The silence that followed was the loudest thing Serafina had ever heard. Her father’s jaw tightened.
“Forgive me, Your Grace, but you have never set foot in this house. How do you know my daughter Serafina at all?”
The duke turned, and for the first time his gaze lifted, not toward the family gathered before him, but toward the gallery above, toward the shadows where a girl in a plain gray dress stood frozen behind the railing.
Serafina’s breath caught. He couldn’t possibly see her, and yet for one unbearable second it felt as though he did.
“That,” the duke said quietly, turning back to her stunned father, “is not a question I intend to answer tonight.”
He removed his gloves unhurriedly and handed them to a waiting servant. “I understand dinner is being prepared. I won’t be sitting for it, not until Lady Serafina joins the table herself.”
Lady Cordelia’s mouth opened and closed without sound. The Duke of Blackthorn simply stood there, patient as stone, waiting for a girl the family had spent years trying to erase.
Serafina came down because refusing was no longer an option. Not with the Duke of Blackthorn standing in the entrance hall, refusing dinner on her account in front of every servant and neighbor who would talk about it for weeks.
She wore the same plain gray dress. She hadn’t been given time or permission to change. When she entered the dining room, conversation stopped. Marguerite’s eyes narrowed. Isolde looked faintly ill. Her father wouldn’t meet her gaze at all.
The duke rose from his seat. No one had ever risen for her before.
“Lady Serafina,” he said, and pulled out the chair directly beside his own, not down the table where the family had clearly intended to seat her, if they’d intended to seat her at all. “Thank you for joining us.”
She sat carefully, aware of every eye in the room. She expected him to ask the usual things: her age, her accomplishments, perhaps some polite cruelty disguised as small talk. Instead, once the first course was cleared, he asked about the estate’s eastern boundary and whether the drainage repairs from two winters ago had held through the spring floods.
The table went quiet in a different way this time, confused rather than scornful.
“They held,” Serafina said slowly. “I reinforced the channel near the tenant cottages myself after the first repair failed.”