Page 1 of Within the Hollow Heart

CHAPTER1

Nickolas Brigham was going to marry a princess. She would be beautiful and charming and hang on his every word. She would be flawless. Incomparable. Her station would be high enough to place him securely in the ranks of Westrende’s most prominent citizens. A princess was indeed the answer to all his problems, and he would marry her posthaste. He just needed to find her first.

“What is the highest rank in the kingdom again?”

His mother glared at him over the rim of her teacup.

“Oh, that’s right. I’d forgotten. There is no king, only the council ruling in his stead. No king, no princesses. And among council, the youngest, I believe, is aged around two and forty. So…”

“So the highest-ranking match you’ll secure is already beneath us.” She made a tsk of disapproval. “Honestly, Nickolas, your great-grandfather dined with a king. Your great-aunt was gifted a horse by another. It should not be so difficult to tie yourself to a woman of station, given the esteem of our family name.”

Nickolas gave her a look. She placed her cup on a finely carved side table and glared into the distance as if she’d not noticed his response. Nickolas moved to stare in the same direction, crossing his arms in his finely tailored suit and finding nothing but a finely papered section of wall between a pair of finely painted floral arrangements. He glanced at his mother over a shoulder. Her hair—darker blond than his and just starting to reveal its first strands of silver—was drawn back into a flawless bun, her attire impeccable.Expensive. They both knew the Brigham line had fallen well beneath what one might call influential. It was high on the precisely detailed list of reasons she’d pushed him so hard to find an acceptable wife.

He turned to sit in the chair across from her, making certain his feet and elbows were placed in a manner that wouldn’t bring a round of censure, although his words surely would.

“Mother, I have doused nearly every woman of high society in my charm since the day I turned two and ten, to no success. They spurn me, every one. They have run off to marry their bakers and their map makers and left me alone in the splendor and finery that the fortitude and fortuitousness of our ancestors bought. There is no one left who meets your standards. I beg you, for the love of all that is tolerable, let this—”

The look she turned on him could have cut glass. In fact, Nickolas felt as if shards of it suddenly lined his spine. He sat straighter, overcome with an urge to check that his vest and cravat were in order.

His mother said coolly, “I have delivered my conditions. You will follow them.”

Theor elsewas plain in her tone. Nickolas swallowed, knowing full well what the “else” would entail. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t expected it—they’d been having the same argument for years—but each time he thought of it, the knot inside of him grew tighter. It felt very much as if, if he didn’t find a way to stop his mother’s plans, the thing that was knotted inside him would become impossible to unbind.

His voice was careful when he told her, “I’m afraid that I cannot do as you’ve bid.” Could not marry. Could not allow himself to be part of her schemes. Could not abide by the underhanded, unpleasant—

The thought cut off at the sound of a knock on the main door. Nickolas’s gaze went sharp, but his mother’s expression didn’t change.

“You speak to me as if I were enfeebled, Nickolas,” she said. “I have given you every opportunity to do this on your own. It became clear far before this evening that you cannot.”

The knot cinched tighter. He did not know what she’d done. Perhaps the caller was only a lady he was meant to attach himself to. One of his mother’s friends, perhaps, in her dotage and desperate for a replacement helpmeet, a stand-in for a dead husband.Perhaps. Nickolas stood, wondering if it were too cowardly to leap from the window in escape. His gaze flicked to the balcony. Yes, it would be dangerous and daft and, above all, cowardly. But it would not be the first cowardly thing he’d done.

The light of a bright moon reflecting on the railing brought a sudden, sharp realization of how late it had become. His gaze snapped to his mother. Her face, like that of his eldest sister, was long and slender, her eyes a steely gray. The countenance had been nearly unwavering since the day he’d been born. When the corner of her mouth quirked, he felt his first real shock of fear. It was too late for callers, well past the hour any respectable family would allow themselves presumed not to be abed. And his mother, she had called him there to… Saints, what she had just said.

He did not bother to ask what she had planned; it was too late to attempt any kind of retreat, with dignity or not. He was trapped. Nickolas had known his mother was obstinate, but he had never expected it to go so far. He should have leapt from the window when he’d had the chance.

He straightened, a sense of dread sliding over him as the figures of three hulking men darkened the sitting room door. They were dressed in the livery of castle staff, crisp black suits with very little trim. They were not castle staff. One man met him with a dead-eyed glare. Another’s eyes held a concerning amount of twinkle when he rubbed his palms together and said, “Evening, my lord.”

* * *

“This cannot be happening,”Nickolas repeated as they heaved him over a pile of fine silk pillows. It was happening. In fact, most of it already had. The men had hauled him down a darkened corridor, his various attempts at fighting be damned, and into a wing of the castle that held some of the most prominent families in the kingdom, where he’d been unceremoniously dragged through a set of garishly decorated private rooms. His jacket had been torn off in the struggle, his shirt tugged loose over a throbbing side and wrenched shoulder, and now a pair of men with the strength of oxen held him against a sturdy bedpost while a third man tied his hands with his own cravat.

Nickolas hurled a few insults, but he was not quite certain whether they pertained to the henchmen or the woman who had hired them. The men did not seem to care either way. The moment the knot was secure, his captors let go their hold and stepped back to take in their work with the pride only a man of difficult labor could know.

Nickolas let his head drop back against the post, wincing at the pain in his shoulder. “Very well. You’ve done it. Good job, all of you.” He would not tell them what it would cost them, what trusting the lady Brigham would buy them each in the end.

Lashed to the post of a bed in some unnamed lady’s room, Nickolas felt they deserved their fate, in any case.

One of the men chuckled. “Aye, a fine job we did. Look at you there, trussed up like a bird.”

Another one chimed in, “Fanciest lord I’ve ever seen, even without his quills.”

“Ain’t a roasting he’s in for.” The first one smiled, a row of fine straight teeth flashing in a face that seemed to possess no other symmetry. “Not when Lady Carvell finds him in her bed.” The lot of them laughed uproariously, apparently unaware that Nickolas had already begun working the knot.

His mother might have found the men sufficiently brutish and unconcerned with the law to haul him there, but she’d not bothered to make certain they knew their tethering skills. Five more minutes and he would be back in his wing, packing a trunk to leave his mother, his sisters, and if he had to, the entire kingdom of Westrende.

Anything but what she was attempting to set him up for. He would not be forced to marry the Carvell woman, no matter that propriety would demand it.

“There she is now,” one of the men whispered as a door in the next room clicked shut. They were gone in an instant, apparently not speaking a word to the woman in the next room on their way out. Beyond the bedchamber door, the sound of light footfalls meandered through the sitting room of the suite. The lady was evidently in no rush, casually about her business before she made her way to the man shackled to her furniture.

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