Elsewhere in SommerChase, Kenworth lingered just outside the study door, holding a silver tray in his hand and wearing a perfectly unimpressed expression on his face. The tray held a single letter, sealed in cream wax, and a small wedge of lemon cake, uneaten, but not unappreciated.
He cleared his throat once. Loudly. Then twice, in case the first had been missed. When no one answered, he shifted the tray to one hand and tapped lightly at the doorframe. “I realize I’m not the foreign secretary,” he murmured, “but I do outrank urgency in matters of refreshment.”
The door opened a crack. Barrington’s voice came, low and taut. “Kenworth, not now.”
“You say that every time,” Kenworth replied, stepping in without waiting. “But I recall a certain bullet wound in Salamanca, and I don’t remember you turning down lemon cake then.”
Barrington sighed, shoulders relaxing ever so slightly. He didn’t look up. “That was different.”
“You were bleeding then,” Kenworth said mildly. “Now you’re just brooding.”
He placed the tray gently on the side table. “Don’t let the boy storm out without a biscuit. It’s hard to fight empires on an empty stomach.”
Barrington didn’t answer, but the tension in the room eased by a thread. Kenworth turned to go, his footsteps soft. “Back in a quarter hour. Try not to start a war before the tea.”
*
Quinton didn’t knock.He let himself into Barrington’s study and closed the door behind him with deliberate finality.
Barrington looked up from the map spread across his desk, one brow arching. “You’re late.”
He stopped just short of the desk, eyes steady but too still. “You lied.”
The words came softly, but they carried finality, like something dropped from a great height.
The air in the room contracted. Barrington’s brows lifted higher. “Is that how we’re going to begin?”
Quinton stepped forward, his jaw tight. He hadn’t come to argue, not truly, but the moment the words left Barrington’s mouth, something in him snapped taut, like a canvas yanked by a storm wind. “You told her it was a customs seal.”
Barrington straightened slightly in his chair, a flicker of caution passing behind his eyes. “I didn’t lie. I simplified.”
“You downplayed the mark of the Order of Shadows.”
He’d seen that symbol once before, etched into a crate in a shadowed storeroom back when the world still thought him missing. At the time, he hadn’t known its meaning. Now he did.
Barrington’s expression faltered. A shudder of tension passed through his shoulders before he masked it. “She doesn’t know what the Order is.”
“She will. And she’ll know you didn’t trust her with the truth.”
“I trusted her with what she needed to hear,” Barrington said, pushing back from the desk with the practiced calm of a man used to control. “You saw her face, Quinton. She’s brave, but she isn’t invulnerable.”
“You think I don’t know that?” Quinton’s voice dropped, low and sharp. He took another step forward, hands fisted at his sides. He’d seen the tension in Mary-Ann’s hands when she thought no one was looking. The way she stood straighter when someone questioned her work, as though her spine alone could hold back a rising tide. She was brave. But brave didn’t mean unbreakable. “You think I haven’t watched what all of this has already cost her?”
Barrington leaned back slowly, one hand curling around the arm of his chair. “She’s only just stepping into this. If we overwhelm her—”
“She’s already in it,” Quinton cut in. “And she deserves to know what she’s walking toward, not what we’ve decided she can handle.”
The silence that followed stretched tight. Barrington’s gaze dropped for a moment, then lifted. It was steady, heavy with calculation.
He still didn’t know who had ordered his silence. But this… this narrowed the list.
“If she puts that symbol to paper,” he said quietly, “if she speaks it aloud in the wrong company, she won’t just be a daughter or a bookkeeper. She’ll be a target.”
Quinton didn’t answer. The words rose.How much longer do we keep her in the dark?But the words caught in his throat before he could speak. His loyalty to Barrington warred with something deeper, older, and more visceral.
He had seen what shadows could do to a man. He would not let them close around her.
Barrington met his gaze evenly. “I want her protected. That hasn’t changed.” He hesitated, his voice dropping, “And until we know more, you will not speak to her of the Order. That’s not a suggestion.”
