The next day, Alec went to the Turkish bath. It seemed like the only possible solution to a rotten bad head and a stomach filled with a sour stew of fear. He soaked and steamed and was impersonally pummelled by powerful hands, until both the worries and the alcohol had been temporarily driven away. He dozed afterwards for an hour, and woke feeling hungry, human, and newly determined.

He’d made his deal with the devil and there was no point fretting now. Last night had been about striking up a friendship with a charming and plausible man in public. Crozier was, it transpired, very good at being charming and plausible; Alec had been charmed. He surely didn’t need to worry about that hint of possible flirtation: the way Crozier had spoken of the music-hall travesty singer didn’t suggest a man who feared or hated effeminacy. He’d probably ended the night simply because he’d seen Alec was drunk enough to forget his role. There was no need to worry.

He told himself all that until he nearly believed it, then went back home to try to get some work done. He had the top floor room, with a skylight; it was a very decent space that allowed for a good-sized table and a folding screen to hide his bed. It wasn’t a grand house or a fashionable location—Mincing Lane, on the wrong side of Eastcheap—but it was clean, and he could afford it on his earnings with no help from his brother, let alone his father. Sometimes he felt proud of that achievement and his independence; sometimes he remembered that he was Lord Alexander Pyne-ffoulkes, slaving with inky fingers to keep the rent paid and his editors happy, and he felt like overturning the table and sending his pens and pots flying to the floor.

Not today. He had plenty of work to do, including providing a sample for a collection of fairy-tales. The publisher had given him a list of the stories to be included; when he saw “The Town Musicians of Bremen”, with its dastardly gang of thieves, he laughed out loud. He sketched out a very nice composition—a dark rustic hovel with a low fire; a sinister robber recoiling in terror from the snapping dog and hissing cat as a cock crowed on the rafters—and was fiddling with the robber’s eyebrows to achieve an impression of movement when there was a knock on the door.

“Mr Pyne, sir?” It was his landlady. “Visitor for you. A Mr. Jerry, he says.”

“Oh. Please send him up. Thank you, Mrs. Barzowski, you’re very kind.”

Mrs. Barzowski knew he was a lord in disguise, and it had taken all the charm of which he was capable, plus dire warnings about speculative burglary, to persuade her not to spread the news throughout the house and to all her neighbours. She insisted on the sir and on bringing messages in person, and called him “Lord Alexander” in private as though to do so was a great privilege. She believed him to have been wrongly done out of an inheritance, which was true in its way, and that he would one day come into a title of his own, which wasn’t. Alec had tried to disabuse her of that conviction, but it hadn’t taken, so he accepted the advantages it brought and made sure his rent was always paid on time.

Crozier made it up the stairs a few minutes later. Alec heard him speaking to Mrs. Barzowski on the landing, smooth tone clear though the words were indistinguishable, and could imagine her bobbing in response. She doubtless thought him a gentleman, or perhaps a lawyer arriving with news of Alec’s elevation to a non-existent coronet.

Crozier rapped on the door and entered, taking off his hat. He wore a light tan coat with a waistcoat in a darker brown, and a gold watch chain. He looked like a gentleman about town, significantly superior to Alec in his shirtsleeves.

“Spectacles?” Crozier asked.

Alec hastily removed them. “I use them for close work.”

“Very reasonable. How’s your head?”

“Better for a Turkish bath. I don’t often drink much.”

“So I gathered.” Crozier’s tone had his usual light hint of something between amusement and mockery. “Best to be careful in the near future, then. Still, we achieved what we intended. May I sit?”

Alec had one armchair, by the small grate. He indicated it and dragged over the chair he used for work. “Would you like tea?”

“Let’s not trouble your landlady. That’s a lot of stairs.”

“It is. I need the light up here.”

“It must be cold in winter.”

Alec felt vaguely criticised. “Yes, and hot in summer. Do take your coat off if you’re warm.”

“I shall,” Crozier said, suiting the action to the word. “Why does Lord Alexander Pyne-ffoulkes live in an attic?”

Alec opened his mouth. Nothing came out for a moment. He wanted to say “None of your business”, knew he couldn’t, but didn’t have anything else to offer.

