I lifted my head, forcing my gaze to the discarded clipping beside me. The words blurred before I blinked them into focus.
“A witness has identified the young woman as Miss Lucy Benette…”
A chill slithered down my spine.
Who could have recognized me? I had been careful, painfully careful. My mask had never left my face. Even in the garden, even when his lips had found mine.
Sylum…
His name was a curse and a prayer in one. My jaw tightened until my teeth scraped harshly together.
Hadhebeen the witness?
Had this been his doing all along, a cruel trick to force my hand, to ruin my name and make me his by necessity? But why now, after all these years?
My temples throbbed, the ache no longer merely a hangover but something deeper, a throb of heat behind my eyes—anger, humiliation, and something far more treacherous… longing.
I should have torn the clipping to pieces. I should have burned it, pretended none of it existed.
Instead, I rose abruptly, crossing the room in unsteady strides. The wash basin waited in the corner, the water faintly chilled from the morning air. I plunged my hands into it, splashing my face until the cold bit into my skin. It did little to cool the fire beneath.
I washed, then dressed with mechanical precision in a plain cream gown, worn but clean. My fingers fumbled with the fastenings as though they no longer belonged to me. I coiled my hair into a severe knot, pins scraping against my scalp until the pain steadied me.
As my reflection took shape in the warped glass, I didn’t see the ruined woman from the masquerade.
I saw a storm.
The fragments of the night before returned with vicious clarity—his scent, his voice, and the deliberate way he had looked at me.
He had known I thought him a dream. He had let me doubt my own senses, watched me unravel beneath his touch, and never once had he told me the truth.
Perhaps, I thought bitterly, he had enjoyed watching me question my sanity.
Perhaps men like Sylum Deveroux always had.
I drew a long, shaking breath and fastened my cloak, the fabric heavy on my shoulders.
But no. Not everything aligned.
The Sylum I had known, the man who once pressed poetry into my palm and kissed me with reverence, would never have taunted my sanity. He would never have let me believe an illusion… not after knowing what it had done to my mother.
No, the man at the masquerade had been colder. Sharper. A stranger wearing a familiar face.
And if that was true… then I had danced not with love, but with something far darker.
Perhaps Sylum was not the man I once knew anymore.
Regardless, I would not sit idly and let my name rot in every London parlor while Sylum Deveroux hid behind his title and wealth. No, I would find him. I would make him explain.
My hand clenched around the doorknob. I could still feel the phantom press of his palm against mine from last night, the warmth of his mouth whispering,Have you missed me, Lucy?
I yanked the door open and froze.
He stood on the threshold as though summoned by my fury, my shame… perhaps my longing.
Sylum Deveroux, Duke of Blackthorn.
The sunlight from the window struck him first—a thin, merciless blade of gold that caught in the threads of his dark hair and turned them to molten bronze. He looked disarmingly alive in that light, more real than the fevered memory of the night before. And yet, there was something altered. Something sharpened around the edges of him, as though grief or rage… or both… had polished him into a finer, more dangerous thing.
