She knew what she was doing was improper. Three weeks was far too soon — she should have remained inside for at least another two months, veiled, kept out of public view, and permitted to see only members of her family. But after her fiancé abandoned her, she married London’s most feared Duke to save her family — only for a hidden ledger to reveal the heartbreaking reason he had chosen her from the very beginning.

 PART 4

The marriage lasted exactly fourteen minutes.

It took place in a drafty, empty chapel off Chapel Street in Mayfair, with two witnesses and a vicar who kept glancing at the door as though expecting God to intervene. Beatrice wore a grey travelling dress, because there had been no time and no money for anything else.

Gideon wore his customary black.

When the vicar prompted him, he slid a heavy square-cut emerald onto her finger. The metal was cold. It sat on her hand like a manacle, and he closed her fingers around it without looking at her face.

They did not kiss.

Within the hour they were in a dark velvet-lined carriage, thundering north toward Yorkshire.

The journey took three agonising days. They spoke perhaps a dozen words to each other. Gideon spent the daylight hours reading through stacks of dense parliamentary reports and leather-bound ledgers, a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles perched on his nose, ignoring her entirely. Beatrice spent the time staring out of the window, watching the polite green fields of the south warp slowly into the jagged, wind-torn moors of the north.

It was raining when they arrived at Rook Hall.

She had expected a crumbling Gothic monstrosity to suit the reputation. Instead Rook Hall was terrifyingly modern and violently austere — a vast symmetrical fortress of dark, unforgiving stone sitting on the edge of a cliff above a churning grey sea. No ivy. No gardens. Only harsh lines, glass, and rain.

Inside, the estate ran with silent military precision. The servants did not smile. They moved like ghosts, anticipating every need before it was voiced.

Her bedchamber was vast and draped in heavy silks of midnight blue and silver. It was connected to Gideon’s chambers by a heavy oak door.

That door remained locked for the first three nights.

True to his word, he demanded nothing of her. He was gone before she woke, riding out onto the moors or shut in his study, and they saw each other only at dinner.

Dinner was its own particular torture.

They sat at opposite ends of a mahogany table long enough to seat thirty. The distance between them required raised voices to bridge, so they simply chose not to speak. The silence stretched tight and thin, filled only by the clink of silver on porcelain and the relentless howling of the wind against the glass.

On the fourth night, Beatrice reached her breaking point.

She was a pragmatic woman. But she was still a woman, and the isolation — the coldness of the house, the invisible proximity of her silent husband — was wearing down the iron spine he had supposedly married her for. She felt like a ghost haunting her own life.

It was past midnight. The house was dead quiet. She could not sleep. The emerald felt heavy on her hand.

She threw off the blankets, pulled a thick wool shawl over her nightdress, and took a candle into the dark corridors. She wanted a book. Something to quiet her mind.

She found her way to the library on the ground floor.

The room was immense, smelling of old paper and leather. A dying fire glowed in the massive hearth. Beatrice moved along the shelves, her candle flickering over titles in Greek and Latin, until she reached the back of the room near a large mahogany desk.

And stopped.

A ledger lay open on the desk.

It was not one of Gideon’s mining reports. It was older — the pages yellowed, the binding cracked and soft with age.

The handwriting was painfully familiar.

Beatrice stepped closer, lowering the candle. Her breath hitched.

Her father’s hand.

She set the candle down and pulled the heavy book toward her. It was a private accounting ledger. Dates. Sums. Names. But it was not a record of Arthur Croft’s investments.

It was a record of transfers. Massive sums of money, moved out of the Croft estate, into an account under a single recurring name:

Harkort.

Beatrice traced the ink with a trembling finger. Five years of it. Dozens of entries. Her father had not lost his fortune in bad shipping investments. The ledger told a different story entirely.

Extortion. Embezzlement.

Lord Harkort had systematically bled her father dry over five years, using a fabricated scandal from her father’s youth as leverage. Every payment. Every date. Every one.

Her father had not died a fool.

He had died a hostage.

“You should not be down here.”

Beatrice gasped and spun around.

Gideon stood in the shadows near the doorway. He was in his shirt sleeves, his cravat gone, a glass of amber liquid in his hand. The firelight caught the harsh scar on his face and made him look demonic in the gloom.

“What is this?” she demanded. Her voice shook with sudden, violent fury. She pointed at the open book. “This is my father’s private ledger. Why do you have it? Why does it say Lord Harkort was bleeding him dry?”

Gideon stepped into the light. He moved slowly; the limp was more pronounced at this hour. He looked at the ledger. Then at her.

He did not look surprised. He looked resigned.

“I purchased that ledger from your father’s solicitor,” he said. He took a sip of his drink. “Mr. Pell is a coward and easily bought. I required proof of Harkort’s embezzlement. Simon’s father ruined my family.”

Beatrice breathed. The horror of it settled into her slowly, like cold water into cloth.

“Simon knew.” Her own voice sounded strange to her. “When he broke the engagement — he knew his family was holding the money. He threw me away while standing on my father’s grave.”

“Simon knew enough to understand where his family’s money came from,” Gideon said. “Whether he knew the full sum, I cannot say. His father would not have trusted him with every figure. But he knew enough.”

She stared at the cold, calculating man she had married, and the puzzle pieces snapped together with an audible click, forming a picture so ugly she felt physically sick.

“You hate Simon Harkort,” she whispered, remembering his words at the ball. I find the sight of him looking smug entirely offensive to my evening. “But it is more than that. It was never about my father at all.” She took a step toward him. “It is about you. You did not marry me because I have iron in my spine.”

Gideon set his glass down on the side table. The soft clink sounded like a gunshot in the quiet room.

“Ten years ago,” he said, his voice dropping into a low, dangerous gravel, “Lord Harkort engineered a land dispute that resulted in the ruin of my elder brother. Thomas, lacking your pragmatic nature, put a pistol in his mouth rather than face debtor’s prison.”

The fire popped. The wind clawed at the windows.

“I have spent the last decade tearing the Harkort empire apart, piece by piece. Shipping lines. Coal contracts. Political alliances.” He walked toward her. “But the old man always insulated himself. I needed direct proof of a crime severe enough to ruin a peer of the realm beyond recovery — beyond the reach of his lawyers and his friends in Chancery.”

He stopped only when he was inches away. The heat radiating off him was a stark contrast to the freezing room.

“Your father’s ledger is that proof.”

“There is one difficulty,” he continued, his pale eyes burning down into hers. “Your father’s will names you — not your mother, whose claims a married woman’s coverture would in any case restrict — as the party entitled to pursue repayment of what was taken. But an unmarried woman has no standing to bring such a claim against a peer’s estate, and no solicitor in London would touch it on her behalf without a husband’s name attached. As your husband, I can act for you. I can press the claim in your name, with the full weight of my own resources and connections behind it. Alone, you would have spent the rest of your life being told to be patient by men who had no intention of ever helping you.”

Beatrice stepped back and hit the edge of the mahogany desk.

“I am a weapon,” she said.

The realisation was a physical blow, landing somewhere beneath her ribs.

“You didn’t save me. You weaponised me. I am a legal instrument for your vengeance.”

“You were drowning,” Gideon said, his voice devoid of apology. “I pulled you into my boat. The fact that I require you to help row does not make the rescue any less real.”