Chapter 5

In the weeks that followed, Nicholas lived inside Bianca's warmth.

Days out together — charity galas, private auctions, weekend trips. Nights that ran until neither of them could pretend they wanted to stop.

After about two weeks of this, a friend invited him to a drinks party.

"Have you heard?" someone said. "The Wyndham family's daughter — the one who went missing over twenty years ago — they've found her. She's back in Edinburgh."

"The Wyndhams? As in the Wyndham Group?"

"The very same. Edmund Wyndham spent twenty years not producing a second heir — he and Catherine refused. All of it held in trust for the girl they were still looking for. Now she's back, apparently. They're throwing an eight-figure homecoming event for her."

Bianca, standing nearby, made a dry sound. "Twenty years missing. She's probably been passed around, the poor thing. Damaged goods. And they're celebrating that?"

Nicholas looked at her.

The sound of her voice — that particular sharpness, the reflexive sneer at someone she didn't know — landed differently than it might have a week ago.

He thought of the girl who had cleaned her way to the top of the social ladder and looked down on the people she'd left behind.

The woman whose principles had lasted exactly until the luxury gifts started arriving.

He thought about how she'd been, before. The resistance that had made her interesting. The way she'd refused him, again and again.

Gone in less than a month.

And for the first time, without the coating of novelty over everything, he thought of Peyton.

Peyton, who had come from nothing worse than Bianca and had never once behaved like this. Peyton, who had understood the difficult years from the inside. Who had never needed to be the loudest person in any room.

He pressed his hand to a dull pain that had settled somewhere behind his sternum.

The wedding. The one Peyton had been looking forward to for six months. The one he'd dismantled with a single sentence in a car.

He remembered the way her expression had changed. Shock, then grey.

She would have been devastated.

It had been more than a week. He hadn't heard a word from her.

He felt, suddenly, that he should go to her.

He took out his phone and called his assistant. "Have the ruby necklace from last week's auction sent to the country house. For Peyton."

He reconsidered. "Actually — I'll take it myself. She'll still be angry about the holding room. She deserves more than a delivery."

Bianca's hand closed around his arm. "You're not going."

He looked at her.

She shifted her grip. "You promised you only loved me. I'm your legal wife. I'm not letting you go to that woman."

Something in her eyes, when she said it, was not right.

He stared at her for a moment.

Then his phone rang.

His assistant's voice was tight. "Mr. Calloway. The country house. There's no one there. I drove out myself. No staff, no sign of habitation — by the condition of the kitchen, it hasn't been used in at least a year. None of the neighbours have seen Miss Wyndham. I don't think she ever went there."

The phone dropped.

He didn't hear the rest of what his assistant said.

She hadn't gone to the country house.

She'd been gone for two weeks, and no one had seen her, and she hadn't gone to the country house.

He thought of the lounge. The blood. The amount of it.

His heartbeat became unreliable.

He grabbed Bianca's arm. "The miscarriage — you said it was staged. You said she was fine. Are you absolutely certain?"

Bianca's face went to chalk.

She kept her voice steady. "Of course. I told you. She was faking."

"She wasn't." The realization arrived with the force of something physical. "She was in a fitted dress. There was nowhere to hide anything."

His knees buckled. He caught himself against the wall.

He struck Bianca across the face — hard, open-handed — and didn't look at her reaction. "Pray she's all right."

He ran three red lights getting to the manor.

His assistant was already outside.

Two security guards had been found and brought before him. They didn't wait to be asked. They were already on their knees.

"Mr. Calloway, it wasn't our decision. We received instructions through official channels, from a number registered to Mrs. Calloway. The message said Miss Wyndham was a thief — your words — and that she was to be placed with the most difficult inmates. To be given no consideration. We didn't know—"

Nicholas's face had gone completely still.

The assistant came forward with a tablet.

"Security footage from the corridor outside the gala bathroom."

He pressed play.

There was no scene of Peyton threatening anyone. No confrontation. No ultimatums about parents.

There was Bianca, stepping in front of Peyton, a hand swinging. There was Bianca, words moving with quick, deliberate cruelty, impossible to hear but easy enough to read. There was Bianca, engineering her own fall, staging the aftermath before Nicholas could arrive.