Duke of Steel (Regency Gods #6)

Prologue

“Oi. Mail.”

This was the only warning that Hector Ferrars received before Ramsay Becham, the one man that Hector could truly call a friend, threw a small paper packet in his direction.

This was a particularly dangerous move, as Hector was standing over a hot forge, but he snatched the paper out of the air before it could be singed. He shot his friend a scowl, but Ramsay just chuckled, waved a hand over his shoulder, and left the blacksmith’s forge, off to annoy someone else.

Hector dusted off his hands, not that it did much to move the streaks of ash that perpetually coated his skin, and broke open … was that his father’s seal?

Except, as Hector learned as he read on, it wasn’t his father’s seal. At least not any longer.

His father was dead. For months now, apparently. And his younger brother was only seeing fit to write with the news now.

Which meant that Hector—for bloody months now—had been a duke and hadn’t even known it.

For some men, this might have been good news. It was an undisputed windfall, after all. It was the kind of shite that went into fairy stories for children—the blacksmith inheriting a dukedom.

But Hector was not that kind of man. He was the kind of man who crumpled the letter in his fist and threw it into the forge’s fire.

This was the news that he’d been dreading for—hell, for nigh on twenty years now. He’d known it would have to come eventually, but now that it was here …

He had to go to London. He had to go back to the south with all its falsehoods, with all those prim and proper smiles that hid the kind of cruelty that would lead parents to send away their own child, that would pit brothers against one another.

He looked at his ash-streaked hands and growled, “Duke of Metford … Duke of steel would be more fitting.”