her hip, cradling the bird against her chest. “If that is my husband, tell him I am busy with a more pleasant creature.”

The door opened anyway, but it was not Roman.

A maid stepped in carrying a silver tray. She was small and pale, with dark hair pinned too tightly and a face made older by caution. Elara remembered her from the previous evening—the one who had looked at Roman as though he were both altar and executioner.

The maid halted at the sight of the bird.

“Mrs. Blackthorne,” she said, and nearly dropped the tray.

Elara flinched at the name before she could stop herself.

Mrs. Blackthorne.

A title with teeth.

“Elara,” she said. “Unless you enjoy watching me suffer.”

The maid stared, unsure whether it was a joke. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Not ma’am either. I’m twenty-three, not a cathedral gargoyle.”

The maid’s mouth twitched. It vanished quickly, but not before Elara saw it. “Yes, Elara.”

“And you are?”

“Mara.”

“Mara, I need a box, a towel, and something to clean a wound.”

“A wound?”

Elara lifted the bird slightly. “His, not mine.”

Mara set the tray down on a table near the fireplace, eyes darting to the windows as if expecting the storm itself to report her. “Birds hit the glass often on this side. The sea winds confuse them.”

“Does everyone here explain cruelty as weather?”

Mara went still.

Elara regretted it at once—not because it was untrue, but because truth could strike servants harder than masters. She softened her voice. “A towel?”

“Of course.” Mara moved quickly to the dressing room and returned with a folded linen cloth, then a small wooden sewing box. “There’s spirits for needles. It might sting.”

“Most useful things do.”

They made a nest from the towel inside a hatbox found at the bottom of a wardrobe. The blackbird permitted itself to be settled with an offended click of its beak, as though it were royalty inconvenienced by peasants. Elara cleaned the nick beneath its wing. Mara watched, fingers laced tightly before her apron.

“You’re not afraid of blood,” Mara said.

“I grew up in a house where men smiled while making women bleed in every way that didn’t stain carpet.”

Mara’s gaze lifted, startled.

Elara had not meant to say it aloud.

The words hung between them, darker than the storm.

“Forgive me,” Elara said, snapping the bottle shut. “That was impolite breakfast conversation.”

“In this house,” Mara murmured, “breakfast conversation is usually worse.”

Elara looked at her properly then. The maid lowered her eyes too fast, but not fast enough to hide the old fear there.

“Has Roman been unkind to you?” Elara asked.

The question cut through the room with a dangerous neatness.

Mara’s face blanched. “Mr. Blackthorne is fair.”

“That is not an answer.”

“It is the safest one.”

The fire snapped in the grate. The wounded bird shifted in its box, rustling like a secret trying to escape.

Elara leaned back on her heels. “Very well. Then give me an unsafe one about the house.”

Mara glanced toward the door.

“Roman said truth in private,” Elara said, tasting the memory. His voice in the dark hall. His hand against her cheek. His mouth taking hers like punishment, then faltering for the smallest fraction of a second, as if he had found something in her he had not meant to want. “He neglected to specify whose truth.”

“You should not test him so early.”

“I tested him at the altar.”

“That is why the household has been speaking of nothing else.”

Elara arched a brow. “Flattering things, I assume.”

“Mostly prayers.”

For the first time that morning, Elara laughed.

It was a small sound, rough from sleep, but it broke something. Mara’s shoulders eased by a fraction.

“What should I know?” Elara asked.

The maid hesitated. “Blackthorne House has rules.”

“Houses don’t have rules. People make rules and blame the architecture.”

“Not here.” Mara’s voice thinned. “Here, some doors stay shut because they should. The cellar is not to be entered after dusk. The north conservatory is unsafe in high wind. The chapel bell is never rung. And the east wing…”

She stopped.

Elara’s fingers stilled on the edge of the hatbox.

Outside, thunder rolled over the bay like furniture being dragged across heaven.

“The east wing?”

Mara gathered the breakfast tray as though spoons required her immediate rescue. “It is sealed.”

“Sealed how?”

“Iron locks. Bolts. Orders from the old Mr. Blackthorne first. Then from Mr. Roman after…”

Again, she stopped.

Elara watched the pulse beat at the base of the maid’s throat. “After what?”

“After Miss Seraphina left.”

