“Answers.”
He wouldn’t say more than that at first. For two days, she simply cataloged, sorting decades of estate records into some kind of order, the same work she’d done at Ashford without anyone noticing or caring. Here, the duke noticed everything.
He sat across from her most afternoons, reading correspondence in silence, occasionally asking her opinion on a name or a date, as though her judgment actually mattered. It was the third night when she found the gap.
An entire section of the Blackthorn family archive, nearly six years of correspondence and household records, had been removed, not lost, removed. The binding showed clean cuts where pages had been sliced free, and the ledger index referenced entries that simply weren’t there anymore.
“Someone erased this on purpose,” she said, showing him the mutilated pages.
The duke’s expression didn’t change, but something behind his eyes sharpened. “I know.”
“You knew before I found it.”
“I suspected. I needed someone who could read what remained and tell me what was missing. Someone who understands estate records the way you do.” He met her gaze. “That’s why you’re here, Lady Serafina. Not for company. For this.”
She should have felt used. Instead, strangely, she felt something closer to relief. To be wanted for what she actually knew rather than dismissed for what she had supposedly done.
They worked together most nights after that, poring over what remained: half-burned letters, a housekeeper’s diary with pages torn out, a ledger where certain names had been scratched through so hard the pen had torn the paper. Slowly, carefully, they began piecing together fragments of a story someone had worked very hard to bury.
Their partnership shifted in those weeks. He stopped speaking to her as an adviser and started speaking to her as an equal, asking her thoughts on a theory before offering his own, deferring to her reading of an old hand’s penmanship, trusting her instincts when a discovery didn’t add up.
She found herself waiting for his knock at the study door each evening, for the particular quiet focus that settled over him when they were close to something. It wasn’t romance, not yet. It was something steadier: trust, built one late night at a time between two people who had both learned not to expect kindness from anyone.
Then, on a rain-soaked evening in early autumn, Serafina found her.