Her face was bloodless, framed by dark hair in matted disarray. Her lips were faintly bruised—kissed or bitten, I couldn’t say. Her eyes were rimmed in sleepless shadow, dilated with something akin to fear… or perhaps longing. The mask was gone, yet the shame clung tighter than my destroyed corset.
“You imagined him,” I told my reflection. “You wanted him to be there, so you made him so.”
The woman in the mirror did not look convinced.
A knock broke the stillness. Three sharp raps that echoed too loudly in the quiet.
I flinched, heart hammering.
“Miss Benette?” came Mrs. Coyle’s voice through the door. “There’s a post for you. A boy brought it by special courier. Said it was urgent.”
“Leave it by the door,” I managed, my throat dry, my voice not my own.
She sighed, slipping it beneath the door before I heard her heavy footsteps recede. Silence returned.
For a long moment, I couldn’t move. The letter lay as a pale, rectangular omen beneath the door, waiting for me to approach it. My stomach twisted into a sick knot—not dread alone, but the kind of dread people feel when they already know the truth and pray to be wrong.
I knelt and retrieved it.
It was thick, expensive stationery that was lightly scented in a masculine cologne that I refused to admit I recognized. My name was written in an unfamiliar hand on the front with no other identifiable way to tell who the sender could be.
I traced the letters, my pulse drumming harder with every stroke. The envelope trembled in my hands as I tore it open.
Inside was no letter. Only a neatly folded clipping from The London Chronicle. The ink had smudged faintly, as though handled by unsteady fingers.
I unfolded it, and the world seemed to tilt again.
SCANDAL AT THE SAMHAIN MASQUERADE: THE DUKE OF BLACKTHORN AND A FALLEN HEIRESS?
The words did not so much sit upon the page as bleed across it, blurring until they looked almost alive. I blinked hard, once, twice, forcing my vision to steady.
“Two figures,” the report continued, had been seen together long past midnight in the garden. “The gentleman, clearly identifiable as His Grace, the Duke of Blackthorn,”had been observed“in a compromising embrace”with a woman who fled before she could be unmasked,“though a witness has identified the young woman as Miss Lucy Benette, fallen heiress and daughter of the renowned Viscount Benette.”
The clipping slipped from my grasp. It drifted soundlessly to the floor.
My mouth opened, but no sound emerged, only a thin, trembling breath that scraped the back of my throat. I pressed a hand to my chest as if I could hold my heart in place.
“No…” The word came out strangled. “No, that… it couldn’t be.”
But the truth, cold and sharp as a scalpel, plunged into me with merciless precision.
It hadn’t been a dream.
He had beenthere. Sylum had been very real.
And now everyone knew it.
The realization struck so hard that I folded in on myself, sinking to the floor as if the clipping had torn the last thread holding me upright. I drew my knees to my chest and hid my face in the crook of my arms, as though the darkness there could swallow my disgrace.
My mind recoiled, frantic, clawing through the scattered fragments of memory, desperate to remember.
Why did I drink so much?
Why had I gone at all?
The last thing I remembered was the cool rush of air in the garden, Sylum’s breath against my ear, and then… running through alleyways slick with mist and moonlight.
Then nothing. Blankness. Silence. A void where memory should exist.
