He was the tightest knot, wound around himself so hard that the rope had cut into his skin and left marks. But he was loosening. She could feel it in the way his thumb brushed over her knuckles. In the way his voice had cracked when he said he would try. He was loosening, and the loosening was painful. But she could not do it for him. She could only be there when the rope gave way.
She looked at him. He was sitting in the chair in his shirtsleeves, her hand cradled in his. Not the wall. Not the mask. Just a man, tired and afraid, sitting beside a woman he did not think he deserved and holding her hand because letting go was the one thing he could not do.
“That is enough,” she relented. “For now.”
She closed her eyes.
His hand tightened around hers. Sleep came slowly. The last thing she heard was his voice.
“Thank ye for marrying me, Duchess.”
She smiled without opening her eyes. “No. Thankyou.”
CHAPTER 27
Edward watched her sleep until dawn.
He did not move from the chair. He watched her breathe. In. Out. Steady. Trusting. She trusted him to sit beside her while she slept. She had survived three years of a man who used trust as a weapon, and she had chosen to trust again.
He did not deserve it. He knew that the way he knew how to load a pistol. But she had asked him to prove it, and he had.
At dawn, he pulled his hand free. She stirred but did not wake. He pressed his lips to her hair and then left.
The corridor was cold. He changed his shirt. Splashed water on his face. Looked in the mirror. Scarred jaw. Green eyes. The face of a man trying to remember how to be human.
Today was his wedding day.
He thought about the vows. The words he would say. To have and to hold. For better or for worse.
He had held weapons and documents and the throats of men who threatened the Crown. But he had never held a woman’s hand and said words that meant forever.
The concept of forever was foreign to him. In his life, forever meant until the next mission. Until the next target. Until the next dark room in the next foreign city. Forever was a luxury for men who did not carry pistols.
But Valeria had asked him, and he had said yes. And Edward Langton, whatever else he was, kept his word. Always. Even when it cost him.Especiallywhen it cost him.
He looked at the clothes laid out on the chair. The dark coat. The white cravat. The waistcoat he had agreed to wear because Valeria had asked and because he was discovering that there was very little he would not do if she asked.
It was a dangerous discovery. A man who would do anything for a woman was weak, and the Hound had spent twelve years making sure he had no weaknesses.
But Valeria was not a weakness. She was the opposite. She was the thing that made the rest of it bearable. The dinners and the social calls and the dull, necessary business of being a duke.
She was the reason he had learned to sit at breakfast tables. The reason he had planted new roses in the south garden. The reason he had started sleeping in a bed instead of a chair—though he still kept the chair by the window, just in case.
Just in case. The two words that defined his life. Always ready. Always watching. Always prepared for the thing that might go wrong. He had spent twelve years living in the space between just and in case. The space was narrow and cold, and it left no room for anything else.
Valeria made room. She made room with her laughter and her riddles and her stubborn refusal to be afraid of him and her garden that had dead ends and false paths and a center that was hard to find. She made room, and he was terrified of what might fill it.
Love. That was what might fill it. The word he had not said. The word he was not sure he knew how to say. He had said it once to George while drunk on cheap whisky in a safe house in Calais, and George had looked at him with the patient exasperation of an older brother and said, “You do not need to be drunk to tell me that, Edward.”
Edward had not said it again, but he felt it. He felt it when Valeria laughed. When she argued. When she put her hand on his jaw, turned his face toward hers, and said,Don’t take it back. He felt it the way he felt the weight of a pistol in his coat—constant, familiar, dangerous.
A knock sounded at his door, sharp and urgent.
A footman entered, white-faced. “Your Grace, we caught suspicious movement around the estate. A rider along the south ridge at dawn. Dark coat. He watched the house for ten minutes and then rode east.”
Edward’s blood ran cold. He knew who it was.
He had known since the masquerade. Since the note. Since the look on George’s face in the gentlemen’s club when his mask slipped and the loss showed through.
