Read Chapter 19: The Debt Paid in Blood

The knock came at Geoffrey’s door just past midnight, three sharp raps that echoed off the wet cobbles. Thomas stood in the shadows of the adjacent alley, watching as a servant cracked the door, muttered something, and disappeared. He counted to ten, then slipped forward before the latch could catch.

Inside, the house smelled of tallow and old wine. A single candle burned in the hall sconce. Geoffrey’s study was at the end of the corridor, its door ajar, amber light spilling onto the floorboards. Thomas pressed himself flat against the wainscot and listened.

“…are you certain it was him?” Geoffrey’s voice, low and tight.

“Durant saw him go into the water. He assumed the boy drowned.” That was a man Thomas didn’t recognize. “But the body never surfaced.”

“The river keeps its dead,” Geoffrey said, but there was a tremor beneath the words. “Unless they’re not dead.”

Thomas stepped into the doorway.

“I’m not.”

Geoffrey’s hand shot toward the drawer of his desk, but Thomas was faster—he crossed the room in three strides and slammed the drawer shut, trapping Geoffrey’s fingers inside. Geoffrey screamed, a thin, animal sound. The other man made to move, and Thomas drew the dagger from his belt, the one Cecil had given him, the blade catching the candlelight.

“Sit,” Thomas said. The man sat.

Geoffrey yanked his hand free, knuckles bleeding. “You little fool. Do you have any idea what you’ve walked into?”

“I know exactly what I’ve walked into,” Thomas said, and he pulled the forged ledger from inside his coat—not the genuine one, still hidden beneath Pettie’s floorboard, but a copy he’d spent the afternoon making. He threw it onto the desk. “I know the debt isn’t owed to the Crown. It never was.”

Geoffrey’s eyes flicked to the ledger, then back to Thomas. “You don’t know anything.”

“Your brother,” Thomas said, quiet. “Edmund. He funded your early career. Every press, every contract, every favour you bought at court—it was his money. And when you failed to repay him, you didn’t go to a moneylender. You went to a grave.”

Geoffrey’s face went pale, then red. “Edmund was a drunk. A gambler. He bled the family dry.”

“He bled *himself* dry,” Thomas said. “His ledgers were clean until you forged the debts. You wanted his share of the inheritance. So you drowned him in the Thames, and you wrote the debt into his name, and you made it look like the Crown was owed—so anyone who traced it would have to go through you.”

Geoffrey laughed, but it was brittle. “And who told you this fairy tale? Your dead father?”

Thomas felt the words hit like a fist. His father’s diary burned in his memory—the last entry, written the night before he vanished: *Geoffrey’s debt is not to the Crown. It is to the dead. And the dead always collect.*

“My father knew,” Thomas said. “That’s why you framed him. You planted the leak markers in his printing house. You fed his name to Cecil. You made him the traitor so the debt would stay buried with him.”

Geoffrey’s eyes went cold. “Your father was a meddlesome clerk who couldn’t keep his nose out of other men’s ledgers. He got what he deserved.”

Thomas’s hand tightened on the dagger. “What did you do to him?”

“Nothing I haven’t done to better men,” Geoffrey said, and he lunged.

Thomas had expected the move—had seen the shift in Geoffrey’s shoulders a half-second before it came—but the older man was heavier, and the desk caught Thomas at the hip, sending him stumbling backward. Geoffrey’s hands closed around his throat. Thomas drove the dagger upward, not to kill, but to wound—the blade bit into Geoffrey’s shoulder, and the man howled, releasing his grip.

Thomas twisted, still holding the knife, and drove Geoffrey back against the bookshelf. The spines rattled. A sheaf of papers scattered to the floor. Geoffrey’s hand found a brass inkwell and swung it, catching Thomas across the temple.

White light. Thomas staggered. The dagger nearly slipped from his fingers.

But he’d read enough ledgers to know when a column didn’t balance. He feinted left, and when Geoffrey swung again, he stepped inside the arc of the blow and drove the blade into Geoffrey’s thigh, just above the knee.

Geoffrey collapsed, blood soaking through his hose and pooling on the floorboards. The other man scrambled to his feet, hands raised. “I want no part of this. I was paid. I’ll go.”

“Then go,” Thomas said, his voice shaking. The man fled.

Thomas stood over Geoffrey, breathing hard. The inkwell had split his brow; blood ran into his eye, stinging. Geoffrey stared up at him, lips peeled back from his teeth, breathing in ragged gasps.

“You’ve killed your proof,” Geoffrey rasped. “No confession. Just a dead merchant and a boy with blood on his hands.”

Thomas knelt. He reached into Geoffrey’s coat, pulled out the folded letter he’d seen him tuck there earlier that week—the letter from the Gilded Quill, demanding payment. He held it up, so Geoffrey could see it.

“Not a confession,” Thomas said. “But enough for Cecil to hang you twice.”

He stood, wiped the blood from his brow with the back of his hand, and walked out into the rain—Geoffrey’s muffled curses trailing behind him, swallowed by the storm.