The Duke Came Back to Destroy My Brother — Then He Looked At Me and Forgot Why

Part 2

Edmund dragged me out before I could get a single answer.

Our carriage rattled home through the rain and he wouldn’t say a word until we were behind the library door.

He poured brandy with a hand that wasn’t quite steady, and I asked him straight out — did you frame that man, did you put marked cards in his coat.

He laughed, bitter, hollow.

Called it the foolish pride of a man who’d lost everything through his own recklessness.

He gave me witnesses, a confession from a valet, a dozen names who’d swear the cards were marked and Nathaniel’s fingerprints were all over it.

I wanted to believe him.

He’s my brother — the same man who taught me to ride, who held me when our father died.

But Nathaniel’s voice kept replaying in my head, that raw, unguarded grief when he talked about finding his father’s body with a letter still clutched in his hand.

A man doesn’t fake that.

I don’t think he can.

So I made a promise to myself in the dark of my room that night — I would not simply choose a side.

I would find out who was lying.

It took three days of careful, quiet asking before I learned the part nobody wanted to say out loud — that the valet who confessed disappeared right after, suddenly wealthy, never to be heard from again.

That a man named Lord Coswick had been drowning in gambling debts that year.

That Coswick and my brother had been thick as thieves before the scandal, and considerably less so after.

None of it proved anything.

All of it made my stomach turn.

When Nathaniel found me in the park days later, I told him what I’d learned, and watched something shift behind those gray eyes — not triumph, something closer to fear.

“I have a witness,” he said.

“A man who took money to lie eight years ago.”

“He’s dying now, and dying men tell the truth.”

He asked me to come with him to hear it.

To sit in a stranger’s cottage and listen to a confession that could either clear his name or bury my brother.

I said yes before I’d even finished thinking it through, because some part of me already knew which way the truth was going to fall, and I needed to hear it with my own ears so no one could ever tell me a softer version later.

We left for Kent two days after, my maid and my dearest friend as my only chaperones, my brother believing I was visiting a sick relative who didn’t exist.

I sat across from a dying man in a chair by his fire and watched him look at Nathaniel like he’d been waiting eight years for this exact moment to arrive.

“Your grace,” he whispered, and there was relief in it, like setting down something heavy he’d been carrying since he was a young man with a sick mother and a stranger’s money in his hand.

He started to talk, and every word out of his mouth pulled the floor further out from under me — because the man he named as the one who’d paid him, planned it, profited from it, was not a stranger at all.

It was my own brother.

So tell me — if the people you love most turn out to be the ones who did the unforgivable thing, do you choose the truth, or do you choose them?