The name entered the room like a draft beneath a door.

Seraphina.

Roman’s first fiancée. The one society ladies whispered about behind lace fans and champagne flutes. The runaway. The ghost. The girl who had vanished before she could wear the Blackthorne ring.

The one some said had never made it past the cliffs.

Elara reached for a piece of toast from the tray and discovered she had no appetite. “And why would her leaving require an entire wing to be locked?”

“I don’t know.”

“Mara.”

“I truly don’t.” The maid’s voice cracked, then lowered. “But I know no one is to go there. Not servants. Not guests. Not family.”

“Not wives?”

Mara looked at her with something too much like pity.

“Especially not wives,” she said.

By noon, the rain had softened to a fine mist, the kind that did not fall so much as breathe. Blackthorne House exhaled dampness from its walls. The corridors smelled of beeswax, wet stone, and old smoke. Elara dressed herself without assistance, choosing a high-necked gown of deep green wool from the wardrobe Roman’s staff had filled before her arrival. It fit perfectly. That annoyed her more than if it had not fit at all.

Someone had measured her life before she stepped into it.

The emerald fabric made her skin look paler, her hair darker. She pinned it at the nape of her neck, then removed two pins so a few strands escaped around her face. Let Roman have his obedience in public. In private, she could leave something undone.

The blackbird slept in its hatbox near the hearth. Elara left the lid open and a saucer of water beside it.

“Do not die while I am gone,” she told it. “It would be terribly rude.”

The bird did not answer.

“Excellent. We understand each other.”

She stepped into the hallway.

Blackthorne House did not resemble a home so much as a family’s attempt to outlive its sins. It sprawled over the cliff in black stone and narrow windows, every corridor bending too sharply, every arch carved with thorns, ravens, or roses pierced by blades. Portraits lined the walls in gilt frames: men with hard mouths and women with eyes like rooms no one had survived entering. Candle sconces burned even at midday, their flames wavering in drafts that came from nowhere.

Elara walked slowly, counting turns.

Left past the grandfather clock with the stopped pendulum.

Right at the suit of armor missing one gauntlet.

Down three steps into a gallery where the windows overlooked the courtyard, slick and empty below.

She had learned as a girl that houses revealed themselves to those who appeared not to be looking. Servants’ stairways, warped floorboards, locked cabinets whose dust betrayed recent use. Her mother had taught her that.

Never ask first, little fox. Questions warn people. Eyes steal more.

Elara touched the silver chain at her throat, expecting the small moonstone pendant that had belonged to her mother. Her fingers found only skin. She had hidden the pendant in the lining of her traveling case before the wedding, unwilling to bring any piece of her mother too openly into Roman’s domain.

But memory did not need jewelry to draw blood.

Her mother, Isolde Vale, had vanished seven years ago on the night of the Blackwater Winter Auction. She had worn a cream satin gown, red lipstick, and a bracelet Elara had loved as a child: a band of black enamel roses set with tiny pearls, clasped by a silver thorn. Elara remembered because she had fastened it herself while her mother hummed before the mirror.

By dawn, Isolde was gone.

By noon, Elara’s father had forbidden her name.

By the following week, Blackwater Bay had swallowed the scandal whole.

A footstep sounded behind her.

Elara turned.

No one.

The corridor stretched empty, red runner rug dark beneath her feet. At the far end, a maid crossed an opening and vanished. Somewhere below, a door shut. The house listened.

She continued.

The main staircase descended in a sweep of black oak into the entrance hall, but Elara did not go down. Instead, she followed an upper passage where the air grew colder and the portraits changed. These were older, their varnish cracked, their eyes clouded by age. A boy holding a hawk with a broken neck. A woman in mourning lace beside an empty cradle. A Blackthorne patriarch with one hand resting on a globe, the other on the shoulder of a child whose face had been scratched away.

“Charming family,” Elara muttered. “No wonder Roman smiles like it costs him blood.”

“He smiles?”

Elara’s heart jumped.

She turned to find a young man leaning in an alcove near a rain-streaked window, as if he had grown there out of shadow and boredom. He had the Blackthorne darkness, but diluted into something prettier and less severe: curling black hair, a narrow face, eyes the gray of polished pewter. He wore a burgundy waistcoat and held an unlit cigarette between two fingers.

