(Nicholas's POV)
She is not what I expected.
I watch from the study window, a sliver in the heavy drapes, as she crosses the inner courtyard below. The wind plucks at that simple navy dress, molding it against her slender frame. Her head is bowed against the gale, but her steps are not the shuffling, defeated tread of a broken thing. They're purposeful. She's heading to the conservatory. Again.
You revive dead things, Miss Banks.
I hadn't meant to say it. The words left my mouth of their own volition during that farcical dinner, an observation that felt too personal, too revealing. She's been here less than a week, and she's already disrupting the carefully curated decay of this place.
I expected a simpering fool, greedy for the reflected glow of Sterling wealth. Or a weeping hysteric, which would have been easier to ignore. I prepared for a fortune-hunter, someone I could contemptuously buy off and stash in a wing until the performance was done.
I did not expect Ruby Banks.
I did not expect the shocking stillness in that dark hotel room, a stillness that felt less like fear and more like… resolve. I did not expect eyes that looked at a dying orchid and saw not a lost cause, but a patient. I did not expect her to sit at the end of that mile-long table and tell me my home felt like a tomb.
No one has ever been that honest with me. Not since before the fire.
It's a problem.
A soft knock at the study door. "Enter."
Mrs. MacLeod comes in, her hands clasped. "The weekly report from London, sir." She places a thin file on my desk. Her eyes, sharp as tacks, dart to the window where I stand. She knows what I was watching.
"And?" I prompt, not turning from the view. Ruby has disappeared into the glasshouse.
"She spends her mornings in the conservatory. She has repotted seven orchids. She talks to them." A pause. "She has made no attempt to contact the outside. She eats little. She explores the permitted rooms. She found the Banks painting in the library."
I turn at that. "Her reaction?"
"Profound shock. Then… calculation. She is her mother's daughter, sir. She sees more than she should."
A familiar, cold tension tightens my shoulders. Elara Banks. Another complication I hadn't anticipated when I approved this specific girl from the list Kai provided. The list that was, undoubtedly, carefully curated to maximum effect. My uncle's long game is as subtle as it is venomous.
"Has she asked about her?"
"Not directly. The groundskeeper's boy, Liam, spoke to her. Told her you collected her mother's work."
I let out a short, humorless breath. Liam. Of course. The manor's designated "friendly face." Another one of Kai's plants, no doubt, meant to feed her pieces of a narrative. "And what does our chatty groundskeeper say about me?"
Mrs. MacLeod's lips thin. "The usual folklore, I imagine. The beast in his castle. He is playing his part."
"Everyone is playing a part, Moira," I say wearily, using her given name, a sign of the trust forged in the ashes of my childhood. "Except, it seems, our new guest. She is terrible at playing hers."
"She is afraid," Mrs. MacLeod states.
"Yes. But not of me. Not in the way she should be." I run a hand through my hair, frustration a live wire under my skin. "She's afraid for her sister. That fear makes her brave. It's an inconvenient combination."
I move to the desk and open the file from London. Financial transfers. Hospital reports for Mia Banks—stable, treatment protocol effective. And the social pages. My eyes narrow on a grainy photo of a cocktail party. There, front and center, is my uncle, Kai Vaughn, clinking glasses with a man whose face I know from Ruby's file: her father, Gregory Banks. They are both smiling. The caption reads: Philanthropist Kai Vaughn and banker Gregory Banks celebrate a new partnership.
My knuckles whiten on the edge of the paper. The public narrative is being woven. The generous uncle, supporting the struggling family of the poor girl sacrificed to his monstrous nephew. Kai is the hero of this story. I am the plot device. The beast.
And Ruby… Ruby is the tragic proof of my savagery.
"He's laying the groundwork," I say, my voice flat.
"He is," Mrs. MacLeod agrees. "The call you've been expecting from the Chronicle? It came this morning. They want a comment on the 'reclusive Mr. Sterling's new domestic arrangements.' I deferred, as instructed."
"Good." I toss the file down. The performance must be airtight. The beast must be believable. Reclusive, unstable, capable of purchasing a young woman. For Kai's plan to work, the world must see me break. And for me to survive, I must let them think I'm already broken.
But Ruby… she looks at me and doesn't see a beast. She sees a man who leaves her tools. A man who collects her mother's art. She is trying to solve the wrong puzzle.
"She needs to be afraid of me," I say aloud, more to myself than to Mrs. MacLeod. "Properly afraid. It's the only thing that might keep her safe. From him. From this house. From… getting ideas."
Mrs. MacLeod is silent for a long moment. "Fear is a fragile shield, Nicholas. It cracks. And what comes through the cracks… that is often harder to control."
I ignore the wisdom in her words. I am a master of control. Of narratives. Of fear. I built this gothic persona from the ground up. One girl with clear eyes and quiet hands will not be my undoing.
"Double the discreet patrols on the west wing perimeter," I order, shifting back to practicalities. "I don't want her accidentally stumbling near it. And intercept any post. She may try to write to her sister despite the rules."
"Of course."
"And, Moira?" I wait until she meets my gaze. "The orchids she's working on… in the east corner. The rare Dendrophylax lindenii. Have the specialist's notes from the Kew Gardens shipment sent to the conservatory. Leave them on the bench. Don't make it obvious."
A flicker of something—amusement? pity?—crosses her stern face. "The ghost orchid. A fitting choice. Very well, sir."
She leaves, and I am alone with the silence and the ghost of my own contradictions. I am the beast who orders rare botanical notes for a prisoner. I am the monster who watches a girl talk to flowers and feels something perilously close to envy.
I walk to the grand piano that dominates the study, its lid forever closed. My fingers itch with a familiar, phantom ache to play, to release the pressure building in my chest into something beautiful instead of this sustained, ugly note of pretense.
I haven't played since the night of the fire. The performance demands a beast, not a virtuoso.
A movement in the courtyard catches my eye. Ruby is emerging from the conservatory. She's holding something small and white in her hands—a discarded bloom, perhaps. Instead of throwing it aside, she kneels by a patch of rough, wind-bitten earth near the wall. With a stick, she digs a small hole and gently buries the spent flower.
A funeral for a dead thing.
Then she looks up, directly at my window.
I freeze, though I know the drapes shield me. She can't see me. But she stares for a long moment, as if she can sense the weight of the gaze upon her. Her face is pale, smudged with dirt, utterly resolute. There is no plea in her expression. No submission.
Just a quiet, unnerving challenge.
She sees the monster the world talks about. She feels the cage. But she is burying the dead and watering the living anyway.
She is not what I expected.
And that, I realize with a sinking clarity that feels like the first true crack in my foundation, is the most dangerous thing of all.
Because the one thing my plan, Kai's plan, this entire gothic fiction never accounted for…
Was her.