Chapter 1: The Unseen Protector
The gardens were a labyrinth of silvered stone and shadows, the last of the sun bleeding out behind the distant hills. Fireflies sparked like false hope against the deepening violet. Edmund Sinclair stood at the library window, a crystal glass of whiskey untouched in his hand, his gaze fixed on a point below.
There, in a forgotten corner where the lavender grew wild, a figure knelt.
Estela. Her skirts were pooled around her, dark against the frost-tipped grass. His youngest, Leo, was hiccuping softly, his small frame shuddering. A scraped knee, no more. But she cradled his leg as if it were porcelain, her hands sure and gentle as she cleaned the wound with water from a porcelain bowl she must have carried from the kitchens. Her voice, too low to hear the words, was a steady murmur. A lullaby, perhaps. Leo’s hiccups subsided.
Edmund’s throat tightened. The memory hit him not as a thought, but as a physical scent—blood and antiseptic, the cloying perfume of dying flowers in a sickroom.
She had been sitting in the chair beside his bed.
He’d been burning with fever, his body a map of poorly stitched wounds and deeper ruin. The campaign had been a catastrophe. The wrong terrain, the perfect ambush. The King’s Sword, broken.
“Why?” he’d croaked, turning his head on the sweat-damp pillow. Estela was mending a tunic in the lamplight, her curls falling across her golden-tone skin. “After all these years of me… looking through you. Why do you do this?”
She had set her needle down. Her smile was small, tired, devoid of accusation. “It was never out of malice. You had other priorities. The kingdom. Your strategies.” She paused, her gaze frank. “And I also never made an effort to stand out. You are my husband—it is my duty to care for you when you are weakened.”
The books said that terrain was dangerous. She’d said it to him, her voice hesitant in his solar, holding a heavy geographical folio open to a mapped valley. He’d barely glanced up from his own plans. Giselle had been the one to laugh, to thread her arm through his and call it overcautious nonsense. He’d listened to Giselle. Her laughter was bright, her confidence absolute.
Now, in the memory-bed, waiting for death, only Estela’s quiet presence remained.
He had closed his eyes, the pain a relentless tide. When he opened them, the room was dark, the chair occupied by a different silhouette.
“Giselle,” he murmured, his vision swimming. “My beloved…”
She leaned into the slash of moonlight from the window. Her smile was a cold, beautiful curve. “Why don’t you hurry up and die already? My son needs to be the duke.”
A frown etched itself into his pain. His mind, fogged with opium and infection, struggled to parse the words.
She laughed, a sound like shattering ice. “What? Haven’t you realized it yet? I knew the plan was a disaster. I wanted you out of the way.”
From somewhere down the hall, a scream tore through the night. High, sharp, female. Estela. Edmund tried to rise, a guttural sound wrenching from his chest, but his body was a dead weight.
Giselle sighed, a mockery of annoyance. “Hm. They were taking too long. I gave them permission to have fun with her before killing her.” She stood, drawing a slender dagger from the folds of her gown. The metal gleamed. “Now do me a favor, my sweet husband, and die.”
The blade plunged down. The physical pain was nothing. The last sound in his ears was not the tearing of his own flesh, but Estela’s fading scream.
Edmund’s eyes snapped open.
He sat bolt upright in bed, gasping, his hands flying to his unmarred chest. Silk sheets, not sweat-soaked linen. Morning light, not oppressive night. He scrambled from the bed, stumbling to the full-length mirror beside the armoire.
A young man stared back. Twenty years old, black hair disheveled, blue eyes wide with a terror that hadn’t yet hardened into the cool stare of the King’s Sword. The face was unlined, the shoulders broad but without the old ache of a lifetime of armor. He touched his own cheek.
In the garden below, a child’s laugh floated up, clear and bright.
Leo’s laugh.
Edmund turned from the mirror, his breath coming in short, sharp bursts. The door to his chambers was ajar. He walked toward it, each step on the polished wood floor feeling both alien and intimately familiar. The hall stretched before him, sunlit and quiet.
From the direction of the nursery wing, he heard it again. That steady, murmuring voice. Estela’s voice.
He began to run.
He began to run.
His bare feet were silent on the cold stone, then the sun-warmed rug of the west corridor. The house was a ghost of its future self—lighter, airier, not yet lined with the grim trophies of a career spent in service to a crown that would demand everything. The portraits on the wall were of strangers, or of relatives whose names he’d forgotten by the time of his first death. He didn’t see them.
He saw only the door to the morning room.
