Half a Chance

A tempest gnashes timber and hope alike, hurling a prison hulk toward the Antarctic’s phantom latitudes; in the churn, shackled thief Rowan Thorne—equal parts scoundrel and reluctant Samaritan—clutches a nameless waif whose pulse flickers like a tallow wick. Ten winters later the same child, now heiress Iris Langford, glides through London’s gaslit salons where barrister Lucian Vale—ink beneath his fingernails, a Tyburn ticket folded in his breast pocket—pleads with velvet rhetoric for clients whose sins he wears like second skin. Their reunion is no fated embrace but a collision of forged ledgers, vanished transport ships, and a blackmail ledger that could topple the Admiralty; every gavel strike tightens the noose around both their pasts.