"Do you believe that fleeing will earn you mercy?"
His voice carried an unearthly calm, stripped of heat yet heavy with judgment. The words pressed into her thoughts like a slow, sinking blade. Florence knew the truth too well, every escape she had ever attempted had ended in ruin in her past life, swift and merciless. Yet submission promised no gentler fate. The marriage may shelter her from the cold but never from cruelty.
"I doubt marriage to you would grant me any either," she answered quietly. Beneath the dim sheen of sorrow in her eyes lingered a soft, aching sadness, one that did not plead, but endured.
Eulothorne regarded her in silence, his expression unreadable, while something restless and deliberate churned behind his gaze.
Florence lowered her head and stepped away, this time not in blind panic, but with purpose; resolved never to seek his eyes again. Eulothorne could only watch as her retreating figure become smaller through the distance.
When he returned to the manor alone, Mrs. Moore descended upon him like a tempest, her theatrics smeared across her face in streaks of ruined mascara.
"My daughter, my lord… have you seen her?" she sobbed, dabbing her eyes with a lace-trimmed handkerchief. "My precious child—she vanished the moment I stepped away."
With a sharp motion, Eulothorne freed himself from her grasp. His mother stood nearby, her posture rigid, her gaze austere. He shrugged off his frock coat, handing it to the waiting valet without a word.
Then, his voice fell, cold and final as a tolling bell in a forsaken cathedral. "Postpone the wedding. Escort Elizabeth home."
Emaranthe endlessly berated Eulothorne in the study room, exclaiming how important the marriage was, but Eulothorne kept fiddling with his work than ever giving his mother the attention.
In the study, Emaranthe raged without respite, her words crashing over him like waves of madness. She spoke of Florence's inheritance, of the necessity of the marriage, of the fortune that could be seized, yet he remained unmoved, his attention fixed upon the orderly rustle of inked pages beneath his hands.
"Have you finally lost all the senses you possess?" she shrieked, hysteria sharpening every word. "We were on the brink of securing everything. I bent that wretched woman to our will; I pried her daughter from her grasp with careful promises and silver tongues, and you cast it all aside. What do I do with you, Eulothorne!"
Still, he did not look up. Papers whispered beneath his hands as he methodically sorted through them, his composure unbroken.
"It was folly to force her into this marriage," he said at last, his voice cold and measured. "She is not one to endure chains without igniting the fire beneath."
Emaranthe's expression twisted, her lips curling with scorn.
"And since when," she snapped, venom seeping into her tone, "When have you presumed to make such decisions about my fortune?"
Her gaze burned with accusation. "Tell me, when have you ever concerned yourself with the welfare of a woman?"
Eulothorne's tongue clicked sharply, a sound like the snap of a whip in the heavy silence. He placed his pen upon the desk, finally lifting his gaze. His eyes were steady, unflinching, dark with a cold certainty.
"That fortune you so obsess over..," he said coldly. "...is of no use to me. It would pass to her alone. Her father's wealth lies bound to her name by his will."
His voice lowered, edged with something dangerous. "If you wish to strip that woman of all she possesses and feast upon it as you please, then you would do well to consider her welfare. An inheritance cannot be stolen without her compliance."
Emaranthe recoiled, her tirade faltering as a dark, unsettling glint settled in her son's eyes. She straightened, drawing herself up with brittle pride. "I am not so impoverished as to grovel in desperation like you."
Emaranthe's pride instantly shattered.
Eulothorne rose, his chair scraping softly against the floor as he strode toward the study's imposing door. His hand closed around the cold brass knob. Before leaving, he cast her one final glance—sharp, merciless.
"Father would have left you everything," he said quietly. "Had you only learned to curb your promiscuity."
With that, the door loomed between them, heavy with words that could not be taken back.
Emaranthe clenched her teeth until her jaw ached, fury and humiliation knotting within her chest. Yet she remained motionless, powerless to answer him. Eulothorne's words had struck with merciless precision, each syllable steeped in truth she could not refute. It was not his cruelty that silenced her, but the weight of her own past; choices made in indulgence and ambition now returning as bitter recompense. Regret settled over her like a funeral shroud, heavy and inescapable, and for the first time, she was forced to sit with the consequences she had so long denied.