She knew him from the wedding. Cassian Blackthorne, Roman’s younger cousin. He had bowed over her hand with theatrical elegance and whispered, Run if he lets you. Pray if he doesn’t.

“Mr. Blackthorne,” she said.

“There are far too many of those. Cassian, please. We are family now, tragically.”

“Are you lurking or lost?”

“In this house, the distinction is philosophical.” He pushed away from the wall. “You shouldn’t wander alone.”

“I keep hearing that.”

“And yet you continue. Either you are brave or you have no instinct for self-preservation.”

“I married Roman. The jury has its answer.”

Cassian laughed softly. “Careful. Some walls in this house are loyal to him.”

“Are you?”

The cigarette paused halfway to his mouth. His smile remained, but something behind it shuttered. “When it benefits me.”

“Honesty. How unfashionable.”

“Roman’s new bride has teeth.”

“Roman’s new bride has ears too. I heard there is an east wing.”

The air changed.

It was subtle, a tightening in the corridor, a pause in the wind. Cassian looked past her, down the hallway she had been following.

“There are many wings.”

“And yet only one inspires everyone to speak as though reciting funeral rites.”

“Ah.” He slipped the cigarette into his pocket unlit. “Mara talks too much.”

“Mara talks just enough.”

“Then let me talk enough as well. Stay away from the east wing.”

“Because Roman ordered it?”

“Because the dead are possessive.”

Elara studied him. His tone was light, but his fingers had curled into his palm. “Is Seraphina dead?”

Cassian’s gaze snapped to hers.

For a moment, the charm slipped entirely, and she saw a boy beneath it—frightened, furious, grieving. Then he smiled again, and the boy drowned.

“Blackwater Bay kills women in many ways,” he said. “Sometimes it lets them keep breathing afterward.”

“That sounds rehearsed.”

“Everything here is.”

“Including you?”

“Especially me.”

He stepped closer. Not threateningly. Almost urgently.

“Listen to me, Elara Vale.”

“Blackthorne,” she corrected before she could stop herself.

His brows rose.

A flush warmed her throat. “Legally.”

“Legally, then.” His voice lowered. “If Roman discovers you prying at that wing, he will not laugh. He will not admire your spirit. He will lock you somewhere nicer and call it protection.”

“You think I don’t know what gilded cages look like?”

“I think you have not yet learned that Roman does not build cages to keep women in.” Cassian’s expression darkened. “He builds them to keep the rest of us out.”

Before she could answer, footsteps rang from below, heavy and measured. Both of them turned toward the staircase at the end of the hall.

Roman appeared beneath the arch.

Even at a distance, he altered the architecture around him. He wore black, as he almost always did, the cut of his coat severe enough to seem like armor. His hair was damp from the mist, combed back from a face carved by sleeplessness and command. Two men followed several paces behind him—one broad and bearded, one lean with a scar at his temple—but Roman lifted a hand, and they stopped.

His eyes found Elara first.

Then Cassian.

The corridor grew very still.

“Cousin,” Roman said.

“Husband,” Cassian replied cheerfully.

Elara almost choked.

Roman’s gaze did not move from Cassian. “Leave.”

“I was merely welcoming Elara to the family.”

“You did that at the wedding.”

“I was drunk.”

“You were afraid.”

Cassian’s smile sharpened. “Of you? Always.”

Something dangerous passed between them, old as rot beneath floorboards.

Roman ascended the last few steps and came toward them. Elara refused to step back, though every instinct in her body noticed his approach. He stopped close enough that she caught the scent of rain on wool, tobacco, and something darker—cedar smoke, iron, winter.

“Elara,” he said.

Her name in his mouth did not sound like a greeting. It sounded like a hand at her spine.

“Roman,” she returned.

His eyes lowered briefly to her throat, her collar, the escaped strands of hair against her cheek. Something flickered there, gone before it could be named.

“You were not in your rooms.”

“Astute.”

Cassian made a soft, delighted sound.

Roman did not look away from her. “I gave instructions that you were to be attended if you wished to explore.”

“How generous. Shall I submit a route in writing next time? Perhaps you can approve which carpets I am permitted to offend.”

“Do not make a sport of misunderstanding me.”

“Then do not make a prison of concern.”

