The Duke’s Timetable
The travel from A rain-soaked London alley near Covent Garden to Dante’s townhouse study, London consumed the next hour. Headlights cut cold through the gathering dusk.
The townhouse on Curzon Street smelled of beeswax and old paper. Dante Crane stood at the study window, watching the rain slick the cobblestones, and counted the seconds until the carriage he’d dispatched would return with the two people who had just upended his entire existence.
Twenty-seven seconds. The clock on the mantle ticked. Twenty-eight. He’d been a soldier for twelve years, had learned to read terrain, ambush angles, the precise moment a man’s nerve would crack. But this—this was a battlefield he did not know how to map.
The front door opened. Murmurs in the foyer. Mrs. Birch, his housekeeper, directing someone up the stairs. And then a smaller voice, high and uncertain: “Is this where the duke lives?”
Dante’s chest seized.
He turned from the window as Isabella entered the study, her hand resting on the shoulder of a boy who had her dark hair and his own guarded eyes. Jace. Seven years old. His son. The boy clutched a leather satchel to his chest as if it held his entire world, and perhaps it did.
“This is Mr. Crane’s house,” Isabella said, her voice steady despite the tremor Dante could see in her fingers. “He is a friend.”
Jace looked up at Dante with the disarming directness of children who had learned to read adults for hidden intent. “You’re the soldier,” he said. “Mum showed me your picture in the newspaper. The one with the medals.”
Dante’s throat closed. He knelt, bringing himself to the boy’s eye level. “I am.”
“Did you kill people?”
“Jace.” Isabella’s warning came soft and immediate.
“It’s all right.” Dante held the boy’s gaze. The truth, or as much as a seven-year-old could hold. “I fought to protect people who could not protect themselves. Sometimes that meant difficult choices.”
Jace considered this, then nodded once, as if filing the information away for later examination. “Mum says we’re hiding from bad men. Are you going to protect us now?”
The weight of that question pressed against Dante’s ribs like a physical force. “Yes,” he said. “I am.”
The word felt both immense and insufficient.
—
Supper was a quiet affair, served in the smaller dining room where a fire crackled against the evening chill. Mrs. Birch had produced a plate of buttered bread and cold chicken, and Jace ate with the methodical hunger of a child who had learned not to waste food.
Dante watched him. The way the boy’s eyes moved to the windows, scanning the dark street below before returning to his plate. The way he sat with his back to the wall, the same instinct Dante had learned in foreign trenches. Isabella had been teaching him survival. She had been teaching him to be afraid.
“The Langleys,” Dante said, when Jace had been excused to the library with a stack of books and Mrs. Birch’s soft promise of warm milk. The door clicked shut. “Tell me everything.”
Isabella sat across from him, her hands wrapped around a teacup she had not touched. The firelight caught the hollows under her eyes, the fine lines of exhaustion at the corners of her mouth. She was still beautiful. She had always been beautiful. But the girl he remembered had laughed easily, had thrown herself into his arms without hesitation. This woman measured every word before it left her lips.
“My father died four months ago,” she said. “The coroner called it heart failure. I called it murder.”
The words landed like stones in still water.
“He had been corresponding with someone in the Home Office. A Whistleblower. They had evidence that Grant Langley had been siphoning funds from military supply contracts during the Peninsula War. Thousands of pounds. Men died because the equipment was substandard. Langley knew. He orchestrated it.”
Dante’s mind raced, assembling pieces he had not known existed. Grant Langley, the patriarch of one of England’s most powerful families. A man who had built a fortune on wool and shipping, who had bought his way into the peerage with the precision of a military campaign. A man Dante had always suspected of being more shadow than substance.
“He found out,” Isabella continued. “The correspondence. My father had kept copies, hidden with a solicitor in Dover. But Langley’s men came first. They ransacked the house. They broke my father’s study apart looking for the originals.”
“And Jace?”
Her composure cracked, just a fraction. “They don’t know about him. Not yet. But they know I exist. They know my father had a daughter. And if they find me, they will use me to get to the evidence. Or they will make me disappear.”
Dante stood, walked to the window. The rain had stopped, leaving the street slick and glistening under the gas lamps. A carriage passed, its wheels splashing through puddles. Ordinary life, continuing beyond these walls.
“Why now?” he asked. “Why did you come to me now?”
Isabella’s voice dropped. “Because the Langleys have a new ally. Someone in the Crown’s inner circle. They are coordinating a blackmail campaign. Grant Langley does not want the evidence destroyed—he wants control. He wants leverage to dictate policy, to shape the next succession. And my father’s papers are the key. The only person who knows where they are is me.”
She paused. When she spoke again, her voice was barely a whisper.
“I can protect a secret. I can run. But I cannot protect your son from men who will tear London apart to find him. And once they know he is yours, Dante, they will not stop until they have him.”
The clock on the mantle struck eight. Dante did not hear it.
