Shadows of deceit : The Augustus secret

Chapter twenty-Seven

Asheley

It was close to one in the morning when I finally settled into the living room, the only glow coming from the flickering fire in the chimney. Rain lashed against the windows, thunder rolling through the house like a slow, distant drum. My laptop rested on my knees, the soft clack of keys blending with the storm as I worked on my draft. For once, the words came easily.

Maybe it was because my thoughts had shifted—Stefan no longer sat at the top of my suspect list. At least not tonight. Lady Agatha and David, on the other hand, fit too neatly into a pattern I couldn't ignore. A murder that conveniently clears a path. A business ripe for takeover. Agatha's relentless fixation on being the Lady Augustus. David's long-standing feud with Henry over money and power. And the unsettling fact that only David seemed to know Agatha well enough to bring her into this house.

It was all too calculated to dismiss, even if hard evidence still slipped through our fingers. That's where Will came in. I'd sent him a late text outlining everything—every detail, every suspicion. His reply was quick and to the point: he'd start digging, see what he could uncover about Lady Agatha.

For now, the spotlight was on them. And until Will found something concrete, all I could do was wait... and keep writing.

I decided to give my mind a brief pause, letting my fingers drift to the book resting beside me. It didn't look particularly important—certainly not a source of clues—but there was something magnetic about it. Maybe it was the thought of stepping inside the mind of an Augustus, tracing the fragments of a story only he could tell. The opening pages had been murky and unsettling, a tangle of shadows and half-meant words that left me wanting more.

I knew I shouldn't be indulging in distractions, not with everything hanging in the air, but after days in this house the weight of it all demanded a moment's escape. So I turned the page and let the words pull me in.

"For he is a man of strange promise, and he hath given unto me all that my starving soul once dared not dream. From rags begrimed with the mud of the common road to garments of fine weave and sober elegance; from nights spent shivering 'neath a pitiless sky to a hearth whose fire knows no want of wood; from crusts of blackened bread to tables spread with meats and wines fit for a lord. How these blessings came, I cannot rightly tell, for no labour of mine did earn them. They flowed toward me as a river that knoweth its own course—unasked, unbidden, yet never without a price.

Yet, though my hands were spared the toil, my mind is never free. A voice, low and constant, steals upon my thoughts with each morsel tasted, with each draught of warmth or cleansing drop of water. It telleth me of a debt, of a covenant sealed in shadow. I have not beheld his countenance since that fateful night, yet his desire lives within me, a hunger twined about my very will. His thoughts creep as mine own; his purpose beats within my breast. What he seeks, though unnamed, is now the labour of my days—and the doom of my soul.

The days that followed were a tempest of unnatural fortune. I opened my ledger and found it brimming with sums no mortal hand should acquire in so brief a span. Tobacco, rum, silks, and spices the wealth of the New World poured into my coffers as if the seas themselves conspired on my behalf. Merchants who had scorned me begged for contracts, ships that should have rotted in the harbor arrived with their cargo intact. And always, always, that presence lingered a shadow at the corner of my vision, a whisper curling through the folds of my thoughts, reminding me of the debt that would never be repaid with coin alone.

I became a name, a presence that could no longer be ignored. The mud-stained peasant, the wretch whom the village spat upon, was gone. In his stead stood the chosen, the survivor. Yet every coin, every cask of sugar, every barrel of rum bore a mark invisible to the eyes of men a silent toll paid with the crimson ink of my own blood. The covenant was sealed, the price was mine to bear.