Page 75 of Reclaimed By Her Scottish Duke

“No?” Oldbrook’s smile did not waver. Magnus knew by now that the smile held no more feeling than the curve of a snake’s mouth. “Then you have wasted your evening and mine to stand in the cold. I am too old for this. What did you ask me here for, Greythorne?”

“To show ye somethin’.” Magnus reached inside his coat, drew out the forged letter, and unfolded it slowly in the lantern light. He held it up so the old man could see. “This.”

He watched Oldbrook’s eyes flick to the letter. He watched him read it. And for half a second, he watched the snake’s smile die.

“Ye ken it, then.” He did not lower the letter. “The forgery that killed me faither. Nae his hand at all. Made to order by a man named Weems, an engraver ye kept on a leash for years and paid to forget his own name. He’s remembered it, Me Lord. He’s set it all down on paper and sworn to it before witnesses. All of it. Who paid him, what ye paid, and the dates.”

He let the words sink in before continuing.

“I have the letter. I have the forger. I have the sworn depositions out of Edinburgh, every man in that circle set down in his own hand, yours at the head of it. It’s a case built brick by brick that no amount of money will bury. It’s done. I only wanted ye to see me face when ye learned it. I’ve waited sixteen years for this. I’ll nae pretend I’m above it.”

The silence stretched.

When Oldbrook spoke again, the warmth had gone out of his voice. What remained was flat and dry, all the pleasantness stripped away. Magnus heard what had been beneath the veneer all along: the cold patience of a snake waiting for something to come within reach.

“Your father,” Oldbrook said, “sat exactly where you are standing and thought he had me, too. He thought he had a cleverer proof than yours. And yet he’s been dead for how long now? Sixteen years? And I am a peer of the realm, and you, Greythorne, are an uncivilized upstart with a title you tripped over in the dark.” He put on the glove he had taken off. “I destroyed a better man than you with a stroke of a pen. Did you really imagine I came here without considering that you might be foolish enough to do this?”

His hand went into his coat.

Magnus saw the shape of a small silver pistol a heartbeat before it cleared the cloth. A gentleman’s means of murder.

He moved.

The shot cracked wide as he barreled forward and hit him low. They went down together on the stone floor. The pistol spun out of Oldbrook’s hand and skidded away into the dark.

Magnus curled a hand into the old man’s collar and hauled him up. He used his strength and anger to drive him back against the nearest pillar.

It was easy. Oldbrook was sixty and gone soft from wine and gluttony. Magnus had been born hard and lived harder. He pinned him there with one forearm across his throat and felt the years of his hunt narrow to this moment. Oldbrook’s pulse jumped under his arm.

“There,” he breathed. “There ye are.”

He should have watched the other hand.

The blade came up out of nowhere. A boot-knife. Thin and fast. It went into his side, but not deep. Magnus twisted, and it skittered off a rib instead of sinking home.

The pain was excruciating, and it bought Oldbrook the half-second he needed. He wrenched himself loose and pushed off the pillar with the desperate strength of a cornered dog, both hands on the knife. Then he dove forward.

Magnus caught his wrist. Barely.

They strained. The blade hung between them, quivering, barely a hand’s width from his throat.

Oldbrook’s face was inches from his own, and he was not smiling now. His teeth were bared, showing his rot. He was no stronger than he had been a moment ago, soft with wine and sixty years of good dinners. It was Magnus who had changed. The wound in his side had taken the power out of his arm, and terror had made the old man quick and reckless with it. He got a foot behind Magnus’s heel and shoved.

The world turned over.

Magnus’s back slammed against the pillar, and his skull cracked on the stone. White stars burst across his vision. His knees went soft under him. His grip on Oldbrook’s wrist loosened for one terrible instant, and the knife lunged at his throat.

He had nothing, no strength, no purchase, only the cold certainty that he was about to die on a filthy warehouse floor, killed by the same man.

But in that half-second, the thing that came to him was not his father’s face. It was Rosaline’s.

It was Rosaline’s face across a dinner table. Rosaline choosing him in the garden. Rosaline walking out a door he had let her walk through, believing to the end that he loved a dead man more than he loved her, because he had never once found the courage to say that he loved her aloud.

Not like this. Not with that unsaid.

Something surged through him that was not strength, but stronger.

With a roar, he pushed his boot against the pillar and shoved off it. It bought him an inch, then it bought him the wrist.