Chapter 1: The Viscount's Study
The study smelled of old leather, whiskey, and anger. It was a familiar combination, one that usually meant Anthony was hours into some estate ledger, his own foul temper his only company. Tonight, however, the room held two other sources of the heat.
Benedict slouched in the wingback chair, one leg thrown over its arm, swirling amber liquid in a crystal glass. The single candle on the desk painted his smirk in liquid gold. "For God’s sake, Anthony. Unclench. You look like you’ve swallowed a fork.”
Anthony didn’t move from his position behind the desk, a sentinel at the gate of his own dignity. His knuckles were white where they gripped the polished oak. “Get out.”
“Or what?” Colin murmured. He was leaning against the bookcases, looking for all the world like a spectator at a mildly amusing play. His voice was soft, friendly even. “You’ll summon a footman? Have us ejected from our own home? Do give the order. I’d love to see them try.”
The air was too thick to breathe properly. It was always like this with them lately—a needle pressed into a bruise, probing for the flinch.
“You’re drunk,” Anthony stated, his voice flat. A judge passing a dull sentence.
“We’re all drunk,” Benedict corrected, waving his glass. “You’re just drunk and pretending you’re not. It’s your worst quality. Well, one of them.”
“The pretending,” Colin clarified, pushing off from the shelves. He took a slow, deliberate step toward the desk. “The relentless, boring pretending that you are above wanting anything. That you’re just a vessel for duty. It’s transparent, brother. And it’s tedious.”
Anthony’s jaw ached. “You understand nothing of duty.”
“I understand you use it as a shackle,” Benedict shot back, his playful tone gone. “And as a cudgel. You hide behind it so you never have to admit what a vicious, hungry bastard you really are underneath the starched cravat.”
The words hit their mark. Anthony felt them land in his gut, hot and shamefully accurate. “You’re speaking madness.”
“Am I?” Colin was closer now, just on the other side of the desk. His blue eyes were bright with a predatory curiosity. “We see you. Stiff at balls, glaring at anyone who laughs too loudly. Scanning the room like you’re looking for a threat. Or a feast. What is it you’re starving for, Anthony? What can’t your precious Viscountcy provide?”
“Leave. Now.” The command was a low growl, animalistic. It barely sounded like his own voice.
Benedict laughed, a short, harsh sound. “There he is. There’s the man who bought out Mortimer’s debts and ruined him for smiling at Daphne. The man who beat that drunk brute behind the tavern with his bare hands. Not the Viscount. The animal. We prefer him.”
Anthony’s control was a pane of glass, and he felt the first hairline crack shoot through it. He saw not his brothers, but two more obstacles, two more mocking echoes of every temptation he’d ever denied himself.
Colin reached across the desk. Not to strike. To lay his hand, infuriatingly gentle, on Anthony’s clenched fist. The contact was a lightning strike. “You don’t have to be so alone with it.”
It was the wrong thing. The final thing.
Anthony’s hand snapped up, seizing Colin’s wrist in a vise-grip. The glass in Colin’s other hand hit the carpet with a dull thud, whisky soaking into the Persian weave. Colin’s eyes widened, not with fear, but with a dark, thrilling recognition.
“Don’t,” Anthony breathed, “touch me.”
Benedict was on his feet. “See? No composure. Just heat. That’s all you are. A furnace locked in a icebox.”
The metaphor, the artistry of it, was the final provocation. Anthony moved. He shoved Colin backward with a force that sent him stumbling into the side table, sending a porcelain figurine crashing to the floor. In two strides, he was in Benedict’s space, grabbing the lapels of his finely-tailored coat.
“You want to see heat?” Anthony snarled, their faces inches apart. He could smell the whiskey on Benedict’s breath, see the flecks of silver in those challenging green eyes. “You want to see the animal?”
Benedict’s grin was wild, unhinged. “I dare you.”
The fight was not a gentleman’s bout. It was a gutter brawl of gasps and grunts, of smashed knuckles against jawlines, of furniture splintering under their weight. Colin recovered and launched himself into the fray, not to break it up, but to be part of it—an elbow to Anthony’s kidney, a hand fisted in Benedict’s hair. It was a tangle of limbs and rage, years of polished rivalry dissolving into pure, physical resentment.
Anthony got his hand around Colin’s throat, not quite squeezing, just holding him against the floor. Benedict grabbed a handful of Anthony’s hair from behind and yanked. The pain was blinding, white-hot. Anthony released Colin to backhand Benedict, and they all went down again in a heap by the fireplace, the grate digging into someone’s back.
The struggle shifted. The blows became less about force, more about contact. A hand meant to push lingered. A knee meant to pin pressed. The furious panting in the dark room took on a new, ragged rhythm.
Anthony found himself on his back, Colin a heavy, breathing weight across his hips, Benedict at his side, fingers still twisted in his hair but now without the intent to hurt. The hate in the air had changed. It had mutated, melted into something much more potent and much more ancient. It smelled of sweat and desire and absolute ruin.
No one spoke. Words were finished. The only sound was their ragged breath. Benedict’s thumb brushed a trickle of blood from the corner of Anthony’s mouth. The touch was not gentle. It was possessive. Colin leaned down, his lips hovering over Anthony’s, his breath hot and shared.
It was an invitation to a different kind of violence.
Anthony Bridgerton’s control shattered. He surged up, capturing Colin’s mouth in a brutal, punishing kiss. It was all teeth and conquest. Benedict’s laugh was a dark shudder against his neck, and then Benedict’s mouth was there too, on his skin, biting down hard enough to brand.
