Chapter Two
The candle on Marianne’s writing table had burned past its collar and was guttering in its own wax.
She had not moved to trim it. She had not moved at all for some time.
The question that had driven her from her bed and brought her to stand at the window had not resolved itself in the hour since, and she had stopped expecting it to.
Only hours ago, the decision had seemed an inevitable certainty.
There was only one man in the sprawling, soot-stained expanse of London who understood the Trust’s anatomy as well as she did, and who possessed a soul reckless enough to strike at its heart.
But as the candles guttered in their holders, the weight of her crown was heavier than ever.
Her priority was not vengeance; it was the girls.
Those taken, whose absence registered as a physical ache in the house’s rhythm, and those currently asleep in the safety she had promised them.
A miscalculation on her part would not be borne by her alone; it would be paid for in the screams and shattered lives of the women she had sworn to shield.
Could she trust Nicholas Archer with the delicate art of restraint?
Or would his own agendas, the long-simmering vendettas and the private aims of a man who had survived by putting his own needs first, take priority as they had always done?
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