Hyde Park, 6:30
-W
There were months before I could bring myself to enter Gabriel’s study at Rycliffe Place. In the end, it was only after the late duke decreed that his heir, Xander, would have his rightful bachelor lodgings that I left. Only then had I abandoned the house Gabriel and I built a life in. That had been a blessing, in the end.
At the time, it felt like a death sentence. Pack up or abandon every beautiful memory I had with the love of my life. It was not a simple undertaking, nor an easy one. And one of the unpleasant tasks had been haphazardly stuffing every remotelyincriminating document into a trunk to be moved to Cadieux House.
For all his faults, Gabriel had been a loving brother. He would not have wanted Xander to know of his more disreputable dealings. And so it fell to me to hide the evidence.
For nearly a year, my husband’s documents yellowed in three trunks. They resided in the corner of my makeshift study gathering dust for the maid to whisk away every week or so.
I had a great many trunks of Gabriel’s belongings. Some were easier to open than others. Some had not been touched in seven years.
To this day, I could not explain what possessed me to crack open the trunks that day, thirteen months after he left me. But that was the day I found the note.
That was the day I remembered the missing piece.
At first, all I could do was relive his final moments. All of the things I’d needed to say but could not manage to choke out. The inane thoughts of those moments haunted me—that I hadn’t felt him leave our bed that morning. The beautiful words I desperately wanted him to leave with, the ones I was too distraught to verbalize. The way his handsome face had been obscured by a veil of tears. And I could remember every single one of his last heartbeats.
But Gabriel’s last day had been full of laughter and love. We had enjoyed a morning luxuriating in bed, an afternoon of teasing at the races, an evening spinning around the dance floor, and a night spent in worship and being worshiped.
Later, I recalled the desperate nature with which he clung to me that final night. He had been insatiable, frenzied, and adoring. Reverent hands cupped cheeks. Impassioned words of love rasped between strained breaths. Infinite kisses had no end or beginning. Adoring lips and tongue tasted every inch of my body. Our lovemaking always had glimpses of those elements,but that night was something else entirely. Again and again, he took me, with a veracity we had not managed even in the earliest days of our marriage.
Then I opened the trunk. Months later, I found the note in his things. In retrospect, it was obvious. Gabriel had known. Maybe not how, or when, or for certain. But the possibility was forefront in his mind that night.
He had known each kiss might be our last.
Once that dreadful understanding made its home in my chest, the recollection of Gabriel’s evasive answers at the races that last day gave way to the memory of a wiry form, umber hair, and impossibly blue eyes.
William.
A man with whom I’d had but two—less than pleasant—interactions. We’d spoken but once, and we’d shared a single glimpse across a crowded field.
The first meeting left me frightened, insulted, and vaguely threatened. His love had stumbled across me practicing my fencing in a damp field between Yorkshire moors. Adriane was strange, skeletal, and unearthly beautiful. When William came for her, he came with nothing but biting sarcasm for me and adoration for her. His eyes, so full of desperate love for the strange, barefoot wraith when he fell to his knees before her, were cold and dead the next time I saw him years later across that field.
I racked my brain for days after I found the note. I fought desperately to recall the vague, euphemistic conversation Gabriel and I shared more than a year before, that day at the races. He was certain that Adriane was gone, that she had succumbed to her illness and insanity. And William wished to speak with my Gabriel later that week.
Then I understood. I realized the truth of that conversation. It had been my husband’s last evasion, his last half-truth.
Theconversationhe claimed was to take place later that week almost certainly occurred the next morning at dawn—with pistols drawn.
Beyond that supposition, I had only guesses of my husband’s final hours. The moments between him leaving our bed and collapsing on our front steps, a knife in his back, were a mystery.
Presumably, Gabriel went to Hyde Park at the designated time. Whether he stood there alone or whether pistols were fired was anyone’s guess. But there were no swords or pistols on his person. Perhaps his challenger supplied the weapons.
At some point, Gabriel stopped by the florist, likely on his way home from that dawn meeting. The irises he brought for me fell with him, scattered by the wind into the pool of his blood. A horrifying reminder of his killer’s cruelty.
The rest of my love’s final moments were filled with pain and chaos.
Wcould only be William Hart. I was more certain of it than I was of anything else in this life.
William, with the magnetic cobalt eyes, once filled with love, then filled with death, and finally last night, lust. He was the man on the balcony.
He had kissed me. The thought left my stomach churning with bile, spilling up my throat to leave a metallic tang on my tongue.
Worse still, I had kissed him. Hell, I had been the instigator. Gabriel’s killer had his lips on mine. His hands caressed my cheek, traced my neck, and dug into my waist.
Those hands had blood on them.
