Chapter 27
Edward watched her sleep until dawn.
He did not move from the chair. He watched her breathe. In. Out. Steady. Trusting. She trusted him to sit beside her while she slept. She had survived three years of a man who used trust as a weapon, and she had chosen to trust again.
He did not deserve it. He knew that the way he knew how to load a pistol. But she had asked him to prove it, and he had.
At dawn, he pulled his hand free. She stirred but did not wake. He pressed his lips to her hair and then left.
The corridor was cold. He changed his shirt. Splashed water on his face. Looked in the mirror. Scarred jaw. Green eyes. The face of a man trying to remember how to be human.
Today was his wedding day.
He thought about the vows. The words he would say. To have and to hold. For better or for worse.
He had held weapons and documents and the throats of men who threatened the Crown. But he had never held a woman’s hand and said words that meant forever.
The concept of forever was foreign to him. In his life, forever meant until the next mission. Until the next target. Until the next dark room in the next foreign city. Forever was a luxury for men who did not carry pistols.
But Valeria had asked him, and he had said yes. And Edward Langton, whatever else he was, kept his word. Always. Even when it cost him. Especially when it cost him.
He looked at the clothes laid out on the chair. The dark coat. The white cravat. The waistcoat he had agreed to wear because Valeria had asked and because he was discovering that there was very little he would not do if she asked.
It was a dangerous discovery. A man who would do anything for a woman was weak, and the Hound had spent twelve years making sure he had no weaknesses.
But Valeria was not a weakness. She was the opposite. She was the thing that made the rest of it bearable. The dinners and the social calls and the dull, necessary business of being a duke.
She was the reason he had learned to sit at breakfast tables. The reason he had planted new roses in the south garden. The reason he had started sleeping in a bed instead of a chair—though he still kept the chair by the window, just in case.
Just in case. The two words that defined his life. Always ready. Always watching. Always prepared for the thing that might go wrong. He had spent twelve years living in the space between just and in case. The space was narrow and cold, and it left no room for anything else.
Valeria made room. She made room with her laughter and her riddles and her stubborn refusal to be afraid of him and her garden that had dead ends and false paths and a center that was hard to find. She made room, and he was terrified of what might fill it.
Love. That was what might fill it. The word he had not said.
The word he was not sure he knew how to say.
He had said it once to George while drunk on cheap whisky in a safe house in Calais, and George had looked at him with the patient exasperation of an older brother and said, “You do not need to be drunk to tell me that, Edward.”
Edward had not said it again, but he felt it. He felt it when Valeria laughed. When she argued. When she put her hand on his jaw, turned his face toward hers, and said, Don’t take it back. He felt it the way he felt the weight of a pistol in his coat—constant, familiar, dangerous.
A knock sounded at his door, sharp and urgent.
A footman entered, white-faced. “Your Grace, we caught suspicious movement around the estate. A rider along the south ridge at dawn. Dark coat. He watched the house for ten minutes and then rode east.”
Edward’s blood ran cold. He knew who it was.
He had known since the masquerade. Since the note. Since the look on George’s face in the gentlemen’s club when his mask slipped and the loss showed through.
George was not the kind of man who lost gracefully. He was the kind of man who would rather burn the game board than concede.
“I know what’s going on,” he said. “I’ll deal with it and be back for the wedding.”
He pulled on his coat, checked his pistol, then walked out.
He found George in a barn two miles east.
It was not difficult; George had left traces. A broken branch. A hoofprint. The kind a trained man left when he wanted to be found. George always wanted to be found. It was part of the game.
He was sitting in the barn, on a hay bale with a pistol on his knee, eating an apple.
“You found me,” he said, as though Edward had arrived for tea.
“Ye wanted me to find ye.”
“Of course. What fun is hiding if nobody comes looking?” He took another bite.
“Having Peter throw that note was a bit theatrical, I admit. But I wanted to see how you’d react, and I couldn’t very well do it myself after your bride had already looked me in the eye.
He volunteered, the fool. Nobody properly appreciates disloyalty. ”
“It was low,” Edward grunted. “Even for ye.”
“Low?” George looked amused. “I once watched you throw a man through a window in Lisbon because he insulted the Queen’s honor. You do not get to lecture me about low.”
“That was different.”
“How?”
“Because he deserved it.”
Edward did not move from the doorway. George’s hand was on the apple, not the pistol. He was here to talk.
“What do ye want, George?”
“I want my friend back.”
The polish was gone. George now looked like the boy Edward had known. The orphan with nothing and nobody.
“I don’t want your title. I don’t care about the Duchess.
I want my friend back. We came up together,” His voice was rough now.
“Remember? Two orphans in the Queen’s household.
You, from Edinburgh. Me, from God knows where.
Nobody wanted us. Nobody looked at us twice.
We were furniture. Background. The boys who cleaned boots and carried messages and slept in the servants’ hall. ”
Edward remembered. He remembered George at fifteen, skinny and sharp-eyed, stealing bread from the kitchens because the servants were fed last and the bread was always cold by then.
He remembered George at twenty, talking his way past a guard at the French embassy with nothing but a forged letter and a smile that could have charmed a snake.
He remembered George at twenty-five, sitting across from him in a safe house in Vienna, bleeding from a knife wound, yet laughing because the man who stabbed him had missed his artery by half an inch.
“I remember,” Edward said.
“Then how can you leave?”
“Because the boy I grew up with would not have imprisoned an innocent man. The boy I grew up with would not have threatened my wife.” Edward’s voice was steady, but his jaw was not. “The boy I grew up with is gone, George. And I have been mourning him for two years.”
