Silence Reigns

Chapter 13

Bernard couldn't have done it.

Shapiero—or Erielle; he couldn't tell which anymore—had prohibited him from even visiting his brother before the evening set.

Ransom had declined the knock at his door, knowing it was his mother with dinner. He didn't care; he would starve. It was better than what Bernard had faced.

And so he had locked himself away in his cottage, wishing for death.

Bernard was the truest brother he had. Now both his brothers were gone.

I love you as a full brother.

He had always known it. But something about the way Bernard had said it tore out his heart.

"Ransom," someone called from the door. A woman. His mother.

As if she felt responsible for him. As if he were a child. He blocked it out.

Helen's knocking became insistent, rapping hard on the oaken door and rattling his brain. At last, he couldn't take it anymore and leapt from his seat to fling open the door.

"What?" he growled.

"Ransom, what are you doing in there?" Helen asked. Her eyes were swollen and red.

She had been crying? His mother had been crying.

Well, of course she would, idiot. Edom was her favorite son. Ransom frowned in frustration. "Why are you weeping?"

"For my son." She stepped toward him, holding a basket out to him. "But now justice has been done, for his death has been avenged."

He looked away, his heart burning with molten anger and pain. No matter what pain his mother felt at the loss of Edom, she would never feel what he felt, for she had taken what was his countless times.

"Get out."

"What?"

He took the basket, his eyes boring into her deceptively soft brown ones, and said with venom, "Get out. I never want to see your face again."

She looked shocked. "But what about your meals?"

"I'm not a child. I can feed myself." He knew she was just trying to get under his skin, using anything as an excuse. Retreating from the doorframe, he shut the door on her face and barred it.

There was silence on the other side of the door, and then he heard the tiny sounds of his mother's feet swishing through the grass back toward the castle.

As a military man, the only tears he had shed had been the day Bernard had left the manor—before Academy. But now, as he felt the impending weight of all the pain he felt, worse than any punishment at Academy, the pressure of the locked cell of his mind crushed him. He never thought he could have lost more than Erielle that day on the edge of the fields, but he had lost everything.

And he had lost Erielle for the second time.

The tears flowed with the sound of his voice—the voice of a dying animal—as it shook from his throat, and the room was overturned by his raging pain.

"Ransom."

Erielle knocked on the unyielding cottage door for the dozenth time, but still there was no answer. Was he out?

Maybe he went walking, she thought. But she knew he hadn't. Better than anyone else, she knew Ransom, and he hadn't gone walking, but had locked himself inside his cottage, blocking out the world.

"Ransom, please." At the end of her words, her voice broke as it narrowed to a strangled whisper. "Please let me in. I know I don't deserve it, but have to talk to you. I just have to."