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“Neither. At least not yet.” Laura sank onto the bench beside her, and the whole of it came pouring out.

She told Kitty about the room full of unmasked women and masked men, the stage, the questions, the bidding, the name on the contract.

Kitty’s face went through several stages of horror throughout, her book sliding off her lap and onto the grass, forgotten. “He sold you, Laura. I was never fond of your father, but this… it is unforgivable.” Her voice lowered. “At an actual… I don’t even have a word for it.”

“An auction.”

“An auction… your own father.”

“Yes.”

“To the…?”

“Duke of Duskwell,” Laura said it flatly.

Kitty’s eyes went wide, and one gloved hand rose to her mouth. “The recluse?”

“Yes.”

“The one who rarely attends social events, and when he does, leaves before the second set?”

“Yes.”

Kitty swallowed. “Laura, do you know what they say about him?”

“Some of it, but it does not matter. My fate is sealed.”

“Oh, Laura! My mother swears he slammed a footman against a door over some trifling insult. And there’s the business with his sister’s husband. Everyone knows he quarreled with the man not a week before he put a pistol to his head, and the coroner may have called it what he liked, but half of London believes Duskwell had a hand in it. They say he has a temper like nothing you’ve ever seen, and that he sequesters himself in that great cold house because he can’t trust himself around anyone for long.”

Laura was quiet for a moment, turning the words over. They sounded so odd when compared to the man she had seen the night before.

She would learn the truth for herself soon enough.

“I’ve heard all of it,” she said. “Every word. And I ought to be terrified, Kitty, I know that. I stood in that room and watched him bid against several men without so much as raising his voice, and it should have frightened me half to death.”

“But…?”

“But it didn’t.” Laura frowned down at the gloves she was twisting in her hands. “When he looked at me, really looked—not the way the others did, like I was something to be measured and priced—I didn’t feel afraid at all. I felt…” She stopped, searching for a word that didn’t exist in any conversation she’d ever been permitted to have.

“It’s all right.” Kitty took her hands.

“It was something else entirely. My whole body grew warm and soft. My pulse wouldn’t settle. Even now, thinking of it, I feel it again. Right here.” Laura pressed a hand briefly just above her stomach, where the sensation lingered. “It felt almost like excitement, but also so scary, which makes no sense at all! Given everything you’ve just told me, given everything I already knew before you told me…”

“Laura Mercer.” Kitty clicked her tongue. “I do believe that’s the first time in six Seasons I’ve heard you say a man made you feel anything at all besides the urge to flee the room.”

“Don’t start.” Laura felt heat crawl up her face. “It means nothing. It’s simply nerves. It would be absurd to feel anything else about a man everyone agrees is dangerous.”

“Mhm.” Kitty didn’t look remotely convinced, but didn’t press the issue either, which was somehow worse. She reached down, retrieved her fallen book, and turned it over in her hands without opening it.

“I mean it.”

“For what it’s worth, dangerous men and gentlemen aren’t always the same men Society claims they are. My aunt always said the ton invents monsters out of anyone who refuses to explain himself, simply because silence unsettles people more than answers do.”

“He told me no harm would come to me.” Laura hadn’t meant to say it aloud. It had simply slipped free, the memory of his voice, low and certain, cutting through the racket in that office. “While my father and the solicitor argued over commissions and settlements as though I weren’t standing three feet away. He said it only to me. Quietly.”

“And did you believe him?”

Laura looked out over the water, where a pair of swans were drifting past, entirely indifferent to the wreckage of her life. She thought of her father’s voice at breakfast, cold and certain in a way that had never once promised her safety. She thought of the Duke’s voice in that office last night, just as certain, and yet somehow the opposite of everything her father’s certainty had ever meant.