Chapter 11
Valeria invited Edward to her study, head high and layers of metaphorical armor in place. Clearly she had no wish to pursue the question he’d asked John.
“Since neither of us can sleep,” she said, “we might as well discuss how we can tend to the people you care for.”
The study was small and warm. Bookshelves lined the three walls, piled with volumes that Gordon had never read but had bought by the yard because a gentleman’s study required books.
The desk at the center was littered with papers.
Valeria’s papers now, covered in her neat handwriting, lists and plans and ideas that she had been making since the day Gordon died.
A fire that someone had banked but not extinguished glowed in the grate.
She sat behind the desk, while Edward took the chair across from her. Between them, a lamp burned low, throwing warm light across the papers and the ink and her hands.
They talked about the orphanages. She asked him about the ones he had visited across Europe and in London.
He told her about the ones that were barely standing.
Children in rags sleeping on straw, eating what they could steal or beg.
He told her about a boy in Constantinople who reminded him of himself—sleeping under a bridge, thin as a rail, with eyes that were too old for his face.
He told her about a girl in Vienna who had followed him for three blocks because he gave her bread and she could not believe there was no catch.
She listened with the focus of a woman who was already making a plan in her head.
She asked questions. Good ones. How many children?
Where were they? What did they need most urgently?
Food? Clothing? Medicine? Schooling? Who was in charge of these places, and were they competent, and could they be trusted with resources?
She pulled a clean piece of paper from the top drawer and started writing notes. Her handwriting was neat and fast, and she pressed hard with the quill.
She organized her thoughts into three columns: names, needs, and actions.
She was already thinking three steps ahead.
The orphanage in the village first. Then Whitechapel.
Then the south field, the one that had been fallow for two years, and whether it could be planted in time for a harvest that would feed the orphanage through winter.
She talked about the empty rooms in the east wing, and whether families could be housed there temporarily while they found work.
She talked about a school. A proper school, with books and a teacher and a room with a fireplace.
They agreed to visit the orphanage in the village tomorrow.
She would arrange for food from the kitchens, enough for the children, the matron, and anyone else who needed it.
Edward would assess the building, the roof, the walls—the things that a man who had a rough upbringing knew how to evaluate.
They would send supplies to the people in Whitechapel the following week.
She wrote it all down. Every detail. Every name.
Edward watched her work and thought that this woman could have run a war office.
She could have planned campaigns, managed supply lines, and organized the movement of armies across continents.
Instead, she had been locked in a house for three years and had not been allowed to send a letter without supervision.
The waste of it, the sheer waste of it, a mind like hers locked behind a door for three years, made him want to dig Gordon back up and kill him again.
Then he asked the question he had asked her brother. The one that had been building in his chest since the entrance hall, growing heavier with every piece of her story he learned.
“What did Gordon do to ye?”
Her hand stopped. The quill hovered above the paper. A drop of ink fell and spread into a small black star on the page. She watched it spread. She did not look at him.
She set the quill down. The study was very quiet. The fire crackled in the grate, and the clock on the mantelpiece ticked.
“He was awful,” she muttered.
The word was too small. A teacup for an ocean. She knew it. He knew it. But she said it, and her voice did not break, and her eyes did not water.
Edward had expected tears, but he should have known better. She was the Hound’s bride-to-be, after all.
“Let us just say that he tried every possible way to control me,” she added.
The quill snapped in her hand. She looked at the two pieces, before carefully setting them down on the desk, then took another quill out of the drawer. Her hands were steady, but her jaw was trembling.
“He could not. And he grew ever more creative as the years passed.”
She gave a bitter smile. It was the worst smile Edward had ever seen. It was the smile of a woman who had learned to mold her pain into a shape that other people could look at without flinching.
“His latest success was keeping my meals. Allowing me to barely eat. Just enough to keep me alive. He thought that hunger would be the key to my bed.” She shook her head.
The lamplight caught her cheekbones. They had filled out, what with months of proper nutrition, but the shadows were still there.
