I Sold the Cursed Duke One Hundred Nights, and He Never Counted Them novel · Chapter 16 of 24

Chapter 16: The Ledger

The first page was ruled in two columns in his heavy black hand.

The left column was headed Nights.

The right column was headed Told.

The first entry ran across both.

Night 1. The veins went out of me under her hand before the second hour. I lay awake and waited for them. By dawn there was nothing. I have looked in the glass four times.

Below it, smaller, the pen pressed harder.

It is gone. It is gone, and she doesn't know, and she will go the moment she does. I have a contract for a hundred nights and I do not know how to be a man who deserves one.

Odalys read it twice.

Then she turned the page.

Night 2 and Told 2. Night 3 and Told 3. The columns matched down to the fourth night, and then the right-hand column began to lag.

Night 7. Told 6. This one is honest.

Night 14. Told 13. Honest.

Night 22. Told 19. I did not have to count the ten minutes. I said clause one.

She put her bandaged hand over her mouth.

The night she slept at her brother's house is not a night at all.

I walked to the Swan and played cards for six hours because I could not sit in my own room and hear the lack of her.

I said it was the cold. She believed me. She believes me every time, and each time I am sick with it.

Night 31. Told 25. I have stopped pretending the number is a mistake.

Night 40. Told 33. The Council says marry. I will lose the duchy before I lose the count.

Night 54. Told 44.

Under the last line, from the night before, there was one sentence in smaller writing, pressed so hard that the nib had torn the page.

I am paying for nights I do not need so that she will stay for nights I do not deserve.

The ribboned sheaf was underneath.

They were receipts on the steward's thick cream paper, stamped with the Drevoss vault seal, one for every dawn.

Received, five thousand crowns in the name of O. Marenne.

She checked them on the floor in the cold daylight, one at a time, with her finger.

Fifty-four.

Not forty-four.

Fifty-four.

The last one was dated this morning.

Even this dawn, the Duke of Drevoss had paid for ten more nights than he had ever told her about.

There was a note pinned to the top receipt in his writing, addressed to the steward.

If Lady Odalys ever asks for her money, give it to her at once, all of it, whatever the count. She is not to be kept by it.

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