PROLOGUE
Claire Yardley fell in love.
That had been her first mistake.
She had been told her entire life that love was not what it was made to seem in the novels. Her mother, her sister, her friends—all of them insisted that there was no bolt of lightning, no shifting of the earth, no powerful flash of certainty. She had been told that it did not exist, that there was no single, perfect person in the world whose soul matched your own.
They had been wrong about that. Horribly, beautifully wrong.
The only rightness at all in their sermons had been this: Love is never easy.
It is never a fairy tale. It is never a penny novel.
That part was true.
Because when Claire had been hit by that bolt of pure, white-hot certainty, it had been for the groom of another woman, a woman she loved very much. A friend.
She saw him first that night, standing at the foot of the stairs, bathed in candlelight. Frederick Octavius Hightower III, Earl of Bentley, had stood in the glow of the pink marble foyer, shining like a fairy-tale prince made flesh, cut from the fabric of myth and legend: golden and beautiful.
It might have been enough to ruin her life, just seeing him, just feeling it slam into her body like a wave in an ocean storm, but then he had turned, their eyes had met, and then her fate had been sealed.
And just like in the novels, just like in the fairy stories and penny dreadfuls, it had been powerful. It had been too powerful to resist. It had been the kind of thing that split the earth in two, that erupted in a blaze from your very skin, that changed the color of the air around you.
It had happened to both of them.
It had been fate.
Fate, it seemed, enjoyed a terrible mess.
Maybe Claire did too. She would be lying if the forbidden bent to their tragedy hadn’t stoked the heat, hadn’t made her heart race and pound, hadn’t made her all the more certain that it was meant to be.
When she’d left in the dead of night, tucked into a carriage with her stolen bridegroom, it had felt right. When she’d wed him on a ship in the English Channel, surrounded by smoke and stars, it had felt predestined. When she’d fallen into his bed again and again and again until her body quickened with child, it had felt foregone.
It was the rest of it that was wrong.
“Freddy?” she said, so softly she knew it would not stir him. “Freddy, are you awake?”
It was late, so late that when she’d stolen out to ask for water, the man at the desk in the lobby had also been dozing, his balding head lolling near his lantern, casting an absurdly large shadow on the wall behind. His dozing state was the only reason Claire had seen the card under his fingers, smudged, like the man had fallen asleep mid-letter.
The police were looking for them. Again. And it hadn’t even felt like a surprise, even as the number cited on the debt slip had sunk like a stone into her heart.
“Freddy, we have to go,” she said again over her sleeping husband, in barely more of a whisper. She felt her hand drifting out, almost touching him, almost stroking that golden hair, the beautiful curve of his jaw. “We have to go.”
Freddy mumbled in his sleep, curling onto his side and burying his face further into the pillow.
She knew he couldn’t hear her.
“We have to go,” she said again. “I have to go.”
When they’d been booted from Paris, it had been thrilling. When they’d fled Luxembourg, it had been an adventure. When Frankfurt ceased to be welcoming, it had been a little worrisome. Leaving Cologne had felt dark and somber. It had felt scary.
Bruges, however. Bruges was the end of the line.
He had promised to take care of her. He had meant it. For a time, he had done it.
But time had been doing something to her husband. The movement, the games, the stakes, and the risks had been chipping at him, crumbling away the man she loved, twisting him into something compulsive and wrong.
“Freddy, there isn’t enough in the strongbox,” she said, kneeling in front of it, pulling free the jewelry into her lap. “This won’t pay the debt.”