It was slightly ajar. Leo’s soft, babbling voice filtered through the gap, punctuated by that other voice, low and warm. Estela’s voice. The sound of it was an anchor in the roiling sea of his panic. It was also a harpoon, dredging up a grief so profound it stole the air from his lungs. He didn’t slow down.
He hit the door with his shoulder. It flew open, crashing against the wall with a crack that sounded like a breaking bone.
Inside, the world froze.
Estela was on the floor by the hearth, Leo cradled in her lap, a picture book open between them. She jolted at the violence of his entrance, her body curving instinctively around the child. Her wide, dark eyes flew to his, filled with shock and a flicker of fear. Leo whimpered, his little fingers clutching at her sleeve.
Two maids by the window jumped. One dropped her feather duster. “Your Grace!” the other gasped, stepping forward, her hands fluttering. “Are you alright? Are you ill?”
He ignored them. His chest heaved, drawing in great, ragged gulps of air that smelled of beeswax and the faint, clean scent of her—lavender and soap. He stared at Estela, drinking in the living reality of her. The gentle curve of her cheek, the worried line between her brows, the fall of her chestnut curls over her shoulder. Alive. Whole. Untouched.
“Husband?” she asked, her voice a tentative thread of sound in the stunned silence.
The word, the title he had never earned from her, broke the dam.
He crossed the room in three long strides. He didn’t think. He reached for her, his hands sliding under her arms, lifting her to her feet with a gentleness that belied his desperate strength. The book tumbled to the rug. Leo sat, blinking up at them.
Edmund pulled her to him and kissed her.
It was not a chaste or courtly kiss. It was a claiming, a desperate vow, a transfusion of all the anguish and regret and burning, newfound reverence that was tearing him apart. His mouth moved over hers with a furious tenderness, his arms locking around her, one hand cradling the back of her head. She went rigid, then pliant in sheer astonishment. He could feel the frantic beat of her heart against his own.
Between kisses, the words spilled out against her lips, fervent and raw. “You will no longer be a concubine. You will be the principal wife. You are… you are so good. You deserve the world. I will give you the world.”
He kissed her again, deeper, trying to seal the promise into her very skin. She received the kisses, her hands coming up to rest uncertainly against his chest. Then, with a soft, distressed sound, she pushed back against him, turning her face aside.
“Husband,” she whispered, her voice trembling. Her cheeks were flushed, her lips swollen. She glanced, mortified, at the maids, who stood frozen, their mouths agape. She looked down at Leo, who was watching with the solemn, unblinking curiosity of a child. “The servants are watching. Your son is watching. Please… compose yourself.”
Edmund looked at her. Really looked. He saw the confusion beneath the embarrassment, the genuine concern in her eyes. She thought he’d lost his mind. Perhaps he had. He took a shuddering breath, forcing air into his lungs, forcing the ghost of a dagger’s pain from his muscles. The wild panic receded, leaving a profound, shaking certainty in its wake.
He calmed. His grip on her softened, but he did not let go.
“Edmund,” he said, his voice rough but clear. “Call me Edmund.”
Estela simply stared at him, speechless. One of the maids recovered enough to bend and scoop Leo into her arms, murmuring about finding a sweet. They retreated, casting bewildered glances over their shoulders. The door clicked shut, leaving them alone in the sudden, heavy quiet.
He still held her. Her body was warm and soft against his, a grounding weight. He rested his forehead against hers, closing his eyes. “You’re here,” he breathed, the statement a prayer.
“Where else would I be?” Her question was cautious, probing. She was trying to understand the fracture in his behavior.
He had no answer that would make sense. Not yet. He opened his eyes, pulling back just enough to see her face. “From this moment, everything is different. Do you understand?”
“I understand that you’ve frightened everyone,” she said, a sliver of her practical nature returning. “Including me.”
“Good.” A faint, desperate smile touched his lips. “Be frightened of that. Don’t ever be frightened of anything else again. I won’t allow it.” His thumb brushed her cheekbone, a reverent touch. “The orders will be given today. Your chambers will be moved to the duchess’s suite. Your authority in this house will be second only to mine. Anyone who questions it answers to me.”
Estela shook her head, not in refusal, but in sheer disbelief. “Why? What has happened? Is this some… political maneuver?”
“It’s a survival maneuver,” he said, the words chillingly earnest. “My survival. Theirs.” He glanced toward the door where Leo had been taken. “Yours. It should have always been you, Estela. I was just too blind to see it.”
