PART 1 Duke Caelan Voss had a habit that his staff found unsettling and his enemies found useful to know about: he counted. Not obsessively. Not in the way of a man afraid of disorder. In the way of a man who had learned, through three decades of negotiation and one near-assassination, that details people…
PART 1 The first thing Vivienne Harlow noticed when her carriage turned through the Blackmere gates — two hours earlier than planned, because the Countess of Eldridge had developed a migraine and sent everyone home — was that the east wing was lit. Not the west wing, where the drawing rooms and her husband’s study…
PART 1 The letter arrived before Mira Valdane did. This was intentional. She had sent it three days ahead of herself, by a different route, through a contact who owed her a significant and specific favor, and she had written it in the particular cipher her father had developed during the eastern campaigns — not…
PART 1 England, 1814. Callum Ashford, the Duke of Wexmore, did not enter drawing rooms unannounced. This was a rule he had maintained for eleven years of navigating London society, first as a young heir learning the machinery of the ton, and then as a duke learning to use it. You did not walk into…
PART 1 England, 1813. Lady Isolde Pemberton had attended one hundred and fourteen balls since her first season, and she had danced at exactly none of them. This was not a complaint. She had stopped thinking of it as a complaint somewhere around the forty-seventh ball, when she had finally understood that the thing she…
PART 1 Callum Ferrara had not laughed in the house in eleven months. He knew this because he had noticed the absence the way you noticed the absence of a sound you had grown accustomed to — not when it stopped, but gradually, in the months after, when the silence had fully established itself and…
PART 1 Sasha Okafor left the Meridian Hotel through the service entrance at eleven forty-seven on a Thursday night, and she did not look back. This was the kind of thing she was good at. Not running — she was not running, she told herself, because running implied fear, and what she felt was something…
PART 1 The first thing Mara Solano noticed when she walked into the wrong restaurant was the silence. Not the ordinary silence of a room between songs, or a table mid-conversation. This was the silence of twenty people who had decided simultaneously to become very small. She noticed this before she noticed anything else because…
PART 1 Nora Vasquez heard the laughter before she found the source of it. She had been working in the Ferrara house for six weeks by then and she knew, with the precision that comes from caring about a space, exactly what sounds belonged to it and what sounds didn’t. The house made its own…
PART 1 England, 1811. Frederick Ashton, the fourth Duke of Wyndmere, had attended one hundred and twelve balls since inheriting his title at the age of twenty-three. He knew this because he had, in a moment of grim amusement during his third season, begun keeping count. One hundred and twelve evenings of candlelight and orchestras,…
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