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 8

By evening the news had reached the City.

It began as a whisper in the coffee houses — that the Crown’s solicitors had received sworn testimony and a decade of falsified ledgers implicating Lord Harkort in the systematic extortion of at least one ruined gentleman, with more victims suspected. It exploded into a roar on the trading floor by morning.

The panic was instantaneous.

Word of a pending Chancery suit and a criminal referral was enough. Every man who had ever lent the Harkort Bank a shilling wanted it back before the scandal broke further. Carriages jammed the streets outside the bank’s headquarters on Lombard Street. By three o’clock the Harkort shipping lines had been seized by secondary creditors. By four, the textile mills in Manchester had halted production. By the following week, two King’s Bench writs had been issued against Lord Harkort personally, and the whispers in every drawing room in London had turned to certainties.

A fifty-year-old empire built on extortion and polite smiles burned to the ground within a fortnight.

Beatrice did not feel the triumphant rush she had anticipated.

She felt hollowed out. A vessel scraped clean.

She spent the following afternoon in the parlour with a book she could not read, her eyes moving over the same sentence twelve times, her mind drifting north to a churchyard where her father lay under a stone paid for by his creditors. He could finally rest. She said it to herself the way one says a prayer one no longer entirely believes.

At dusk, a commotion at the front door shattered the quiet — raised voices in the foyer, the heavy thud of boots on marble.

Beatrice set the book aside and walked out onto the landing.

Simon Harkort was standing in the entryway.

He looked like a man who had been dragged behind a galloping horse. His immaculate cravat was torn. His golden hair was plastered to his forehead with sweat. Two of the massive Ashborne footmen had him pinned by the arms, their faces entirely impassive.

Gideon stood at the foot of the stairs, leaning on his cane, watching Simon with the detached curiosity of a man observing a dying insect.

“Let him go,” Beatrice said.

Her voice cut cleanly through the scuffle. The footmen stepped back at once, though they kept their enormous frames planted between Simon and the staircase.

Gideon glanced up at her. He did not object. He simply waited.

Beatrice descended the stairs slowly. The silk of her skirts whispered against the runner. She stopped on the bottom step and looked down at the man she had once planned to marry.

“Beatrice—” Simon lurched forward. He stopped when Gideon’s cane tapped sharply against the marble floor — a single, terrifying warning.

Simon swallowed hard. His eyes were wide and frantic.

“You have to stop this. My father is being questioned by the Crown’s men. The bank is gone. The creditors are taking the townhouse tomorrow morning. We have nothing.”

“I am aware of how ruin operates, Simon,” Beatrice said softly. “I experienced it three weeks ago. Did you come here to ask for a tutorial on how to pack a trunk?”

He flinched as though she had struck him.

“It was my father. It was all his doing — I did not know the full sum of it, I swear it. When I broke the engagement he forced my hand. He threatened to cut me off. I had no choice.”

He was begging.

The golden boy of the London Season was standing in her foyer, throwing his own father to the wolves to save his own skin. It was pathetic. It was sickening in a way that was almost restful, because it meant she could finally stop wondering whether she had misjudged him.

“You always had a choice,” Beatrice said. Her voice was entirely flat. “You chose your comfort over my life. You chose your allowance over my father’s memory. You looked at me across that ballroom, Simon, and you saw nothing but a liability.”

“I was a fool.” He reached out. He did not dare touch her, but his hands grasped at the empty air as though he might catch something. “Please. Talk to him. Talk to Ashborne. He will listen to you. Have him withdraw the criminal referral — just enough that I might slip away to France before the Fleet takes what is left of us. If I stay in London they will throw me in with my father. I will not survive it.”

Beatrice stared at him.

She searched her chest for the old affection. The girlish admiration she had carried for him since she was sixteen, the way one carries a pressed flower in a book.

There was nothing there.

Just ash.

“The Duke of Ashborne does not take orders from me,” she said coldly. “And even if he did, I would not ask for your salvation.”

She turned her back on him and began to climb the stairs.

“You bitch—”

His voice cracked into something venomous and small.

“You sold yourself to a crippled monster just to ruin me. You think you won? You have to live with him—”

Gideon moved faster than his injury should have allowed.

Before Simon could draw another breath, Gideon had crossed the foyer, dropping his cane. He seized Simon by the throat of his ruined cravat and slammed him backward into the heavy oak door. The impact shook the glass panes in their frames.

Simon choked. His hands scrabbled uselessly against Gideon’s grip.

Gideon’s face was inches from his. The scar beside his eye pulled tight, white, and terrible.

“If you ever speak to my wife again,” Gideon whispered, the gravel in his voice grinding like broken glass, “I will not bother with ledgers or solicitors. I will tear you apart with my hands and throw you into the Thames.”

He waited.

“Nod if you understand me.”

Simon nodded frantically, his face turning purple.

Gideon released him and stepped back in disgust. He did not pick up the cane.

“Throw this trash into the street,” he said to the footmen. “If he approaches this house again, break his legs.”

They dragged a weeping Simon Harkort out of the door and tossed him onto the damp cobblestones. The heavy oak slammed shut behind him.

Silence fell over the foyer.

Gideon stood near the door, breathing hard, his weight shifted entirely onto his good leg, his hands clenched into fists at his sides. Beatrice stood on the landing with her fingers gripping the banister, watching the tension hum through his massive frame.

He did not look like a monster to her.

He looked like a man who had carried a war inside himself for ten years and had finally, in this one ugly minute, set it down.

She descended the stairs. She bent and picked up the silver-tipped cane from the marble floor, and she walked over to him and held it out.

Gideon looked at the cane.

Then at her.

He took it. His rough fingers brushed against hers.

“We are done here,” Beatrice said quietly.

“Yes.” His voice had lost its violent edge; what was left underneath was only tired. “We leave for Yorkshire in the morning.”