“Careful.” The single word stopped his uncle cold. Oliver took a deliberate step toward the desk. “Choose your next words carefully, Uncle.”
Something shifted in the Duke’s expression. Perhaps it was the look in Oliver’s eyes. Perhaps he simply recognized a manwho had reached the limit of his patience and found nothing left on the other side but absolute certainty.
“She was six or seven years old,” Oliver said, his voice like cold steel. “He stole her from a village fair, and she spent the next fourteen years as that man’s prisoner and his victim. She has no family that she can remember. She cannot read or write because he deliberately kept her ignorant to ensure she couldn’t ask for help. She watched a stable lad hang from gallows because he tried to get a message out for her. She watched him die and she has carried that ever since.” He held his uncle’s gaze without flinching. “She is twenty-one years old and has never in her adult life been permitted to make a single free choice. And you would have me send her away quietly and let the man responsible continue on with impunity and likely recapture her and perhaps kill her.”
The Duke said nothing.
Oliver moved toward the door. “I want armed men at every entrance, and someone posted outside the east wing specifically. I will deal with Penharrow, and I will deal with the legal strategy, and I will deal with the consequence to this family’s standing. All of it, but you will give me this castle as a safe harbor, and you will post those guards.”
“And if I refuse?”
Oliver stopped with his hand on the door. He didn’t turn around.
“Then I will stand guard myself. Outside her door. All night. In the hall. Without sleep.” A beat. “And when your household asks why the heir to the Saxton dukedom spent the night on the floor outside a guest’s room, you can explain your reasoning to them, and if that doesn’t work, I will go back to the army and ensure I don’t come home and your title and estate can go some obscure relative if one can be found.”
He heard his uncle exhale. The sound of a man who recognized when he had been outmaneuvered.
“The guards will be posted within the hour,” the Duke said stiffly.
“Thank you.” Oliver opened the door. “And Uncle, James deserved better than an unmarked grave and a polite lie. I intend to ensure he gets it. I think somewhere beneath all that pragmatism, you know he did too.”
He left before his uncle could answer and walked down the corridor toward his own chambers, feeling beneath the exhaustion something that had been absent since the moment he’d first read James’s letter.
Not peace exactly. There would be no peace until Penharrow answered for what he’d done.
But purpose. Clean and sharp and sure.
He had work to do.
* * *
The bath had beenthe most extraordinary thing that had happened to her in fourteen years because Penharrow was not here or waiting for her. Not only that, but she also had a fine meal too. She was full and totally content. Nothing was as good.
Not the escape. Not the river crossing. Not Oliver coming back for her in the freezing current. Those had been terrifying and desperate and vital, but the bath—the deep copper tub filled with hot water that smelled of lavender and rose, the soft cloth, the soap that lathered into something approaching luxury—that had undone her in a way that danger never quite had.
She’d cried. Silently, with her knees pulled to her chest and the water cooling around her, she’d cried until there was nothing left.
Now she sat before the fire in the bedchamber they’d given her, wrapped in a night robe of ivory silk so fine it whispered against her skin like a secret, and she tried to understand where she was.
Saxton Castle.
The name alone was enough to make her feel like an imposter. She’d been shown to her room by a maid who’d curtsied to her, actually curtsied, as if Megan were someone worthy of the gesture. The girl had laid out the borrowed nightgown and robe across the bed with careful hands, had asked if she required anything further, and had closed the door softly behind her when Megan couldn’t find the words to answer.
She hadn’t been able to answer because she’d been staring at the room.
It was beautiful. Of course, it was beautiful. She’d lived in beauty for fourteen years, silk curtains and fine furniture and pretty things carefully chosen to disguise the cage they’d decorated. She knew beauty but wasn’t dazzled by it.
This was different.
The room at the hunting lodge had been beautiful the way Penharrow was beautiful—deliberately, purposefully, with an edge beneath it that reminded you at every turn who owned it and who it was for. Every comfort designed to soften and bind and keep.
This room simply was. A fire that asked nothing of her. Curtains drawn against the dark and windows with no bars. A bed turned down with clean linen. A chair pulled close to the hearth as if someone had thought, here is a tired person who needs warmth, and made it ready.
Megan pulled the robe tighter around herself and looked into the flames.
She was out of Penharrow’s clutches.
The thought arrived the same way it had been arriving all evening, in waves she couldn’t quite brace against. She’d think it—you’re free—and her mind would still, like an animal that’s run so long it doesn’t know what to do when the ground levels out. She’d wait for the catch. For the door to open and the familiar dread to flood in.