“Let me rephrase that,” Crozier went on. “Do you understand what we did last night and what we’ll be doing now?”

“Probably not.”

“I shall pursue your acquaintance, so that you will have good reason to invite your new best friend to a family party. Hence, if I am caught or even suspected when your stepmother’s jewels go missing, you will be seen as a dupe rather than an accomplice.”

“Why does that matter to you?” Alec demanded.

“Because if you’re arrested I’m quite sure you’ll give me up to the police. Therefore I don’t want you arrested. My presence in your life has to be plausible, and so does your attendance at a celebration of the Duke and Duchess of Ilvar’s marriage. Understand? You can’t just walk into your estranged father’s house with a stranger and have the jewels go missing.”

“I understand that very well. I was going to talk to my siblings tomorrow.”

“You’re going to talk to me first.” Crozier spoke quite pleasantly but Alec felt a prickle on his skin. “I want to know all about the Pyne-ffoulkes family, all about your charming father and delightful stepmother, and very much all about why you live in an attic working for your bread while your sister Lady Caroline lies in something near a pauper’s grave.”

Alec couldn’t breathe. He sat, mouth open, staring at this damned intrusive impertinent bastard with pure hate boiling up inside him, and Crozier shook his head. “Can you illustrate a book, or a story, without a brief? I need the brief. I need to know what not to say; I need to know how to tell your story and who is going to raise questions and how we answer them before they’re asked. I can’t help you if I don’t know the situation.”

“Of course your main interest lies in helping me,” Alec said bitterly.

Crozier gave him a look. “My interest lies in helping myself to the Duchess’s diamond parure and getting away clean. Is that not what you asked for?”

“Yes, well, that’s very sensible.” Alec knew he was being absurd, but shame and resentment were overwhelming all common sense. “I’m sure you’d be quite ready to give over your family history for profit. Forgive me if I’m not.”

“As if you’ve anything to tell me that’s worse than my history,” Crozier said. “Do you imagine I’ll be shocked by anything you have to say? Do you think I care?”

Alec snorted. “At least you’re honest.”

“That’s precisely what I’m not. Consider me the antithesis of a Romish priest. I take confession, I keep your silence, but instead of absolution I give you vengeance. That’s what you’re after, isn’t it? Some way to get through the armoury of wealth and title, to hit the Duke where it hurts.”

That was savagely accurate. Alec rose, needing to move, needing not to see Crozier’s face or anyone’s. He went to the skylight, staring out over the rooftops, took a few deep breaths.

“My father met Mrs. Clayton when I was six. Clayton was my father’s estate manager at Castle Speight. He came from a good family that had had a crash. His wife had no birth, a little money, not much beauty, or so I’m told. Apparently she had something, though, because my father was obsessed with her from their first meeting and their affair became public extremely quickly. My mother was unwell. She had had a terrible time when Annabel, my younger sister, was born, and never really recovered. So my father—it wasn’t surprising for him to take a mistress, but he didn’t even try to be discreet. And then, you see, Mother died, and my father told Clayton to petition for divorce so he could marry Mrs. Clayton. Ordered him to. Mother hadn’t been dead six months. Father was still wearing mourning.”

Crozier didn’t say anything. The glass of the skylight was grimy. Alec rubbed at it with his thumb but the muck was on the outside; he couldn’t reach it to clean it off.

“Clayton wouldn’t do it,” he went on. “The local story is, he told my father in the street, ‘You’ve made her your whore but you’ll never make her your wife.’ Everyone knew he was being cuckolded by his employer, and I suppose preventing them from marrying was his revenge. He didn’t keep his grievances private, though: he spoke quite wildly about my father ruining his marriage and destroying his happiness. They say he was drinking too much. And then he was found dead, in the grounds, some little way from his cottage, with his gun by his side.”

“Considerate of him to do it outside.”

“Oh, no, it wasn’t suicide,” Alec said sardonically. “The coroner said so, because of the missing ring.”

“What’s that?” Crozier enquired, perking up.

