She Slapped England’s Most Feared Duke… Then He Refused to Let Her Go

Chapter 9

The rain began before dawn.

Thin silver lines streaked the tall windows of the Duke’s private library while London still slept beneath its gray sky. Dominic Karstair had not slept.

The terrace conversation replayed endlessly in his mind. Victoria’s warning. Isabelle’s quiet dignity. The moment he had defended her without hesitation — Miss Fairmont is beneath no one — a sentence he had spoken without thinking, and that alone would feed gossip for weeks.

He poured another glass of brandy, but did not drink it.

Instead, he stared at the empty chair across the desk — the chair where Isabelle usually sat. The chair where she frowned at his cyphers and called him accurate as ever and claimed patterns did not wait politely for one’s best gown.

That chair had remained empty for three nights.

She had not returned. No explanation. No note. Nothing.

And Dominic hated the silence far more than he had ever hated scandal.

He moved across the room, restless, and stopped before the portrait that hung above the fireplace — his father. Henry Karstair. The man whose signature, repeated dozens of times, had helped destroy Thomas Fairmont. He was an old man in the painting, stern and kind and tired, a man who had spent his life trying to be fair in a world that rewarded anything but.

You never told me about the audit, Father. You took the blame quietly, accepted the committee’s finding, and let them bury a mathematician’s reputation to protect… to protect what?

He turned away, and his hand brushed the stack of letters at the end of the desk — his father’s old correspondence, unsorted for years. Something fell to the floor. A memorandum, yellowed with age, stamped with the East India Company crest.

Dominic bent to pick it up.

The memorandum was dated a month after Thomas Fairmont’s death. It was a complaint — a clerk’s careful, diplomatic complaint — about an under-secretary’s “unusual interest in the handwriting of the convicted parties” and a request that the under-secretary be “discouraged from personally retaining audit documents for extended periods.”

The under-secretary’s name was initialed at the bottom.

E.G.

Sir Edmund Graves.

Dominic’s hand tightened on the paper.

His father had never spoken of this. Had never mentioned the clerk’s complaint, or the audit, or the way an under-secretary — a man Henry Karstair had trusted, a man who had dined at their table, who had stood godfather to half the young men in the Ministry — had kept documents.

He sat down heavily in the chair across from the empty one.

The truth was a pattern, Isabelle had said. Patterns never lie.

And the pattern here was beginning to look very like a noose.

Around what — or whom — he did not yet know. But he knew this much: he could not sit in this library, in this house, surrounded by these portraits and these silences, and let the pattern go unread. He had watched his father die slowly, rumor by rumor, under the weight of an accusation he had never once denied publicly. And Dominic had never asked. Never doubted. Never once looked beneath the surface of a name.

He was done accepting what powerful men handed him.

Dawn came slowly, gray and wet. Dominic wrote a letter to the Ministry — a single, short letter, sealed with his ring — requesting his father’s full audit records be transferred to Harrington House for “family review.” Then he went to his rooms, changed his coat, and gave the butler a set of instructions that made the man’s eyebrows climb.

Not to Bloomsbury, the butler said, puzzled. “My lord?”

“To Bloomsbury,” Dominic corrected. “And not the carriage Greaves — the closed one. I do not want half of London watching me.”

The truth was the only thing his father had left him.

He would give it to Isabelle Fairmont, whatever it cost.