What followed was not lovemaking. It was demolition. It was loud, wet, sloppy hate, a threesome of grasping hands and tearing fabric, of muffled curses and desperate, broken sounds. It was Anthony pushing Benedict facedown into the carpet and taking him with a furious, relentless rhythm, while Colin watched with fever-bright eyes before dragging Anthony off and claiming that same brutal dominance for himself. It was a cycle of taking and being taken, a feverish game of power surrendered and seized, where every gasp was a wound and every touch was a battleground. The pristine study was a wreck around them, a mirror of their shattered dynamics. It was raw, it was ugly, and it was the most violently honest thing that had ever happened between them.
When it was over, the silence returned, heavy and complete. They were three separate ruins on the floor, surrounded by the wreckage. Anthony stared up at the dark ceiling, the taste of blood and salt and his brothers on his tongue, the physical reality of what they had done crashing down upon him with the weight of a tombstone. The animal was sated, for now. And the Viscount was utterly, irredeemably lost.
And the Viscount was utterly, irredeemably lost.
The silence was absolute, broken only by the wet, ragged pull of air into three separate sets of lungs. Anthony stared at the ceiling’s dark molding, his body a map of aches and unfamiliar impressions—the burn of carpet on his shoulder blades, the sharp sting where skin had been scraped raw, the deep, throbbing memory of possession and of being possessed. The taste in his mouth was copper and salt and betrayal.
To his left, Benedict let out a slow, shaky breath that was almost a laugh. It wasn’t amused. It was shattered. “Well,” he whispered to the room. “That happened.”
Colin was the first to move. He rolled onto his side with a grunt, away from them, curling slightly. The elegant lines of his back were marked with red streaks. He didn’t speak.
What followed was not lovemaking. It was demolition. It was loud, wet, sloppy hate, a threesome of grasping hands and tearing fabric, of muffled curses and desperate, broken sounds. The evidence was everywhere. A chair was on its side, a ledger scattered its pages like fallen leaves. Anthony’s waistcoat hung from a lamp, the fine silk ripped clean down the seam. The air stank of sex and sweat and spilled whiskey, the candle had guttered out in its own wax, plunging them into a grey pre-dawn gloom.
Anthony finally sat up. The movement felt Herculean. His muscles screamed in protest. He looked at his brothers—the tousled dark head, the sandy one—and felt nothing but a hollow, howling vacancy. Where there should have been remorse, or horror, there was just… spent fury. And a shame so deep it felt like cold mud in his veins.
“Get up,” he said. His voice was wrecked.
“You get up,” Colin muttered into the floor.
“We can’t… lie here until the maids come.”
“Why not?” Benedict pushed himself up on his elbows. His shirt was gone, his chest a landscape of bruises and bite marks. His silver-green eyes were glassy, wide. “Let them see. Let the whole fucking ton see. The pristine Bridgertons. Wouldn’t that be a masterpiece?”
“Shut up, Benedict.” Anthony found his trousers and yanked them on, his hands trembling. The simple buttons felt impossible. “This was a mistake. A drunken… aberration.”
Colin did sit up then. He looked at Anthony, and his boyish face was strangely calm. “No, it wasn’t.” He swiped a hand over his mouth. “That was the most honest thing we’ve done in a decade. You just can’t stand it.”
“It was nothing,” Anthony snarled, hating the flinch in his own words. He was lying and they all knew it. It had been everything. It had been a confession in the language of violence.
Benedict stood, wobbly, finding his own discarded clothes. He didn’t dress, just held them in a bundle. “So what’s the order, brother? Do we pretend it didn’t happen? Go back to our rooms and nurse our headaches and our… other wounds? Smile at breakfast?”
“Yes.” Anthony’s answer was immediate, clipped. The Viscount reasserting command. It felt pathetic.
Colin laughed, a real one this time, dark and ugly. “Right. Of course. Back to the performance. Anthony the stoic, Benedict the rogue, Colin the charmer.” He stood, stepping into his trousers. “What a tiring fucking farce.”
He walked to the door, pausing with his hand on the knob. He didn’t look back. “For the record, Anthony? You kiss like you’re trying to win a war. It’s exhausting.” He opened the door and slipped out into the hall, the sound of his bare feet fading quickly.
Benedict and Anthony were left in the wreckage. The distance between them was only a few feet, but it felt continental.
“He’s right, you know,” Benedict said quietly. He finally pulled his shirt on, wincing as the fabric touched abused skin.
“About which part?” Anthony asked, his back to him, straightening the one upright chair.
“All of it.” Benedict took a step closer. Anthony went still. “This changes everything. Or it changes nothing. But it can’t be unseen. Or unfelt.”
Anthony turned. Benedict was close, too close again. The memory of his hands, his mouth, was a brand on Anthony’s skin. The animal in him, now fed, was not sleeping. It was watching.
“What do you want from me, Benedict?” The question was a raw scrape in his throat.
Benedict’s gaze dropped to Anthony’s mouth, then back to his eyes. A ghost of that wild grin touched his lips. “I want you to stop pretending you don’t want it too.”
He didn’t wait for an answer. He turned and left, closing the door with a soft, definitive click.
Anthony stood alone in the center of the ruin. The first grey light of dawn was beginning to seep around the edges of the heavy curtains. He could hear the house stirring—a distant clatter from the kitchens, the faint creak of a floorboard above. The world was moving on, utterly oblivious to the cataclysm that had just rewritten his own.
He righted the overturned table. He gathered the scattered pages of the ledger, his movements mechanical. He picked up the shattered porcelain figurine—a shepherdess, her head cleanly severed. He stared at the broken pieces in his palm.
Demolition.
It was the only word for it. And as he stood there, the master of this empty, violated room, a terrible, thrilling fear took root in the hollow space inside him.
The demolition was over.
Now he had to live in the ruins.