The ride to London was a conquest.
Each thunderous beat of his horse's hooves against the muddy road was a drumbeat marking his advance. The wind tore at him, cold and sharp, but he felt nothing but the exhilarating chill of purpose. The letter in his breast pocket was a warm, living thing, a secret heart beating in time with his own. It was more than a weapon; it was a key. A key to Julia.
He rode with a singular, unwavering focus. This was not a plea. It was not a negotiation. It was a claiming. Evelyn Harrow, in her quiet, iron-willed arrogance, had long considered herself a gatekeeper to the Harrow women. Today, he would burn her gate to the ground.
His mind was a crystalline palace of strategy. He saw every move, every countermove. He saw the flicker of fear in Evelyn's eyes when he produced the letter. He saw the crumbling of her composure when he revealed the depth of his knowledge. He saw her, trapped and broken, bending to his will.
It was not cruelty that drove him. It was necessity.
The poet, Silas, was a sickness. A romantic, festering wound that threatened to infect Julia with the same weakness that had destroyed Marian. He had to be excised. Julia, with her sharp mind and her quiet, defiant strength, deserved more than a life of running and hiding with a man who lived in the past. She deserved an empire. She deserved Blackwood Hall. She deserved him.
This, he told himself as the spires of London pierced the grey, smoky sky, was a form of rescue. He was saving her from a lesser fate. He was saving her from herself. The city enveloped him in its grimy embrace, a chaotic, sprawling mess that offended his sense of order. It was a place of petty concerns and fleeting ambitions. He was here on a matter of permanence.
He directed the carriage to Evelyn's townhouse, the building appearing exactly as he remembered it: a narrow, disapproving face of brick and ivy. He stepped onto the wet pavement, the cold air doing nothing to quell the fire in his blood. He was here to secure his queen.
And he would burn down the world to do it.
***
EVELYN
The late afternoon light in Evelyn Harrow's drawing-room was the color of weak tea. It did little to warm the space, which was arranged with such rigid, unforgiving precision that comfort seemed like an unwelcome guest. Every chair was angled just so, every book on the mantelpiece placed with geometric certainty. It was a room that valued order over ease, a perfect reflection of the woman who commanded it.
Evelyn sat at her writing desk, a cup of untouched tea cooling beside her. She had been trying to compose a letter to a solicitor, but her mind was not on matters of law. Her mind was hundreds of miles away, in a cold, damp house built on secrets and rot. Her mind was on Julia.
A familiar, cold dread coiled in her gut. It was an old companion, this feeling. The same dread that had visited her when Marian first wrote of Blackwood Hall's oppressive beauty. The same dread that had seized her when the letter arrived announcing Marian's 'fever'.
She had warned Julia. She had pressed the crucifix into her hand and told her to have a backbone. But she knew, with the weary prescience of a woman who had seen too much, that backbones could be broken. That house was a specialist in the art.
A sharp, authoritative knock sounded at the front door.
Evelyn froze, her pen hovering over the paper. The sound was too confident for a tradesman, too sharp for a casual visitor. It was the knock of a man who did not expect to be kept waiting.
Her heart clenched. She knew. Before she even stood, before she crossed the hall, she knew who it was. The dread in her gut turned to ice.
She pulled the door open, her expression a mask of hardened composure.
He stood on her threshold like a handsome specter, the London mist clinging to the shoulders of his fine black coat. Alistair Blackwood. His smile was a polished, chilling thing that did not touch the cold blue of his eyes.
"Evelyn," he said, his voice smooth as silk drawn over a blade. "How good of you to answer."
"What do you want?" she demanded, her own voice sharp, foregoing all pretense of civility. She did not invite him in.
He ignored her tone, his gaze sweeping past her into the meticulously ordered hall. "A word, merely. About your niece." He paused, letting the word hang in the air. "And your daughter."
The ice in Evelyn's stomach shattered, sending splinters of pure, cold panic through her veins. She stepped back, an involuntary retreat, and he took it as an invitation, striding past her into the drawing-room as if he owned it. He stripped off his gloves with slow, deliberate movements.
"Julia is unwell," he said, turning to face her. His calm was more terrifying than any rage. "The fainting spells have returned. The migraines. So very like Marian, near the end."
