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The suggestion, sensible as it was, felt unbearable to Hudson in the moment – the thought of standing still while his wife remained missing struck him as a betrayal of everything he owed her – but he forced himself to nod regardless, recognizing the wisdom in it even as every instinct screamed at him to act.

The household sprang into motion around him, and Hudson found himself pacing the length of the foyer with a violence of feeling he had rarely permitted himself to display before his own staff, his mind supplying him with increasingly dark possibilities he could not seem to banish no matter how firmly he tried.

He thought of highwaymen, of some enemy from his business dealings seeking leverage against him, of a hundred terrible fates that might have befallen her while he sat brooding uselessly behind a closed door only a few rooms away. He thought, with a fresh stab of guilt, of Rowland – of how the man had once threatened to challenge him to a duel for the crime of merely inconveniencing his sister, and how thoroughly Hudson would deserve every ounce of that fury now, should any true harm have come to her while under his protection.

He very nearly sent word to Rowland regardless, some instinct insisting that her brother ought to know, ought to be searching alongside them – but he could not yet bring himself to speak the words aloud that would make the fear feel entirely real, and so he held his tongue and continued pacing instead, willing every passing minute to produce some sign of her.

Get to work then, he told himself grimly, forcing his mind away from panic and toward action. Panic will not find her.

He had been at it scarcely half an hour, questioning the stable hands about whether any horses had gone missing in the night, when the sound of an approaching carriage sent him sprinting toward the front of the house with a speed he would later be faintly embarrassed to recall.

The carriage rolled to a stop, and the door opened, and there – pale, but entirely whole, entirely alive – stood Anna.

Relief crashed through him with such force that for a moment he could not move at all, could only stare at her as though he did not quite trust the evidence of his own eyes. Then he was moving, closing the distance between them in three long strides, his hands framing her face as he searched her for any sign of injury.

“Anna. Anna, are you harmed? What happened, where have you–”

“I am well,” she said quickly, covering his hands with her own. “Hudson, I promise you, I am entirely unharmed. I was frightened, but no one hurt me.”

It was only then, as the tight coil of terror in his chest began to loosen, that Hudson registered who else had emerged from the carriage behind her.

Cornelius. And beside him, Edith, both of them watching the scene before them with matching expressions of wary apprehension.

Understanding arrived with the swiftness of a physical blow, and Hudson felt the relief that had flooded him a moment before curdle instantly into a fury so complete it left no room for anything else.

He had spent the better part of an hour imagining highwaymen and enemies and a dozen other terrible fates, and to discover instead that his own brother had orchestrated her disappearance – however well-intentioned the motive might prove to be – struck him as its own particular betrayal, sharper somehow for being entirely preventable.

“You,” he growled, his voice going low and dangerous. “You did this.”

Before Cornelius could so much as raise a hand in his own defense, Hudson’s fist connected with his jaw, the force of the blow sending his brother stumbling backward against the side of the carriage.

“Hudson!” Anna cried out, but he barely heard her, already advancing on Cornelius again, every parental terror of the past hour transmuted instantly into rage.

Cornelius, to his credit, did not strike back, merely raised a hand to his jaw and straightened himself, blood welling faintly at the corner of his mouth.

“I deserved that,” he accepted easily, with a steadiness that only further inflamed Hudson’s temper. “But we need to talk, Hudson. All of this – it needs to be said, finally, and I would rather say it now than continue circling one another for another year or more.”

“You put your hands on my wife,” Hudson snapped, advancing another step, only for Anna’s hand to close firmly around his arm, holding him back with a strength he had not expected from her.

“No one harmed me, Hudson,” she told him again, more firmly this time, forcing him to look at her rather than past her at his brother. “I promise you. I was frightened, yes, but they did not hurt me, and they have brought me home safely, exactly as I asked them to.”

“You asked them to?” Hudson repeated, some of his fury faltering into confusion.

“I asked them to return me and face you honestly, rather than continue hiding behind schemes and secrecy,” Anna explained delicately. “Which is precisely what they would have done. I would ask that you extend them the same courtesy of a proper hearing, rather than your fists.”

“Why,” Hudson demanded, turning back to Cornelius with barely restrained violence still trembling through him, “would you do such a thing? What were you thinking, taking her from her own home in the dead of night?”

“We were trying to help her,” Cornelius exclaimed defensively. “We offered her an annulment, Hudson. A way free of you, and of the marriage you forced upon her. We thought – given everything you had cost her – that she deserved the choice of leaving, if she wished it.”

The words landed like another blow, this one considerably harder to absorb than the physical one he had just delivered.

“And what did she choose?” Hudson asked, his voice gone quieter now, some new and different fear beginning to creep in beneath the fading anger.

Cornelius glanced toward Anna, something almost apologetic in the look.

“She refused,” he sighed, looking as though he still could not understand why. “She defended you rather thoroughly, in fact, which I confess surprised me a great deal.”

Hudson turned to look at her, searching her face for confirmation, and found it in the steady, unflinching way she met his eyes.