The Queen Reborn: Claiming What's Mine novel · Chapter 10 of 32
Chapter 10: The Morning After
Ronan Keane woke at five, as he had every morning of two lives, with the sound of rain in his head.
It was the same rain.
He lay on his back and did not move.
Cora slept on her side, facing him, one hand tucked under her cheek and her brown hair tangled across his pillow.
She was warm and alive and breathing.
He watched her chest rise, and fall, and rise again.
Last time, he had counted her breaths on a wet road, on his knees in broken glass.
He closed his eyes for one second, and opened them.
Cora's breathing was even.
She did not know.
She could never know.
If she knew he had been there and failed, she would look at him and see the man on the wet road, and nothing he built in this life could make her look at anything else.
He slid out from under the sheet without waking her.
In the kitchen he ground coffee in the dark, and the mill's old pipes knocked.
He thought about the wound he carried and had never said aloud.
Two weeks after the divorce, in the last life, he had walked into a pharmacy and held out a card.
Come work for me, he had said.
She had looked at it, and then at him, with red, empty eyes, and thrown it in his face.
I don't want your pity, she had said. I don't want anyone's.
She had been right to say it, and he had gone home and not slept for a week.
This time he was not offering pity.
He was offering her a place to stand, and she had taken it, and then she had taken him.
He poured two mugs.
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