The Duke Never Touched His Bride and Vanished Every Night for Thirty Days — But When Cecilia Forced Open the Locked Room Beside His, She Found No Mistress, Only a War Her Husband Had Never Escaped

PART 4

Dawn arrived without warmth, a slate-gray light seeping through the boarded window. Cecilia woke to the ache of her own spine against canvas padding, her arm gone numb beneath the weight of Nathaniel’s head. He was asleep, curled onto his side, his face buried in the ruin of her skirt. The tremors that had wracked him for hours had finally burned out sometime near four in the morning, leaving behind a stillness so complete it frightened her more than the screaming had.

She catalogued the damage without meaning to. Torn linen at his shoulder. Raw knuckles where he’d struck the padded wall. Crescent-shaped marks in his palms where his own nails had bitten deep. This was the Duke of Ashborne — a man who managed vast estates, spoke with authority in the House of Lords, terrified his tenants into respectful silence. Utterly broken, on the floor of a room he’d built specifically so no one would ever see him this way.

At ten past six, footsteps stopped outside the door, and the iron latch lifted with a metallic crack.

Nathaniel didn’t wake slowly. He surged into consciousness with the raw, adrenaline-soaked panic of a hunted animal, scrambling backward until his spine hit the wall, chest heaving, eyes darting — until they found her.

The silence stretched, thick and suffocating.

He looked at her disheveled hair, the torn lace of her bodice, the exhaustion carved into her face. The wild panic in his eyes slowly curdled into something darker. Shame. Absolute, crushing shame. He turned his face away, forehead dropping to his knees, dragging his torn sleeves down over his wrists — a futile gesture, hiding scars she’d already seen.

The door creaked wider. Thomas stood in the frame, rain-soaked, mud-caked, a medical bag in one hand and a canvas strap in the other. He took in the scene — the empty chair, Nathaniel cowering against the wall, the Duchess sitting on the bare floor — and dropped the strap. It hit the wood with a dull, final thud.

“Your Grace.” His voice shook. “The bridge at the lower crossing gave way. I rode the long way round. I tried—”

“It’s all right, Thomas.” Cecilia’s own voice came out hoarse, rough from hours of talking a man back from a battlefield only he could see. “The storm has passed.”

She pushed herself up. Her numb leg buckled, and Nathaniel moved before he could stop himself — lunging forward, catching her elbow, his grip iron-tight and trembling. They both froze. It was the first time he had touched her voluntarily since handing her into the carriage outside St. George’s, thirty-one days ago.

He looked down at his own hand on her arm as though it belonged to someone else, and released her instantly, pulling back like she was a hot stove.

“Thomas.” His voice ground out like stone against stone. “Escort the Duchess to her rooms. Ensure the staff doesn’t see her like this.”

“No,” Cecilia said.

He stiffened. “Cecilia—”

“I am not a scandal to be managed, Nathaniel. And I am not leaving you on the floor of a padded cell.” She smoothed her ruined skirts with deliberate, unhurried precision, then turned to the valet. “Thomas. Draw a hot bath in his official chambers. The ones in the south wing. Not here.”

Thomas hesitated, glancing at his master.

“Do it.”

The steel in her voice finally landed — not haughty, but the tone of a woman who had survived a siege and was now dictating the terms of surrender. Thomas bowed and fled.

Cecilia turned back to her husband. He was staring at the floorboards.

“You shouldn’t have seen this,” he whispered. “You have no idea what you’ve tied yourself to.”

“I tied myself to a man who honors his debts, runs a profitable estate, and apparently fights ghosts in the dark,” she said flatly. She extended her hand. “Now get up. The floor is cold, and I require tea.”

For a long moment he didn’t move — calculating, she understood, the risk of crossing a boundary he’d spent years building. Finally, jaw clenched so tight a muscle ticked in his cheek, he reached out. He bypassed her offered hand entirely, planting his palms on the floor and hauling himself up under his own power. He towered over her, battered and rigid — but he didn’t walk away.

“Lead the way,” he said quietly.

They spoke properly at two that afternoon, in the library, sunlight pouring through tall arched windows onto shelves of leather-bound silence. Nathaniel sat by the unlit hearth, restored to his crisp waistcoat and tailored trousers — the physical trappings of a duke rebuilt around a man who no longer had the illusion of being whole. Cecilia sat opposite him. A tea service sat untouched between them.

“How long?” she asked. She didn’t clarify. She didn’t need to.

He stared at the empty grate. “Since 1815. Eleven years. The padded room came later — I had it built four years ago, when I understood the rest wasn’t going to fade on its own. Before that, I broke things. Furniture. Windows. Valets.” He said it with a clinical detachment that chilled her more than shouting would have. “My father sent me to a physician in London. Melancholia and hysteria, he called it. Laudanum. Leeches. When that failed, he suggested an asylum in Surrey. A quiet place for aristocratic madmen.”

He looked at her then, eyes stripped of every polite neutrality he’d worn for a month. “I came back to Oak Haven instead. Hired Thomas. Built the room. It was the only way to be certain I didn’t harm anyone when the dark came.”

“And you thought you could marry,” Cecilia said. Not a judgment — a logistical observation.

“I thought,” he said, voice tightening, “that if I gave you enough wealth, enough freedom, enough distance, you’d simply ignore the eccentricities of a husband who preferred the night to himself. Society is built on marriages of mutual avoidance. I did not account for your curiosity.”

“I am not curious, Nathaniel.” She leaned forward, forearms on her knees, every ounce of aristocratic posture gone. “I am your wife. In name, in law, in fact — and now in reality. I watched my father destroy our family piece by piece because he refused to admit he’d lost control of anything. I will not watch my husband chain himself to a chair because he refuses to ask for help.”

“There is no help for this.” He surged to his feet, pacing to the window, voice cracking like a whip in the quiet room. “Do you think this is a matter of will? When the sun sets I smell burning flesh. I hear horses screaming. I feel the mud pulling me under. You cannot reason me out of it, because my mind believes I am still there.”

He gripped the window frame, knuckles white. “You were brave last night. But bravery runs out. Pity runs out. Eventually you’ll look at me and see exactly what I am. A broken liability.”

Cecilia didn’t flinch at the volume. She studied his rigid back and asked, quietly, the one question that mattered.

“Who was Philip?”

The name hit him like a physical blow. His shoulders dropped. The fight went out of him all at once, leaving behind only the exhausting weight of eleven years of memory — and, for the first time since the wedding, the beginning of the truth.