Dusk Snow Hides All Return (Rowan and Adrienne) novel Chapter 19

Chapter 19.

“Ma’am.”

That single word, like a red hot blade, drove straight into Adrienne’s heart. Instant carnage. The pain blacked out her vision. Her legs almost gave out.

“Rowan…” Her voice shook hard. She reached out. Wanted to touch him. Didn’t dare. Her hand froze mid–air. “I… I’ve been looking for you so long… Come home with me. Please?”

Rowan looked at her, quiet and still. Those eyes that had once been full of her reflection were hollow now. They didn’t hold anyone’s image at all.

“Home?” He repeated the word, voice flat, like he was commenting on the weather. “Where’s home?”

“Our home!” Adrienne stepped forward desperately, words tumbling out in a mess. “Come back to our home. I was wrong, Rowan, I know I was wrong… I shouldn’t have treated you like that. I shouldn’t have doubted you. I shouldn’t have put you through all of that… Let’s go home. Please? I’ll treat you right from now on. Only you. I’ll never–”

She couldn’t keep going. Because Rowan took a step back, dodging her reaching hand.

His movement was small, but the rejection in it was absolute.

“Ms. Merritt,” he said again, using the same cold address, “please have some dignity.”

Adrienne’s eyes went red instantly. She had never felt this small and wrecked, like an abandoned child with nowhere to go. “Don’t call me that… Rowan, look at me. It’s me. Adrienne… Look at me…”

She fumbled inside her coat pocket and pulled out a document that was neatly folded yet visibly creased from being handled too much–the Engagement Dissolution Agreement.

“I didn’t sign it!” Her voice pitched up, a streak of stubborn desperation running through it. “Look. I didn’t sign it! Rowan, we’re still engaged. You’re still my fiancé. We’re still-

“It was dissolved unilaterally and doesn’t need your signature,” Rowan cut her off, his tone still perfectly even. “The legal paperwork is already handled through my lawyer. Ms. Merritt, legally, there is nothing between us anymore.”

“Then I’ll win you back all over again!” Adrienne was almost shouting now. She was grabbing at the last piece of driftwood she had, her eyes begging in a way that was closer to groveling. “Rowan, just give me one chance. One. I’ll spend my whole life making it up to you, I-”

“Adrienne.”

Rowan suddenly smiled.

It was a small smile, and the curve of his lips carried a cold, cutting mockery.

“Do you remember,” he said, looking right at her, each word clean and deliberate, “how you used to chase Desmond the same way? You waited outside his dorm all night, sent him ninety–nine roses, and told him, ‘Just give me one chance, let me take care of you.” Every drop of color drained out of Adrienne’s face. Her blood felt like it froze over in that second.

“What,” Rowan’s smile sharpened at the edges, and his eyes were like ice. “The moves you used on Desmond–now you’re recycling them on me? Too bad I am not buying it.”

His words were a rusted, dull blade, sawing slowly through a heart that was already in pieces, dragging back and forth. Adrienne opened her mouth, but nothing came out. She wanted to push back, wanted to say it wasn’t like that–but the images she’d buried on purpose came flooding back, crystal clear.

Yes, back then, Desmond had said since their families were engaged, he never got to enjoy being chased; because she spoiled him too much, she agreed to chase him.

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She waited outside his dorm, sent him flowers, and said every sweet thing she could think of.

She had thought that was love, the purest and most honest teenage devotion.

But now, hearing those same words come out of Rowan’s mouth made them the most bitter irony.

“Adrienne. “Rowan wiped the cold smile ff his face. His eyes went fully dead, frozen over like a layer of thick ice that nothing could melt. “I don’t love you anymore.”

He paused, as if feeling that wasn’t quite accurate, and added, “No, to be precise, I can no longer love. You ground down my ability to love, piece by piece, until there was nothing left.”

He lifted his hand and gently tapped the spot over his heart.

“It died,” he said, his soft voice hitting Adrienne’s eardrums like a sledgehammer, “when you had the abortion, when you locked me in the freezing dark of the Storage Room, when you had your people beat me with a wooden stick, and when you personally handed me over to the police so I could take the fall for the man you loved… I died and rotted through.”

Every word was a picture, a wound, and a scar that would never heal.

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