Lord of Deceit (Heiress Games Book 2)

M
iss Octavia Briarley
jumped from the carriage as soon as it stopped, leaving her chaperone behind. She dashed across the paving stones and up the stairs to the main entrance of Briarley House. The staff hadn’t muffled the knocker or closed the drapes.

Julian couldn’t be dead yet.

She pushed the door open. The footman who should have opened it for her was missing. Was he in the attics, retrieving the traditional signs of mourning? The heavy front door of Briarley House had held mourning wreaths many times. Enough Briarleys had died violent deaths in the preceding centuries — what was another one?

But this one was Ava’s brother Julian, the last Briarley heir. And if the gossip that had reached her in the shops on Bond Street was true, he’d been shot in a duel that morning.

Shot by Lord Chapman, the viscount with the charming smile and daring hands who had kissed her the night before.

Ava couldn’t think of that. She ran up the first flight of stairs, then the second. As she passed, the servants’ gazes slid away. No one said a word to her, either of comfort or condolence.

Julian’s door was open. Ava slowed down as she approached it. No one had said that he was dead, but what if…?

She took a breath and walked through the door. Julian was in the center of the bed, still wearing the breeches he had worn to the ball the night before. His coat and shirt were gone. A maid pressed a bandage against his ribcage.

If she was keeping pressure on the wound, it meant he was alive. But his skin was so pale. His hair was wet with sweat and matted against his temples, marring the artistic waves he’d spent so much time perfecting.

Ava’s cousin Lucy knelt on one side of the bed, holding Julian’s hand. She didn’t look at Ava. Nor did their grandfather, the Earl of Maidenstone, who stared out the window as though the familiar sights of Mayfair were more compelling than his only grandson’s possible death.

“How is he?” Ava asked.

No one spoke for a moment. Finally, Lucy shifted as though waking up from a dream. “The doctor gave him laudanum,” she said, her voice hoarse.

“Where’s the doctor now?” Ava demanded. “What are they doing for him?”

“The doctor is fleeing for the Continent, if he knows what’s good for him,” her grandfather said. He finally turned away from the window and gave Ava a quick embrace — which told her just how worried he was. He would buy her anything she wanted, but he often declared that hugs were for children and dogs. “He presided over a duel that looks likely to kill two lords. He’d do well to leave before I see him hanged.”

Lord Maidenstone wouldn’t press charges over a duel. He was a staunch advocate of the practice, despite its illegality. He said it built character to walk across a field at dawn and not know if you’d live to see your breakfast. But that was the Briarley way. Most Englishmen in the modern era solved their disagreements with something other than dueling pistols.

Ava shook her head. She could barely think through the drumbeat of fear throbbing in her temples. “
Two
lords are dying?”

“So I’ve heard,” Lord Maidenstone said, sounding almost proud. “If killing Lord Chapman was Julian’s last act, he did it beautifully. The ball went straight through Chapman’s heart. Julian may yet survive, but the imbecilic surgeon they hired to preside over the duel held no hope for it. So I sent him packing and sent the footmen out for a new one.”

Ava couldn’t breathe.

“Why did Lord Chapman call Julian out?” Ava asked.

She said this to her grandfather, but she looked at Lucy.

Lucy kept her eyes down.

“Julian called Chapman out,” Lord Maidenstone corrected. “At White’s, in front of half of London, for dishonoring his sister. Damned foolish, of course. I always knew Julian only had half a brain, and that the other half was mostly brandy and impulse.”

“Chapman didn’t dishonor me,” Ava said. She would have laughed, if she was capable of it. Chapman had merely kissed her the night before. And no one but Lucy had seen him do it.

Lucy
. Lucy had come into the garden at the ball the night before, catching Ava and Chapman together. Ava had had at least fifteen proposals of marriage that season, but Chapman was the first man who had dared to kiss her.

Chapman hadn’t proposed. He hadn’t made any declarations of love. He’d kissed her, though, with his hands on her hips and his breath smelling of whisky.

Ava would have stopped him herself, but there wasn’t time. Lucy’s voice, when she had interrupted them, had been as frosty as any patroness of Almack’s. She’d dragged Ava back to the ballroom, hissing at her to behave herself for once in her life and stop encouraging unsuitable men. Ava had laughed at that — Chapman was a viscount, after all, which was better than anyone who had courted Lucy.

