Page 75 of A Shadow Amongst the Roses

“No,” she said. “Not now.”

She met his gaze directly. “Sammy, I need you to stay here. I need you to stay quiet. And I need you to trust me.”

“I do,” he said without hesitation.

Her throat tightened. She brushed his hair back from his forehead with a tenderness she didn’t question.

“I will return soon,” she said. “And Mr. Grey… Thomas… he will know what to do.”

Sammy nodded, small but brave.

Eliza rose, stepping back into the dim light. The candle sent their shadows stretching across the carved names on the far wall.

Her eyes lifted toward one name in particular. Adrian.

She drew a breath, steady and soft.

“Let your name shield him,” she whispered into the quiet. “Let it shield this child. Let it shield Thomas.”

The crypt answered only with silence that held.

Eliza turned toward the door, heart hammering, skirts brushing the cold stone.

“Come home, Thomas,” she breathed. “Before he tries to take everything from you.”

And the candle flame trembled, as if it heard her.

Chapter Thirty-Five

Eliza did not sleep.

Cold stone leeched through her skirt and shawl, numbing her legs long before midnight, but sensation had narrowed to other things. The small, bundled shape on the mourner’s bench. The pale, wavering flame of the candle. The slow, uneven rhythm of a child’s breath.

Wax and cold stone scented the air, the crypt holding every sound too closely, as though unwilling to let anything escape once spoken within its walls.

Sammy slept fitfully. Each time a draft slid through the crypt, he shivered and stirred. Eliza soothed him with a whisper or a gentle hand at his shoulder until he settled again, as though her voice alone could anchor him to rest.

Hours passed like that, slow and strangely suspended.

Above them, Hartleigh groaned in the wind. At intervals, a faint tremor ran through the stone floor, not violent, but deliberate, as though the house shifted its weight.

Eliza listened.

She had never kept a vigil like this. Not alone. Not underground. Not surrounded by names carved into stone. Yet it was not the dead who held her attention.

It was the living.

Rain began again just after midnight, hard and punishing sheets that struck the chapel above like fists. The sound echoed through the crypt, magnified and hollow. Eliza lifted her head whenever the storm intensified, straining for hoofbeats, for the scrape of iron on stone, for anything that might break the night open.

Nothing.

Sammy’s words returned again and again, unbidden.

“He said to say Mr. Grey brought me.”

Each repetition twisted inside her until the tension reached her throat and held there, sharp as a held breath.

“Come home,” she whispered into the dimness. “Please.”