Forgotten Vows (Forged Alliances #5)

1. CHAPTER 1

"If you turn me in, you will never find your wife."

Dalton stopped breathing.

Alfred sat back in the chair. Handcuffed, bloody-nosed. Smirking.

For a long moment Dalton did not move and did not speak.

He stood at the far wall, arms foldeIt was not just your accent d, the stone cold through the linen of his shirt.

He set his face in the empty, assessing lines he had learned during nineteen years of interrogations.

The face that gave a prisoner nothing to read and made them eventually fill the silence themselves.

The silence stretched.

Alfred broke it first.

"You have nothing to say?" His voice came thick through his damaged nose. "I expected more from the great spymaster. Shall I repeat myself? Your wife is alive. Vivienne. Alive."

"Prove it."

Alfred tilted his head toward the photograph on the table.

Dalton had looked at it once, when Alfred first produced it, and had felt the floor tilt under him.

He didn't need to look at it again. The image had imprinted in his mind.

Her face in three-quarter profile. The angle of her jaw.

The shape of her ear, half hidden by a curl. He had seen enough to know.

"A photograph proves nothing," he said. "It could be seven years old. "

"It was taken four months ago. You can see the differences.

They are subtle, but there. Her clothes, for one.

The Duchess of Dalton never wore anything so…

humble. The simple way she does her hair.

Her expression." Alfred let the silence stretch.

"She is living under a different name. A new identity.

With no memory of you. She cannot remember a thing before the shipwreck.

The duchess thinks she is a nobody." Another pause. "And she is engaged to a local doctor."

Dalton absorbed each piece the way he absorbed intelligence reports: cataloging, cross-referencing, filing. A new identity. No memory.

Engaged.

The last detail was a knife. Alfred had clearly held it back for exactly this purpose.

He didn't let any of it show.

Beneath the cataloging, something else was happening that he could not stop. The walls he had built around the fact of her death were failing at every joint. He could feel his composure as a physical effort. He could feel the moment when it might collapse.

Not here. Not in front of this man.

"What do you want?"

"Thirty thousand pounds. And my freedom."

"No."

"Then you will never see her again."

"Do you think I can't find her on my own?" His voice came out level. "Now that I know there is a possibility she is alive, I will move heaven and earth. She will be back before the end of the month. With or without your help."

Alfred leaned forward. The chains on his wrists clinked against the chair.

"How did that go for you the last time you searched for her?"

Dalton didn't answer. He could not have answered even if he had wanted to. The last search had gone on for nine months, across three countries and four coastlines. And had been a resounding failure. The pain of that failure was a corrosive acid that burned him from within .

Alfred saw the silence. The smile widened on his split lip. He didn't seem to notice the blood.

"What you fail to understand, cousin, is that she lives at my pleasure. Turn me in, and that pleasure ends. And if you keep delaying with useless threats — " The smile again. "Perhaps by the time you find her on your own, it will be too late."

Dalton crossed the cell in two strides, took Alfred by the lapels, and dragged him half out of the chair.

"What does that mean? Speak."

Alfred didn't flinch. That was the unnerving thing about him — not courage, but a kind of cold patience. Like a man who had decided long ago that sentiment was for fools. Dalton was convincing in giving the appearance that he believed that. Alfred embodied it.

"It means I am not the only one watching her.

" Alfred's voice dropped. "The people I work with — they are aware of her too.

I kept her safe because she was useful to me.

Remove me, and she becomes a problem they will solve.

" He paused. "They have done it before. You know that.

You have been chasing the evidence for months. "

Dalton released him. Took a step back.

Then another.

He had been assembling the pieces for the better part of a year, and Alfred was right — he had seen the pattern. People who became inconvenient died.

His hands were shaking. He put them behind his back.

The trap was so clean it was almost elegant.

He could not turn Alfred in. He could not kill him here.

He could not leave him in this cell to be moved to a Crown prison where he would die of an apparent accident before he ever stood trial.

The only option left was the one Alfred had presented to him.

He had to let his cousin walk away. And he had to trust him to lead him to her.

"Tell me where she is," he said. "I will verify it myself. Once I have seen her, you go free. "

"I don't think so." Alfred straightened his coat with what dignity the handcuffs allowed. "This is how we do it. We leave England together. You hire a ship — not yours. A neutral vessel. Something fast enough for the open sea."

"And the money?"

"You bring it. Locked, if you like. I don't care."

"You expect me to trust you?"

Alfred laughed. "No. I expect you to want your wife more than you want my head."

A long silence.

"You need to tell me where we are going," Dalton said, "so I can hire a yacht."

"Do you take me for a fool? Surely you don't think I would just give up her location. I will disclose it once we are underway. Once we are on the open sea, and there is no turning back."

"How do you expect me to hire a ship without telling the captain our destination?"

A handcuffed wave. "I have faith in your powers of persuasion. And your deep pockets."

Dalton stared at him.

The operative in him — the man who had kept the Empire's secrets for nineteen years — knew this was a trap. Alfred was a proven liar. He could have fabricated the photograph. He could have built the story to secure his escape.

But beneath the operative was a man who had not slept a full night in seven years.

A man who had kept his wife's rooms intact because he could not bear to part with anything she had ever touched.

Who had almost killed himself searching for her until his sister begged him to stop, weeping, telling him he was becoming their father —

If there was any chance at all that the woman in the photograph was Vivienne, he would walk into a trap. He would walk into ten.

"When we arrive," Dalton said, "you will take me directly to her. "

"Before we leave the ship, the money goes into my berth. And you will instruct the captain to convey me wherever I please when I return alone."

"You assume I will allow you to walk away once I find her."

"You will." Alfred's voice was almost gentle. "Once you set eyes on her, you won't even see me leave."

A pause.

"You see, under the veneer of the spymaster, you are just your father's son. Sentimental. Predictable." He held Dalton's gaze. "Weak."

His father, who had loved so completely that when his wife died, he had followed her within a year. Who had left behind a seventeen-year-old boy, a weeping ten-year-old girl, and a dukedom with no one at the helm. Dalton had spent twenty-three years making certain he would not be that man.

He had just decided to be that man.

He kept his face still.

"If this is a trick — "

"You will hunt me to the ends of the earth," Alfred finished, rolling his eyes. "Yes. I know. I will take my chances."

"And if you are lying," Dalton said, stepping closer, "you will not survive the trip."

"Agreed. But if I am telling the truth, you will stop pursuing me."

Dalton turned and walked to the door.

"We leave at dawn."

He opened the door, climbed the stone stairs, and reached the corridor of his own house, and there he stopped.

He pressed his head against the wall.

For one moment only, he let it in.

The hope.

Seven years of keeping it down, and now it broke through, and he had nothing left to hold it back. The hope, and the terror that came with it. This was the kind of thing that could save a man or finish him, and he didn't yet know which it would be.

She is alive .

The belief he had carried without acknowledging it. The reason he had never remarried. Never taken a lover, never permitted himself even a passing interest in another woman. Some part of him that refused reason or evidence had known.

Vivienne. Alive.

His father's son indeed.

He pushed off the wall. Straightened his cuffs. Composed his face.

There was a ship to hire, and a crossing to survive.