It hadn’t been a kind thing to say. But Ava was embarrassed to have been caught, and a little drunk from champagne, and very disappointed that her first kiss hadn’t been more romantic. Lucy hadn’t known that, though. Her eyes had gone dark. She’d walked away without saying another word, either at the ball or in the carriage home after. And she’d let Ava go shopping that morning without her, claiming a headache.

And now, as Ava stared at Lucy’s face — as she saw the guilt there, with Julian’s body lying between them like an accusation — she remembered the whispers in the modiste’s shop, before her grandfather’s messenger had found Ava and her chaperone.

A sick feeling overtook her, so fast that she thought she might retch. She had ignored the whispers that surrounded her in the shops that morning. She had never been shunned — she could never imagine that the ton would turn against her. The ton
loved
her. The men wanted to marry her and the women wanted to befriend her. She was the acknowledged Incomparable of the season, and she would be someone’s wife by the end of it.

Or so she had thought. She remembered the muffled laughter that had followed her out the door of the modiste’s shop. She had heard those tones before, but never directed at her.

It was the sound of the gossip mill going into full production, ready to crush someone.

She sucked in a breath, and then another, too fast, until she was lightheaded. The gossip mill was not to be trifled with. Depending on the transgression, some targets emerged humbled, but not broken.

But unmarried ladies rarely survived it.

Especially unmarried ladies who were no longer pure — as everyone would assume of her, since Julian had called Chapman out for dishonoring her. The only way to make that sin right was for her to marry the man who had compromised her.

And Julian — stupid, impulsive, protective, wonderful Julian — had killed him before she’d had the chance.

Julian still didn’t move. She dropped to her knees by the bed and took his hand in hers, mirroring Lucy’s pose on the other side. The maid shifted to accommodate her, still keeping pressure on the wound — but there was so much blood, and even more on the discarded bandages in the basin next to the bed.

He looked on the verge of death. Killed by the man who had kissed her….

And the girl who had told him about it.

“Wake up,” she said to Julian. “You can’t leave me alone.”

He didn’t move.

Lucy buried her face in the bedclothes. The sheets couldn’t muffle her sobs.

Ava stared at Lucy’s bowed head. Lucy had always been kinder, sweeter, more careful. Better in almost every way, but too shy and too unhappy in London to woo the ton the way Ava had.

Had she always been a traitor?

“How could you, Lucy?” Ava whispered to her.

Lucy looked up. “I didn’t mean it,” she said, in the smallest voice Ava had ever heard from her.

She may not have meant it — but she didn’t deny it.

“How could you?” Ava said again, her voice rising. “Julian’s dying, and I’ll be ruined by the rumors, and all because you….”

“Not now,” her grandfather said, putting a hand on her shoulder and cutting her off. There was sympathy in his voice, but steel too. “We will discuss what to do once we know whether Julian will live.”

She wanted to press the issue anyway. But there was a disturbance in the hallway. The new doctor arrived a moment later. Ava wouldn’t move, so it was Lucy who gave up her position by the bed.

But there was so much blood, and so little to be done.

As the doctor unwrapped and rewrapped bandages and muttered about infections and blood loss, her grandfather touched Julian’s forehead. She looked up at his face and saw the earl’s façade fall away, leaving grief deeply etched in the lines of his face — a face that had withstood more than a man should be asked to bear. All of his sons and the wife he had adored were already lost to him.

If Julian perished, the Briarley name and the Maidenstone title would die with him. Julian was the last male heir to an ancient, doomed legacy. If the earlier generations had realized that their tendencies to commit homicide, fratricide, patricide — virtually every type of murder except regicide, and then only because the family had sided with the monarchy instead of Cromwell in the 1600s — would eventually result in losing every heir, would they have behaved themselves?

Ava doubted it.

But as she looked over Julian’s body at Lucy’s ashen face and guilty eyes, Ava understood her ancestors’ desire to spill each other’s blood.

