Chapter 3
When consciousness returned, it did so with the gentleness of a guillotine.
Light cleaved through the thin curtains in merciless white slashes, striking my eyes with the precision of a blade.
I gasped, recoiling instinctively, one arm flung up as if to defend myself from a blow.
The pain in my skull pulsed violently as though the orchestra from the masquerade had followed me home and continued tuning its instruments inside my head.
For several disorienting heartbeats, I could not name the room around me. The ceiling looked warped, the shadows unfamiliar. The air felt too thin. I didn’t know where I was or who I had been the night before.
My body answered before my mind did.
Everything ached.
My corset hung half-unlaced, digging cruelly into my ribs.
The taste of champagne lingered on my tongue, stale and metallic.
My dress—wrinkled, smeared with London’s grime, and sagging off one shoulder—still clung to me like a second skin that wished to be shed.
One glove was missing entirely. The remaining one was torn straight through the palm.
My hairpins, bent and crooked, pressed into my scalp with the unkindness of tiny daggers.
Then memory, slow at first, gathered speed.
The masquerade.
The waltz.
That voice.
The garden.
Sylum…
A tremor worked through me, and I pressed both hands hard against my face, as though I could keep the truth from seeping through the cracks. As though I could stop the memory forming shape, stop it from becoming something I might have to believe.
“No,” I moaned into my palms. “No, that wasn’t real.”
It couldn’t have been.
Yet I had seen him, touched him, felt his breath against my skin. But he was a ghost from my past, not a man who would kiss me under a silvered moon. My heart insisted he had been real, but my mind recoiled, refusing the possibility.
I laughed weakly, though it sounded more like a sob. “A dream,” I muttered. “A drunken, ridiculous dream.”
Dreams could resurrect the dead. Dreams could make monsters look like lovers.
The silence of my little room pressed in, close and claustrophobic. For several months I’d been renting a one room flat in the shadiest part of London. It certainly wasn’t the townhome in Mayfair I’d grown up in, but it was all I could afford.
Outside, the world continued indifferent to my unraveling—carriages rumbled through morning slush, street vendors shouted their prices, and my landlord’s wife berated some unfortunate servant with her usual venom.
I swung my legs from the bed. The floor bit into my bare feet with icy teeth. A shudder wracked me, violent enough to force my arms around myself.
I lifted my gaze toward the mirror hanging crookedly on the opposite wall… and immediately wished I hadn’t.
A stranger stared back.
Her face was bloodless, framed by dark hair in matted disarray. Her lips were faintly bruised—kissed or bitten, I couldn’t say. Her eyes were rimmed in sleepless shadow, dilated with something akin to fear… or perhaps longing. The mask was gone, yet the shame clung tighter than my destroyed corset.
“You imagined him,” I told my reflection. “You wanted him to be there, so you made him so.”
The woman in the mirror did not look convinced.
A knock broke the stillness. Three sharp raps that echoed too loudly in the quiet.
I flinched, heart hammering.
“Miss Benette?” came Mrs. Coyle’s voice through the door. “There’s a post for you. A boy brought it by special courier. Said it was urgent.”
“Leave it by the door,” I managed, my throat dry, my voice not my own.
She sighed, slipping it beneath the door before I heard her heavy footsteps recede. Silence returned.
For a long moment, I couldn’t move. The letter lay as a pale, rectangular omen beneath the door, waiting for me to approach it. My stomach twisted into a sick knot—not dread alone, but the kind of dread people feel when they already know the truth and pray to be wrong.
I knelt and retrieved it.
It was thick, expensive stationery that was lightly scented in a masculine cologne that I refused to admit I recognized. My name was written in an unfamiliar hand on the front with no other identifiable way to tell who the sender could be.
I traced the letters, my pulse drumming harder with every stroke. The envelope trembled in my hands as I tore it open.
Inside was no letter. Only a neatly folded clipping from The London Chronicle. The ink had smudged faintly, as though handled by unsteady fingers.
I unfolded it, and the world seemed to tilt again.
SCANDAL AT THE SAMHAIN MASQUERADE: THE DUKE OF BLACKTHORN AND A FALLEN HEIRESS?
The words did not so much sit upon the page as bleed across it, blurring until they looked almost alive. I blinked hard, once, twice, forcing my vision to steady.
“Two figures,” the report continued, had been seen together long past midnight in the garden.
