Chapter 79 - Seventy Nine
The Grand Albion inn was quiet in the middle of the afternoon. Delia walked into the main dining hall, her steps confident, her expression carefully neutral. She saw him sitting at a table in the most secluded corner of the room, a glass of untouched wine before him. Duke Philip looked up as she approached.
"I thought you didn’t want to meet. I even thought you wouldn’t come." He said as soon as she sat down, his voice a smooth, silken challenge. He was testing her from the very first sentence. "What made you change your mind?"
Delia placed her hands calmly in her lap. "You were the one who was so insistent on meeting, Your Grace," she replied, her own voice even and direct. "I thought it would be rude to ignore a second invitation from a Duke."
A small, tight smile touched Philip’s lips. "I see." He leaned back in his chair, studying her. "I thought we might be able to understand each other, you and I. Perhaps because we find ourselves in a rather similar situation."
Delia’s brow furrowed slightly. "A similar situation?"
"Yes," Philip replied, his voice taking on a sad, confidential tone. "No family. No real home. That kind of situation." He looked down at his wine glass, as if recalling a painful memory. "My own mother died when I was very young. An illness, they said. It was all very sudden. And then my stepmother, the Duchess Lyra, came into the picture right away. My father really loved him, saying she made him heal. She had Eric, and then Amber, before my father... before he died in the last war between Albion and the forces on the eastern border."
He looked up at her, his eyes full of a carefully crafted sorrow. "In that house, I was always half the person the others were. I had a different mother. And then the one person we all had in common, my father, was dead. I was an outsider in my own home."
He was trying to build a bridge between them, a bridge made of shared tragedy. But Delia was not interested in crossing it. She had lived a life of real pain, and she could recognize the hollow performance of it in others.
She let out a short, unimpressed chuckle. "I did not come here to share sad stories about our backgrounds, Your Grace."
Philip’s tight smile returned. He lightly tapped his left leg with his fingers, drawing her attention to it. "Then you must be curious about what happened to my leg," he said, his voice dropping low. "Eric must have given you some idea of the story. I am sure it was a very convincing one." He leaned forward. "Did you agree to see me today because you couldn’t quite believe him? Because you wanted to hear the truth from the one it happened to?"
His words were a clever trap, designed to make her admit she doubted Eric. Delia let out a long, slow breath, and a small, knowing smile touched her lips. She stood up.
"What are you doing?" Philip asked, surprised by her sudden movement.