S
he didn’t murder Lucy
. In those first awful days, there wasn’t time — she was too consumed with nursing Julian. Immediately after his death, the doctor had sedated her. Ava had spent the carriage ride to their ancestral estate in Devonshire in a twilight haze of grief — grief for Julian, and grief for the dreams his duel had cost her.

Now, a month later, Ava could get out of bed. Some of that was her grandfather’s doing — after she’d spent a solid week in her bedchamber at Maidenstone Abbey, he had ordered her to spend at least ten hours a day outside of her room or he’d have the servants drag her out. He knew something about grief — she supposed he thought he was helping her.

But there was no real reason to get out of bed. No one would ever visit her. They wouldn’t even send her a letter. The rumors had turned vicious, with wild tales about how badly Chapman must have compromised her to make Julian call him out. No one seemed to believe the truth — that Julian and Chapman were drunk, barely more than boys, and entirely unthinking of the consequences of kisses and duels.

And no one seemed to realize how unfair it was that Ava would pay, forever, for their stupidity.

“Would you pass the salt, please?” Lucy asked.

They sat at opposite ends of the long table in Maidenstone’s breakfast room. They used to share one end of it, close enough to laugh and gossip and share a salt cellar. In fact, they’d shared every meal since the age of seven, when their parents had been killed in a carriage race because neither Briarley brother would give an inch and risk losing a bet to save his own life. On that awful day, Ava and Lucy had held hands, uncomprehending, as everything had collapsed around them.

Everything had collapsed again, but they didn’t hold hands now.

Ava gestured to the footman who attended to them. He picked up the salt cellar from Ava’s place at the table and walked around the table to give it to Lucy.

Lucy sighed. Her face was thinner than it had been a month earlier, pale with grief. An observer might have thought they were twins, with the same dark eyes and Briarley nose. Ava’s hair had more red in it from her mother, but the Briarley traits ran true.

“Are you ever going to forgive me?” Lucy asked.

“No.”

Lucy had asked that question before. Ava’s answer was always the same. This time, though, Lucy didn’t sigh and go back to her meal. She looked at the footman and said, “Leave us.”

He bowed. The servants were accustomed to the family’s fights, even though Lucy and Ava had never fought before. They would stay silent and not take sides until they knew who would emerge as the winner.

“Why won’t you let me apologize?” Lucy asked, as soon as the footman had shut the door behind him.

“I’ll let you apologize. I just won’t accept it.”

Ava had perfected that cold, distant tone — the voice that felt like an act, not betraying how much it cost her to cut Lucy off. But she couldn’t trust Lucy again.

“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” Lucy said. “I meant to protect you.”

“Protect me? From what? Receiving too many offers of marriage? Being happy? Living a life somewhere other than Maidenstone?”

Lucy shook her head impatiently. “You know that’s not true. I only ever wanted you to be happy. But Chapman wasn’t going to come up to scratch.”

Ava pushed her plate away, leaving most of her food untouched. “Easy to say now that he’s dead.”

In the ton, Lucy wilted in the face of conflict. But with Ava, her temper flared. “You keep reminding me of that as though it’s entirely my fault. But you chose to go into the garden with him. Chapman chose to take advantage of you — and I
know
he wouldn’t have stopped with just a kiss. Julian chose to call him out rather than talking to him. And Chapman chose to accept the duel rather than marrying you. Everyone played a part in this.”

“If everyone played a part in this, why are you the only one who doesn’t have to pay a price?”

“What do you mean by that?” Lucy said, her eyes narrowing.

Ava waved her hand at the large windows overlooking Maidenstone’s vast gardens. “Isn’t this what you wanted? I’m effectively a prisoner here. We’ll be the same as we always were, staying here forever, until we grow old and die. And you don’t have to go to any bloody parties or do any other social activities that you hate. You won, Lucy.”

“You think I wanted to trap you here?” Lucy’s voice rose. “Can you imagine spending the next fifty years like this? I should have let Chapman ruin you for real if I’d known I’d have to suffer through breakfasts like these forever. Someone would have ruined you eventually anyway, with the risks you always took.”

The silence was sudden and ugly.

And then the door opened. The butler, Claxton, walked in, seeming oblivious to their warfare. “You have a visitor, Miss Octavia,” he said, handing her a salver with a calling card on top.