He saw the doubt in her eyes, the lifetime of being overlooked warring with the shocking physical evidence of his passion. She didn’t trust this sudden change. She would be a fool if she did. But he also saw a flicker of something else—a longing, deeply buried, that his onslaught had cracked open.
“You are unwell,” she said finally, her hand rising to touch his brow, checking for fever. The gesture was so instinctively caring it nearly shattered him. “You should rest.”
He caught her wrist, not to stop her, but to hold her hand against his cheek. “There will be no rest. Not for me. Not until certain things are… made secure.” His mind was already racing ahead, past the miracle of her, to the lurking threats. Giselle. The plot. The coming war. The knife in the dark.
But here, in this sunlit room, with her scent wrapping around him, he had won his first battle. He had changed a single, critical variable in the equation of his doomed future.
He had chosen her.
And he would burn the world before he let that choice be taken from him again.
And he would burn the world before he let that choice be taken from him again.
The resolution was a cold, clear flame in his chest. It burned away the last vestiges of panic, leaving a focused, predatory calm. He still held her hand against his face. He turned his head and pressed a kiss to her palm, his eyes never leaving hers. Then, without a word, he bent and swept her into his arms.
Estela gasped, her hands flying to his shoulders for balance. “Husband! What are you—put me down!”
“No,” he said simply, adjusting her weight against him. She was soft and warm, a comforting solidity. He carried her out of the morning room and into the hallway.
His stride was long and purposeful, boots echoing on the stone. Servants scurried out of his path, eyes wide, pressing themselves against tapestries and doorframes. Whispers bloomed in their wake like poisonous flowers. He didn’t care. Let them talk. Let the entire fucking duchy talk. Every step was a demolition of the past.
“Edmund, please,” Estela whispered, her face flushed with mortification, buried against his neck. “Everyone can see.”
“Good,” he murmured into her hair. “Let them see.”
He turned a corner into the main gallery, the one lined with portraits of stern-faced ancestors who had built this house on blood and calculation. And there, poised like a statue before a window, was Giselle.
She was a vision in ice-blue silk, her pale blonde hair arranged in perfect coils. Her expression was one of artful surprise, her blue eyes wide. They flickered from Edmund’s face to the woman in his arms, and a frost of pure, venomous confusion settled in their depths.
“Giselle,” Estela blurted out, her voice strained with apology and alarm. “Something is wrong with the Duke.”
Giselle’s perfect mask softened into concern. She took a step forward, her body moving with that languid, seductive grace he once found irresistible. Now it looked like a studied performance.
“Beloved husband,” she said, her tone a velvet caress, dripping with honeyed worry. “I heard you caused a scene. Are you feeling unwell? You seem… fevered. Let me help. Put that down and come with me. I’ll have a physician sent for.”
That down. As if Estela were a sack of grain. As if she were nothing.
Edmund didn’t break stride. He didn’t even look at her. He walked right past her as if she were one of the stone pillars holding up the ceiling. He felt Estela stiffen in his arms, heard her soft, indrawn breath. He kept walking.
He knew Giselle was standing there, frozen. He could feel the heat of her stunned, furious gaze on his back. He pictured her beautiful face hardening into a plot. Good. Let her plot. He was already ten steps ahead.
He reached the carved doors of his private chambers. A footman, trembling, rushed to open them. Edmund shouldered inside and kicked the door shut behind them.
The room was all dark wood and deep red fabrics, masculine and severe. The bed was a massive four-poster, the sheets rumpled from his earlier frantic awakening. He carried her to it and, without ceremony, threw her onto the mattress.
She bounced once, a soft oof escaping her lips as she sank into the feathertop. Before she could even process the fall, he was on the bed, kneeling between her legs, his hands pushing her skirts up in a rough, urgent bunch of fabric around her waist.
Estela yelped, scrambling back against the headboard, her hands flying down to cover herself. Her eyes were huge, her face a mixture of shock and utter scandal. “My lord! What are you doing? It’s daytime!”
He ignored her, his focus absolute. He pushed her thighs apart, his hands firm on her soft skin. He bent, pressing his face against the warm, creamy flesh of her inner thigh. He inhaled her scent there—lavender soap, the salt of her skin, something uniquely, essentially her. It was the smell of life. Of forgiveness he didn’t deserve.
His mouth found her skin, and he began to kiss it. Open-mouthed, hungry kisses along the sensitive path from her knee upward.
She jerked as if burned. “Husband, wait!” she cried out, her hands pushing ineffectually at his shoulders. “You shouldn’t be doing that! That is… it’s not… proper!”
