"One question."
The room leaned in. Even the candles seemed to listen.
"And if you lose?" he asked.
"You may ask one of me."
He dealt swiftly. Cards whispered across baize. Isolde did not sit. She stood, and the standing itself was an insult dressed as courage. Lucien glanced at her hands as she received her cards, then at her face.
"You have done this before," he said.
"You have cheated before," she answered, and laid her fingers firmly on the remaining cards, stopping the deal as cleanly as a slammed door.
The gold lady whispered, "Isolde—"
Isolde did not look away from the duke.
"Why," she said, each word weighed and set down like coin, "does your family crest appear on a debt note belonging to my dead brother?"
Lucien's smirk vanished. For a heartbeat the room held nothing but the soft thud of a chip stack settling as someone's sleeve caught it, and then the larger thud of consequence arriving where pleasure had been.
He stared at her. The color left the edges of his composure. Behind Isolde, Lady Harriet Voss—gold silk, pearls, white fan—stepped forward as if to put her body between her niece and whatever came next. Lady Prudence Langford, in blue-grey, did not step forward. She stepped sideways, toward the nearest cluster of listeners, already choosing which version of this night she would carry home.
Isolde kept her fingers on the cards.
"I will have an answer," she said. "Not tonight's theater. An answer."