Castle | ✔️

Chapter Twenty Four

I couldn't get much sleep that night as I kept tossing and turning in bed. My mind was preoccupied with what I would find in the journal that Theo had given me.

Early in the morning, when Castle was still asleep, I climbed out of bed and picked up the journal that I'd kept hidden. The maids wouldn't come to disturb me for at least another hour, and Castle was snoring softly. I knew he wouldn't wake up as long as I stayed beside him. If he found me gone from bed, he would wake up and cause a racket.

I'd gone for an early morning walk in the courtyard last week, making sure that Castle was sleeping, but thirty minutes later when I came back inside the mansion, he was screaming and running around throwing the doors open looking for me.

After that day, I knew not to sneak out. He constantly sought physical contact and finding the bedside empty made him very upset.

He draped his arm over my waist. I traced my fingers over his biceps as I opened the journal to read.

The journal was ancient since being passed down from generations, and the pages in the beginning were filled with entries by different ancestors of their family.

Mostly male.

I realized they were all written by the firstborn member of the family.

Did that mean Castle had written something here too?

Theo had specifically advised me to read the dog-eared pages because he said the other entries were irrelevant. Looking at the first few entries, I realized he wasn't joking when he said it bored the hell outta him. There wasn't anything interesting that the ancestors had written.

I skipped to the middle pages of the journal.

Aster Montgomery.

I tried to recall if I heard that name before.

Was this Castle's mother?

I started reading from the first page, but the pages were all detailing about school life, and college, and other not-so-important events in her life. I skimmed some more pages until I found the juicy parts. The page had a small red star scrawled on it with a pen.

I don't know long I've been in this bed, thinking about ending this madness that runs in my family.

My father wouldn't listen.

Innocent lives have been sacrificed; people have died for some sick rituals. I needed my dad to stop. I needed him to understand that this wasn't how I wanted life to go on.

Sometimes I wish I could just run away far from here. Sometimes I sit by the lake and stare into the water, wishing I had the guts to jump into it. The blue, serene water calms me down somehow. It feels like a soothing balm to my loneliness.

If I jumped into the lake, it would all end then, wouldn't it?

The pain and the sufferings would be gone.

But I was a coward and couldn't bring myself to commit suicide.

Dad wanted me to get married soon as I was turning twenty-five, but I didn't want to as I knew the man that my father had chosen to marry me.

Terrance Briggs was nice, sweet, intelligent, and kind. He made me smile, and his family was as influential as mine. I went on a few dates with Terrance, just to make my father happy. I liked Terrance, but that spark was missing.

He didn't make my insides turn to molten; he didn't make me laugh until I had tears in my eyes, and he wasn't as handsome as a movie star.

Christopher was all those things. And more.