Chapter 15
BECKETT
Beckett stalked up the sweeping marble steps and through the massive arched doorway.
He’d expected the Great Hall to be filled with a crowd of gossiping servants, all trying to catch a glimpse of their dying master.
The only thing it was full of was its usual calm, settled peace and some motes of dust twinkling as they fell in shafts of sunlight.
He shut the ornate door behind him, and since there was no one to see, he helped it along with a vicious backward kick.
Beckett had first come to Avendene when he was twenty-four years old, sent here by a grateful lady he’d helped out of a tight spot.
After his mam had died, he’d done his best to stay out of trouble on the streets.
He had some of his mam’s old friends looking out for him at first, and as soon as he presented, he shot right up and out.
He was a big lad with a bad attitude. It wasn’t hard to get himself a job where looming around being big was most of his job description.
He was working as door muscle in a low-rent fancyhouse run by the gambling lords in Sevennis when he met Lady Dahli Dalbryn, and fuck knows what the woman had been thinking, taking herself to a dive place like that without the proper protection, alpha or not.
It was clear from the second he let Lady Dahli in that she was out of her depth. She was bright, vivacious, up for a good time, and apparently cursed by the gods themselves. The woman couldn’t win a roll of the dice to save her life.
Literally.
Someone floated a comment about taking it out of her hide when she lost for the ninth time straight, and even her strength and rank wouldn’t have been much help if the drunken fools got carried away.
The upshot of it was, Beckett left his post at the door and stepped up beside her. The itchy regulars might have chanced a takedown on an unknown alpha. They knew him, though. Not a soul among them dared try.
He got her out of trouble, and himself out of a job.
It was no hardship. He’d been there long enough, he reckoned.
He’d grown restless. He wanted more from his life than keeping the peace between idiots who had nothing better to do with their time and their coin than throw it on the gaming table, pour it their down their throats, or buy themselves a hole for the night.
As he didn’t have anything better to do, he saw the lady safely across town to her noble home, where he turned down her offer to see her all the way up to her bedchamber.
He did accept a hot meal and a bed in the servants’ dormitory, though.
He knew better than to go back to the fancyhouse, where he’d had a tiny bed tucked up under the eaves as a perk of the job. His bed and belongings were long gone. The only thing he owned that he gave a damn about was his mam’s old brooch, anyway. He kept that on his person.
The next morning before he headed out, the lady summoned him to her parlour and offered him a replacement job as her own personal footman.
He turned that down, too.
He had, he decided, spent enough time working for people he didn’t respect.
Lady Dahli was a powerful young alpha and a looker besides, but she had a cold arrogance to her that he didn’t trust. Funny thing was, while she didn’t seem to be all that concerned with paying her gambling debts, she got herself in a right froth about repaying him for his assistance.
She’d been astonished when he turned down her offer of a shag, astounded when he turned down the job, and outraged when he declined to have her fob him off with a purse of jewels that Beckett didn’t even have to glance at to know were as fake as her kindness.
“What do you want, damn you?” she snapped at him testily. “I pay my debts.”
At his raised brow she’d laughed despite herself, then looked down her nose at him and said, “I pay the important debts. I don’t care about money.”
She would when the gambling lords caught up with her, and he told her so.
When she waved this off carelessly, he shrugged and said that if she was going to get fluffed up about it, then he wouldn’t mind working some place out of the city—and make it a nice one.
She’d sent him to Avendene with a letter of recommendation.
She would, she’d told him, have sent him to Dalbryn Hall, her family estate, but her father didn’t allow alpha servants there.
She could have sent him to one of her brothers, perhaps, but she didn’t see any reason to give them the cachet of an alpha footman if she couldn’t have him. Instead, she was sending him to an old family friend. The duke would certainly appreciate Beckett.
More importantly, he’d appreciate Lady Dahli.
Beckett had never met a more brazen self-interested alpha in his life, and that was saying a lot.
He thought she’d sent him to one of the royal palaces at first. Beckett was nothing if not adaptable, though, and it didn’t take long for him to stop looking around, owl-eyed and impressed by everything.
Though that was more down to the fact Jack came home three months after Beckett had arrived, and from that moment on, Beckett had only ever had eyes for Jack.
Had only been with Jack.
A low churn in his gut and a flicker in his vision made his lips twist in an angry snarl.
Until last night.
And soon.
If this was just a matter of him being in rut, then he wouldn’t do it. It was just a rut. He’d had a couple before. He’d got through them alone. He could get through this one.
He didn’t need the duch.
The duch needed him.
So if the duch, who’d put the one person in the entire world aside from his mam who Beckett had ever loved, wanted Beckett’s cock?
This time, the duch was going to have to come and find Beckett himself.
The duch was going to have to command him.