“A very fine antique emerald ring he always wore. It was a family heirloom, to be passed to his son or returned to the next heir, his brother, if he died without issue. The ring was about all the Claytons had left from their crash, and it wasn’t on his body when it was discovered. That allowed the coroner to float a theory of a poacher shooting him, whether by accident or on purpose, and robbing the corpse. So the verdict was death by misadventure.”

“What a remarkable conclusion.”

Alec snorted. “My father is the richest, most powerful man in three counties. Of course the inquest wasn’t going to accuse him of driving his mistress’s husband to self-murder. They’d have found for divine intervention if they could.”

“The march of justice,” Crozier murmured. “Go on.”

“Well, my father married Mrs. Clayton five months later. They should both still have been in blacks, but they held a full wedding, not even privately, but with all possible pomp and ceremony.”

“Attended by the great and the good, I suppose?”

“Fewer than you’d think, actually,” Alec said. “It was less than a year after Mother’s death, and a lot of people wanted nothing to do with the business. The Duke of Ilvar, and nobody from the Royal Family attended his wedding. The Duchess was furious. I remember her shouting.”

“Mmm. And how was she as a mother, afterwards?”

Alec laughed. There was nothing to do but laugh. “Oh, she loathed us. There was George—Earl of Hartington, you know—Cara, me, and Annabel, and she didn’t want four children. She was twenty-five when she married Father, and George was fifteen. A stepson only ten years younger? No, she hated us, and she made sure we all knew it. George because he was outspoken about the insult to Mother’s memory; Cara because she was sickly. The Duchess can’t bear sickliness, you know, it revolts her. I’m not worth her notice, and Annabel—one might have thought she’d want Annabel. She was so young; she could easily have come to love a new mother who cared for her at all. But the Duchess wanted her own children.”

“I don’t recall they have any?”

“No. She was expecting a couple of times. I used to lie awake at night wondering what would happen if she had a son, with George and me ahead of him in the line of inheritance. Just childish fears, you know,” he added hastily. “In any case, it never came about.”

“I don’t suppose that made her fonder of her stepchildren,” Crozier said. “It all sounds very unpleasant. I understand the Ilvars are not popular outside the home either.”

“In Society? No, not at all. My father isn’t the sort of man who’s liked, if you know what I mean. He’s invited for his title, not himself. And of course he’s entitled to pride because of his position, but once he started demanding, not just courtesy but humble deference to the mistress he married—well, the sort of people who like dukes don’t much like that. And she’s every bit as proud of her place as he is. She ranks above everyone but the Royal Family now, so she never tried to win friends, or good opinion. I don’t know if she thought she’d gain them by right or if she just doesn’t care.”

“One could almost respect that, you know. Like a medieval queen.”

“She is medieval. She runs Castle Speight ‘sacked if seen’, so if any servant who isn’t meant to be there dares to intrude on her view, they are dismissed at once. If she catches a housemaid doing her job or sees a footman in the wrong place or a groom not in the stables, that’s their lot. God help anyone who is meant to be there but doesn’t bow with sufficient deference, come to that. The locals call it Castle Spite.”

“They must have quite the changing roster of staff. Interesting. So she wasn’t much of a stepmother to you. Your father didn’t seek to improve relations?”

Alec rested his head on his arm. He hadn’t spoken about this in years. Family wasn’t a subject he discussed with anyone but his siblings, who already knew. “No, not at all. He took her side in the arguments—there were a lot of arguments—and he always made it clear that if it came to a choice between his wife or his children, he’d choose his wife. Eight years ago it did, and he did.”

“Leaving you where?”

“In an attic,” Alec said. “George has a small income as Hartington—well, a very good one for a young man, which is what it’s meant to be, but he’s had Cara and Annabel, our sisters, to support since the break, and a family of his own now, and a wife who didn’t expect to penny-pinch when she married an earl. He’s had to shoulder all the family obligations because Father won’t. He’s never even met his grandchildren, do you know that? George has two sons, one of whom will be the Duke of Ilvar eventually, and Father doesn’t give a damn. He won’t acknowledge any of us unless we bow the knee to him and grovel to his wife.”

“And you won’t.”

