“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 7

“Silas.” Anthony’s voice had dropped into something Clara had never heard from him before — not fury, but a terrible, controlled stillness, the voice of a man measuring every word against a life. “Put it down. Whatever you think this buys you, it buys you nothing. Not now.”

“It buys me time,” Silas said, and the pistol trembled in his grip. “It bought me three years the last time. It can buy me three more.”

“The magistrate already has the ledgers,” Clara said. Her heart was slamming against her ribs, but her voice came out steady, because she had spent eight years learning exactly how to sound calm while everything in her shook. “Killing me tonight changes nothing that’s already been written down and delivered, Mr. Hastings. It only adds one more crime to the pile they already mean to hang you for.”

“Then I’ll hang for one more,” Silas said. “Or I’ll be gone from England before they’ve finished reading the first page.”

“You won’t,” said a new voice from the doorway — not Mrs. Gable’s.

Four men stood in the rain behind her, soaked through, one of them wearing the sash of the county magistrate’s office. “Mr. Silas Hastings,” the officer said, stepping into the candlelight, “you’re to come with us regarding forged trust documents and the misappropriation of a ward’s inheritance. Put down the weapon.”

For one endless second, nothing in the hall moved at all — only the pistol, wavering between Clara and the door, between one last desperate act and the plain fact that there was no longer anywhere left to run to.

It was Jane who broke it. She stepped forward, past Anthony’s outstretched arm, until she stood directly between the pistol and Clara, her chin lifted, her hands steady despite everything.

“You wanted me back under your roof so badly,” Jane said. “Here I am. Look at me instead of her.”

Something in Silas’s face cracked — not softened, Clara would think later, but cracked, the way old plaster gives way under enough pressure, revealing rot rather than strength beneath it.

“I never wanted to hurt you,” he said, and for the first time his voice shook with something other than fear for himself. “You were never meant to be part of this.”

“Then put it down,” Jane said. “And be part of something you didn’t have to lie about, for once.”

The pistol lowered an inch. Two.

It was enough. Anthony crossed the distance in three strides and wrenched the weapon from his uncle’s slackening grip, and the magistrate’s men closed in before Silas could so much as raise his hands.

He didn’t fight them. He only looked at Anthony as they took him, something almost like relief buried beneath the ruin of his face.

“Your father found the trust accounts a week before he died,” Silas said, quiet enough that only the room’s stunned silence let it carry. “He came to me himself. Gave me a chance to make it right before he took it to the courts and named her openly besides.” A long, unsteady breath. “I told him I only wanted time to repay what I’d taken. He believed me. That was his mistake, and I have lived with what I did about it every day since — badly, and not nearly well enough to earn any forgiveness for it. I don’t ask for yours, Anthony. I only tell you now because you deserve the truth more than I deserve the silence.”

No one moved to comfort him. Anthony’s jaw was iron, his eyes wet and furious at once, and when he finally spoke, his voice held no mercy at all.

“Take him,” he said to the magistrate’s men. “And take him carefully. I want him standing, and conscious, and answering for every year of it in open court.”

They led Silas Hastings out into the storm. The doors shut. Rain hammered the old stone. And for a long moment the great hall simply breathed — Jane sinking into a chair with Mrs. Gable’s arms already around her, Anthony’s hands not quite steady as he reached for Clara and found her, impossibly, still standing.

“You could have died tonight,” he said, low, his forehead dropping to hers.

“I didn’t,” Clara said. “And I chose to stand here, Anthony. That’s rather the point of the paper you gave me — and the point of what I chose in that library three nights ago, before any of this happened.”

He let out a breath that was half a laugh, half something rawer, and held her as though he intended never quite to stop.