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 6

Outside, the morning sun had climbed higher over the harbor. Sebastian still stood near the low stone wall, though his posture had grown tenser in her absence.

Norah crossed the street toward him without hurrying, though every part of her wanted to run, the folded receipt burning against her side like a coal pulled fresh from the hearth.

“Well?” he asked quietly as she reached him.

“It was not simply a servant acting alone,” Norah said, her voice barely above a whisper despite the noise of the harbor around them. “The purchase was made through her own family’s household. Three weeks past. Paid in full by a manservant matching Vivien’s description exactly.”

She paused.

“Sebastian — this reaches further than her chambers. It reaches into her father’s house as well.”

Sebastian’s face, already pale with the strain of the morning, went a shade paler still. For a long moment neither of them spoke, the weight of what she had uncovered settling between them like a stone dropped into still water.

They said little as they walked back toward the carriage, the receipt tucked carefully into Norah’s satchel alongside the chamomile — which now felt like an unwelcome joke, a courtesy gift from a shopkeeper who had no notion of what his ledger had just revealed.

Sebastian handed her up into the carriage with the same practiced ease as before, though his jaw stayed tight, his eyes scanning the harbor road one final time before he climbed in after her and rapped twice against the roof to signal the driver.

“Her father’s household,” Sebastian said once the carriage had rolled clear of the town’s outer lanes, the words tasting bitter even as he spoke them. “That means this was planned before Vivien ever set foot in my house as a bride. Planned before the betrothal was even announced publicly.”

“Or planned the very moment it was,” Norah said quietly. “Three weeks past is not so distant from when the wedding date was first fixed.”

Sebastian said nothing to that, staring instead out the small carriage window at the coastal road unwinding behind them.

The road narrowed as it climbed away from the coast, flanked on either side by dense stands of trees that had not yet been cleared for farmland — the sort of stretch where a carriage’s pace slowed naturally to accommodate the uneven ground.

It was here, as the horses labored up a gentle rise, that Norah first heard it.

The drum of hooves approaching fast from behind. Too fast for casual travelers on a quiet coastal lane.

“Sebastian—”

Her voice came sharp, and he was already turning toward the small rear window before she finished speaking.

Two riders had appeared on the road behind them, cloaked despite the mild weather, their horses pushed hard enough to close the distance quickly. Sebastian recognized the livery beneath one rider’s cloak in the instant before the man drew a pistol from his coat — not aimed to fire, but held plainly enough as threat.

Any doubt about their purpose vanished entirely.

“Down,” Sebastian said, pulling Norah low against the carriage seat as he leaned forward to bang his fist against the driver’s small hatch. “Faster, whatever the road allows. We are followed.”

The driver cracked the reins, and the carriage lurched forward with a suddenness that threw Norah briefly against Sebastian’s shoulder before she caught herself — one hand gripping the satchel tight against her chest, as though the receipt inside might somehow be shaken loose and lost.

“They mean to stop us, not harm us outright,” Sebastian said, watching through the small window as the riders gained ground despite the driver’s efforts. “Whoever sent them wants what we carry, not blood on a public road where questions would follow.”

“That is small comfort at this speed,” Norah said, though there was a thread of dry humor beneath the fear in her voice.

“There is a lane ahead,” Norah said suddenly, gripping his arm. “A cargo track my father used, cut through the low fields to avoid the toll gate on the main road. It is not marked on any map a stranger would carry. If we take it, we lose half a mile of distance — but they will keep to the main road, thinking it the faster way, because it looks it.”

Sebastian did not hesitate. He leaned out to shout the turn to the driver, who hauled the reins hard right at the fork Norah pointed to, the carriage lurching off the main way onto a rougher but shorter track between two hedgerows.

For a long, breathless stretch, the world became nothing but the crack of branches against the carriage’s sides and the frantic rhythm of hooves — their own horses’, and, fainter now, the riders’ behind them, still following the main road, not yet realizing their quarry had slipped sideways out of sight.

By the time the track rejoined the coastal road further on, the pursuers were nowhere behind them — outpaced not by speed, but by a shorter path only a local would know to take.

“They will not stay lost for long,” Sebastian said, glancing back through the rear window at the empty road. “Vivien’s father has more riders than these two, and more reasons now than ever to want that receipt found before we reach the estate.”

Norah said nothing, still catching her breath — one hand pressed flat against the satchel where the evidence lay hidden. For the first time since the cottage, she allowed herself to feel the full weight of fear she had kept carefully buried since the moment the ropes first bound her wrists.