Page 68 of Reclaimed By Her Scottish Duke

“I have him.” He crossed the room and grabbed her by the shoulders. He could not keep the thing out of his voice, the fierce singing thing that had ridden home with him through half of London. “After all these years, I finally have him, Rosaline.”

He had left her at their own door hours ago, still pale and quiet from the reeking Southwark garret, and had not been able to make himself come inside and sit down. There had been too much roaring in him, and too much to be done before the chance slipped away again.

So, he had turned the carriage around and gone straight back out into the failing afternoon, from a shipping office to a posting house to a clerk’s desk where a tired man took down his hurried instructions, and he had not let himself stop until the whole of it was in motion. Only then had he come home, too full of the thing to hold it a moment longer.

He had not let himself believe it, even then. To believe it too soon felt dangerous, as though hope itself might loosen something in him he had spent sixteen years holding tight.

For all those years, justice had belonged to some distant someday. A door he could see but never open.

And now a ruined man in a Southwark garret had put the key in his hand.

He had spent the hours since they left Deane setting it in motion, and walked out into the cold at last with his heart beating hard and, for the first time in his life, allowed himself to think it.

It might actually be done.

Passage north was booked, and word already sent ahead in his own hand, warning the keeper of a certain strongroom in Edinburgh that the Duke of Greythorne would be calling on it shortly and would take it very ill to find any door barred to him.

“It’s true, Rosaline. Every word Deane swore to us.” Magnus heard himself talking too fast and could not slow down. “There was a tribunal. A private commission that heard the evidence against me faither, and for all they claimed to burn its papers, they did not burn the sworn depositions. The names of every man who signed the thing into being, set down in their own hands. Deane filed them himself. They were carried north when the commission was dissolved, to a strongroom in Edinburgh, and they are there still because no one ever imagined a soul would come lookin’.”

“Edinburgh,” she said quietly.

“Aye. I ride for it within the week. Me name is enough to command that door open where a lesser man’s would not, and I’ll bring back the proof that ties the whole rotten circle together, with Oldbrook’s name at the head of it.” His grip tightened on her, still gentle but urgent. “And then I lay it before the men who have the power to undo what was done, in the open, where no scandal sheet and no quiet threat can bury it a second time the way they buried it the first. Sixteen years, Rosaline. Me faither died branded a traitor, and I mean to clear his name in the one place they can never take back.”

He was smiling. He realized it as he said it, smiling like a boy. He waited for her to smile with him because she, of all people, understood what this meant. She had said it herself, by the fire, with her hand in his. “Then we will find them.”

She did not smile.

He had come home to the one soul in the world he was certain would understand, the woman who had taken his hand by the fire and said, plain as anything, that they would find these men together. He had carried her north with him all afternoon in his head, her cleverness, her unbending courage, the ally he had waited his whole life to have and never thought he would. And now she was looking at him as though he had told her he meant to walk into the sea.

“They killed him.” Her voice had gone very careful, very level, the voice he had learned meant she was frightened and would not show it. “Your father. These men. You have told me yourself what they are. They forged proof of treason, left a good man to die in a cell for it, and slept soundly after. And you mean to ride north alone and carry the proof of it out of a strongroom, and then stand up in public and name them for it.” She drew back from him. “Magnus, they will kill you too.”

“They’ll nae dare, once it’s⁠—”

“They dared with your father.” The words came fast now, and her hands rose between them. “He was a baron with a conscience, and they destroyed him with paper and a paid witness, and no one lifted a finger. You would be doing exactly what he did—gathering proof against powerful men who had already shown you precisely what they do to a man who gathers proof.” She was pale. “Let it go, Magnus. I am begging you, let it go.”

Something in him went cold and still.

“Let it go?”

“He would not want this.” She reached for him, both hands pressing flat against his chest over the greatcoat, over the cold. “Whatever your father was, he loved you. You have told me so. He did not tell you to spend your life chasing his killers into an early grave. He would not want you destroyed over a thing already done, that no verdict can undo. He is gone, Magnus. You are not. Do not throw away your entire life to settle the account of his death.”

“Daenae.” His voice came out rougher than he meant. “Daenae tell me what me faither would want. Ye never met him.”

She flinched, and he saw it, but he could not stop.

He heard the unfairness of it even as it left him, the way he had reached clean past every soft thing between them for the one blow that would end the argument.

Part of him stood back and was ashamed. The rest of him drove on regardless. He had never in his life spoken to her so. He had sworn to her sisters on the chapel steps that he never would, and he did it anyway, because the anger inside him was greater than his shame.

“I have carried this since I was fifteen years old. Every borrowed manner, every dinner I choked down, every hour I played the tame Scot for a room full of men I despise—all of it has been for this one thing. And now it’s within me reach, closer than it has ever been, and ye ask me to walk away from it.” He stepped back from her hands. “Honor isnae a small thing to me, Rosaline. It’s everything I have. Me faither died with his stripped from him and never got it back, and if I waste the one chance to return it to him because the men who took it are dangerous, then I am a coward. I would be a coward every day for the rest of me life, and I would ken it every time I looked in a mirror, and so would he.”

“He is dead. He will not look.”

“I will look.”

The silence sat between them, cold as the streets he had brought in on his coat.

“I cannot do this.” Her voice had gone thin and unsteady in a way he had never heard. “I cannot live like this, Magnus. Waiting. Listening for the horse in the yard, wondering each time you ride out whether this is the day someone decides you have become inconvenient. I spent my whole life afraid in my brother’s house, and I told myself when I came here that the fear was over, that we were building something. Something steady. A life. I thought that was what this was.” Her eyes shimmered. “And now you are telling me it was never a life together. That underneath it all, you were only waiting to go and get yourself killed.”