“You still do not understand,” he said.
A chill slid down her spine.
“What do you mean?” she asked, though something inside her had already begun to recoil from the answer.
Martin leaned back slightly, his gaze never leaving hers.
“We are not going back,” he said.
The words fell into the space between them, heavy and irreversible.
Diana’s head turned sharply toward the window.
The familiar streets were gone. The houses had thinned and open road stretched ahead. In that instant, with dreadful clarity, she understood.
Her stomach dropped.
“You—” Her voice broke. “You have taken me?—”
“Yes,” Martin said softly.
Her heart slammed against her ribs.
“You have lost your mind,” she whispered.
“No,” he replied, his voice steady now, frighteningly calm. “I have finally chosen not to lose you.”
“Think,” Cartwright said, his tone quieter now, more deliberate, as though he were placing each word with care. “If this was jealousy, then it did not begin in that alley. It began long before. Can you name any man who might have looked at the Duchess and believed himself entitled to her?”
Alexander did not answer at once. A pressure started building somewhere deep and insistent, forcing its way upward whether he wished it or not. He had seen men admire Diana. That was nothing. Any man with eyes had admired her. But this—this was different. This required fixation. Resentment. The kind of twisted conviction that turned admiration into ownership.
His mind resisted it for one heartbeat. Then?—
Something turned sharply behind his eyes, and the room shifted out of alignment for one terrible second. Pain lanced through his skull so suddenly that he reached for the arm of the chair on instinct, his fingers biting hard into the leather. The headache was sharp, cruel, as if some locked door in his mind had been wrenched from its hinges.
“Your Grace?”
Alexander could not answer.
The gaming hell came back to him not as a sequence at first, but as sensation. Heat. Tobacco. A room thick with stale spirits and male voices. A polished table beneath his gloved hand. A man across from him speaking quickly—too quickly—about contracts, shipments, numbers, all of it carrying the greasy urgency of someone who wanted to be believed and feared discovery.
The sudden need for air. The alley outside, colder than he had expected, wet stone glistening under a reluctant moon. His temper was already sharpened by the interview he had just left. Then the voice.
Martin.
The pain in Alexander’s head burst brighter, and with it came the final missing piece. He remembered turning. He remembered the dark outline of Martin Hyatt stepping from the shadows. He remembered the first hard throb of warning in his own gut, that deep instinct that knew danger before the mind arranged it into logic. And then he remembered the blow.
Cartwright was on his feet now. “Your Grace.”
Alexander looked up.
The room had settled again, but only outwardly. Inside him, something had gone violently, irreversibly still.
“It was Martin Hyatt,” he said, and his voice sounded almost unlike his own, stripped so flat by certainty that even he heard the danger in it. “Not only the face. The voice. I heard him before I turned.”
Cartwright’s brows drew together. “The Baron?”
“Yes.”
