Page 106 of A Bride for the Devilish Duke

Sutherland followed him into the room, scraped a chair back from the table, and sat, unlacing the leather binder and taking out the first page within. There was a look of naked greed on his face as he licked his lips in anticipation of wealth.

Unobserved, Damien went to a tea chest in a corner of the room and opened it. The items that he had requested be left for him were present. Rope. A pistol. And powder.

Everything he had arranged weeks ago, when this had been about legacy, not vengeance.

Now, he closed the lid again.

He wouldn’t need the powder.

He turned, resting his hand atop the chest as he watched Sutherland read, the man’s face flushed with eager calculation.

Gregory Fitzgerald had been an egotistical brute, hellbent on befouling his sons. Isaac and Jacob had been sly snakes, but Sutherland… Sutherland was something fouler. A man who had left bruises on a girl and told himself she had deserved it. A man who took, and laughed, and walked away untouched.

Not today.

Damien’s voice, when it came, was calm. Almost conversational. “Do you know, I had this whole place set to burn.”

Sutherland did not look up. “Hmm?”

“These warehouses. All of them. Full of oil and wool and men who’d been paid to vanish.” He stepped forward, wrapping the rope tight around his knuckles. “I was going to turn this place to ash. Make a clean end of it. Let the world call it tragic and move on.”

Sutherland hummed absently. “Preposterous. The wealth here could satiate generations, but I suppose you would have—”

“But then I learned what you did to her.”

That got Sutherland’s attention. His head jerked up, expression tightening just a fraction.

Damien smiled.

Not pleasantly.

Not at all.

“There it is,” he said, softly. “You thought no one would ever know, didn’t you?”

Sutherland stood abruptly, the papers spilling to the floor, half-formed excuses tumbling from his mouth. “I—I don’t know what you’re talking about. Whatever she said, I—”

“Whatevershesaid?” Damien’s tone didn’t rise, but the temperature in the room dropped. “Say her name, Sutherland.”

Silence.

Damien moved forward again, slow, deliberate steps across creaking floorboards.

“I have imagined this moment,” he said, conversational again. “For weeks. I wondered what I’d say. How I’d say it. Who I’d say it to. Whether I’d shoot you. Break your fingers. Leave you tied to a piling at low tide.”

Sutherland backed away a pace.

“You disgust me,” Damien muttered, and now his voice was sharp, honed to a knife’s edge. “A weak little man who thinks power is the same as cruelty. That because someone is smaller, younger, they belong to you.”

He passed the table, ignoring the papers and the chair, and uncoiled the rope from his hand.

“Your Grace,” Sutherland began, voice cracking. “You—you don’t want to do this.”

“Oh, you are wrong about that, old boy,” Damien said coldly. “I have never wanted anything more.”

“Over here, Your Grace. A small gate in that larger one,” Elsie whispered, “I can't think where the nightwatchman has got to, these places are never deserted like this.”

“Damien would not risk innocent lives in whatever he is planning. He would have sent away anyone that might be harmed,” Emma whispered back.