Page 144 of How to Love a Duke in Ten Days

She wasn’t harmless. She knew how to wield a pistol.

He could be walking into a trap, even now.

Even as all these suspicions drove spikes into the coffin of ice surrounding his heart, he violently rejected them.

The more he desired to trust her, the more his mind seemed to sway with riotous suspicion bordering on paranoia.

He didn’t believe she would try to hurt him.

This was Alexandra. As compassionate as she wasdetermined. As honest as she was enigmatic. Logical, levelheaded, and lovely.

Except she’d had secrets, hadn’t she? He’d seen them lurking in the shadows of her eyes. But he thought they were done with that, that he’d uncovered them all.

Apparently not.

You’ve only known her ten days,his reason whispered.

Another sensation raised the hairs on the back of his neck, causing him to duck behind cover and squint into the night.

It still felt as though the devil walked here, looking to smother what little light he’d found in darkness. Piers’s hunter’s instincts sensed danger out there. Not a being, but a void. Something or someone hollow, abysmal, hungry.

Another predator?

With his hand on his weapon, he stalked his wife in the dark, as he had so many other creatures, intent on following her to the source of her mysteries.

Alexandra trained her pistol into the shadows beyond where the illumination of the lantern danced upon the damp walls of the catacomb. She might be willing to sacrifice herself for her friends, but that outcome certainly wasn’t her first option.

Especially now.

Now that she’d fallen in love with her husband.

No, not fallen, per se. But drifted into it in barely recognizable shifts of her heart. He’d become necessary. A curator of healing and joy. The idea of him finding out. Of rejecting her. Or worse, of falling victim to her tormentor, was simply untenable. She had to do what she must to keep something like yesterday’s cave-in from happening again.

Alexandra hoped to meet her nemesis in the first antechamber past the crypt entrance, the stability of which remained dubious in her estimation. But as she’d tripped over smaller rocks still yet to be cleared from the causeway, she’d discovered a note stuck between the temporary buttress and the seam of the cave.

The Redmayne Tomb.

She swallowed the harsh, metallic flavor of panic as she made her way down what now seemed to be an eternal, windowless hall. The dank stone, cracked by the insistent roots of grass and vegetation, threw every one of her footsteps back at her in an eerie echo. She’d the sense she was being watched, or followed, and she couldn’t help but wonder what lurked in the shadows beyond her feeble light.

She couldn’t say why she lowered her pistol when she turned the corner to the Redmayne crypt. Perhaps because the thought of shooting a friend seemed so ludicrous.

Of course she would never. She didn’t have it in her to kill.

Except she did.She had.

That’s why she was here.

“Julia?”

The woman reclined against the mound of dirt where the Redmayne skeleton had once rested, still attired in a dinner gown and bedecked with diamonds. The diamond comb in her golden hair glittered in the light of the lamp resting at her elbow. It must have cost more than any one of Alexandra’s payments.

“Oh, don’t let’s pretend to be astonished,Alexander.” Julia tipped her head to the side, eyes narrowed like a serpent’s. “You’re just so exceptionally clever, you had to have at least suspected it was me.”

Alexandra flinched, but mainly at Julia’s use of the Red Rogue nickname for her.

Shehadsuspected Julia. That is, the woman had beenon her list of possible suspects, though she’d never truly believed it simply because…

“You don’t need my money,” she puzzled. “And yet, you’ve taken mine all these years…”