"Get out of my house," Evelyn whispered, her control fraying.
"I think not." He moved closer, his presence sucking the air from the room. "Not until we have an understanding." He reached into his coat and produced a folded, crinkled letter. He held it out to her. "I believe this is yours. Or rather, it was meant to be."
Evelyn's eyes fixed on the frantic, familiar handwriting. Marian's. Her breath hitched. That foolish, sentimental girl. She had written it all down.
"She implicates you so beautifully," Alistair murmured, his voice laced with a cruel sort of admiration. "Begging you for help. Accusing you of a convenient silence after she confided her fears. It paints a rather ugly portrait, wouldn't you agree? An aunt, ignoring the desperate pleas of her niece." He took another step closer, his voice dropping to a near-whisper.
"But of course, a mother's silence is so much more damning, isn't it?"
The world tilted. He knew. The secret she had guarded for over twenty years, the shame and the grief she had buried beneath a mountain of iron-willed denial—he knew. Marian was her daughter. Her firstborn, her secret shame, farmed out to her sister to be raised as a niece to avoid the scandal of an unwed mother.
"How?" she breathed, the single word all she could manage.
"Marian was many things," Alistair said coolly. "But she was not discreet when she was terrified. She told me everything, in the end. Hoping, I suppose, that I might take pity on you both." He smiled faintly. "I did not."
Evelyn felt the floor give way beneath her. He had it all. The letter. The secret of Marian's birth.
Then he delivered the final, killing blow.
"And then there is the matter of Julia's inheritance," he continued, his tone conversational, as if discussing the weather. "And that interesting little clause you had your solicitor draft. The one that states should Julia be deemed… what was the phrase?… 'unfit for marriage due to hereditary afflictions'… her considerable fortune passes directly to you."
He let the words settle in the suffocating silence.
"Her fainting spells, her night terrors… they seem to fit the description perfectly, don't they? It would be a terrible scandal," he mused, tapping the letter against his palm. "A mother, plotting to have her second daughter declared mentally unfit for financial gain, after having already sold her firstborn into a marriage that killed her. The newspapers would feast on it for a month."
Evelyn stared at him, her heart a cold, dead stone in her chest. She was ruined. He had her utterly and completely trapped.
"What do you want?" she asked again, her voice a dead, hollow thing.
He smiled, and for the first time, it seemed genuine. It was the smile of a predator that has finally cornered its prey.
"I want Julia," he said simply. "I want you to convince her to marry me. You will write to her. You will tell her it is the safest choice, the most sensible match. You will tell her that I am the only one who can protect her from the very afflictions you wrote into that will. You will become my most ardent supporter."
He leaned in, his voice dropping to a confidential, conspiratorial tone. "In return for your enthusiastic assistance… these unfortunate secrets remain ours. And Julia remains safe under my care. And you, of course, remain solvent and respected."
He had won. He had laid out all his pieces, and she had nowhere left to move. To refuse was to be exposed and ruined, leaving Julia alone with him anyway. To agree was to become his puppet, to actively push her daughter, her last surviving child, into the arms of the monster who had swallowed her sister.
"I see we have an understanding," he said softly, seeing the surrender in her eyes. He placed Marian's letter on the mantelpiece, a trophy of his victory. Then, with a final, chillingly polite nod, he turned and walked out of her house, leaving her shattered in his wake.
Evelyn stood trembling in the center of her perfectly ordered room, which now felt like a cage. The control she had worshipped her entire life was gone, stolen by a man with eyes like winter ice. Rage, hot and useless, warred with a terror so profound it threatened to swallow her whole.
She had to warn Julia. But how? He would be watching. He would read her letters. A direct warning would be a death sentence, for both of them.
Her hands shaking, she stumbled to her writing desk. She couldn't fight him, not directly. But she could arm Julia. She could give her clues. She could write in a language of shared fear, in codes he would dismiss as the hysterics of a worried aunt.
She dipped her pen, the ink bleeding slightly on the fine paper, her hand trembling so badly she could barely form the words.
Julia, my dearest girl, she began. Her mind raced, searching for the right words, for a phrase that would scream danger without saying it.
Come home, she wrote, the words a desperate prayer. Come home before it inherits you.