“We oughtn’t have to. I don’t say the Duchess should have loved us, but the fact is, Annabel was four years old when they married, and I was eight, and we didn’t deserve to be punished because we wept for our mother. George oughtn’t have to be de facto head of the family, with all the burdens and none of the benefits. Cara—” He broke off, glaring through the glass at nothing.

“No,” Crozier said. “Some might say that nobody at all has a right to the kind of obscene wealth possessed by your family, but I quite see that if you’re born to it, it would be exasperating not to have it.”

“I’m well aware George’s income could support all the families in this street, if he lived like the families in this street,” Alec said testily. “But he’s a duke’s heir. He’s got to keep up appearances, to keep them up for his wife and children. You said yesterday, one ought to reach for what one wants and not miss opportunities. Well, George and his wife and his children and Annabel have the opportunity to be part of the highest society. And if George gets a job as a clerk, say, or Annabel becomes a governess, they and their children will suffer for it. You must know that.”

“They’d prefer aristocratic poverty to joining the middle classes?”

“Yes,” Alec said. “They would. Because George will be a duke one day, when Father dies and if he and his children have become an object of pity and contempt to their peers, well, that’s not fair on them. And Annabel is the Duke of Ilvar’s daughter. It’s not unreasonable that her intended’s family should want her to bring something to the marriage, but Father won’t give her a penny for a wedding portion. And if she could marry and George didn’t have to worry about her any more, that would take a strain off him too. She and his wife don’t get on awfully well—nobody’s fault, but it would be better for everyone if they didn’t share a house. If I could give her a sum to marry on—”

“Is that it?” Crozier asked. “Are you funding Lady Annabel’s dowry with the Duchess’s jewels?”

“Henry, with whom she has an understanding, is a gentleman,” Alec said. “Which means he needs to marry money rather than making it himself.” That came out slightly more sarcastically than he’d intended, and he heard the ghost of a chuckle from behind him. “I don’t mean to be rude. He’s pleasant enough, but not the most energetic fellow, or terribly bright. He’s a drone, not a worker bee.”

“And as a worker bee yourself, you disapprove.”

“Not really. I’d have liked an idle life of luxury as much as anyone.”

“Would you?” Crozier said. “This room seems to me a hive, as it were, of industry. It suggests a man who puts importance on his work.”

It didn’t lack markers of his profession, Alec was aware: he had pictures pinned haphazardly to the walls, pots of drawing materials, piles of images for reference. It was a working space more than anything and he did feel a certain satisfaction in his Bohemian existence, at least when the commissions came thick and fast. Not to mention that artists and journalists tended to have better conversation than sons of gentlemen, to be rather less demanding in matters of dress, and considerably more open in their pleasures.

“I have a knack for drawing,” he said. “And as it happens I like it, and the society it’s brought me into, well enough. Naturally I’d rather have more money; I dare say we all would.”

“I dare say.” Crozier sounded rather dry.

“If Father had given me an income to live on, I don’t suppose I’d ever have taken up drawing seriously, and I’d have missed out on a lot of things. But he didn’t cut me off to teach me to live a useful life. It wasn’t a lesson; he just doesn’t care. So even if I don’t feel I’ve been wronged as George and Annabel have, it’s still not right.” He took a deep breath. “And then there was Cara.”

“Yes,” Crozier said. “Tell me about Lady Cara.”

“He wouldn’t pay for her.” Alec stared out of the skylight. There was a cat on the roof opposite, a brindled one, basking in the sun. He fixed his eyes on it, because sometimes, if one fixed one’s eyes on a thing, one didn’t cry. “She was never strong, always short of breath. The Duchess called her sickly. She ought to have been in the country, with clean air, but instead she lived with George. He did try to send her to the seaside when he could, but with all the expenses—he couldn’t afford to keep up two households, and I needed to be in London to get work, and she didn’t want to go to a sanatorium on her own. And then last autumn the fog was so dreadful that I wrote to Father. I begged him to invite Cara to Castle Speight. I told him she was unwell, that she needed to be out of London, and please would he help. And his secretary wrote back and said His Grace could not countenance my request unless Cara wrote to make a personal apology for her intolerable insolence. His secretary.”

