My Fiancée Tried To Blackmail Me With A Gutter Orphan — She Didn’t Know I Used To Be One

Part 1

I was ten minutes away from announcing my engagement to my blackmailer when the ghost of my childhood walked into the ballroom holding a silver tray.

The grand chandeliers of my London manor illuminated hundreds of aristocrats, but my attention was solely fixed on the woman destroying my life.

Heather Jenkins had trapped me with a fraudulent ledger and a threat that could ruin my family name forever.

She stood beside me at the apex of the marble staircase, her emerald silk dress masking a heart as cold as the Thames in winter.

I was groomed to absolute aristocratic perfection, wearing a flawless dark tailcoat that felt more like an executioner’s hood.

The air was thick with the suffocating scent of expensive cigars, exotic orchids, and the bitter realization that I was utterly powerless.

Beside me stood Heather Jenkins.

Wrapped in shimmering emerald silk, she was an heiress of an ancient but financially crumbling bloodline.

Our impending engagement was the worst-kept secret in the city.

It was a transaction of the highest order.

I required her family’s impeccable pedigree to wash away the lingering whispers of my sudden ascension to the dukedom.

Heather desperately needed my vast fortune to save her father’s failing tin mines in Cornwall.

There was no love between us.

There was only cold, calculated mutual survival.

“You seem distracted, Daniel,” Heather murmured.

Her painted lips curved into a smile that did not reach her calculating blue eyes.

She tapped her ivory fan against my forearm.

“The Earl is staring.

Do try to look as though you actually enjoy my company.”

I offered a tight, practiced smile.

“My apologies, Heather.

The heat of the room is simply oppressive.”

I turned to signal for refreshment just as a maid approached from the servants’ corridor.

Approaching from the servants’ corridor, a new maid kept her head respectfully bowed while balancing a heavy tray of champagne.

Despite wearing the standard starched white apron and somber gray dress, a jagged stiffness betrayed her tense posture.

This sudden lack of graceful subservience was entirely foreign to the highly trained staff of my household.

As she offered the tray to me, her hand trembled slightly.

The harsh gaslight reflected off a crude object on her right hand.

I reached for a flute, but my hand stopped in midair.

My breath hitched and trapped itself in my chest.

There, resting on the maid’s roughened, red-knuckled ring finger, was a twisted piece of tarnished copper wire.

Cradled within the clumsy setting was a cracked, misshapen piece of blue sea glass.

It had been polished by the tide to resemble a sapphire.

The opulent ballroom instantly dissolved around me.

The suffocating scent of orchids was replaced by the phantom stench of damp coal soot, boiled cabbage, and raw sewage.

Before I was Daniel Robinson, Duke of Alderley, I was simply Daniel.

I was a nameless, starving ward of the parish workhouse.

I was an urchin whose world consisted of grueling shifts picking oakum and dodging the cruel cane of the workhouse master.

But I had not been entirely alone in that hell.

There was Megan.

She was a fiery-haired, fiercely loyal girl who had been dumped at the workhouse steps after her mother passed away.

Megan had been my protector.

She was my shadow and my only source of warmth in a world designed to freeze us out.

When the older boys cornered me in the cobbled alleyways, Megan fought them off with jagged stones and wild teeth.

When the rations were cut to nothing but watery gruel, she smuggled half a stale loaf of bread under her apron for me.

The ring had been a prize from the mudlarks.

At twelve years old, I had dragged myself through the freezing, toxic sludge of the river at low tide.

I had scavenged for anything of value.

I found that blue glass half-buried in the muck.

I twisted a piece of discarded copper wire around it and scrubbed it until it shone.

I remembered the damp, rat-infested cellar where I had given it to her.

We had been huddled beneath a single moth-eaten blanket, shivering uncontrollably.

“It is a real sapphire, Megan,” I had lied, my voice cracking with the cold.

“Just like the queen wears.

When we get out of here, I am going to buy you a real one.”

She had smiled a brilliant, hopeful thing in the gloom.

She let me slip the crude wire onto her finger.

“I do not need a hundred, Daniel,” she had whispered.

“I just need this one.”

I had promised to marry her and build a house with a fireplace in every room.

That promise was broken a month later.

A velvet-lined carriage bearing the crest of my uncle arrived at the workhouse gates.

Lacking a legitimate heir, he had tracked down his disgraced brother’s bastard child.

I was ripped from the only home I knew by men in livery.

I fought and screamed for Megan, but I was thrown into the carriage and locked away.

For a year, tutors brutalized my street accent into polished English while I begged to send for her.

Finally, my uncle handed me a parish record.

Megan Carter, deceased from cholera.

That grief shattered the boy named Daniel and hardened me into the cold, untouchable Duke.

I buried my past beneath layers of aristocratic duty.

Now, standing in my own ballroom fifteen years later, the ghost of my past was holding a tray of champagne.

My eyes dragged upward from the ring.

I traced the line of the maid’s coarse sleeve past the starched white collar to her face.

Her fiery hair was tucked away beneath a severe linen cap.

Her cheeks were hollowed by years of hard labor.

But those defiant, storm-cloud gray eyes were unmistakably hers.

Megan was alive.

She looked up, and our gazes collided.

For a fraction of a second, the mask of the obedient servant slipped.

A profound, searing hatred flashed in her eyes.

A lifetime of betrayal was contained in that single look.

Then the mask slammed back into place.

She lowered her head, dropped a flawless curtsy, and backed away into the shadows of the corridor.

“Daniel,” Heather’s voice cut through the roaring in my ears, sharp and irritated.

“Did you hear a word I just said?”

I blinked, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird.

The glass flute in my hand was in danger of snapping under my grip.

“Forgive me, Heather,” I managed to say.

I set the untouched glass onto a passing waiter’s tray.

“A sudden matter concerning the estate requires my immediate attention.”

I left my furious fiancée standing in the middle of the grand ballroom and followed the ghost of my past into the servants’ corridors.