My fiancé didn’t break my heart. He appraised it, weighed it, and sold it to England’s most feared recluse—the so-called “Rotting Duke”—to settle his gambling debts, certain I would wither away inside that crumbling estate. But instead, I became a Duchess… and when the locked West Wing finally opened, it revealed the heartbreaking reason the Duke had chosen me long before I ever knew his name.

 PART 7

When Mrs. Gable opened the heavy oak doors, the blinding summer light spilled in, illuminating two men in the courtyard.

One was an elderly gentleman clutching a leather satchel — clearly the solicitor, Mr. Finch. The other was a man roughly Nathaniel’s age, dressed in a sharp, ostentatious riding habit that belonged in Hyde Park, not on a working northern estate. He had Nathaniel’s height but none of his breadth. He possessed the classical, unmarred aristocratic features that my husband had lost to the fire.

“Cousin!” the man called out, stepping lightly over a muddy rut in the cobblestones. His voice dripped with an aggressive, mocking cheer. “They told me the roads were impossible. I see they merely meant unpleasant.”

Nathaniel went utterly still.

The relaxed, confident man who had been laughing with me over miscounted sheep ten minutes earlier vanished. The rotting duke slammed back into his posture — shoulders rounded, chin dropped to shadow his left side, hands balled into massive fists at his sides.

“Reginald,” Nathaniel said. The name scraped out of his throat like a rusted blade.

This was the heir presumptive. The man who had spent five years waiting for Nathaniel to simply die, or default on the inheritance.

Reginald stepped into the cool shade of the entrance hall, his eyes darting around, cataloguing the changes — the polished floors, the fresh flowers in the vases, the absence of dust. His smile faltered for a fraction of a second before his gaze landed on me.

Specifically, on my stomach.

“Ah,” Reginald murmured, a nasty, calculating gleam in his eye. “The traded bride. Henry Pendleton was crying into his gin at White’s, claiming you were locked in a dungeon. Yet here you are, looking incredibly domestic.”

“Mr. Finch.” I ignored Reginald entirely and extended my hand to the elderly solicitor. “Welcome to Harwood Hall. We have tea prepared in the drawing room.”

Finch looked profoundly uncomfortable.

“Your Grace, I apologise for the unannounced arrival. Lord Reginald insisted on accompanying me for the annual review of the estate’s condition. As the named secondary beneficiary—”

“As the man who is going to own this pile of stones in a few months,” Reginald interrupted, stepping closer to Nathaniel. He looked his cousin up and down, lingering pointedly on the scarred flesh. “Let us not play games, Finch. I came to see the rot for myself. Though it seems you have hired a competent maid, Nathaniel — even if she is wearing a duchess’s dress.”

Nathaniel lunged.

It was a terrifying, explosive movement. In a fraction of a second he had Reginald by the lapels of his expensive coat, lifting the man until his polished boots left the floor. Reginald gasped, his mocking smile dissolving into sheer primal panic.

“Nathaniel, stop.”

My voice was not loud, but it cut through the air like a whip.

Nathaniel froze. His massive hands trembled against Reginald’s chest. The unscarred half of his face was dark with murderous rage.

“He is a vulture, Nathaniel,” I said softly, stepping closer. I placed my hand over one of his rigid fists. “Do not give him the satisfaction of a broken jaw. He will only use it to claim you are violently unstable. Drop him. Let him see what we have built instead.”

For a long, agonising second, I thought he would not listen. Years of internalised hatred and defensive anger were boiling over.

Then he looked at me. He looked at my hand on his.

With a sound of profound disgust, Nathaniel opened his hands. Reginald crashed to the floor, gasping for breath, scrambling backward like a cornered rat, then hauling himself upright and straightening his coat with as much dignity as he could salvage.

“Mr. Finch,” I said, turning my back on Reginald to face the trembling solicitor. “We have medical documentation regarding the pregnancy, signed by Dr. Harrison of York. We have ledgers proving the estate has turned a twenty per cent profit this quarter. My husband has fulfilled every term of the late Duke’s will. Let us settle this properly, in the library, with the papers in front of us.”

We confined the business to the library. Reginald followed, straightening his cravat, his composure rebuilt into something colder and more calculating than before. He sat in a corner armchair with a glass of our best brandy, watching us with venomous resentment. He had banked his entire financial future on Nathaniel’s failure. Seeing the meticulous ledgers, the proof of repaired tenant farms, and the undeniable medical certificate of my pregnancy was destroying him in real time.