Crozier was silent. The brindled cat blurred in Alec’s vision. He blinked the tears away. “She caught a cold. It would have been a mere chill for anyone else, George’s boys constantly have them, but it came at the same time as that bad week’s fog in early December, and she died. Her weak chest, you see. It was very sudden. We’d been worried, but we didn’t expect her to die.”

“I’m sorry,” Crozier said softly.

“So am I. And Father refused to pay for the funeral. He said the expense was not convenient.”

There was a slight pause. “That’s quite a statement from one of the richest men in England.”

“Yes. He said he had an obligation to his Duchess which took priority. That was the diamond parure. As if he couldn’t have afforded to pay for the funeral too, as if his own daughter’s funeral shouldn’t have been more to him than another set of jewels. George had to pay, and we didn’t have flowers. Cara loved flowers but in December—hothouse lilies are awfully expensive— There was holly. One of the vases was knocked over and berries rolled everywhere, on the floor. People trod on them.” He remembered the red drops splashed like blood against the stone and the sharp smell.

“Yes,” Crozier said, as though he were agreeing with something, instead of listening to Alec ramble about holly. “I see. It’s the insult of indifference.”

Alec swung round at that. Crozier was only a couple of feet away. Alec hadn’t heard him move. “That’s exactly what it is. He has no right to be indifferent. No right to treat us as though we don’t exist. No right not to come to Cara’s funeral, not to care.”

“I’m surprised he wasn’t concerned with public opinion.”

“We didn’t want people to know. George says it would make things worse if everyone was talking about us as hard done by, and he’s probably right. And in any case, I don’t think Father would care what people say. He’s so entrenched in his outrage at people’s failure to pay suitable homage to the Duchess that he doesn’t see anything else. It’s the only matter of right or wrong in his world. And Cara would rather have died than apologise. She did.”

Crozier’s brows angled down. “An extreme stance even in a family dispute.”

Alec had no intention of going into her reasons. “Well. Is that what you wanted? Enough of my family misery to be getting on with?”

“It’s a start.” Crozier seemed unconcerned by the belligerence of his tone. “The obvious question: Given the situation you’ve described, how do you propose to claim your place at the anniversary dinner?”

Alec put his chin up. “I’m going to apologise. I’m going to reconcile with my father and bow to the Duchess. He’ll want that: it will prove he was right all along.”

“And what have your brother and sister to say to that?”

Alec’s stomach clenched. “I haven’t spoken to them yet.”

“What are you going to say?” Crozier pressed.

“Well, I’m not going to tell them I’ve hired thieves,” Alec snapped. “I don’t know. That I’m tired of the fighting, that I’m giving in to Father in order to wring money out of him for Annabel. What else can I say?”

“That you need the money yourself. It’s very heroic to sacrifice yourself for your sister, but firstly she might refuse the offer, and secondly, if you announce that you’ll do anything to get money for her and then the jewels go missing, your siblings would be fools not to link the two things. Whereas if you admit to a minor villainy now, they will believe they know what you’re up to, and there won’t be an outstanding mystery to which the theft will, in due course, be a solution.”

“Oh. I see, I think. So I should say I want his money, and I don’t care about what he’s done?”

“Not that you don’t care, but that you can no longer keep to those principles. Let’s say you have accrued gambling debts. You’ve fallen back into expensive society—that’s me—and need to hold your own. You’re tired of scribbling for pennies. You’d prefer to have lilies at your funeral.”

Alec couldn’t help wincing. Crozier held his gaze, giving a deliberate shrug. “Forget your sensibilities. You’ll need to ask your father for money, lots of it, well before we do the job. Another safeguard: why would you steal from the goose when it’s started laying you golden eggs again?”

“Yes. Right. Christ.” Alec made a face. “George and Annabel will despise me.”

“I’d say it’s considerably more likely that once one of you has thrown in the towel, the others will follow. Try not to despise them if they do.”

“I don’t think they will,” Alec said with some understatement.

“In that case, yes, this is likely to be unpleasant for you with the people you most care about. Are you prepared for that?”

