All Chapters of The Villainess rewrites her fate : Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

Kesworth returned two days later, later than she'd expected, his expression carrying the particular careful weight of someone bearing news he hadn't yet decided how best to deliver."She agreed to see me," he said, once they'd settled into the privacy of the garden. "Though not, I think, entirely willingly. I had the distinct impression I was being watched the entire time I waited for her.""What did she say?""That her father learned of her private overture within a day of making it, through means she wouldn't specify, and forbade her from pursuing any further negotiation on the family's behalf. The public challenge was his direct response, meant, in her words, to ensure the matter proceeds entirely on his terms rather than hers." Kesworth's expression had turned grim. "She was careful about how much she said, Miss Amber, understandably so given how closely she's apparently being monitored since. But she asked me to convey something else, something she was unwilling to commit to writ

It was Sophia who solved the problem of where to meet him."The bookbinder," she said, when Chloe laid the difficulty out over tea. "The one who examined the novel's spine. He's discreet, he's been doing my family's work for thirty years, and his shop has a back room with its own door onto the alley. No one thinks twice about a man carrying a parcel into a bindery.""You'd be putting him at risk.""He'd be delighted, if I know him. He hasn't had anything this interesting happen since the old Duke's library caught fire." Sophia's smile was brief and fond. "Besides, I'm coming with you. A young woman visiting a bookbinder with her friend is the most invisible thing in the world."Kesworth delivered the invitation to Tobias Wren through three separate intermediaries, none of whom knew what they were carrying, and Wren's reply came back within two days on a scrap of paper that said only: *Thursday, after dark. I will come alone.*Her father, when she told him, did not object to the plan.

Kesworth insisted on going alone."If Margaret is right, and he's the calmest man in that house exactly when he's most dangerous, then two of us is one too many to hide, and one of us alone is still one too many to lose," he said, when Chloe pressed to come with him. "Let me watch him for a night. Only watch. I'll learn more from a single evening of patience than either of us would from a confrontation neither of us is prepared to survive."She hated it. She agreed to it anyway, because every argument she made against it, he had already made better, and because she had learned, across these last strange months, that the people who loved her were allowed to take risks on her behalf, provided she never pretended those risks cost nothing.He left at dusk on Friday, dressed like a dockworker coming off a late shift, and Chloe spent the evening in the garden with Sophia, not talking about it, talking about everything else instead, the way two people do when the thing they are actually thin

Kesworth had not slept, that much was obvious the moment he came through the door, mud to his knees and his coat still damp from a hard ride he'd clearly not paused to change out of."They're close," he said, before he'd even taken a seat. "Not certain yet. But close enough that I couldn't in good conscience wait until morning to tell you."Chloe's stomach dropped. "Wren?""Safe, for now. But someone has been through the village asking after a guest matching his description. Quietly. Careful questions at the posting inn, at the chandler's, framed as concern for an elderly relation gone missing rather than anything more obviously threatening." Kesworth accepted the tea Mrs. Pryce pressed into his hands without seeming to notice he was drinking it. "The innkeeper, fortunately, is not a fool, and gave nothing away. But it will not hold. Whoever is asking has resources enough to keep asking in a dozen more villages along that coast, and eventually they will ask the right one.""We need to

Fenwick's clerk found the record on the second day: seven dinners at the Renshaw estate across fourteen months, not three, along with a hunting invitation the magistrate in question had accepted the previous autumn. Aldercott filed the objection to the transfer within the hour, and by evening word came back that the request had been quietly withdrawn, the pretext apparently no longer worth defending once it had been so thoroughly exposed."A small victory," Fenwick said, when he brought the news himself. "But a real one. And real victories, in a fight like this, are worth rather more than their size might suggest."Chloe allowed herself, for the length of one evening, something close to relief. She sat with her father over a quiet dinner, and for the first time in weeks the conversation drifted toward ordinary things, a dress Delphine had commissioned, a letter from a distant cousin, nothing that mattered, and she found she had almost forgotten what it felt like to talk about nothing