The ride out to the Grey’s mansion was a journey to another dimension. With each mile we rode farther away from the crazy pulse of the city, the world opened up in rolling hills and sweeping views of open space. The property loomed before us like a gothic romance hero—dark, foreboding, and incredibly large for one man.
It was heavy with air when we arrived. Heaviness of the earth found us even behind car shutters. It was beautiful, of course, but something more—a hollowness lurked at the periphery, as if it had been abandoned and much earlier that the world began to lose its memory of its function as a home.
Caspian braked to a halt, arms over the steering wheel and then letting it fall. “Welcome to Grey Manor,” he said, his voice devoid of welcome.
I stepped, wrapping my coat around me in the cold. It was cold here, cold and still. Too still.
The doors of the mansion creaked open, and in the doorway was a man in his early sixties, bowing to us politely. “Mr. Grey,” he said. “Long time.”
It Is, Reynolds,” Caspian said icily. “We need nothing. Only privacy.”
Reynolds bowed once more, his eyes flicking for an instant in my direction before he vanished into the shadows of the mansion.
I trailed after him, and it was chilly under the tall walls. Arched ceilings went overhead, tall and unbroken. It was all gorgeous beauty. It was lovely, yes, but lovely in the sort of way that took your breath away, made you step back, as if it did not wish to be gazed upon.
“Do you ever come here?” I inquired, quite crunched up in the open doorway.
“Rarely,” he replied, already disappearing. “There is nothing for me.”
It was true. The house was as tomb as home, a home whose memories had been rotting.
I returned to the library a little later in the evening when Caspian had walked away to take a call. The library was huge, with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and ladders that went all the way up to the top shelves. There was a smoldering fire on the corner, and its light produced whirling shadows that would dance up on the walls.
I ran my hands across the tops of books, looking in the library. It was the kind of room you’d kill to pace up and down in, but it shared the same wet, ghostly feeling as the rest of the house.
“Isn’t it magnificent?” Caspian asked, and I looked around to see him leaning against the doorway, his pockets deep in his hands.
“It is,” I said to him. “You read all these as a child?”
A sneer. “Not all of them. My father would receive things he didn’t want.”
I raised an eyebrow at the bitter tone. “And you? Did you want them?”
He shrugged and moved another step further into the room. “Books were an escape. Something better than the other choice.”
There had been a fleeting glimpse of something deeper beyond his highly polished-on surface. Part of me was itching to dig further for it, but I knew I better not dig too deep.
I turned to somewhere else on the shelves and picked up a book at random. Something had moved when I had and drifted to the floor.
It was a very old photo, worn around the edges. I reached out to take it. The photo was of Caspian as a child, ten or eleven years old, standing stiffly between a man and a woman. The boy’s shoulder was being held by the man’s hand, but the grip was not a gentle one.
Caspian stepped back when he caught sight of the photo in my hand. “Where did you find it?”
“It fell out of the book,” I panted, holding it out to him.
He refused to take it. He spat upon it like a snake, something he would kill but never touch.
“Is this you?” I asked him quietly.
“Yes,” he finally said. His voice was strained, held back, but I saw the cracks in his armor.
I stood there, whether to nudge him on, but the anguish in his eyes goaded me. “You never say anything about them.”
“There is nothing to say,” he growled. But the fists knotted at his hips betrayed him.
“Caspian,” I said, moving closer to him. “You can tell me.”
He smiled, but no laughter had come into it. “So you can feel for me?”
“No,” I said gruffly. “You do not have to do it alone.”
There was silence, his eyes still on the photograph. And then, pitiably, his shoulders had slumped and the burden he bore was revealed.
My father, he began, low and steady, “was a man more in love with power than with anything else. He didn’t love people, but what they could do for him. And my mother. She was just a piece in his game. He destroyed her, slow and deliberate, taking nothing back.”
I swallowed, the vastness of his pain leaving me gasping.
“When she passed away,” he continued, “he didn’t even fake grieving for her. He just continued, as if she hadn’t ever existed. And I… I was just one of his string. A puppet to be pulled that he could manipulate into whatever form he desired.”
“Caspian,” I whispered softly, my own heart aching for him.
He shook his head, gritting his teeth. “I don’t want your pity, Lily. I don’t need it.”
It’s not pity,” I told him, stepping in close. “It’s understanding. And having the courage not to share something you know with someone.”
His eyes snapped into battle with mine, accusatory and tense. For an instant, I thought he was going to fight this, push me aside like he'd pushed me aside before. But something sparked in his eyes, and the grubby walls fell away.