“Am I prepared to have people say cruel things to me?” Alec asked, almost incredulously. “Yes, probably I am. I went to school with everyone quite sure my father had married his mistress after driving her husband to suicide and covering it up. I grew up in the Duchess’s power. I think I can tolerate my brother and sister’s poor opinion for a couple of months. I don’t much want to, but I can.”

“Good, because you’ll have to. If your father is to believe in your submission, you can hardly be on good terms with the offspring who defy him, can you?”

Alec hadn’t quite thought of that. “I suppose not.”

“Three months,” Crozier said. “Two to prepare, the job, and then at least another month of good behaviour before you arrange to be cast into the outer darkness once more and can rebuild bridges with your siblings. This is what we call playing the long game, and it has a price. Don’t imagine any of this comes free and easy.”

Alec tried an eyebrow lift. “You look free and easy enough.”

Crozier’s lips curved responsively. “I already told you. I’m never sorry.”

He was two feet away, very close in a room which seemed suddenly rather smaller than usual. He wasn’t sorry, and he didn’t care about things, and he was going to guide Alec down the primrose path to villainy, and Alec wished to God he hadn’t drunk so much last night because it always made him randy the next day. The last thing he needed right now was, for example, Crozier taking two steps forward, grabbing his hands, pressing him against the wall or down over the drawing table...

The second last thing he needed right now was to be sporting a hard one, and he was well on the way. He put a hand casually behind his back, in order to dig two fingernails into the sensitive ball of his thumb. “Well. I’d better get on and speak to my siblings, then.”

“Before your father? Would you do that if you had no ulterior motive? What if he’s not interested in your submission?”

Alec resisted the obvious, tempting, unsayable reply. Keep your mind on the job, damn it. “Uh... I don’t know what I’d naturally do. Probably not this at all. I’d rather speak to George first.”

“Or is it that you’d rather put off contacting your father a little longer?”

Alec glared at him. “I dare say you’re very acute, but it doesn’t make you any more likeable.”

Crozier laughed aloud. “I’m sure it doesn’t. Look, from what you tell me, it will be harder than I suspect you realise to do as your father wishes. You’ll have to say a number of unpalatable things. Yes?”

“Yes.”

“Tell them to me.”

Alec didn’t want to tell him anything. It stuck like brambles, all of it. He shut his eyes, which didn’t help, and opened them to find Crozier a silent step closer.

“You’re crossing the Rubicon,” the thief said softly. “If you were doing this because you meant it, you’d be renouncing a great deal of what has guided your life to this date. As you aren’t, you’re taking a significant step down a path that you don’t want to walk. But this is nevertheless the way to your goal, so tell me, what will you need to say?”

“That I apologise for my insolence to the Duchess.” Alec’s throat felt thick; he had to force the words out. “That I regret my failure to give due respect to my father and my father’s wife. That I pray to be accepted back into their good graces, that I promise proper filial piety from now on and will—will do as I’m told.”

Crozier nodded slowly. “Yes, that’s rather a lot to swallow.” He paused for a fraction of a second. “Do you not like to do as you’re told?”

“It depends what I’m being told to do,” Alec said. “Just as it depends what there is to swallow.”

Crozier’s eyes snapped wide, and Alec felt a fierce pulse of satisfaction—wrong-footed you there, you bastard—alongside the appalled realisation that yes, he had said that. There was silence for a few seconds. Alec’s blood was pounding; he could hear Crozier’s breath and his own. The air felt thick.

And then Crozier smiled, and Alec thought, Oh shit.

It wasn’t a nice smile, or a complicit one of shared understanding, or even the sort of smile that was a precursor to being bent over a table. It was a smile that could only be called predatorial. His brows were slanted in a truly satanic way, and Alec’s ribcage was suddenly rather too tight for comfort.

“That’s very true,” Crozier said slowly. “If it’s a matter of humiliating necessity, say, to which you’re driven by sheer desperation...that wouldn’t be good, would it?”

“Not at all.” Alec’s mouth was dry. He swallowed involuntarily, saw Crozier’s eyes dip to track the movement of his throat.

“Desperation is a terrible thing,” Crozier said. “It’s amazing what a man can find himself doing once he’s on his knees.”