He turned, his face unreadable. “The boy is my heir. Whether Parliament recognizes my claim or not, he is a Crane. The Langleys want leverage against the Crown. Grant wants to control the narrative. But I have something he does not.”
“What?”
“A reputation for violence. And seven years of rage.”
—
Selene arrived at half past nine, bundled in a cloak against the damp and carrying a carpetbag stuffed with what she called “the absolute essentials of civilization.” She was a small woman with sharp eyes and a wardrobe that spoke of quiet prosperity—the widow of a naval captain, she had told Dante once, who had left her comfortable but not secure.
Dante had known her for two years, had trusted her with dispatches and coded messages during his final months in active service. She was the only person in London he would call a friend.
“You did not tell me she was beautiful,” Selene said, after Isabella had excused herself to check on Jace. “That would have been relevant information.”
“Selene.”
“I am merely observing.” She set her carpetbag on the sideboard and began extracting folded linens, a small sewing kit, a tin of throat lozenges. “The boy has your jaw. And your eyes. The Langleys will notice the moment they see him.”
“They will not see him.”
“Oh, my dear duke. They already know you are back in London. They know you were in the House of Lords this morning, petitioning for restoration. You might as well have lit a beacon.” She paused, her hands stilling. “Grant Langley has been expecting you for months. He has been waiting for you to show your hand. Now you have, and it comes with a son. He will not let that opportunity pass.”
“Then I will move them to the estate in Kent. Tomorrow. Before sunrise.”
“Kent is too close. The Langleys have holdings in Surrey, influence in Dover. You need somewhere remote. Somewhere with walls and men who answer only to you.”
Dante considered. There was a property in Northumberland, a hunting lodge his grandfather had used, abandoned for decades. It would take time to make it habitable. Time he did not have.
“I will arrange it by week’s end,” he said. “Until then, they stay here. With guards.”
Selene tilted her head. “Owen?”
“Already deployed. Two men on the street, two in the garden. The Langleys will not breach this house tonight.”
“And tomorrow?”
Dante’s jaw set. “Tomorrow, I go to Parliament. I reclaim my title. And then I burn Grant Langley’s empire to the ground.”
—
The study door opened at half past ten. Jace stood in the doorway, still in his day clothes, hair mussed from sleep he had clearly not achieved.
“I cannot sleep,” he said. “The walls are too quiet.”
Dante looked up from the intelligence ledger he had been reviewing—a thick binder of contacts, debts, and secrets Owen had compiled over the past six months. The boy’s shadow stretched across the carpet, thin and fragile.
“The walls where we stayed before,” Jace said, stepping into the room, “they had rats. You could hear them running. Mum said they were just mice, but they were too big for mice.” He stopped beside Dante’s desk, eyes scanning the ledger with a curiosity that was startlingly adult. “What is that?”
“A list of people who owe me favors.”
“Like debts?”
“Yes.”
Jace considered this. “Mum says debts are dangerous. They tie you to people.”
Dante closed the ledger. “Your mother is very wise.”
“She is. She also cries when she thinks I am asleep.”
The confession landed like a blade between Dante’s ribs. He reached out, slowly, and placed his hand on Jace’s shoulder. The boy did not flinch.
“I am going to make sure she does not have to cry anymore,” Dante said. “And I am going to make sure you are both safe. Do you believe me?”
Jace looked at him for a long moment. Then, with the solemnity of a child who had learned to weigh promises against broken ones, he nodded.
“You saved the men in your regiment. Mum told me. She said you brought them home when everyone said they were dead.” He paused. “Will you bring us home too?”
Dante pulled him into an embrace. The boy’s body was small, rigid with tension, but he did not pull away. He buried his face in Dante’s shoulder, and for a moment, Dante felt the weight of seven lost years press down on him like a shroud.
“I will,” he said. “I swear it.”
—
The house fell silent after midnight. Dante sat alone in the study, the intelligence ledger open before him, a single candle burning low. He had marked the Langleys’ known assets, their political allies, the debts they had called in over the past decade. It was a web of influence that reached from the docks of Portsmouth to the drawing rooms of St. James’s.
But every web had a weak point.
Grant Langley’s was his son. Reid Langley, twenty-nine, ambitious, reckless, and hungry for his father’s approval. He was the one who had been sent to intimidate Isabella’s solicitor. He was the one who had left a trail too careless for his father’s network to cover.
If Dante could turn Reid, or break him, the entire structure would collapse.
He was reaching for his pen when the knock came.
A footman entered, his face carefully neutral. He carried a silver tray with a single sealed note.
“From White’s, sir,” the footman said. “Delivered by a messenger not ten minutes ago. The gentleman insisted it was urgent.”
Dante took the note, broke the seal, and unfolded it. The handwriting was sharp, angular, impatient—a man who did not like to wait.
He read the words once. Then again.
A footman delivered a sealed note: “The Langley heir, Reid, requests your presence at White’s. He says he has a ‘coloring book’ your son left behind. He will return it for a price.”