The Silent Duchess

Chapter 10

Mrs. Halloway inhales sharply. "How far along, Doctor?"

"I should estimate six weeks, perhaps seven." He pauses, looking between the two women. "You must be extremely careful now. No heavy lifting, no strenuous exertion, and most importantly, no stress. Your body needs absolute calm to sustain this."

The irony is almost laughable. She is living in a house built on blood and iron, married to a man who treats intimacy like a siege, and she is being told she needs calm.

"I understand," Laura manages to say, though her voice sounds foreign to her own ears.

"I will leave you both to compose yourselves," Dr. Aris murmurs, bowing low before retreating.

As the door closes, Mrs. Halloway turns to Laura. The older woman's face has gone pale. "He must be told, Laura. Soon. The Duke will not tolerate deception, and he will certainly not tolerate a child that he believes has been kept from him."

Laura looks up at her, her silver blue eyes cold and clear. "Then we decide how to tell him. We decide how to make him see this as mine as much as it is his."

Laura places a hand on her stomach, the wicked thought of not telling him, letting him kill his own child as he slams her body in his nightly use of he, plays at the edge of her mind. But it wasn't just his baby; it was hers. A new courage grew inside of her. She was going to protect this baby from him. The fire had burned down to coals by the time she heard his boots on the stairs. She had not changed into one of the sheer nightgowns her mother had gotten for her. She pressed her hand flat against her stomach and felt nothing yet, no movement, no proof, only the fact of it, only the decision she had already made without knowing she had made it. Let him be angry about the nightgown. Let him be angry. She pressed her thumbnail into her palm and thought: this is the last night I do not know what I am protecting. Now she knew. His knock landed on the door like a judgment. She did not move to answer it. She did not move at all.

The fire crackles in the hearth, casting dancing shadows across the walls of the bedchamber, but the warmth does not reach Laura. She sits in a high-backed chair near the flames, dressed not in the gossamer silk or thin cotton he prefers for his nocturnal conquests, but in a structured velvet dressing gown, buttoned tight to her throat. Her hair is pulled back firmly, leaving no loose strands for him to wind around his fingers.

The thought that had flickered in her mind earlier, the dark, poisonous temptation to let him destroy what he had created, has solidified into something else entirely. It is no longer just despair; it is a cold, maternal fury. She cannot hate the child, but she can fear the father. And if she must protect this tiny, fragile thing from the man who sees her as nothing more than a vessel, then she will become a fortress.

She hears the familiar, heavy tread of his boots in the corridor. The sound sends a spike of adrenaline through her, but she does not flinch. She simply straightens her spine, her hand resting protectively over her womb beneath the heavy velvet.

The knock comes three measured, authoritative raps. Before she can even answer, the door swings open, and Duke Hudson Argent enters. He has already begun to unbutton his waistcoat, his movements carrying the casual confidence of a man entering his own domain to claim his prize.

He stops mid-motion when he sees her. His grey eyes sweep over her, taking in the absence of the nightgown, the absence of the pale, exposed skin he expects, and the way she sits not waiting on the bed like a supplicant, but seated like a queen in her own right.

"What is this?" he asks, his voice dropping into that dangerous register. A frown creases his gaunt features. "I expected you in bed, Laura. Why are you dressed like you are expecting guests for tea?"

He moves toward her, his presence filling the room, the scent of brandy and leather preceding him. "Have you forgotten your place? Or has your silent rebellion taken a new, more insolent form?"

He reaches for her chin, intending to tilt her face up to meet his gaze, but there is something different in her expression tonight. The emptiness is gone. In its place is something harder, something watchful.

His fingers found her jaw and wrenched it upward. She let him. She let him turn her face to his, and she held his gaze and did not blink, and the words "have you forgotten your place" hung in the air between them, and something that had been coiled tight in her chest for weeks finally went still. "Yes, sir," she said. Then she pulled her face from his hand the way you move a thing that belongs to you.

The physical rejection sends a shockwave through Hudson that is more visceral than any blade wound. When she yanks her face from his grasp, the sudden loss of contact leaves his palm tingling and empty, a humiliation that burns hotter than any insult. He has never been denied, not by enemies on the field, not by subordinates in court, and to be rebuffed by his own wife, in the sanctity of their own bedchamber, ignites a fury he struggles to contain.

"How dare you?" he hisses, the words vibrating with suppressed rage. His grey eyes narrow, turning cold as winter flint. "You dare pull away from me?"

The sneer she flashes at him is a challenge, a direct violation of the submission he has spent weeks enforcing. His instinct is to seize her, to pin her down until she remembers exactly who holds power in this house, but something in her eyes stops him. That cold, harsh reply that 'yes, sir' delivered with such venomous irony doesn't sound like the compliance of a broken woman. It sounds like the declaration of a soldier who has fortified her position.

"You think this insolence frightens me?" he demands, stepping closer until he towers over her, his shadow swallowing her whole. "You think by dressing in armor and speaking in riddles you can defy me?"

He reaches out again, not to caress, but to grip the collar of her velvet gown, his knuckles white. "You will learn, Laura. I will break this defiance out of you if I have to spend every night reminding you who you belong to."

But as he looks down at her, he notices the way she holds herself. She isn't cowering. She isn't trembling. She is sitting there with a strange, almost unnerving stillness. Her hand remains pressed against her stomach, a gesture he initially misreads as nervousness, but now, something in his military mind flags it as something else: protection.

"Why are you sitting here like a statue?" he growls, his breath hot against her face. "And why do you look at me as if I am the enemy rather than your husband?"

The hit didn't come. She kept waiting for it. His knuckles were white on her collar, and she could smell the brandy, and she knew this feeling, had memorized it the way you memorize a scar with your thumb, and yet. Nothing. Her body didn't believe it. He had taken out his aggression on her every night in bed. He hasn't held back; he has never shown a drop of kindness or understanding. Some part of her was still waiting, still doing the math of his moods the way she always had, and some other part, the part she hated, almost wished he would just do it and be done with it.

She looked up at him because she couldn't help it. After all, some stupid, starving part of her was still looking for something in his face that had never been there. Her mouth opened. "Yes, sir."