Emaranthe's fixation on Gillian Loxley had festered for years. Many assumed it was born of some long-buried romance, a scandal whispered behind gloved hands, but they were gravely mistaken. Gillian Loxley, proprietor of the capital's most profitable hotels and brothels, commanded a prestige almost rivaling even that of the Oberons. It was his fortune, not his affections, that had captured Emaranthe's relentless gaze.
Her own downfall had come swiftly. Her infidelities—too numerous, too public—had driven her former husband to file for divorce, a privilege far more easily exercised by men, and especially by men of riches. The courts had been merciless. What wealth she once possessed was stripped away piece by piece, leaving her with little more than her name and a burning resentment that refused to die. From it sprang a darker hunger, a ravenous greed that did not merely covet, but sought to dominate, consume, and claim without end. Thus, the inheritance Gillian Loxley had bequeathed to his daughter became Emaranthe's newest and most consuming obsession.
Florence was never meant to live long enough to enjoy it in Emaranthe's plan. Emaranthe's design was patient and perverse: bind the girl in marriage, secure the inheritance in due time, and then let her wither under calculated torment until death came gently enough to appear natural. By law, Florence's possessions would pass to her husband, Emaranthe's son who had already consented to the arrangement. It was a scheme woven from greed and cruelty, sanctified by legality and masked as nobility.
Florence slipped through the narrow gap in the picket fence of the modest villa, her movements slow and deliberate, every breath measured. Rebellion still burned in her chest, raw and insistent. Tonight, she intended to flee this corner of the country altogether—to vanish before the night could betray her.
Inside, Elizabeth Moore paced relentlessly, her footsteps sharp against the floorboards. Rage had unmoored her. The fantasy she had nursed of sudden wealth had shattered in an instant, and the loss gnawed at her like rot. Florence's sisters watched with thinly veiled indifference as their mother raged, her voice rising and falling like the cries of a wounded animal.
"If I lay hands on that girl, wherever she's slithered off to, I'll tear her hair out until her scalp bleeds," Elizabeth spat, her fury refusing to settle. The thought of the ceased brideprice festered in her mind, a wound she could not stop probing. "Who's to say the Oberons will ever look upon our family again?"
Veronica, the eldest, lounged back and crossed her legs, unimpressed. Her voice carried a sharp, unfeeling calm. "Do you really think your puppet will crawl back to you, mother, after all you've done? Her father made a mistress pregnant, but her fate was never yours to control. Marrying into responsibility is no obligation of the wealthy, you cannot expect that from them. He was generous enough to leave us this villa while he still lived."
The room fell heavy with bitterness, the air thick with resentment and the echo of a family long since hollowed by greed and cruelty. Elizabeth zipped her mouth, ever so tolerating of her other daughters.
Nearly finished with her hurried packing, Florence was met with calamity just as her escape drew within reach. Her fingers brushed the door's knob when it wrenched open from the other side. Standing there was her sister, cold-eyed, unfeeling, showing no trace of surprise at Florence's return. A knowing smirk curved her lips, before she raised her voice to summon their mother, who was still pacing elsewhere, clawing at her own frustration as though it were a living thing.
"Mother, look who has returned!" her sister's voice rang out, sharp and triumphant. Her heart pounded with a ferocity that drowned all else, each beat a hammer against her ribs, while her vision constricted into a tunnel of rising dread.
Florence gripped her wrists tightly, bracing herself for the inevitable. As she grips her wrists, a fleeting thought struck her with determination. Let her strike, my spirit has survived worse than her fury.
Even through the muffled walls of the chamber, the heavy thud of her mother's footsteps echoed like the drumbeat of impending doom, each strike against the floorboards summons of dread to her ears. She had no other recourse than the defense she had always relied upon; brace for impact, shield against the storm.
Then, her mother's voice cut through the gloom, a sound so fierce it seemed to rattle the very timbers of the house.
"Florence!" it bellowed, full of fury and command, deafening in its intensity.