Chapter 2 - Sixteen Years of Ash
Cassian didn't move. He stood in the center of her small shop, his presence so massive it seemed to shrink the room, making the ceiling feel low and oppressive. He looked down at his own hands, his leather gloves dark with rain, before slowly pulling them off and tucking them into his pocket. His hands were heavily scarred now, the knuckles thickened by years of violence he had promised she would never see.
“Sixteen years, Rose,” he murmured, his eyes locking onto hers with a desperation that made her step back against the counter. “I spent sixteen years believing you had married a schoolteacher from Boston. I spent sixteen years trying not to come back to this street because I thought the sight of your children would kill whatever was left of my soul.”
Rosalind let out a sharp, bitter laugh that sounded foreign even to her own ears. “A schoolteacher from Boston? Is that what you told yourself to sleep better at night in your big house in Chicago, Cassian? Is that the lie you used to justify that beautiful cream envelope you sent me?”
Cassian’s brow furrowed, his dark eyes narrowing in genuine confusion. “What cream envelope? What are you talking about?”
“Don't play the fool with me,” Rosalind hissed, her voice rising as the dampness of the storm began to seep into her bones. “You wrote to me. Two years after you left. You told me you had married a woman from the syndicate. You told me you had found someone who suited your 'world' better than a girl who smelled of yeast and cheap sugar. I kept that letter in my drawer until the ink bled out from my tears, Cassian. I know every word of it by heart.”
Cassian stepped forward, his scarred hand shooting out to grab her wrist. His grip wasn't painful, but it was unyielding, warm, and entirely solid through the thin fabric of her sleeve. “I never wrote you a letter, Rose. I never married anyone. My father locked me in a federal penitentiary in Illinois forty-eight hours after I left Providence. He intercepted every message I tried to send you. When I finally got out four years later, I came back to Rhode Island in secret. I went to your sister’s house.”
Rosalind’s breath caught in her throat. Her heart gave a sudden, sickening lurch. “Clara? You saw Clara?”
“She told me you were gone,” Cassian whispered, his voice cracking with an ancient, heavy pain. “She showed me an invitation to your wedding. She told me you had met a man named David, a teacher, that you were pregnant with his child, and that if I ever showed my face near you again, the Belmonte name would ruin the respectable life you had built. She told me you hated the very memory of my face.”
He reached into the inner pocket of his black coat, his fingers trembling slightly as he pulled out a piece of paper that had been folded and refolded so many times the edges were frayed into white threads.
May you like
“I carried this for twelve years, Rose,” he said, laying the paper on the flour-dusted counter between them. “I found it three days ago in my father’s private safe after we buried him. It’s a letter addressed to my father, signed by your sister, confirming that the 'Fairchild girl' had been successfully paid off and removed from the Providence ledger.”
Rosalind stared at the paper. The handwriting was elegant, precise, and instantly recognizable. It belonged to Clara Fairchild—the beautiful, ambitious younger sister who had left Federal Hill fifteen years ago to marry a wealthy real estate developer in Newport, leaving Rosalind behind to care for their dying father and a bankrupt bakery.
