“The Duke Is Gay and Impotent,” Her Stepsister Mocked When Clara Was Forced to Marry Him—But His Wedding-Night Confession Revealed Why She Had Really Been Chosen

 PART 5

She found the loose panel behind the third shelf on a grey afternoon nine days after the wedding, while Anthony rode out to the tenant farms and the house sat quiet around her.

It was slow work. Clara had spent eight years reading other people’s numbers for other people’s benefit, and she brought every hour of that unpaid, unthanked practice to the ledgers hidden behind the warped wood — years of trust accounts kept in Jane’s name, and beneath the official entries, in a second hand trying very hard to look like the first, numbers that didn’t add to what the totals claimed.

She recognized the forger’s tells almost at once. A signature copied from memory rather than drawn from muscle habit always hesitated in the same three places — the tail of an H, the loop of an s, the pressure at the end of a line where a real hand relaxes and a copying one doesn’t dare to. Her father had shown her that at twelve years old. She had never once been able to explain to Lady Sterling why it mattered.

It mattered now.

Three years of quietly bled trust funds. Payments recorded as “administration” that matched nothing Mrs. Gable could recall being administered. And tucked into the back of the oldest ledger, two entries that stopped Clara’s breath entirely.

The first: a payment, made the same week Anthony’s father died, to a Dr. Whitfield of London, described only as consultation, discretion assured.

The second, dated barely a fortnight before her own wedding, was a letter, not a ledger entry — folded small, pressed flat between two pages as though someone had meant to hide it rather than destroy it. Silas’s hand, unmistakable this time, no forgery required.

Whitfield’s fee is arranged and waiting on account, same terms as before. Once the marriage is settled, the girl may be dealt with in the same manner as her predecessor, should it become necessary. No family to ask questions. No one to insist on more than a quiet grave and a sympathetic notice in the papers.

Clara read it three times before the meaning fully landed, and when it did, her hands had gone entirely cold.

Her predecessor. Anthony’s own mother’s letters, further back in the same ledger, referenced a fever no physician’s name had ever been attached to. And now this — a fee already paid, already waiting, for whichever physician was needed to write whatever cause of death would be least likely to draw questions about a duke’s second unfortunate, unremarked-upon bride.

She had not been chosen only because she was quiet. She had been chosen because Silas had already decided, before she ever signed her name to that contract, exactly how easily she could be made to disappear.

She found Anthony in the stables that evening and put both documents in his hands without a word.

He read them standing very still, the color leaving his face by degrees, and when he reached the letter, something in him seemed to come apart and reassemble itself entirely, colder and harder than she had ever seen him.

“He meant this from the start,” Anthony said. “Not as a threat should you discover him. As a plan already paid for.”

“I know,” Clara said.

He looked up at her then, and whatever iron had gathered in his face broke, just for a moment, into something raw and afraid. “I brought you into this. I let a man who has already killed once choose my own wife for me, and I never thought to ask why he’d bother.”

“You didn’t know,” Clara said. “Neither did I. We know now.”

He crossed the small distance between them and took her face in both hands, careful, as though she might still be something fragile enough to lose. “I should send you away tonight. Use the settlement. Take the house near Bath and never come near this family again.”

“No,” Clara said, and there was no hesitation in it at all. “I told you once I would not spend my life as anyone’s convenient shadow. I did not mean only Silas’s.”

She kissed him then — she was the one who closed the distance, her hands fisting in his shirt, deliberate and unafraid, everything she had not yet let herself say folded into it instead. He went still with surprise for the length of a single held breath before his arms came around her, careful even now, restrained even now, until she felt him hesitate.

“Clara.” He drew back just far enough to see her face, his voice rough. “Tell me this is what you want. Not fear. Not the letter. You.”

“It’s you,” she said simply. “It has been for longer than I’ve let myself admit.”

He kissed her again, slower this time, and there was nothing restrained in it at all — three years of a man who had trained himself never to want anything he couldn’t afford to lose, finally, deliberately, choosing to want something anyway.

Later, with the candle burned low and the ledger’s damning pages copied twice over on the desk beside them, Clara lay with her head against his chest, listening to his heartbeat slow.

“Mrs. Gable’s sister married into the village magistrate’s household,” Anthony said quietly, into her hair. “If we send copies tonight, by the north fields, before the roads flood — Silas will not know the truth has already left these walls.”

“Then send them now,” Clara said. “Before he learns I’ve found it.”

Outside, the wind had picked up, rattling the old glass, and somewhere past the tree line, the first low growl of thunder rolled in off the hills.