Her Groom Let Her Fall at the Altar to Save His Polished Shoes—But the Feared Duke Caught Rosalind, Carried Her Out Before Three Hundred Guests, and Refused to Return Her to the Family That Had Nearly Killed Her.

 PART 5

The shouting reached them before they reached the stairs.

Ugly, frantic, cracked in the middle — the sound of a man who has just discovered that his most valuable asset has been removed from the building.

Thomas Abernathy had spent forty years building the polished exterior of a gentleman, and it had held up remarkably well considering what was underneath it. Underneath it was a rat drowning in a bucket of its own debts, and this morning the bucket had tipped.

Rosalind heard her father’s voice from the landing and froze.

Every instinct she owned lit up at once. Hide. Shrink. Apologise for breathing. Make yourself smaller and he will not see you and it will be over sooner.

Dominic saw it happen. He saw a woman who had faced down a carriage, a scandal, and a bank draft go white at the sound of one man’s voice.

He stood and buttoned his coat with deliberate, unhurried calm.

“Stay here.”

“No.”

The word shocked her more than it shocked him. It came out thin and trembling, but it came out.

She stood, gripping the edge of the mahogany table.

“If I hide, he wins. He will tell the magistrate you are holding me against my will.”

Dominic paused. He studied the terror in her eyes warring with the sudden hard set of her jaw.

Then he nodded once.

“Stay behind me.”

They walked out onto the landing above the grand foyer.

Thomas Abernathy was pacing the black-and-white marble in yesterday’s wedding clothes, crumpled and faintly reeking of gin, his face flushed a dangerous purple. Beside him stood a nervous magistrate clutching a leather satchel, flanked by two constables who were both very carefully not looking at the Duke.

“WICKLIFFE!”

The roar came up the stairwell and bounced off the stone.

“You arrogant bastard. Fetch my daughter down here. I have the law with me. I will have you hanged for abduction.”

Dominic descended the stairs with slow, measured steps. Rosalind followed two steps behind, her hand closed around the banister hard enough to turn her knuckles white.

“Good morning, Thomas.” His voice was a low, terrifying purr, and it filled the cavernous hall without effort. “I see you survived the tragedy of your daughter being kept alive.”

Thomas’s eyes snapped past him and found her.

“YOU.” He jammed a trembling gloved finger at the landing. “Get down here. Immediately. Your mother is hysterical. Hastings is threatening to withdraw the settlements. Do you have any idea what you have done, you selfish little—”

The word cracked through the hall like a whip.

Rosalind flinched.

She did not step back.

“She has done nothing.”

Dominic stopped on the last step, and placed his frame entirely between the girl on the stairs and her father.

“I took her. And she is not going anywhere with you.”

“I am her father.” Thomas swung wildly on the magistrate, spit flying. “Do your duty, man. Arrest him. He has stolen my property.”

The magistrate cleared his throat and looked as though he would rather be anywhere else on earth, including a war.

“Your grace, I must inform you that Viscount Abernathy has sworn a warrant. If the young lady is being held here contrary to her wishes—”

“I am not.”

Rosalind’s voice rang out, remarkably clear, into the sudden silence of the foyer.

She stepped out from behind Dominic’s shoulder.

Thomas stared at her with his eyes bulging.

“Shut your mouth, Rosalind. You are coming home. Or so help me God I will beat the skin off your back.”

Dominic moved so fast that the magistrate flinched.

Two strides across the marble. He took Thomas by the lapels of the crumpled coat and slammed him backward into the oak door hard enough to shake the hinges.

“Threaten her again,” he said, his face inches from Thomas’s sweating forehead, “speak to her in that tone in my hearing again, and I will see you stripped of every house, every acre, and every privilege you possess, and there is not a magistrate in this room who could stop me.”

Thomas gasped, clawing at the iron grip on his coat.

“You— you cannot— the debts. Hastings holds the notes. If the marriage does not happen I am ruined. Debtor’s prison—”

Dominic’s expression flattened into something cold and deeply, quietly satisfied.

He released him. Thomas sagged against the door.

Then Dominic reached into his coat and produced a thick stack of vellum, bound in red ribbon, and tossed it onto the marble at Thomas’s feet.