“Proper,” he repeated against her skin, the word a dark laugh. He gripped her thighs harder, spreading them wide, holding her open. She was completely exposed to him now, the curly brown hair between her legs, the soft, pink folds beneath. She made a frantic sound and tried to close her legs, but his strength was immovable.
He looked up the length of her body. Her chest was heaving, her nipples tight peaks against the fabric of her dress. Her face was a masterpiece of confusion and arousal.
“Actually, my beautiful wife,” he said, his voice a low, rough growl that vibrated through her, “I should have done this from the very beginning.”
He lowered his mouth to her.
He ran his tongue slowly from bottom to top, savoring her. The taste was clean, musky, profoundly intimate. He licked into her, a slow, deliberate exploration that made her whole body arch off the bed. A sharp cry tore from her throat, part protest, part pure, shocked pleasure.
“Oh—God—no—” she whimpered, but her hands were no longer pushing him away. They were fisted in the dark bedding, knuckles white.
He feasted on her. He licked and sucked, his tongue circling the tight, throbbing bud of her clit before plunging deep inside her. He was ruthless, driven by a need to brand himself here, in this most vulnerable part of her. To erase the ghost of every neglect, every night he spent in another woman’s bed. This was penance. This was worship. This was claiming.
Her protests dissolved into ragged moans. Her thighs, which had been rigid with resistance, began to tremble. She was wet now, soaking his mouth, her hips making tiny, involuntary thrusts against his tongue.
“Edmund… Edmund, please…” she chanted, her head thrashing side to side.
He added a finger, then two, sliding them into her tight, slick heat. She cried out, her back bowing. He fucked her with his fingers in a steady, relentless rhythm while his tongue worked her clit.
He could feel it building in her, the tension coiling tighter and tighter. Her moans became screams she tried to muffle by biting her own wrist. Her inner walls began to flutter around his fingers.
“Look at me,” he commanded, pulling his mouth away for a second.
Her eyes, glazed and desperate, found his.
“Come for me, Estela,” he growled, and drove his tongue back onto her.
It broke her. A shattered, sobbing cry was ripped from her throat as her climax slammed through her. Her body convulsed, gripping his fingers, shaking uncontrollably. He rode it out with her, gentling his mouth, drinking in every pulse and tremor until she collapsed, boneless and panting, into the mattress.
He rose over her, finally freeing himself from his own constraints. His cock sprang free, hard and aching. He watched her face as she came back to herself, her eyes dazed, watching him stroke himself. There was no fear now, just a deep, overwhelmed wonder.
He positioned himself at her entrance, the head of his cock nudging against her wetness. He leaned down, bracing himself on his arms, caging her in.
“This,” he said, his breath hot against her lips. “This is where I belong. Nowhere else. Do you understand?”
Before she could answer, he thrust into her, burying himself to the hilt in one fierce, possessive stroke.
She gasped, her body stretching to accommodate him, her nails digging into his back. He was huge inside her, filling her completely. He held himself there, buried deep, trembling with the effort of control.
“You are mine,” he whispered, a feral promise. “And I am yours. Everything else is just noise.”
Then he began to move.
He grabbed her thigh and pulled her against him as he began to move. Estela started moaning, a soft, broken sound that grew into something louder, more desperate. When Edmund started hitting that perfect spot inside her, she clutched the sheets above her head, gripping them tightly, her knuckles bone-white.
Edmund was thoroughly enjoying how tightly she squeezed him and how loud she was. They had only been together in bed twice before, and one of those times she had gotten pregnant with twins. The memory of that distant, dutiful coupling was ash in his mouth compared to this—this living, breathing reality of her coming apart beneath him. He fucked her with a ruthless, focused intensity, each deep thrust a punctuation mark in a vow only he understood.
Edmund grabbed the front of her dress and ripped it open, exposing her large breasts. He watched them bounce with every deep thrust as he moved inside her. The sight was obscene and beautiful. Her nipples were hard, dark peaks against the golden skin. He lowered his head and took one into his mouth, sucking hard, biting gently, then soothing the sting with his tongue.
“Oh, God—Edmund—” she cried out, her back arching, pushing her breast deeper into his mouth.
He switched to the other, lavishing it with the same rough attention. His hips never stopped their piston rhythm, driving into her wet, clenching heat. The room filled with the sounds of their coupling: skin slapping against skin, the creak of the bedframe, her escalating moans, his guttural grunts. The air tasted of sex and salt and her.
