Chapter 1

"Jonathan Young, Duke of Hawkins, you have been found guilty of murder and High Treason and are hereby sentenced to hang by the neck until dead by order of His Majesty King George III."

The executioner's voice rang out, cold and implacable, as deadly as the axe they used in days of yore. Andrew heard them like a noose around his own throat. His heart raced as the support was kicked out from beneath his father's feet, as the Duke fell and fell and fell and?—

Andrew woke in his bed.

His heart was racing, that much was true, but the rest of it hadn't been real.

It wasn't real, he told himself as he hauled his body, clammy with sweat, to an upright position against his pillows.

The problem with that argument, of course, was that it wasn't accurate. To be sure, it hadn't happened exactly like that. The pronouncement of his father's crimes, for example, had happened weeks before the hanging that had left Andrew Young as the new Duke of Hawkins.

And the fall off the scaffold had been horrifyingly quick, the snap of his father's neck brutal and cruel, even as Andrew knew it was a mercy, the instant death far preferable to a slow, choking descent into that final darkness.

His nightmares didn't care about the facts, however. His nightmares didn't care that his father had been a cruel, hard man, a lifelong criminal who had culminated a life of wrongdoing with the abduction and murder of the daughter of a duke, an innocent girl.

His nightmares didn't care that the only part of the whole ordeal that had surprised Andrew was that his father had been stupid enough to harm a girl whose position in the line of succession (albeit very far down that line) had rendered her killing High Treason, the kind of crime not even a duke could wriggle his way out of.

The late Duke of Hawkins had never suffered any qualms about letting others pay the price for his misdeeds.

"And now," Andrew muttered bitterly into the first rays of dawn, "I get to pay that price."

His nightmares, he often reflected, were probably the consequence of the stress of sorting through the seemingly endless pile of shit and scandal his father had left behind.

He splashed water from the ewer onto his face, ignoring that it was ice cold after sitting out all night. The noise roused his valet, Trenton, who only showed his dismay over the early hour through a single, yearning glance toward the dim outside light.

"Good morning, My L—Your Grace," he amended quickly, face twitching in a swiftly stifled wince. Andrew didn't begrudge him the slip. A year after his father's very public execution, he, too, still chafed under the title ‘the Duke of Hawkins.'

It was, after all, unpleasant to wear a soiled garment.

"Good morning, Trenton," Andrew returned. "Apologies for the early hour."

"Not at all, Your Grace," said Trenton smoothly… just as he did every morning. Christ, how many days in a row had Andrew roused the man before dawn? He ought to give his valet a raise. "Shall I call for a bath?"

"Please," Andrew said. This, too, was becoming habit. He continually woke in a cold sweat that he needed to wash from his skin if he hoped to get anything done that day.

And he always needed to get something done. There were his father's victims to find, amends to make. There were criminal enterprises to dismantle, unsavory coconspirators to pay off and send on their way—with funds that were growing tighter and tighter by the day.

And then there was his thrice-cursed reputation to salvage, a name to scrape back from the mud, the constant, grinding efforts to prove that perhaps his family tree was rotten through, but he was the apple that had fallen far, far away.

He stifled a sigh. He would take today as it came; it was all he could do, all he could ever do.

"Let's get moving," he told himself as much as his long-suffering valet. "We have much to accomplish."

"I hope you are pleased with yourself, Diana Fletching," seethed the Countess of Preston.

Diana was, as it happened, relatively pleased with herself. Not due to any particular action, necessarily, and certainly not whatever she'd done now that had her mother in such a dither. Diana was just pleased with herself in general. She was fine company.

In fact, she'd been enjoying her own company for breakfast very much indeed until her mother had entered the room in a right snit.

Diana speared a kipper instead of answering. She knew by now that her mother neither needed nor wanted Diana's contribution in this conversation.

The kippers were very good this morning. She might have some more.

"After all," her mother went on, "what other reasons could you have for being so dreadfully rude to Lord Beauford last night besides your own perverse enjoyment?"

Oh, that.

In Diana's defense (a defense that she would not be mounting aloud), Lord Beauford had been rude first. He'd looked her over with an unrepentant frankness and said, "Well, your hips aren't much to speak of, but your dowry might compensate for that. Dare say dowry won't buy me an heir if you're too skinny to get me one, though."

