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The lady. As though I am a piece offered for inspection rather than a person standing three feet away, perfectly capable of hearing.

“Before we proceed,” Lord Alden went on, folding his hands atop the desk, “I must ask you to remove your mask. I demand the same courtesy of every buyer before we sign the contract. A man ought to know whose name he’s about to sign beside.”

There was a pause. Laura felt it more than she saw it, a shift in the air. When she finally lifted her eyes, the stranger reached up and untied the black silk from behind his head.

Her breath caught.

She knew he was attractive, but was not prepared for what she saw. He was handsome, devastatingly so, in a way the mask had only half concealed. His features were not soft, though. His jaw was sharp, and his brow was heavy and dignified, a faint white scar cutting through one dark eyebrow. Everything about his face suggested a man built to endure things rather than charm his way past them.

Somehow, he looked familiar.

She studied his face like a painting, looking for a hint of what⁠—

I know this man.

Not well. She had seen him perhaps twice across crowded ballrooms, always alone, always leaving early. And yet she recognized him. More than that, she knew his name. Half the ton spent half its idle conversations repeating it in hushed, delighted tones.

The Duke of Duskwell.

A recluse. A man rumored, in whispers that grew more elaborate with each retelling, to have a temper that had once put a footman through a wooden door, to be involved in his brother-in-law’s death, to keep himself shut away from Society because good people could not be trusted around whatever darkness lived behind that composed, unreadable, impossibly handsome face.

Her eyes went wide. Beside her, her father made a small sound. It was not one of alarm, but one of something closer to delight, quickly and imperfectly smothered. She felt his grip on her arm loosen, not out of mercy but the sheer distraction of calculation. She could practically hear the cogs turning in his head, which only heightened her embarrassment.

A duke. Not a simple buyer, but a duke. And not only a duke, but the reclusive, mysterious duke whose favor other families would kill for.

Lord Alden, for his part, betrayed nothing so crude as greed. Only a flicker of pleasant surprise, quickly folded back into his professional calm like a paper in a dossier.

“Your Grace.” He inclined his head with precisely the correct measure of deference. “I confess I hadn’t expected to see you here this evening. It is an honor.”

“Good evening,” the Duke said flatly.

“Shall we proceed to the formalities?”

The solicitor had remained entirely silent until this moment, then laid a fresh sheet of paper across the desk and dipped his quill. He handed it to Lord Alden.

“The sum stands as agreed at the close of bidding,” Lord Alden began, leaning back in his chair. “Separate from my commission for the introduction. Ten percent, as I believe you were informed when the invitation was arranged.”

Her father inserted himself into the exchange with the eagerness of a man terrified the moment might close before he’d had his say. “Ten percent sounds entirely reasonable! A modest sum, given the… the singular honor of the match!”

“The settlement, Lord Harwood,” the solicitor spoke up, without looking up from his papers, “concerns the sum owed to you as the lady’s father, separate from Lord Alden’s commission. If you’ll sign here…”

Laura stopped listening then.

She stood in the center of a room where three men discussed the precise value of her existence, her father haggling over the amount owed to him for having sired her, the solicitor totting figures with the brisk indifference of a man balancing accounts, and Lord Alden pressing his advantage without so much as glancing her way.

Her stomach churned, and the candlelight blurred at the edges of her vision.

They hadn’t asked her a single question since they had led her through the door. Only the Duke was looking at her.

She felt it before she lifted her eyes to confirm it—that steady, unbroken attention, unlike the assessing looks the other buyers had given the women on the stage.

Nothing in it made her want to shrink. If anything, it did the opposite. It settled somewhere low in her gut and spread outward; a warmth she had no name for and no experience to compare it to, entirely separate from the fear that ought to have swallowed her whole in a room like this.

“No harm will come to you.” He said it quietly, for her ears only, cutting clean through the discussion of figures and commissions.

Her lips parted, but no answer came. She didn’t know what to do with a promise like that, offered so plainly and without pretense by a man whose name half of London whispered with a shiver of fear.

Her father, oblivious, had reached the end of his negotiation and was already extending his hand across the desk toward him with an eagerness that made her skin crawl.