“You feel that?” he growled against her breast, his breath hot. “That’s me. That’s me inside you. That’s where I live now.” He punctuated the words with a particularly vicious thrust that made her scream.
She was unraveling again. He could feel the tight coil of her climax building, her inner muscles fluttering around his cock like a frantic heartbeat. He reached between their bodies, his thumb finding her clit, rubbing rough, tight circles.
“Come,” he commanded, his voice ragged. “Come all over my cock. Show me you’re mine.”
It was too much. The order, the friction, the relentless fullness. Her climax tore through her with violent force. She screamed, a raw, shattered sound that was utterly unlike her usual gentle murmurs. Her body convulsed, clamping down on him so tightly he saw stars, milking his length as she shook apart.
He watched her face. The ecstasy, the surrender, the momentary oblivion. It was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. He kept moving, fucking her through the quakes, prolonging her pleasure until her cries became sobs.
Only then did he let his own control snap.
He pulled out of her abruptly. She made a faint, confused sound of protest, her body searching for his. He ignored it, flipping her onto her hands and knees with a rough hand on her hip. He knelt behind her, one hand gripping the soft swell of her ass, the other guiding his cock back to her dripping entrance.
“This time,” he breathed, “you’ll remember who fucks you.”
He slammed back into her in one brutal stroke. She gasped, her arms buckling, but he held her up by the hip, dragging her back onto him. The new angle was deeper, more animal. He set a punishing pace, each thrust jolting her forward. He watched himself disappear into her, her slick folds stretched around his girth. The obscene, wet sound of their joining filled the room.
He leaned over her, his chest against her back, his mouth at her ear. “You’ll take my seed,” he whispered, the words filthy and fervent. “You’ll swell with it. You’ll give me more sons. More daughters. You’ll build a fucking dynasty with me while I burn the rest of this world to the ground to keep you safe.”
His thrusts became erratic, brutal. He was close. So close. He wrapped a hand around her throat, not choking, just holding, claiming. Feeling her pulse hammer against his palm.
“Say it,” he demanded, his voice breaking. “Say you’re mine.”
“I’m yours,” she sobbed, the words punched out of her with every drive of his hips. “I’m yours, Edmund, I’m—"
He came with a roar that was half agony, half triumph. He buried himself to the root, pumping his release deep into her welcoming heat in hot, endless pulses. He collapsed over her, his body shuddering, his face buried in the sweaty tangles of her hair.
For a long moment, there was only the sound of their ragged breathing. The afternoon sun slanted across the floor, illuminating the dust motes dancing in the air. The real world, with its plots and daggers, waited outside the door.
Slowly, he softened and slipped from her body. He rolled onto his back, pulling her with him, tucking her against his side. She was limp, boneless, her head on his chest. Her fingers traced idle, wondering patterns on his skin.
“What,” she began, her voice hoarse from screaming. She cleared her throat. “What happened to you today?”
He stared at the canopy above the bed. The truth was a boulder in his throat. I died. I saw you die. I failed everyone. He couldn’t say it. Not yet.
“I woke up,” he said finally, the words simple and terrifying in their honesty. His hand stroked down the curve of her spine, possessive, calming. “And I saw everything clearly for the first time.”
She was quiet for a while. Then, “Including me?”
“Especially you.” He turned his head, kissing her forehead. “The orders will be given before dinner. Your things will be moved.”
“Giselle—”
“Is nothing,” he cut her off, his voice hardening. “She is less than nothing. She will be handled.”
Estela shivered, but she didn’t argue. The shift in him was too absolute, too terrifying to challenge. And a part of her, a part she’d buried so deep she’d forgotten it existed, was stretching awake in the warm, brutal light of his focus.
Down the hall, a child began to cry. Leo. She tensed, instinct moving her to rise.
Edmund’s arm tightened around her, holding her in place. “The nurses will see to him,” he said. His voice was quiet, but it held the iron of command. “You rest. You are the Duchess of Sinclair now. Your only duty is to heal from my attentions and prepare for the next ones.”
The cry was soothed by a murmuring voice. The moment passed.
Estela relaxed against him, her body melting into the unfamiliar comfort of being held, of being wanted. The fear was still there, a cold knot in her stomach. But under it, warming her from the inside out, was something else.
Hope.
Edmund lay still, listening to her breathing even out. The warmth of her seeped into his bones, a temporary bulwark against the cold memories. He had won the hour. He had claimed his queen.
Now he had to secure the kingdom. And he knew, with a chilling certainty that tightened his arms around her, that the first attack would come before nightfall.