Chapter 672: Fragile Moments (Part One)
Moments as intense as the reunion between the two women from Blackwell County could only last for a very short period of time. Like a candle flung into the hearth, the moment burned so brightly in the eyes of the onlookers, no one felt comfortable watching.
The kneeling soldiers all kept their gaze firmly on the soft, damp earth while Ollie and the other notable people turned their backs, giving the two women a moment of relative privacy while they held each other tightly.
"Sir Ollie," Hugo Hanrahan whispered, clearly shaken by what he had just seen. "She’s the real, really the real Lady Ashlynn? Lord Owain’s wife?"
Seven months ago, during the grand wedding between Lady Ashlynn and Lord Owain, Hugo had been an unimportant guest at the grand ceremony. It was his father, Ian Hanrahan and his brother Bastian who sat in the front rows of honored guests while the poor bastard Hugo was lucky to have received a place in the gallery, watching from a distance. He’d never come close to the stunning woman before them, but he remembered how lucky Owain was to marry such a beautiful woman who looked so radiant in her gleaming gown.
Months later, when he met the ’Lady Ashlynn’ in the summer villa, he still thought that she was a beautiful woman and Lord Owain seemed to be very affectionate with her in the few moments where he saw them together. Certainly, her light had dimmed with her advancing pregnancy, but that was normal, wasn’t it? But if the woman in the Summer Villa wasn’t Lady Ashlynn, and if the real Lady Ashlynn wasn’t carrying Lord Owain’s heir, then who was the woman he’d met in the villa?
Hugo felt his mind tearing in two and the world falling away from him as his scholarly intellect started assembling pieces of a puzzle that the rest of him refused to accept. The strangeness of keeping Lady Ashlynn at the Summer Villa well into the fall when she could have just as easily taken her rest in an isolated wing of the Lothian Manor without being threatened by the demons and vampires that prowled these lands in winter. The strangely light guard on the villa that more than tripled in size when Lady Jocelynn visited and then reduced immediately after, even though Lady Ashlynn should be the one the Lothian March most needed to protect...
The closer he examined everything had seen, the less it made sense. To the outside, to the people who didn’t know any better, there was a natural explanation for everything, but after months of traveling at Lord Owain’s side, Hugo and seen too much... he’d just been too afraid of what Owain might do to him to ever allow his mind to put together the pieces. He’d accepted without challenging and followed orders without questioning because if he did anything else... his whole world might collapse, just as it was falling apart now.