Adrian
The house was too quiet.
It had been filled with Evelyn's presence — her laughter drifting down the hall, her calm voice soothing him after a day's battle in council, the soft shuffle of her footsteps in the garden. Now the silence pressed in on him, suffocating.
Adrian sat in the study, Evelyn's shawl still draped over the chair where she had left it a day before the accident. His hands trembled as he lifted it to his face, inhaling the faint scent of lavender. His chest ached, his breath hitched.
The funeral had been a blur. The city turned out in mourning, hundreds of people lined the streets as the procession passed. Newspapers called her a saint, a lady of grace and quiet strength. Men who had never spoken to her wept as though they had known her soul.
And Adrian — Adrian had walked behind her coffin, his face pale, his eyes hollow, every step an act of will. When the earth closed over her, something inside him had closed too.
At night he could not sleep. At dawn he stared at the ceiling, feeling the vast emptiness of a future that had once seemed luminous. Evelyn's absence was a wound that would never heal. And beneath that wound, the cruelest cut of all: the child she had carried, lost with her.
"Two graves," he whispered into the darkness. "Two lives taken."
Crowne
Sebastian Crowne read the morning papers with a face schooled to solemnity, though inside he felt the quiet thrill of opportunity.
Vale was weakened — broken, even. A man so fierce, so unyielding, now hollowed by grief. That strength had always made him dangerous; now sorrow made him malleable.
But Crowne knew grief alone would not topple him. For that, rumor was still required.
It began softly, almost imperceptibly. A whisper in the gentlemen's club: that Adrian Vale had quarreled with his wife before her accident. A murmur in a drawing room: that Evelyn had discovered a secret, and that despair had driven her into reckless haste. A suggestion, subtle but poisonous: that Clara Moreau's presence at the scene was no mere coincidence.
Crowne did not name the whispers' source; he let others carry them, each voice certain it had overheard another. By the time the story reached the council corridors, it had grown teeth.
"Tragic, yes," one alderman murmured to another. "But I heard… well, she knew more of Vale's private life than she ought."
Crowne smiled thinly into his wineglass, saying nothing, merely allowing the silence to suggest agreement.
Clara
Clara played her part with exquisite precision. She appeared in society veiled in black, her voice hushed, her expression grave. When spoken to, she gave nothing but gentle laments, a carefully timed tear, the implication of intimacy without confession.
"I was near," she told a group of ladies at a musicale, lowering her lashes. "I tried to help… but it was all so sudden. I fear it will haunt me forever."
They clasped her hands, murmured comfort, and later repeated her words with an edge of speculation. Clara did not correct them.
At night she returned to Crowne's side, her mask discarded. "It is working," she whispered. "The city wonders. They look at him with pity, but also with suspicion."
Crowne drew her close, his smile sharp. "Good. Soon pity will sour into doubt, and doubt into ruin. Then Vale's crown will fall into my hands."
Adrian
In the council chamber, Adrian felt the shift. Where once his words had commanded the floor, now he sensed the hesitation, the darting glances, the hushed tones that ceased when he entered. Sympathy filled the air, but beneath it was something else.
Pity. And something darker.
He clenched his fists, jaw tightening. Evelyn's death had not only stolen his heart — it threatened to steal his cause.
He looked across the chamber and found Crowne's gaze waiting, calm and impenetrable. For the first time, Adrian wondered if grief had made him not just vulnerable, but prey.