Page 90 of The Duke’s Caught Bride

Something opened in Kenneth’s chest that he had not known was sealed. Not grief, which he had learned to carry, or guilt, which he had learned to manage, but something beneath both: the conviction that control was the same as care, that governance was the same as love, that holding everything at a manageable distance meant he could never be the instrument of its destruction.

“She climbed a tree yesterday.” The words left him before he understood why they were the words he chose. “An oak in the park, in her afternoon dress, because she had promised Freddie she would show him the route. Miss Leyton was alarmed, but Alice did not care.”

Jonathan said nothing.

“She was reading tonight. In the morning room.” Kenneth stopped. The fire had burned down to embers. The club had gone very quiet, the last of the members having departed without his notice, and the silence held whatever was said in it. “I could hear her turn the pages.”

“Kenneth.”

“I have been listening to her turn the pages for a week.”

Jonathan set his glass on the table between them carefully, and the care was its own answer.

As they sat in the dim firelight, Kenneth stared at the embers and felt the truth of what Jonathan had said settle into him, slow and irreversible as a tide turning, not because the water chose it but because the pull required it, and resistance was no longer an option the body recognized.

Jonathan heard it first. He straightened, his head tilting toward the door. Kenneth, still deep in the wreckage of what he had been thinking, did not register the change until the door to the card room opened and someone entered at a half-run, disheveled, carrying news he had not yet organized.

“Fire.” The voice echoed through the near-empty room. “In Mayfair. Grosvenor Square, they are saying. One of the great houses. The blaze has taken the upper floors.”

Kenneth was on his feet before the man finished speaking. The brandy glass hit the carpet without breaking. Jonathan put a hand on his arm, but Kenneth shook it off and crossed the room in strides that covered the distance before his mind had completed the calculation his body had already performed.

Grosvenor Square. The upper floors, where his sons were sleeping, where Alice was sleeping.

The night air hit his face on the stone steps. His carriage was at the pavement. He did not hear his own voice when he gave the instruction, only the whip crack and the wheels lurching forward. Behind him, Jonathan was shouting something that fell away beneath the hammering of hooves on cobblestones and the hammering inside his own chest, which was not fear precisely but something larger, the total and ungovernable collapse of every structure he had built to hold himself at a distance from the things that mattered.

He braced one hand against the carriage wall and watched the lamplit streets blur past, before the sky above the roofline changed.

A stain of orange and amber spread above the chimneys where no warmth should be, growing, feeding on whatever it had found. It was the color of the silk Alice had worn at the ball, and the brandy in his glass, and the copper in her hair, and every shade of warmth he had spent a week trying not to see.

The glow sat above the roofline of Mayfair like a hand laid flat against the night, and it did not diminish. It grew.

The carriage turned onto their street, and the glow filled the window. Kenneth leaned forward, gripped the sill, and felt everything he was, everything he had governed and contained and held at arm’s length, become a single thought, formless and total, occupying his entire body with a force he had no structure left to hold.

Alice.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

The smoke found her before the sound did.

It arrived as thickness at the back of her throat, a heaviness in her chest that pulled her from sleep not as waking but as warning, the body’s ancient recognition that the air had changed, moving through her lungs before consciousness had fully assembled itself.

She coughed. The cough pulled her upright in the bed, and the second breath was worse, dense and acrid and carrying beneath its warmth something her mind refused to name.

Then the screaming reached her.

Voices, several, overlapping, rising from the floors below and the corridor beyond her door, stripped of every courtesy.

A woman’s cry broke high and raw above a man shouting instructions she could not discern through the thickening air. She heard the clatter of feet on the stairs, too many and too fast, the sound of a household that had been sleeping minutes ago and was now running.

“Fire! Fire in the house!”

Alice was on her feet before the words had registered properly. She did not recall the motion of standing. She was in the bed, and then she was on the carpet in bare feet and her nightgown.

The smoke was visible now, a grey haze pressing beneath the door, low and steady, spreading across the carpet toward her bare feet. The heat of the floorboards registered against her soles, flat and specific, a thing she would recall later, if later came.

She pressed her palm flat against the door, found it warm but not burning, and pulled it open.

The corridor was a different country. Smoke banked along the ceiling in a dense grey layer, already past the uppermost foot of the doorframes and sinking lower with every breath she took. The wall sconces had guttered out. The only light came from further down the corridor, a shifting orange glow that pulsed and drew.