“The child could be a girl,” Reginald said suddenly from his armchair, swirling the amber liquid.

“The entailment is specific, Finch,” he went on. “It must be a male heir to secure the line permanently. If she births a daughter, the clock merely resets.”

“The will stipulates a legitimate child to secure the current term of holding,” Mr. Finch corrected nervously, adjusting his spectacles. “Gender is immaterial to this specific clause, Lord Reginald. His Grace has met the conditions.”

“It’s a trick.”

Reginald stood, his face flushed with panic and brandy. He pointed a trembling finger at Nathaniel, who stood quietly by the massive stone hearth.

“Look at him. He hasn’t left these moors in half a decade. He’s a monster.” His voice climbed. “Who is to say the child is even his? Pendleton had her first. Or perhaps one of the stable boys.”

The room went dead silent.

I did not yell. I did not need to.

I simply picked up the heavy leather-bound ledger I had spent the last eight months bleeding over, walked across the room, and slammed it onto the small table beside Reginald’s chair. The sound was like a gunshot.

“You are speaking to the Duchess of Harwood,” I said. My voice was a cold, flat void. “You are standing in my house. You are breathing my air. You will apologise, or I will have the estate workers drag you to the property line by your hair.”

Reginald laughed. A high, desperate sound.

“You arrogant little—”

He did not finish the sentence.

Nathaniel crossed the room. He did not rush. He walked with a heavy, terrifying inevitability. He bypassed Reginald entirely and stepped to the fireplace, where he picked up the heavy iron poker.

Reginald scrambled backward, throwing his arms up. “Finch, you see this? He’s mad. He’s going to kill me.”

Nathaniel did not look at him.

He shoved the iron poker deep into the burning coals, stirring the fire until it roared — throwing fierce orange light across his scarred profile. He stood bathed in the heat of it. The very element that had destroyed his life.

He did not flinch. He did not hide.

He pulled the glowing iron out of the flames and turned to face his cousin.

“I burned once, Reginald,” he said.

His voice was a low rumble that vibrated in the floorboards.

“It took my skin. It took my family. It nearly took my mind.” He took a slow step forward. “But it did not take my teeth.”

He drove the poker into the stone hearth, embedding the tip into the mortar with a shower of sparks.

“This estate is mine. This woman is my wife. Her child is my blood.” Another step. “You have spent five years waiting for a ghost to die.”

The poker stood upright in the hearth, still glowing, like a stake driven into the ground.

“I am not a ghost anymore. Get out of my house, and do not come back until you are invited, which will be never.”

Reginald looked at Nathaniel. He looked at the glowing iron. He looked at me, standing cold and immovable by the door.

He did not say a word. He walked out of the library at a stiff, furious pace that he clearly hoped looked like dignity, abandoning his hat and his brandy on the table.

Mr. Finch cleared his throat, his hands shaking as he gathered his papers.

“I have seen everything I require, Your Grace. The documents will be filed in Chancery by the end of the week.” He bowed. “The estate is secure.”

“Thank you, Mr. Finch.”

When the carriage finally rolled out of the courtyard, taking Reginald and the last threat to our survival with it, the silence in the hall was deafening.

I walked back into the library. Nathaniel was still standing by the fire, staring into the flames.

I walked up behind him and wrapped my arms around his waist, pressing my cheek against his broad, solid back. He let out a long, ragged breath, his hands coming up to cover mine where they rested over our unborn child.

“He was right about one thing,” Nathaniel whispered to the fire.

“What?”

“You are terrifyingly arrogant when you hold a ledger.”

I laughed — a real, unguarded sound that bounced off the ancient stone walls.

Nathaniel turned in my arms, pulling me flush against his chest. He kissed me, tasting of smoke and survival.

That night, after the house had gone quiet, I took a candle and walked to the west wing for the first time.

The doors were warped and swollen. I put my shoulder to them. They gave.

The corridor beyond smelled of rain and old charcoal — five years of weather walking in through a broken roof. The floorboards sagged under my feet. I kept to the wall, where the joists still held.

At the end, the long gallery opened up. A gallery that had once held the family’s portraits. Half of them were gone — burned or fallen. The survivors leaned against the walls where the servants had stacked them, frames charred, canvas blistered by heat.

I held the candle up.

Nathaniel at nineteen. Unscarred. Dark-eyed and laughing at something outside the frame. His left hand resting on a dog’s head.

I stood there a long time in the cold, holding the candle, looking at a man I had never met.

Then I went back the way I had come, and closed the doors behind me, and did not tell him I had been there.

Not yet.