It landed with a heavy, definitive slap.

“Hastings does not hold your notes any longer, Thomas. My solicitors paid a visit to his bank at eight o’clock this morning. I bought them all. The gambling markers. The mortgage on the country estate. The lien on your London house.”

He straightened.

“I own every penny of your miserable existence.”

Thomas stared at the red ribbon. The colour drained out of his face and left him a sickly, ashen grey. He looked up in absolute horror.

“You did what?”

“I bought you.”

Dominic said it without inflection.

“And this is the new arrangement. You will leave this house. You will return home, pack your bags, and take your wife to the country estate. You will never set foot in London again. You will never speak Rosalind’s name in public.”

He leaned down, and his voice dropped to a lethal register that did not reach past the two of them.

“If you do exactly as I say, I will not call the debts in. But if you ever approach her again, if you ever attempt to sell her, or harm her, or force her into a room she does not wish to enter — I will call the notes in by noon. I will take your house. I will take your land. And I will let you rot in the Fleet until you die.”

A pause.

“Do you understand me?”

Thomas Abernathy broke.

The blustering tyrant was simply gone, and what was left was a snivelling, terrified little man looking at a pile of paper on the floor.

He looked at the papers, and then at the Duke, and then at his daughter standing on the stairs.

“Rosalind.” His voice cracked completely. “Please. Tell him. I am your father.”

Rosalind looked down at him.

The man who had starved her. Who had laced her into a cage. Who had signed her over for thirty thousand pounds and had signed the paper before he had asked her name.

She felt a profound, echoing emptiness where her duty used to be.

She came down the last two steps. She did not look at the magistrate. She looked only at her father.

“You are not my father,” she said.

Her voice was steady and hard and entirely without heat.

“You are a man who sold me to a monster. And now you have been bought by a duke.”

A pause.

“Take the deal, Lord Abernathy. Because if you do not, I will gladly watch you starve.”

Thomas recoiled as though she had struck him across the face.

Then he bent down. His hands shook violently as he gathered the bound papers off the marble. He did not say another word. He fumbled at the brass handle, got the door open, and stumbled out into the street.

The magistrate and the constables scrambled after him.

The heavy door clicked shut.

The silence rushed back in, thick and absolute.

Rosalind stood frozen on the marble floor. Her heart was hammering against her ribs, and the bruised ache beneath it felt as though it might crack beneath the force of it.

She had done it. She had cut the cord.

She was adrift. Completely untethered from everything she had ever known, from every name and every obligation and every locked door of the last two-and-twenty years.

She felt suddenly very light.

The adrenaline drained out of her all at once, leaving her hollow and trembling. She swayed. The edges of the foyer blurred.

Before she could fall, Dominic was there.

His arm came around her waist, solid and warm, anchoring her to the floor. He did not pick her up this time. He simply held her steady and absorbed the shivering into his own rigid frame.

“Breathe, Rosalind,” he said softly. The lethal edge was entirely gone out of his voice. “Just breathe. It is over.”

She leaned into him. The rough wool of his coat smelled of sandalwood and cold morning air. She closed her eyes and pulled air into her unbound lungs.

“I did not take the bank draft,” she said into his chest.

“I know.”

His hand came up and rested lightly on the back of her head, his fingers tangling briefly in her loose hair.

“I did not expect you to.”

She tilted her head back to look at him.

His dark eyes were fixed on her, and they were no longer clinical. They were no longer detached. He was looking at her the way a man looks at the only real thing in a room full of paper.

“You bought my father’s debts just to destroy him.”

“I bought them to build a wall around you.” His gaze dropped briefly to her mouth and came back up. “I told you I do not keep captives. But I protect what is mine to protect, fiercely.”

Rosalind stared at him.

The cynical, brutal Duke. The man who had ruined her life in order to save it. She had no family, no reputation, no future in polite society, and no illusions left about any of it.

And standing in the foyer of his fortress, held up by his arm, she felt something she had genuinely never felt in two-and-twenty years.

She felt safe.

“Then protect me, Wickliffe,” she whispered.

A slow, dangerous smile broke across Dominic’s face, and it transformed him entirely.

“Always, Rosalind.”