And she, appalled and shocked in a way she hadn't known was still possible, not after two years out in Society, had stammered, "You're old enough to be my grandfather!"

Which was both true and the only part of the conversation the Countess of Preston had overheard.

Also, Diana had resented the comment about her hips. Perhaps her build tended somewhat towards the athletic, but she did have some womanly curves, thank you very much. Not that she wanted Lord Beauford to be thinking about or looking at said womanly curves. But still, they existed.

Diana's mother worked her way through her usual lamentations about her daughter while Diana nibbled on a piece of toast because her mother was blocking her access to the kippers.

"It's been two years—" Diana slathered on some butter. "—cannot be picky about suitors—" She assessed the slice and decided against marmalade. "—I don't know why you insist on being like this, Diana Louise Fletching, but at least I am comforted to know that at long last, it no longer matters."

Wait, what?

Diana looked up from her toast. "What do you mean, it no longer matters?"

A gleam of triumph lit her mother's eye at finally gathering her daughter's attention. Diana wished that her relationship with her mother wasn't like this but in the sort of absent, wistful way that she wished that the weather would always be fine and every pair of shoes be comfortable. It would be nice if things were better, but it wasn't necessary. And it was nothing more than wasted effort to sulk over the world that wasn't.

Bridget Fletching simply couldn't understand why her daughter never got excited over flirtations, ballgowns, or gossip. She found it unnatural in a woman, particularly in an earl's daughter who was fortunate enough to be endowed with relatively good looks and a robust dowry. Diana, her mother imagined, ought to think of nothing else besides snaring a rich, titled, and (though this concern was decidedly lesser) handsome husband. If she could manage to find one who would be kind to her after those first three qualities were met, that would be acceptable, too.

But what Bridget had never understood was that not only did her daughter lack a natural inclination for these interests, but that any hope of developing them had been shattered the night her friend, Lady Grace Miller, had disappeared, never to be seen or heard from again.

After all, Grace had been a gem, a diamond of the first water, and she'd vanished without a trace. What hope did Diana have of finding a trustworthy man in a world full of criminals, blackguards, and murderers?

None, that was what.

The Countess let the moment extend, obviously relishing having Diana on the hook. If the topic had been anything less than Diana's entire future, she might have considered this fair payback for all the times she'd bedeviled her mother.

"Your father and I," the Countess said at long last and with the air of an actress delivering her final monologue, "have made you a match."

The kippers turned instantly into a heavy lump in her stomach.

"No," Diana said flatly.

"Oh yes," returned her mother. "I warned you, Diana; I warned you time and again. You had to choose someone. You had to at least try to choose someone. But did you?" She pointed a stern finger at her daughter. "You did not."

"Mother—"

"Ah, ah, ah." Now the Countess was wagging that finger. Diana scowled. "I will not brook any more arguments. Last night's debacle with Lord Beauford was the final straw, my dear."

Bridget only called Diana "my dear" when she was well and truly put out.

"Your father and I have been discussing this measure for some time, and when you failed to show any sign towards improvement, we made our final choice. You will be married, Diana. Resign yourself to the idea."

The unpleasantness in Diana's stomach traveled up to her heart which now felt as though it was clenched in a vice. She couldn't be married. She couldn't.

If she got married, the secret she held, locked away and unknown to any but her closest friends, would become moot. All her scheming, her plotting would be ruined by the autocratic hand of some man who would, for all intents and purposes, own Diana.

She was starting to feel just a bit panicky.

"Mother," she tried again. "I'm only twenty?—"

"Indeed, you are," the Countess returned with a tone of triumph that did not promise good things. "Not yet at your majority. Which means that it is up to me and your father—it is our duty, Diana—to make sound decisions when you will not. And since you have proven unwilling or unable to perform your own duty towards this family, we have done so on your behalf."

There was a loud buzzing sound in Diana's ears that she was almost entirely certain was coming from inside her head. Duty. Duty. Her mother was always blathering on about duty, but when she said it, all she ever meant was that Diana was supposed to stay out of the way, get married, and get gone so that she wasn't her mother's problem any longer.

That was wrong, though. Diana had another duty. One that was dearer and more sacred to her than anything else.

