Lord Thomas Reed slapped the Duchess of Summerton in a velvet alcove, certain no one would ever know — until the door behind her opened. Her husband had heard what Thomas said. But when the Duke saw the red mark on her cheek, it was not the anger in his eyes that chilled her. It was the question he asked Thomas: “How long do you think I was standing outside that door?”

 PART 3

“Henry, stop.”

Her voice rang out sharp and metallic in the small room, and this time he heard her. “Henry. You will kill him.”

For one stretched second, Henry did not loosen his grip. Then he leaned his head closer to Thomas, and spoke into what little air the man had left.

“You are going to leave London tonight. You will pack a single trunk and take the first available crossing to the Continent. If I see you in this city again — if I hear your name spoken in the same breath as my wife’s — I will not kill you.”

Thomas’s fingers were still scraping uselessly at the Duke’s wrist.

“I will dismantle you. I will take your family’s estate. I will bankrupt your father, sell his horses, and pull the roof off his house. And then I will find you, and I will take your hands.”

Thomas’s eyes rolled back.

With a look of profound disgust, Henry let go.

Thomas collapsed onto the rug and lay there gasping, coughing violently, dragging air into his bruised throat in ragged, animal sounds. He curled onto his side and wept openly.

Henry did not look at him again.

He took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his hands with slow, deliberate thoroughness — as though he had just touched something foul — and he dropped the linen onto Thomas Reed’s trembling back.

Then he turned to Beatrice.

The violence vanished from his eyes between one heartbeat and the next. What replaced it was not pity. It was something heavier. Something that had weight.

He walked to her.

She flinched. She could not help it — an entirely involuntary recoil, a body remembering what a raised hand had just done to it.

Henry stopped cold.

He lowered his hand and his jaw went tight.

“Beatrice.”

“I am fine,” she said automatically. Her voice shook. She hated it.

“You are not.”

He moved closer — not touching her, but positioning himself between her and the weeping man on the floor, blocking the sight of him entirely with his own body. He looked at her face for a long moment, at the welt, at the blood on her chin, and his expression was drawn tight around something she could not name.

“We are going home,” he said, quietly.

He offered her his arm.

He did not command her to take it. He simply held it out — a silent anchor in a room that had started to spin — and waited.

Beatrice looked at the dark sleeve. Then she looked up at his face, and for the first time in a year of marriage, she did not see a contract standing there. She did not see duty.

She saw a man who had just torn his own composure to pieces because someone had hurt her.

Slowly, she reached out and wrapped both hands around his forearm.

He was solid. He was warm.

“Yes,” she whispered. “Take me home.”

Henry steered her down a servant’s corridor, bypassing the glittering crush of the ballroom entirely. The air there smelled of lye soap and cold stone — a sharp, honest contrast to the perfumed fog they had escaped. He moved with brisk, economical strides but kept his arm braced firmly under hers, matching his pace to the unsteady rhythm of her breathing. He said nothing.

A footman at the side entrance scrambled to haul open the oak door.

“Your carriage has been standing in the mews since half past nine, your grace,” the boy said, bowing low, addressing Henry. “I sent word up twice, but you weren’t in the ballroom to be found.”

Henry did not break stride. “Bring it round.”

The footman ran ahead.

Beatrice turned her head. Half past nine. It was gone eleven now. Henry had been inside the Carmichael house for the better part of two hours, and not once, not for a single dance, had he set foot in the room where he was meant to be seen.

She filed the fact away and said nothing. There would be a time to ask him what he had been doing in that house for two hours instead. This was not it.

The London night hit her like a blow of its own. Damp, biting air, smelling of coal smoke and the distant Thames. She shivered and pulled her thin silk wrap tighter across her shoulders.

The carriage rounded the corner a moment later, the horses stamping and snorting, their breath pluming white in the amber light of the carriage lanterns. The driver took one look at the Duke’s face and snapped to attention, pulling the door wide without a word.

Henry handed her in. He climbed in after her, the carriage dipping under his weight, and shut the door.

“Summerton House,” he said through the speaking grate. “Quickly.”

The wheels lurched forward.

Inside, it was pitch black save for the rhythmic flashes of street lamps cutting through the velvet curtains. The leather seats were cold.

The silence between them was not the polite distance of their first year. It was heavy. It was loaded with the residue of violence, and with something else — something neither of them had a name for yet.

Beatrice leaned her head back against the squabs. The adrenaline that had held her upright drained away and left behind a cold, nauseating exhaustion. Her left cheek throbbed in time with the rattle of the wheels. She could feel the skin stretching tight over the swelling.

She turned her head.

Henry sat on the opposite bench, perfectly still, hands resting on his knees. In the intermittent flashes of lamplight she saw his jaw locked so hard the muscle ticked beneath the skin. He was staring straight ahead at the brass fittings of the door.

“Henry.”

Her voice came out thin and frail. She cleared her throat and winced as it pulled at the cut inside her mouth.

“I didn’t provoke him. He was drunk. He was angry about the past. I tried to leave.”

She needed him to know. Some cynical, well-trained part of her — the part built by a lifetime in a society that always found the woman at fault — demanded she establish her innocence before anything else was said.

Henry’s gaze snapped from the door to her face.

“Do not,” he said.

His voice grated like stone dragged over stone.

“Do not defend yourself to me, Beatrice. I do not care what he was angry about. I do not care if you insulted his lineage or spat in his face or set fire to his coat. He struck you.”

She swallowed hard. The taste of blood was still there, thin and metallic.

“It will be a scandal.”

“It will not. If he talks, he will not talk.”

Henry shifted, leaning forward, forearms on his knees. The space between them shrank to nothing.

“Thomas Reed is a coward. He knows precisely what I will do to his family if a single whisper of this reaches the clubs. He is, at this moment, packing a bag. By tomorrow he will be on a crossing to Calais, and he will tell his father he has sudden gambling debts and must flee. That is the end of it.”

Beatrice stared at him in the dark.

She had spent a year cataloguing this man. He liked his tea black. He preferred The Times to the post. He worked late on Tuesdays. He did not like the smell of lilies. She had built an entire private archive of him, and none of it had prepared her for this.

“You nearly killed him,” she whispered.

“I considered it.”

His tone was chillingly matter-of-fact.

“For roughly five seconds, I calculated the logistical difficulty of snapping his neck and burying him under the Carmichael estate. I decided the resulting investigation would be too disruptive to your peace of mind.”

Beatrice let out a sound that was half laugh, half sob.

It hurt her cheek. She clamped a hand over her mouth.

Henry was across the carriage in a second. He knelt on the floorboards between her knees, indifferent to the dirt ruining his evening trousers. He reached up and gently drew her hand away from her face. His bare fingers hovered an inch from her bruised skin and did not touch it.

“Does it hurt terribly?”

The question had no armor left on it at all.

“It burns,” she admitted. She was too tired to lie.

“We are almost home. I will send for Dr. Aris.”

“No.”

She caught his wrist. His pulse was beating fast against her palm.

“No doctors. I don’t want anyone else looking at me with pity. Please.”

Henry looked from her grip on his wrist to her eyes.

He nodded once — a sharp, decisive movement, like a man signing something.

“No doctors. I will tend to it myself.”

“Henry,” she said again, and this time it was not about the pain. “You asked him a question. Before I stopped you. You asked him how long he thought you’d been standing outside that door.”

Henry’s hand went still on her cheek.

“I did.”

“How long were you standing there?”

He did not answer. The carriage rolled on through the dark, and the silence he left in place of a reply was the loudest thing she had heard all night.