A duke found his bride-to-be’s servant bound to a chair in a cottage with a theft charge. But the girl slipped a folded note into his pocket — and it named the poison meant to be poured into his wedding goblet, purchased through the very household he was about to marry into.

 PART 2

The West Tower had not been used for prisoners in living memory.

Sebastian remembered playing in its lower rooms, chasing his sister up the spiral stairs while their nurse scolded them for the dust on their stockings. Now a guard stood at its base with a lantern and an expression that suggested he took his new duty far too seriously for a man who usually did nothing more taxing than polish the stable gates.

“Her ladyship said no visitors,” the guard said, though his voice wavered when he recognized who stood before him.

“Her ladyship is not the master of this house,” Sebastian replied. “I am. And I intend to question the prisoner myself, as is my right.”

The guard hesitated only a moment before stepping aside.

Sebastian climbed the narrow stairs alone. At the top, behind a heavy oak door fitted with a rusted bolt, he found Norah seated on a narrow cot — her wrists finally free of rope, though a length of chain still bound one ankle to the wall.

She rose when she saw him, and for a moment neither spoke. The guard’s footsteps could be heard pacing below, close enough that any careless word might carry down through the old stone stairwell.

“You read it,” she said quietly. Not a question.

“I have not had the chance. I came the moment I could slip away unnoticed.”

Norah glanced toward the door, then back at him. “Then you must be careful how you speak here. These walls carry sound further than you’d think. When we were little, my mother used to say the tower gossiped worse than the laundry maids.”

It was an odd thing to say, and yet Sebastian understood at once what she meant. She was warning him that anything spoken plainly might reach ears beyond the guards.

He thought of the household ciphers his own mother had taught him and his sister — a private language of turns of phrase, meant to pass messages beneath the notice of servants and guests alike. It had been a game once. Tonight it was something else entirely.

“The weather has turned strange this season,” he said carefully, watching her face. “I found something of yours caught in my coat.”

“A leaf, perhaps — though it smelled less like autumn and more like my aunt’s garden tonic.”

Norah’s eyes sharpened at once.

The garden tonic was no invention. Sebastian’s aunt had once nearly died from a badly prepared remedy meant to ease her joints, a mixture the household apothecary warned could turn deadly if measured wrong. It was a phrase the family used sparingly, and only when discussing matters of poison.

“I found it hidden beneath a loose board in the servants’ corridor outside Lady Vivien’s chambers only days ago, while cleaning,” Norah said, choosing her words with the same care. “I should never have read it, but something in the wax seal troubled me enough to look.”

“And what did it say?”

She hesitated, glancing again toward the door. The guard’s footsteps had stopped — which worried her more than their steady rhythm had.

“It named an amount, measured in drops, and it named the goblet. The one meant for your wedding toast.” Her voice dropped further, barely more than breath. “But whatever is in it is not meant to show itself that day. The effects it described are slow — timed to trouble you only in the days following the wedding breakfast, so that no one standing in that cathedral would ever think to look for poison at all.”

Sebastian felt something cold settle behind his ribs — the sort of stillness that came before anger rather than after it.

“Vivien would not.”

“I did not say her name,” Norah said gently. “I said only what I found.”

But they both understood the shape of what neither wished to say aloud. The note had come from within Vivien’s private chambers. Whatever hand had written it, whatever hand meant to see it carried out, answered first to her.

Footsteps sounded on the stairs, heavier this time. Sebastian straightened at once, stepping back as the door creaked open to reveal Vivien herself, a shawl thrown over her nightgown, her expression arranged into gentle concern.

“Sebastian. I did not expect to find you here at this hour.”

“I wish to question her myself,” he said, his voice returning smoothly to its earlier calm, though his pulse had not yet slowed. “A future duke ought to know the truth of matters concerning his own household, rather than relying entirely on the word of others.”

“Of course.” Vivien’s smile did not reach her eyes as she studied Norah’s still form on the cot. “And did she confess?”

“She denies the theft,” Sebastian said. “Though I suspect a night alone in this tower may loosen her tongue further before morning.”

Vivien seemed satisfied with this, though her gaze lingered on Sebastian a moment longer than comfort allowed — as though searching his face for something she could not quite name.

“Come, then. It is late, and you will need your rest before tomorrow’s rehearsal. The whole county will be watching.”

Sebastian offered Norah one final glance before following Vivien toward the stairs — a glance that carried more than any coded phrase could hold.

Norah watched him go, the chain cold against her ankle, and understood that whatever came next, they had only begun to uncover the truth hiding beneath Blackwood’s quiet shops, and Vivien’s carefully arranged smiles.