Alec tried very hard not to whimper. He wasn’t sure if he’d succeeded. Crozier’s smile tilted, a crooked curve. “You know, in my line of work it’s useful to have a few characters. Identities, you might say, entire personalities that you can slip on or off like a garment. It’s far easier than struggling to reconcile difficult realities or remembering a mass of loose facts.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s simple enough. Don’t write your letter as Alec Pyne, degrading himself in his own eyes with lies he’d rather not tell. Write as, shall we say, ‘Lord Alexander’, the weakling nobleman who comes on in Act One. A man of no real strength, easily swayed by bad company, who’ll do absolutely anything he’s told to.”

Alec blinked. “A character from the melodrama, you mean?”

“Precisely. The effete young cipher, the hapless plaything of stronger men’s will. Create the part and play it. And then, you see, you’ll have Lord Alexander ready and waiting whenever you need to go to your knees. For any reason.”

“That’s your professional advice, is it?” Alec managed.

Crozier took one more step forward, so he was far too close, mouth almost at Alec’s ear, breath warm. “I’d be delighted to help you create the character.”

Oh God. Alec had to lock his knees to stand straight. This was all appallingly wrong and a terrible idea and...

...it might work. The Lord Alexander that Crozier had sketched out would write the vile, humiliating letter that he needed to write. He’d do anything a strong ruthless villain like Crozier wanted. Anything at all.

“Or,” Crozier said softly. “Perhaps I could let you think about it, and you could have my words at the back of your mind as you write your letter and create your character, and try it out on paper and in person. All that time you could be speculating about how far Lord Alexander can be pushed, and what he can be made to swallow. Do you think that might help your inspiration?”

“Possibly,” Alec said. His voice was a trifle high.

“Give it some thought.” Crozier stepped back. “I, meanwhile, am going to do a little digging. Meet me at the Cafe Royal, two days’ time, eight o’clock. Have your approach to your father made and sent by then, Lord Alexander. Don’t fail me.”

He took up his hat and turned on his heel. Alec stared at the door long after it had closed.

In over his head didn’t even begin to describe it. That conversation ought to have been a humiliating agony—Cara, the plain awfulness of what he intended to do—and instead it had become the thing it had, and now it felt almost like a game. A wicked game with stakes he didn’t want to consider, but still a game, and he wanted to play. He wanted to win this round, to meet in two days’ time with the letter written, to prove to Crozier that he could manage his hand. As it were.

Oh God.

Alec walked over to the door and threw the bolt. He leaned on it, bracing himself with his right hand, unbuttoned himself with the left, paused.

Crozier had clearly wanted to leave him in this squirming state of shameful arousal. He’d seemed to feel that would fuel Alec’s ability to create his character. And he might even be right, because if three-quarters of Alec’s mind was on his painfully tight cock, perhaps he could manage his more distasteful duties without thinking too much.

He released himself, buttoned his trousers again, and went to the table, but hesitated over a pen. He took up a pencil instead, twisting it in his fingers, thinking about Lord Alexander. A weak-willed aristocrat, a spineless clothes horse, easily bent to another’s commands...he let the pencil drift over the page, creating something not his own face but not so far off as to be unrecognisable. A character that would instantly strike an experienced viewer of the melodrama as a third rank villain, never to be trusted, though liable to repent in the final act. A weak mouth, a petulant curve to the slightly open lips, a sulky, evasive look to the eyes...

He could do this. He could create a version of himself that resembled his truth as much as the sketch did his face and write the letter without staining his own soul, because it wasn’t him. Lord Alexander would submit to the Duke of Ilvar’s will, and grovel far more than Alec could stomach, and Alec would stand back and laugh as he did it.

And as to Crozier, and what the devil he’d been playing at talking Alec into this state of desire and humiliation and pretence...he’d just have to find out on Friday night at their assignation. He only knew that if Crozier had been acting in character, he’d been sufficiently immersed in his role to have sprung a very substantial bit of stiff. Crozier had been as caught in that moment as Alec, and if he was being toyed with, at least it was by a skilled player.

He let his mind dwell on that thought as he reached for the pen.