CHAPTER ONE
“Papa, you cannot mean to hold to such a purpose, surely?”
The words left Lysandra’s lips before she could soften them, sharp as broken glass in the faded gentility of her father’s study.
She stood in the doorway, one hand still pressed against the frame as though it might anchor her to something solid, something real, because in truth, what she had just heard could not possibly be real.
Sir Harold’s countenance fell. He was seated behind his desk, though “seated” was perhaps too generous a term; he was slumped there like a marionette whose strings had been cut, his once-handsome features wan with exhaustion and something worse.
Shame, Lysandra thought, watching him with the practiced eye she had developed over eight years of managing this household’s slow decline.
That particular shade of gray was shame, she had become an unwilling expert in its variations.
“Lyssi…” he began.
“Do not.” She stepped into the room and closed the door behind her with a control she did not feel, acutely aware that her sisters were somewhere in this house, that Frederick was likely running through the halls with his wooden sword pretending to slay dragons, that none of them could hear this conversation.
None of them could know how thoroughly their father had destroyed them.
“Do not ‘Lyssi’ me as though this is some minor household matter to be smoothed over with pet names and placating tones. You have just informed me that I am to be wedded. To a stranger. A stranger who, I might add, slayed a man in cold blood.”
Her father’s eyes dropped to the scattered papers on his desk, bills, she knew, creditors’ notices, the accumulated evidence of years of weakness stacked in damning columns of figures that refused to add up to anything but disaster. “He was acquitted.”
“The ton calls him The Beast.”
“The ton calls him many things.” Her father’s voice was thin, reedy, nothing like the warm rumble she remembered from childhood, back when he would lift her onto his shoulders and call her his little general.
That man felt like a stranger now, or perhaps he had always been a stranger, and she had simply been too young to see the cracks in his foundation.
“Most of them are exaggerated. You know too well how society derives great pleasure in feeding upon and enlarging such rumors.”
“And some of them, presumably, are not.” Lysandra moved further into the room, her fingers finding the worn edge of a chair and gripping it hard enough that her knuckles went white beneath her skin.
The study smelled of old paper and cold ash, the fire had not been lit in days, one of the many economy measures that had become so routine she barely noticed them anymore.
They had let go of the second housemaid in spring.
The cook now served as housekeeper as well, and the once thriving stable housed two horses now.
But she noticed everything now, with the terrible clarity that comes from standing at the edge of a precipice.
She noticed the chill seeping through the thin wool of her dress, noticed the water stain on the ceiling that had spread since last month and would spread further still because there was no money to repair the roof, noticed the threadbare patch on the carpet that she had carefully arranged a side table to conceal.
She noticed everything that spoke of a family sliding inexorably toward ruin.
And she noticed, most acutely, that her father still could not meet her eyes.
“How much?” she asked quietly.
“Lysandra…”
“How much, Papa? If I am to be sold like livestock at market, I should at least like to know my price.”
The word hung between them, sold, and she watched it land on her father like a physical blow, watched his shoulders curl inward as though he could somehow make himself small enough to escape the weight of what he had done.
Let him suffer the pangs of his own making.
Let him understand what he was asking of her.
Let him sit with the knowledge that his weakness had brought them to this moment, and that it was his eldest daughter who would pay the cost.
“The debts are…” He passed a hand over his face, and for a moment he looked every one of his four and fifty years.
He looked older, he looked like a man whose spirit had already departed, leaving only a hollow frame that refused to lie down to rest his weary soul.
The gesture was achingly familiar, and she had watched him make it a thousand times over the years, always when the news was bad, always when reality proved too heavy to carry. “They are considerable.”
“More specific, if you please. I find my patience for euphemism has quite evaporated.”
“Twenty thousand pounds.”
The number stole the breath from her lungs.
Twenty thousand. She had known things were bad, as she had managed the household accounts herself these past eight years.
She had witnessed the daily retrenchments as she was by no means a stranger to the bitter economies of their situation.
She witnessed each passing season how they had been reduced to selling parts of their home to survive, but the most heart wrenching was selling had sold her mother’s jewelry piece by piece until only the locket remained.
She had not known the ruin was of such a nature.
Twenty thousand pounds was not bad. Twenty thousand pounds was catastrophic.
Twenty thousand pounds was the kind of sum that swallowed families whole and left nothing behind but whispers and cautionary tales.
How? The question screamed through her mind even as her lips shaped a calmer version of it. “How did it come to this?”
Her father said nothing. He didn’t need to.
She knew the answer already, had known it for years even as she’d tried desperately not to see it: the late nights when he claimed to be at his club, the smell of brandy that clung to his clothes at odd hours, the hollow promises that things would turn around, that his luck was about to change, that this time would be different.
The gambling. Always the gambling. Cards and dice and wagers placed with money they didn’t have, debt piled upon debt until the mountain became an avalanche.
She had been managing the household on half of what was needed, stretching every penny until it screamed, and all the while he had been throwing fortunes into the wind.
“Lord Wolford offered for me,” she said, because she needed to understand all of it, needed to map the full shape of this disaster before she could begin to navigate it.
Eight years of crisis management had taught her that much, you could not solve a problem until you understood its dimensions.
“Three months ago. You encouraged me to accept.”
“Wolford would have settled the debts. All of them.”
“And I refused.” She remembered it clearly, Lord Wolford’s too-warm smile, the way his hazel eyes had tracked her across the room like a hunter tracking prey, the crawling sensation along her skin whenever he stood too close.
He had been all charm, all concern, all solicitous attention, and something about him had repulsed her on an instinct too deep to name.
Predator, her mind had whispered, even as her father had extolled his virtues.
He looks at you like something to be consumed.
“I told you I would never enter into matrimony with him. I told you I would rather work as a governess than give myself to that man.”
“Yes.” Her father’s voice was barely audible, a whisper of defeat. “You did.”
“So now there is another option. A duke, no less.” She heard the bitter edge in her own voice and did not try to soften it.
There was no point in propriety now, no reason to maintain the pleasant fiction that they were a family discussing a happy occasion.
“How terribly convenient. How very, very convenient that a duke should appear just when we need one most. Tell me, Papa, did you seek him out, or did fate cast him at your feet like some sort of murderous providence?”
Her father winced at the word murderous, but pressed on nonetheless.
“The Duke of Stormhaven has paid the primary debts. Twelve thousand pounds, gone overnight, simply erased, as though they had never existed.” He raised his head at last, and what she saw in his eyes was not hope, it was the desperate pleading of a man who knew he had no right to ask for forgiveness but was asking anyway.
“He has offered to make a full settlement of the debt upon the event of the nuptials. In return, he requires a mistress for his house. He wants you, Lysandra.”
He wants you.
The words settled into Lysandra’s chest like stones dropped into still water, sending ripples of something cold and unfamiliar through her entire body.
A man she had never met, a man called The Beast by the very society he had once graced, a man who had covered his blade with another man’s blood and walked away without consequence, and he wanted her.
Not her modest dowry, which had long since evaporated.
Not her family connections, which were respectable but hardly impressive. He wanted her.
“Why?” she demanded. “Why me? I have no fortune, no connections of any particular value, nothing to offer a duke except…” She stopped, her mind catching on possibilities she did not want to examine, dark imaginings that made her stomach turn.
“I do not know his reasons.” Her father spread his hands in a gesture of helpless ignorance that she had seen a multitude of times before, usually when she asked how money that was meant for the butcher had somehow disappeared.
“I only know what his solicitor conveyed: that the Duke of Stormhaven wishes to wed, that he has selected you, and that his terms are generous. More than generous.”