Chapter 1 — The Locked Door

The wedding night at the Thornevale estate was meant to be the final act of a perfect charade.

Instead, Caspian stood in the corridor outside a locked master bedroom, his chest tight with a dread he could not name.

The charade had been flawless right up until that corridor.

The ceremony had gone exactly as arranged — the right guests, the right photographs, the right careful performance of a union that both families understood to be a matter of assets rather than affection.

Cosima had moved through all of it like a woman underwater, pale and composed and utterly unreachable, and Caspian had assumed her stillness was simply the mood of a woman marrying a man she did not love for reasons neither of them said aloud.

He had felt, if he was honest, a little sorry for her, in the distant way one feels sorry for a stranger.

He had not felt curious.

That was the thing he would think about later, with something like shame — that he had stood beside her at an altar, promised her the whole of his protection in front of two hundred people, and never once, in all of it, actually wondered what was happening behind that composed and colorless face.

He had married her the way he acquired companies: with due diligence on everything except the thing that mattered.

And now there was a locked door between them, and a maid’s frightened report, and the first genuine wondering he had done about his own wife was arriving all at once, in a corridor, too late to have spared her anything.

Minutes earlier, a frightened maid had come to him with a report that made no sense: a dark stain spreading through the back of Cosima’s pale wedding gown.

His new wife — the woman the whole of high society mocked as the plain, unwanted Ravenscroft daughter — had locked herself inside and was refusing, flatly and with something close to terror, to let her father’s personal physician anywhere near her.

Caspian knocked once, keeping his voice level.