“He would sit across from me at supper and watch me eat broth and bread while he had roast beef and three courses and dessert. He would count every bite. If I had too much butter, there would be consequences. Not violent ones; he was too clever for that. Just the quiet kind. The kind that nobody sees.”
She paused, took a deep breath, then continued.
“He used to read my letters before I could send them. Most of the time, he decided I could not. He counted the sheets of paper in my drawer and checked the ink levels. He timed how long I spent in each room and with each person. He chose what I wore and whom I spoke to. He oversaw every interaction I had with the staff, and if he heard me laugh at something Mary said, I would not be allowed meals the next day.”
Edward’s hands were flat on his knees. He kept them there. If he moved them, he would break the chair. He could feel the grain of the wood under his palms. He pressed harder.
“When I found out he was dead, I laughed.” She turned her gaze to him. It was steady and burning. “I actually laughed. And I am not sorry for it.”
The lamp flickered. A log cracked in the fireplace.
“Let us hope history does not repeat itself, Duke,” she said.
Edward nodded. He realized, sitting there in the lamplight with the broken quill on the desk and the fire dying down, and this woman looking at him with eyes that had seen the worst a man could do and were still open, how much he respected her.
He tried to say so. He opened his mouth to tell her that what she had endured was unconscionable and that her survival was an act of extraordinary courage and that he would spend every day of their marriage trying to be worthy of the trust she was placing in him.
But Valeria was far away from him at that moment. Lost in her memories. Her eyes distant.
She was not in the study anymore. She was somewhere cold and locked and hungry, and he could not reach her.
He recognized that look. He had seen it on soldiers who had come back from places they could not talk about.
The body was present, but the mind was elsewhere, racing through rooms it could not leave.
She blinked. The distance left her eyes, and she was in the study again, solid and present.
“I want to get married as soon as possible,” she declared. “In three weeks, after the banns are read.”
“Why the rush?”
“I am not safe while I am unwed.”
It was the first time he had actually seen her vulnerable. Not the careful composure. Not the sharp tongue. Not the woman who had stuck out her hand when the Hound walked in, or played riddles in a gazebo, or stood in the rain and told him to stop ordering her around. Just a woman. Afraid.
“I wish I could have killed him for ye,” Edward said. His voice came out rough. Wrong. He cleared his throat, but it did not help. “I would kill anyone who put that look in yer eyes, Duchess.”
She looked at him, her expression shifting. Not gratitude, but recognition. She had found someone who did not flinch at the ugliness of it.
He had not tried to comfort her. He had wanted to hurt the man who had hurt her. Those were different things. She seemed to know the difference.
Then she laughed. Short and dry. “You do not need to be so extreme. You can just make sure you are not the one to put it there.”
With that, she walked away.
He listened to her footsteps retreat down the corridor. The creak of her door. The click of the latch.
He sat in the study for a long time. The fire died. The broken quill was still on the desk in two pieces. He picked them up and held them together. They did not fit back the way they had been.
He thought about what she had said.
“Let us hope history does not repeat itself.”
She had looked at him when she said it. Looked him right in the eye. And the look was not a plea. It was a warning. She was telling him what she had survived, and in the same breath, that if he did to her what Gordon had, she would survive him too.
He thought about the charity work Valeria had planned in under an hour. Three columns: names, needs, actions. A school. A harvest. Housing for families.
She had built the blueprint for a better world while sitting behind a desk in a dead man’s study, and she had done it with the same calm efficiency that she had used to survive the worst years of her life.
She was not fragile. She was not damaged. She was the strongest person he had ever met, and he had met people who killed for a living.
He put the broken quill down and went up to his room.
He lay in his bed and stared at the ceiling, thinking about a woman who had convinced a duke that she was barren so he would never touch her and who planned an auction for her own hand and who kissed a killer in the rain and who wanted to feed orphans.
I will not be the one to put that look in her eyes. Whatever it costs me, I will not.
But even as he thought it, he could still feel the weight of her in his arms when he carried her through the rain. And he knew, with the certainty of a man who had spent his life reading people, that keeping that promise was going to be the hardest mission he had ever undertaken.
Because she was not afraid of him. And a woman who was not afraid of the Hound was the most dangerous thing in the world.