Chapter 64
Chapter 64:
The morning after the wedding, the Blackwell estate was quiet in the way that expensive houses are quiet: deliberately, architecturally, with double-paned windows and thick walls and the particular insulation that money provides against the noise of the outside world.
Sunlight came through the bedroom curtains in long, warm bands that lay across the bed like something poured. The air was clean — the Thornfield air, which smelled different from Halcombe’s, less industrial, more mineral, carrying the faint, ancient scent of sandstone that had been warming in the sun for centuries. The window was open a few inches, and the breeze that came through was the temperature of skin.
Edmund was awake. He’d been awake for a while — watching the light move across the sheets, watching Lara sleep, watching the way her breathing made the fabric rise and fall in a rhythm that was, he was learning, the most calming thing he had ever experienced. He was not, by nature, a man who lingered in bed. He was a man of schedules and routines and the particular, disciplined momentum that had built the Blackwell name and sustained it through four generations.
But this morning — the first morning — he was still.
Content to be where he was.
Content to be the man in this room, in this bed, beside this woman, in a life that had taken a shape he hadn’t expected and hadn’t known he wanted.
Lara’s hand was resting on his chest. Her fingers were curled slightly — relaxed, unconscious, the hand of a woman who was sleeping deeply and had placed her hand on the nearest warm surface the way sleepers do.
Edmund looked at her fingers and felt something shift behind his sternum — not dramatic, not the thunderclap of cinematic love, but something quieter and more durable: the slow, structural rearrangement of a man whose priorities were changing.
The doorbell rang.
It was wrong — the sound, the timing, the intrusion. The Blackwell estate had staff. Staff answered doors. Staff screened visitors. The fact that the doorbell was ringing meant someone had bypassed the gate, bypassed the garden, bypassed the front desk, and arrived at the private entrance that only family and senior staff knew existed.
Edmund frowned. Set Lara’s hand gently on the pillow — the gesture of a man who didn’t want to wake her but understood that the sound might do it anyway. He pulled on a robe. Tied it. Walked to the door with the unhurried gait of a man who was irritated but not alarmed, because Edmund Blackwell had never been alarmed by a doorbell.
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Doorbells were interruptions. Interruptions were managed.
He opened the door.
Callum’s fist arrived before his voice did.
The punch was real this time — not Declan’s wild, emotional swing from days ago, but Callum’s version: precise, calculated, aimed at the jaw with the specific intent of a man who had studied anatomy and understood that the mandibular angle was the most efficient target for disorientation.
Callum Hargrove did not do things impulsively.
Even his violence was strategic.
Edmund moved.
Fast — faster than Callum had expected, which was Callum’s mistake: he’d assumed that a man in a bathrobe on the morning after his wedding would be slow, softened, dulled by domesticity.
Edmund caught the fist mid-trajectory, redirected it, and locked Callum’s arm behind his back in a single, fluid motion that suggested either martial arts training or the instincts of a man who had grown up in a family where physical confrontation was not theoretical.
“What the hell are you doing p>
Edmund’s voice was calm. The calm of a man who was holding another man’s arm at an angle that could dislocate a shoulder and was choosing not to.
Callum was unrecognizable. Not the CEO. Not the strategist. Not the man whose composure had been a fortress for thirty-five years. He was — and the word was exact, not metaphorical — destroyed. Several days of stubble had turned his jaw into sandpaper. His eyes were red-veined, raw, carrying the specific glaze of a man who hadn’t slept in forty-eight hours and had spent those hours in a hospital watching his best friend undergo surgery while the woman he loved married someone else on a live stream that he couldn’t stop watching and couldn’t bear to see. His suit — the same suit, Callum had been wearing the same suit for three days — was wrinkled in ways that fabric wrinkles when it has been slept in, fought in, and worn through an emotional apocalypse.