Page 8 of The Duchess Curse

“Too much smoke inhalation. Your brain’s rotted right through.” Chester swept past Bran.

But Bran caught his arm and held him fast. He might look like an elegant academic, but beneath this cursed duke’s glamour he still possessed muscle. Could use it, too.

Chester’s gaze flashed from the hand on his arm to Bran’s face, and something hard there gave the message. Release him now or regret it.

Bran didn’t release him. He was desperate. Would regret nothing.

“A few days before the fire,” he said low, allowing the faintest hint of his Scottish accent to bleed through, “I gave you a knife. In the hallway outside your wife’s door. You weren’t wed then, though. She was still Miss Grant, and she was hiding, and you were ready to die for her.” Something Bran well understood.

Chester quick as a snake, twisted out of Bran’s grasp and grabbed his jaw.

Bran trapped the other man’s wrists, but not before Apollo had squeezed Bran’s mouth open. Fucking Jupiter. What the hell was the scoundrel about? Something like shock kept Bran from throwing off the touch and curiosity kept him still as Chester peered inside Bran’s mouth.

“Huh,” Chester said, releasing Bran’s jaw. “Do you have Bran in there? You sound just fucking like him. But he’s dead.”

“He’s not. I am Bran.” He loosed the brogue in full force. “And I am very fucking alive.”

Chester stumbled backward, face pale, and jaw like the newly sharpened edge of a blade. “Can’t be.” Words like bullets shot from fifty paces. “You’re a transcendent. That’s clear as day. High up if your glamour’s to be believed. Bran was a well-trained assassin, hired muscle without even a surname.”

“I’m a transcendent, too. Always have been. Duke of Braxton.”

“You’re Braxton? The fellow who’s always on about changing the laws surrounding love potion?”

Bran grunted, nodded.

Chester stumbled backward until he found the edge of a table, his weight rattling the plants lined up in bright clay pots. “I’ve never heard a more Bran-like grunt than that, but… how?”

“This”—Bran waved a hand down his body—“is Brandon Lennox, sixth Duke of Braxton, and beneath the duke is Bran.”

“Brandon… Bran. It’s a glamour. Bran can produce glamours… because he’s… a transcendent!” His eyebrows were practically into his hairline. They dropped as he chuckled. “Well fuck me.”

“No, thank you.”

“I never would have guessed.” Chester’s eyes warmed.

“You believe me now, fire eater?”

“Yes, I believe you, death cheater.” He dragged a heavy hand through his hair then made for the back of the shop. “I need a drink. You?”

“God, yes.”

“Why are you letting everyone—and by everyone I mean Lady Guinevere—believe you’re dead?”

“I don’t have a choice. The glamour’s stuck. I can’t dissolve it, no matter what I try.”

At the very back, Chester led Bran through a door into a small but comfortable office with a desk, a large fireplace, a thick rug, and two wingback chairs before the grate, leaping with crackling flames.

“Sit,” Chester said, opening a desk drawn and pulling out two crystal tumblers and a decanter with amber liquid. “Sybil keeps the fire hot at all hours. Don’t even need eternal coal. She’s a wonder.” He poured the liquid into the glasses.

Bran sat, watching him closely. “So are you. She can’t keep those flames going when she’s not here. If there’s no alternative fuel, then… you are the heat, Apollo Chester.”

Chester handed over one of the glasses as he sat in the other chair across from Bran. “Bottom’s up.” But he only sipped the drink and settled into the back of the chair. “Tell me how you came to be undead.”

The amber glinted inside the glass, catching the fire’s light as Bran circled it round and round. Smelled like whisky, and it burned beautifully going down his gullet. No idea where to start. He’d hit on the idea of speaking with Chester this morning when he’d woken, once more, with the glamour hard around him, and he’d not thought much about what he would say when he got here.

“Who are you? Really?” Chester asked quietly. “Duke or guard?”

Ah. An easier place to start. “Both. I was born Brandon Lennox. Second son of a second son of the Duke of Braxton. I grew up as Bran close to the Highlands. Death made me a duke.” Quite a lot of death, actually. “This”—he gestured at this face—“is the traditional Braxton glamour.”