“I don’t know how to open up,” he confessed, his voice a mere whisper.
“You don’t have to know,” I whispered into the maelstrom of my brain. “You just have to try.”
The air between us pulsed with words unsaid. And then, inch by inch, inch by inch, he moved forward, his fingers inches from mine. It was a small gesture, but one that was laden with a thousand words unsaid.
And then, in the gray dimmed library at Grey Manor, I saw the face behind the mask—the child with the scar, the man who built walls to keep others out, and the human who, in spite of it all, was trying to open himself to me.
And I was hurt for the first time, not for him, but for us.
There, where I’d spent time with Caspian in the library as his confession loomed over me suspended like a wave, I was so starved for him that I could never be. Grey Manor’s wall extended beyond the physical—it was an extension of the wall of protection he’d erected about himself. And tonight, for the first time in all of eternity, he was opening its doors to another human soul.
“Tell me about her,” I panted, my face closer to the photo he still held in his hand. “Your mother.”
Caspian’s expression shifted, his eyebrows creased as he looked at the photo. I didn’t think he would answer, but then he took a deep breath, easing his shoulders by a degree.
“She was. Nice,” he said to me, his tone softer than ever before. “Too nice for this world, and too nice for him, that’s for sure.”
I didn’t have to ask him who “him” was. The acid burn in his voice informed me that he meant his dad.
“She’d read to me,” Caspian continued, his eyes distant as if he stared back at what he’d left behind. “Here, in this house, in this room. She said books were an escape, a place things made sense.”
His face was a brief, gentle smile. “The only time I ever felt safe.”
“Then what?” I asked, though I dreaded the answer.
Caspian’s brow furrowed and I worried he’d brush me out of the way. He talked with his mouth open then, the tone gruff. “She became ill. Cancer. My dad. He didn’t care. He didn’t even try to save her. She fought like crazy, but then.” He left his voice to trail off. “She wasn’t even near the woman she used to be.”
My condolences to him, to the youth that he was, as he stood and witnessed his mother’s death in a house full of riches but not love.
“And your father?” I pressed softly. “What happened to him?”
Caspian’s lips curled into a bitter smile. “He’s alive, at least. To me, though, he’s deceased. I’ve not heard or seen from him in over a decade, and I don’t foresee that changing for a long time yet now.”
The acidity of his tone couldn’t be helped, but under that I could feel a pain that gnawed at him—a pain that never even formed a scab in the first place.
“I apologize,” I said softly.
He shifted his gaze to me, his blue eyes unyielding as they struggled with mine. “Don’t,” he snarled. “That is behind me now. I don’t require anybody’s pity.”
“It’s not pity,” I said, coming closer to him. “It’s… concern. Understanding. And whether you like it or not, you’re entitled to it.”
He released holding onto nervousness and, for a moment, the strained air between us disappeared into something else—something serene and still. I pressed with his stroke through my fingers, their tips dancing on the edge of his palm. He didn’t pull back.
“Why did you bring me here?” I questioned, disrupting the silence.
He stood there, stunned, as if he didn’t realize who he was. Then, hesitantly, he shook his head. “I don’t know,” he finally spoke. “Maybe I thought it would be safer to stay hidden here. Or maybe.” He stopped, looking again at the photo of himself and Xan. “Maybe I just didn’t want to be alone.”.
His vulnerability His voice stole my breath. Caspian Grey—the one everyone was too afraid to touch, no one had the right to place a hand on—stood before me, defenseless. And I knew I was seeing him for real then, the man that he kept behind the façade for everyone.
“Caspian,” I whispered, crying for him.
He glared at me, and I simply sat quietly for a moment, watching as he went off. But he turned and went off and away, guard firmly in place. “It’s late,” he growled. “You should sleep.”
I didn’t even have a chance to try to say anything before he strode out of the room, photo and ghosts of Grey Manor trailing after him.
I lurched and flailed that night in the huge, empty bed, gazing up at the gold ceiling as it revolved lazily above me. I couldn’t even try to make sense of it all around what Caspian had signaled—and hadn’t signaled. The more I got to know him, the less I knew how little I knew.
He was a conflicted individual. Cold and distant one moment, and the next, passionate and afire. It was maddening, trying to piece him together. But even my own fury trying to get the better of me, there could be no question: I had to know him. All of him.
For behind the ice barrier and protectiveness was a man who was worth fighting for.