His jaw tightened.

Cassian’s gaze moved between them with open fascination. “Oh, this is going to be ruinous.”

“Cassian,” Roman said, softly.

The younger man lifted both hands. “Leaving. Vanishing. Becoming a cautionary tale elsewhere.” He leaned toward Elara as he passed, voice barely above breath. “Pretty birds should distrust open windows too.”

Roman caught his wrist.

The movement was so fast Elara barely saw it. One second Cassian was gliding by; the next Roman’s hand had closed around him, hard enough to whiten skin.

“Do not whisper to my wife.”

Cassian’s smile trembled at the edges. “Possessive already?”

“Careful.”

“Or what? You’ll lock another wing?”

The words struck like a match.

Roman’s face emptied.

Not anger. Worse. A total absence of mercy.

Elara felt the change before she understood it. The air seemed to lean away from him. Even Cassian paled, though he held the smile as if it were a knife between his teeth.

“Go,” Roman said.

This time, Cassian obeyed.

His footsteps faded down the corridor. When they were gone, the rain seemed too loud.

Elara folded her arms. “Was that necessary?”

“Yes.”

“He is your cousin.”

“That is one of his lesser crimes.”

“Is speaking to me another?”

Roman turned his attention fully on her, and Elara hated the way her body remembered the previous night. The pressure of the wall at her back. His thumb at the corner of her mouth. The heat of him, controlled until it wasn’t.

“You may speak to whomever you like,” he said. “You may not trust whomever you like.”

“Another rule?”

“A warning.”

“I’m collecting those today.”

“Then collect this one carefully.” He stepped closer. “Cassian smiles when he is deciding where to cut. My uncle lies when he breathes. The staff fears names for good reasons. And this house has rooms that were locked before you were born.”

“Such as the east wing.”

His gaze hardened.

There it was. A door slamming behind his eyes.

“You do not go there,” he said.

Not loud. Not cruel. Absolute.

Elara felt her temper rise to meet him, bright and reckless. “Why?”

“Because I said so.”

“You’ll find that phrase works better on dogs and heirs.”

“Elara.”

“Roman.”

He looked at her for a long moment. The stormlight cut shadows beneath his cheekbones, making him seem older than he had at the altar, older than any man of thirty should seem. There were bruises beneath his eyes. A faint nick near his jaw. His hands were bare, and his knuckles were marked with healing cuts.

She had not noticed last night.

Or perhaps she had been too busy being furious about wanting him.

“The east wing is structurally unsafe,” he said at last.

Elara laughed once. “That is the worst lie I’ve heard since my father told creditors he believed in patience.”

Something almost like amusement touched Roman’s mouth. Almost.

“You ask for truth like it is a coin owed to you.”

“You promised it.”

“In private.”

“We are in private.”

His eyes flicked to the portraits. “Not here.”

A chill slipped over her skin.

Before she could press, one of Roman’s men appeared at the end of the hall. “Sir.”

Roman’s expression closed. “What?”

“Mr. Vale’s man is at the south gate. Says he has a message for Mrs. Blackthorne.”

Elara’s stomach tightened.

Her father never sent messages without hooks buried in them.

Roman glanced at her. “Did you expect one?”

“No.”

“Then you will not receive it alone.”

“I do not recall asking your permission.”

“Good. You’re learning.”

He turned to the man. “Bring it to my study. Search the messenger before he leaves the gatehouse.”

“Yes, sir.”

The man vanished.

Elara stared at Roman. “Do you search everyone who comes to my attention?”

“Only the ones sent by men who sell daughters.”

The words landed too accurately to deflect.

For a moment, she saw not the crime heir, not the arrogant husband, but the man who had stood before her last night and said, No one touches what is mine. A sentence that should have revolted her. A sentence that had instead lodged under her ribs, terrible and warm.

She hated him for making possession resemble shelter.

“Your study, then?” she said.

“No.”

Her brows lifted.

Roman’s gaze slid down the corridor behind her. “Return to your rooms.”

“Pardon?”

“I will bring the message to you after I have read it.”

“After you—” Her voice sharpened. “You will not read my correspondence.”

“If it comes from your father, I will.”

“You are insufferable.”

“Alive wives may insult me as often as they like.”

“How generous of you to prefer me alive.”