“The gentleman, clearly identifiable as His Grace, the Duke of Blackthorn,” had been observed “in a compromising embrace” with a woman who fled before she could be unmasked, “though a witness has identified the young woman as Miss Lucy Benette, fallen heiress and daughter of the renowned Viscount Benette.”
The clipping slipped from my grasp. It drifted soundlessly to the floor.
My mouth opened, but no sound emerged, only a thin, trembling breath that scraped the back of my throat. I pressed a hand to my chest as if I could hold my heart in place.
“No…” The word came out strangled. “No, that… it couldn’t be.”
But the truth, cold and sharp as a scalpel, plunged into me with merciless precision.
It hadn’t been a dream.
He had been there. Sylum had been very real.
And now everyone knew it.
The realization struck so hard that I folded in on myself, sinking to the floor as if the clipping had torn the last thread holding me upright. I drew my knees to my chest and hid my face in the crook of my arms, as though the darkness there could swallow my disgrace.
My mind recoiled, frantic, clawing through the scattered fragments of memory, desperate to remember.
Why did I drink so much?
Why had I gone at all?
The last thing I remembered was the cool rush of air in the garden, Sylum’s breath against my ear, and then… running through alleyways slick with mist and moonlight.
Then nothing. Blankness. Silence. A void where memory should exist.
I lifted my head, forcing my gaze to the discarded clipping beside me. The words blurred before I blinked them into focus.
“A witness has identified the young woman as Miss Lucy Benette…”
A chill slithered down my spine.
Who could have recognized me? I had been careful, painfully careful. My mask had never left my face. Even in the garden, even when his lips had found mine.
Sylum…
His name was a curse and a prayer in one. My jaw tightened until my teeth scraped harshly together.
Had he been the witness?
Had this been his doing all along, a cruel trick to force my hand, to ruin my name and make me his by necessity? But why now, after all these years?
My temples throbbed, the ache no longer merely a hangover but something deeper, a throb of heat behind my eyes—anger, humiliation, and something far more treacherous… longing.
I should have torn the clipping to pieces. I should have burned it, pretended none of it existed.
Instead, I rose abruptly, crossing the room in unsteady strides. The wash basin waited in the corner, the water faintly chilled from the morning air. I plunged my hands into it, splashing my face until the cold bit into my skin. It did little to cool the fire beneath.
I washed, then dressed with mechanical precision in a plain cream gown, worn but clean. My fingers fumbled with the fastenings as though they no longer belonged to me. I coiled my hair into a severe knot, pins scraping against my scalp until the pain steadied me.
As my reflection took shape in the warped glass, I didn’t see the ruined woman from the masquerade.
I saw a storm.
The fragments of the night before returned with vicious clarity—his scent, his voice, and the deliberate way he had looked at me.
He had known I thought him a dream. He had let me doubt my own senses, watched me unravel beneath his touch, and never once had he told me the truth.
Perhaps, I thought bitterly, he had enjoyed watching me question my sanity.
Perhaps men like Sylum Deveroux always had.
I drew a long, shaking breath and fastened my cloak, the fabric heavy on my shoulders.
But no. Not everything aligned.
The Sylum I had known, the man who once pressed poetry into my palm and kissed me with reverence, would never have taunted my sanity. He would never have let me believe an illusion… not after knowing what it had done to my mother.
No, the man at the masquerade had been colder. Sharper. A stranger wearing a familiar face.
And if that was true… then I had danced not with love, but with something far darker.
Perhaps Sylum was not the man I once knew anymore.
Regardless, I would not sit idly and let my name rot in every London parlor while Sylum Deveroux hid behind his title and wealth. No, I would find him. I would make him explain.
My hand clenched around the doorknob. I could still feel the phantom press of his palm against mine from last night, the warmth of his mouth whispering, Have you missed me, Lucy?
I yanked the door open and froze.
He stood on the threshold as though summoned by my fury, my shame… perhaps my longing.
Sylum Deveroux, Duke of Blackthorn.
The sunlight from the window struck him first—a thin, merciless blade of gold that caught in the threads of his dark hair and turned them to molten bronze.
He looked disarmingly alive in that light, more real than the fevered memory of the night before.
And yet, there was something altered. Something sharpened around the edges of him, as though grief or rage…
or both… had polished him into a finer, more dangerous thing.