“No! You haven’t. You still have time to make things right with her.” When she finished, her voice was barely a breath. “Montague cannot andwillnot win this.”
“Yes, he will not.” Raph’s tone was iron. “Because tomorrow, I will ride to the place he named. I will challenge him. And this time, I’ll make sure not to miss.”
Camelia’s head snapped up. “You truly believe that a duel will fix everything?”
“It is the only language Montague has ever understood,” he hissed.
“You will kill him or die trying?” Her question cracked like a whip.
Raph met her gaze, his eyes flat and lethal. Camelia did not understand the world of pain Lord Montague had caused him. The years of torment he endured without his sister. Together, they had survived the wrath of their father. Until Lord Montague entered Josephine’s life and ruined her.
“I failed to put him in the ground sixteen years ago. I will not fail again. If I do this, Pamela will be safe. You and your family will be safe.”
“Safe?” She laughed—a raw, wounded sound. “Safe while I wait to hear whether my husband is bleeding out on some frostbitten field? Safe while Pamela wakes up to discover that the only father she has ever known is dead because of pride?”
“This is not pride,” he snarled. “This is justice.”
“This is suicide!” she shouted. “What if you die, Raph? Have you thought past the moment you pull the trigger? What then?”
“Then Montague is dead, and the secret dies with him.”
“And if he shoots you, we bury you!” Her voice broke. “Do you truly believe that Pamela will thank you for that? That she will be grateful you chose vengeance over living for her?”
He turned away, his jaw clenched so tight it ached. “Some debts can only be paid in blood.”
Camelia grabbed his hand from across the vast space between them, forcing him to face her. “Listen to me. This is my father’s debt! I will go back home. You can end this marriage if it means saving your life. There is always another way. Pay him. Expose him. Buy time. Send me back home. Anything but throwing your life away on a duel you may not win.”
“I will win.”
“He shot you before, Raph.”
“I was younger then; I’ve had practice since then.”
“You did not win last time!” she cried out, and Raph’s shoulder stung as a reminder. “You went home with Montague’s bullet in your shoulder and Josephine in a grave. Do you think lightning strikes the same place twice in your favor?”
His eyes flashed. “I hesitated then because Josephine begged me not to find him and kill him. But this time… this time I will not hesitate. He cannot threaten my wife and my niece and get away with it. If that’s the type of husband you think you married, then by all means,leave.”
Camelia’s hand retreated from his. “And what of us? What of the girl who still calls you Father? What of the wife who lov—” She stopped abruptly. “Don’t you see that you are worth more to us alive than any vengeance?”
Raph’s face twisted. Her words struck a chord, but he had already made up his mind.
“You do not understand. If I let him live, he will come again. And again. He will bleed us until there is nothing left but ruin and shame.”
“Then we face ruin together!” she argued. “We are not porcelain, Raph. We will not shatter. But if you die tomorrow, we will. Pamela will.Iwill.”
He stared at her, his chest rising and falling too fast, the air between them thick enough to choke on.
Camelia’s ferociousness set him ablaze. God help him, he wanted to drag her against him, silence her fierce mouth with his own, taste the salt of her anger and the sweetness beneath until neither of them remembered how to fight.
But the wound he had dealt her still bled. He had seen the exact moment her heart cracked open. He had walked away from her while the light in her eyes guttered like a candle in a storm, and the echo of that heartbreak followed him still. There was no time to fall to his knees and beg for forgiveness.
Dawn was coming, Montague was waiting, and the choice he had made in the dark was already thundering down the drive. So he stood up, fists clenched at his sides, drinking in the sight of Camelia one last time while the space between them pulsed with everything he could not say and everything he had already destroyed.
Camelia’s voice dropped to a deadly whisper. “Raph, last night I got to know you as my husband. I will not sit in this house waiting for a servant to knock and tell me that you are dead. I cannot lose you after everything.”
Raph had never heard such words spoken to him before.
“Tomorrow morning, if you ride out to meet Montague, I will be gone before the sun is fully up. I will take Pamela, and I will leave Brentmere. Because I will not watch her grow up visiting a grave instead of a father,” she continued.