“Mourning.” George’s voice was flat. “You are mourning me while I am sitting right here.”
“Aye. Because the man sitting right there is not the one I knew. Ye threatened her.”
“I wanted to see what you would do.” George set the apple core down. “And you punched Peter, which was predictable and exactly what I would have done. But after a bit of a punch, he backed down, the dog.”
“If ye were an honest and loyal person yerself, we’d still be a team.”
George’s expression shifted. “So it’s not for power? Not for being called Duke?” he taunted.
Edward pressed his lips together. “I’m disgusted. I considered ye family, and ye’d have an innocent man imprisoned just for a fuck.”
George flinched. Actually flinched. It was the first honest reaction Edward had seen from him in years.
“That was a mistake,” he said quietly.
“A mistake.” Edward’s voice was cold. “Ye tried to trick me into arresting an innocent man, George. A father. Because ye wanted his wife.”
“I know what I did.”
“Do ye? Because ye are sitting in a barn on my wedding day with a pistol on yer knee, which suggests ye have not learned a single thing from any of it.”
“Which part? The affair or the lie?”
“Both. Neither. I don’t know.”
George looked at his hands. “I got bored with her, truly. I don’t care to be tied to a woman, Eddie.
I just want my friend back.” He kept talking.
Words that twisted and circled. And then, quiet and sharp: “If you don’t come back, I will kill her.
I will put a bullet in that pretty head of hers, and you will have nothing. The way I have nothing.”
The words landed like a blade between Edward’s ribs. Not because of the threat. He had heard worse. He had made worse. The words landed because George meant them.
For the first time in twelve years of partnership, George Turner was not performing. He was not manipulating. He was not running a play from the old playbook. He was a man with nothing left to lose, and men with nothing left to lose were the most dangerous kind. Edward knew. He had been one.
He moved.
He crossed the barn in three strides. His hand closed around the pistol barrel and twisted it free. His other hand found George’s collar and slammed him against the wall. Dust rained from the rafters.
George’s feet lifted off the ground. Edward’s fist flew back. His hand closed around George’s throat and squeezed. George’s face went red. His feet kicked against the wall.
Edward could feel the pulse under his fingers, fast and thin. The old instinct was there, the one that said finish it, the one that had ended men in darker rooms than this. His hand tightened. George’s eyes bulged.
“See?” George wheezed, blood on his lips. He smiled through it. “No matter what you do, this is what you are. A weapon. A Hound. You can’t be anything else, old champ. Your bride is in danger with you.”
Edward’s hand shook. The anger was black and hot and familiar. The old anger. The one that had carried him through cellars and alleys and the worst nights of his life. George knew how to summon it. He had always known.
Edward thought about Valeria. About the way she had said, Prove it. About the way she had looked at him in the firelight. About the way she had looked at him in the gazebo, as though he were safe.
He uncurled his hand from around George’s throat and stepped back. Then he pulled a length of cord from his pocket and bound George’s wrists. Quick. Professional.
“Ye don’t deserve my attention,” he said flatly. “I’ll let the Queen decide what happens to ye. Ye’re not my problem anymore.”
George sat on the ground with bound wrists and blood on his face. And grief. The grief of a man who had just lost the only person who mattered.
“You were my brother,” he said.
“Aye, I was.”
Edward walked out of the barn. The morning air was cold and clean. He found his horse and mounted it. His knuckles were raw.
At the gate, he called over two footmen. “Go east. Two miles. There is a barn off the main road. Inside, you will find a man with his hands bound. Send for the constables. Tell them he threatened the Duchess and has used the power given to him by the Crown for selfish motives.”
The footmen went.
Edward sat on his horse. The sun was rising. The house was painted gold in the early light.
George’s words rang in his head.
“No matter what you do, this is what you are.”
But Valeria’s words rang, too. Prove it. The two phrases sat side by side in his chest. George’s accusation and Valeria’s challenge. The weapon and the man. The Hound and the husband.
He had chosen. Standing in that barn with George’s blood on his knuckles and George’s words in his ears, he had chosen. Not the kill. The cord. But the binding. Walking away. He had chosen to be the man Valeria believed he could be, even if George was right that the weapon was still inside him.
Maybe that was the point. Maybe being a good man did not mean the violence was gone. Maybe it meant choosing, every time, not to use it. Maybe it meant lowering his fist when every muscle in his body was screaming at him to swing.
He opened his eyes. The house was waiting. Somewhere inside, a woman was waking up and reaching for a hand that was not there.
He would be there. He would stand at that altar and say the words and mean them. Not because he deserved her. He did not. But because she had asked him to prove it, and this was the proof. Not the fists. Not the cord. Not walking away. But coming back.
Always coming back.
He thought about the vows he would say in less than an hour—to have and to hold, for better or for worse.
The words meant something different now than they had earlier.
Earlier, they had been obligations. Now, they were choices.
His choices. Made freely, with eyes open, by a man who had spent twelve years having his choices made for him by the Crown.
He closed his eyes. Breathed. Then he rode to the house to marry the woman who thought he was more than that.
The sun was warm on his face. The horse shifted under him. Somewhere in the house, Valeria was waking up.
But he had not left. He had dealt with the last piece of his old life, and now he was going back to the new one. The one with breakfast tables, rose gardens, and a woman who designed mazes and cheated at relay races, and who had looked at the most dangerous man in England and chosen him anyway.