"I know you've struggled," the Countess continued in what Diana supposed was an approximation of kindness. "It was horrible, losing your friend like that."

She made it sound as though Grace had died a natural death, as though it was a misfortune but a commonplace one. She made it sound as though Grace hadn't been snatched out from under the ton's noses—including Diana's.

"But it's time to move on," her mother went on matter-of-factly. It was cruel, that decisive tone. "The past is the past, and the future is the future. And your future, Diana, is as a wife and mother. It's what every girl dreams of. So, get your head on straight and get excited because this is happening no matter your attitude about it."

She held her daughter's gaze for a long moment longer, as if this would cause her command to stick more forcefully into Diana's psyche. Then she left, her posture drawn in self-satisfied lines.

Diana clenched her fists under the table.

Her mother would never understand. Her mother thought the past was the past, a neat bit of recursive logic that meant nothing except to say, do shut up now, Diana.

Her mother didn't know what Diana knew, however. Her mother didn't know that the past had never been laid to bed. She didn't know that there were more answers to uncover. She didn't know that Diana couldn't shut up, not when her mind constantly screamed for her to find the truth.

The Countess of Preston didn't know what Diana knew: that the Duke of Hawkins had not killed Lady Grace Miller.

The problem was that Diana couldn't prove it. Not yet, anyway. But she knew it in her bones, the same way she knew the sun would rise each morning, the same way she knew her friends Emily and Frances would do anything for her.

The details of the trial had been kept away from her, of course—such things were not for proper young ladies to see. But Diana had listened in on gossip and read stolen newspapers at every chance and had never found a satisfactory answer to the question that plagued her.

Why?

The Duke of Hawkins—the late Duke, that was—had no reason to kill Lady Grace Miller, the star of the Season. He'd been courting her, to be sure, but not with the manner of a man driven mad by love. Rather he'd had the acquisitive manner of a man who wanted to show off the shiniest bauble, wanted to be able to say it was all his.

He couldn't show off a dead girl.

Diana rose from the breakfast table and headed up to her room, startling a maid with her fierce expression.

"Is everything all right, My Lady?" the maid asked cautiously.

"Yes," Diana said, mind whirling. "Of course."

Everything was not all right.

It had taken her two years of combing through old records by candlelight in her father's study, tracking all the places where the Earl of Preston (fortunately an avid keeper of records) had noted this or that shift in the markets or strange comments made in Parliament. She'd listened at keyholes, hidden in shadowy corners of ballrooms, risked her reputation a thousand times over. She'd had a few narrow escapes where she'd nearly been caught in a place where she absolutely could not explain her presence.

She'd determined this: the late Duke had been up to no good.

Some people (including some people named Emily and Frances) felt this was evidence for the Duke's guilt in Grace's murder.

"Are you sure you aren't seeing what you want to see?" Emily would ask, tone unbearably gentle.

"It happens due to grief, sometimes," Frances would add.

Diana couldn't seem to make them see that a man entrenched in a criminal lifestyle—and the late Duke did seem well and truly entrenched if Diana's sleuthing was correct in assessing that he was wealthier than he had any right to be, given the production of his estates—would not be so stupid as to be seen by half of London immediately before murdering someone as visible and well-connected as Grace had been.

It just didn't make sense. Diana needed to make it all make sense.

There had been a while when she'd thought she'd never have answers, that the truth had died with the Duke when he'd hanged. But then, she'd had a breakthrough in the form of servants' gossip, secured by bribing half the ton's servants with nearly all her pin money.

There was a location, an address in a part of London where no duke had business showing up. And yet the late Duke had shown his face there—time and again.

That was all she knew for now. Diana had been calculating a plan to find out more ever since this little tidbit had fallen into her lap several weeks prior.

But now, she was out of time. Now, she had to worry about a husband, of all the useless things.

There was no way around it; she had to go to that address. Tonight.

A shiver of excitement—or was that fear?—wound through her as she planned to make a late night trek to the place where the late Duke had conducted his nefarious business. She hid her darkest cloak under her bed and bribed one of the kitchen maids who was a similar size to lend Diana an unobtrusive working girl's dress.

She threw herself so fully into her plans that she didn't even realize that she'd neglected to ask her mother for the identity of this supposed husband to be.