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Chapter 1
Chapter 1: A Blade in the House of Lords
The chamber smelled of beeswax, old ambition, and the faint metallic tang of too many men pretending they did not sweat beneath their wool.
Lady Rosalind Everleigh did not pretend.
She stood in the Strangers’ Gallery in a gown the color of fresh blood—because of course she did—gloved fingers curled over the rail as though it were a hilt. Below, Baron Tristan Ashbourne rose to speak against her cousin’s tenancy-reform bill with the lazy confidence of a man who had never been told no and lived.
His voice was velvet over steel. Every syllable landed like a gauntlet.
Rosalind waited until he finished, until the smug ripple of approval swept the benches, and then she leaned forward just enough for her voice to carry.
“Tell me, my lord,” she called, clear as cathedral bells, “when you speak of protecting the sanctity of land, do you mean the land itself, or merely your right to bleed it white?”
A collective intake of breath. Several dowagers clutched their reticules as though she had produced a pistol.
Tristan turned. Slowly. His eyes—winter-green and entirely too amused—found hers through the haze of cigar smoke.
“Lady Rosalind,” he said, bowing with theatrical grace. “How generous of you to remind us that some women mistake volume for argument.”
Titters. Smirks. The usual masculine chorus.
Rosalind smiled, sweet as arsenic. “And some men mistake inheritance for intellect. One cannot help one’s accidents of birth, my lord. Only what one does with them.”
The chamber erupted—half scandalized, half delighted. The Speaker banged his gavel like a man trying to wake from a nightmare.
Tristan’s smile did not waver, but something colder flickered behind it.
Later that evening, the Everleigh bill was quietly buried in committee.
And the war began.
