Page 145 of How to Love a Duke in Ten Days

“Of course I didn’t need your money, butyoudid. Everyone knows your family has been in financial decline for decades. I simply enjoyed the idea of your suffering.”

“But… we’re friends.” She realized how insipid the statement was; they obviously were anything but. However, she couldn’t seem to stop listing reasons why her blackmailer and persecutor couldn’tpossiblybe Julia Throckmorton.

Even though she stood right before her, admitting it.

She’d always been rather timid as a girl. Dainty and gullible and, forgive her, intellectually hopeless. Had she changed so much in ten years? Enough to mastermind a cave-in, hire assassins, instigate the accident on the ship, and also time the catacomb cave-in just right so she hadn’t been caught in the wreckage. It seemed improbable. Impossible.

But then, Julia had been flitting from tomb to tomb the day before, hadn’t she? Touching everything, bothering people just enough that they’d purposely ignored her. She must have tampered with something.

She’d been on the ship deck when the load had fallen. At the wedding where the assassins had been. On the train platform.

She’d been everywhere that something had gone wrong.

“Friends?” Julia toyed with her necklace, pinching her lips tight against her teeth. “Friends?Friends don’t fuck each other’s fiancés,Alexander.”

Stymied, Alexandra stepped back. “I—I never… whatever rumor you heard, it was wrong. I’ve never taken a lover.”

The woman’s skin tightened over her bones with a terrifying look of pure malice. It was the ugliest expression Alexandra had ever seen. “You hadone,didn’t you,Alexander?And don’t bother denying it, I watched you that night. I saw what you did. I witnessedeverything.”

Struck dumb, Alexandra gasped cold, dank air into her lungs. Julia couldn’t mean…

“Maurice de Marchand.” Julia whispered his name like that of a saint. “For two yearsIwas his muse.” A look of nostalgic rapture overtook her, transporting her, no doubt, to the past. “He stripped me bare and worshipped my body. He showed me how to tempt and please a man. Taught me how much pleasure could be found in pain. I was his obsession. The only object of his desire.”

“If you truly believe that, you are a fool.” Alexandra shook her head, the tableau before her inconceivable. She’d assumed the blackmailer would be an opportunist at best, and at worst someone with a grudge against her family.

But never someone who actually missed the man she’d murdered.

With a blink Julia returned to the present, pinning Alexandra with a glare of hatred so poisonous, it curdled the contents her stomach.

“Helovedme,” she spat. “You were nothing but a diversion. An opportunity. He spent hours worshipping at the altar that was my body. And I at his. All he did was bend you over his desk and shove up your skirts like a cheap whore. Don’t think you were special to him,Alexander.”

Alexandra’s hand tightened on her pistol. Shereallywished Julia would cease using that name. She didn’t know which she found more shockingly abhorrent, the woman’s cruel words, or the madness glittering like her diamonds in her hard, hard eyes.

“De Marchand hurt me, Julia. Don’t you understandthat?” Anger rose within her, welling from a place so old and dark it frightened her. “If you witnessed what you claimed to have done, then you know that we were notlovers.That I didn’t want him anywhere near me.”

Julia threw up her hands in a gesture of disbelief as old as time.

“Oh, don’t make me laugh.Everybodywanted him. You snuck into his rooms and took his most intimate things foryears.I’m the one who told him, you know.”

“You.What?”Alexandra’s finger caressed the trigger of her pistol at her side, reeling with disbelief. “Did you know what he would do to me? Did you throw me to him hoping he’d steal my virginity?”

Julia rolled her eyes and kicked her hip away from the empty dais ledge. “Oh, don’t be dramatic, of course I didn’t. I thought he would strap you a good one and then come looking for me… How could I have known you would practically ask for it.”

“I did nothing of the—”

“You let him spank you first, when everyone knew how aroused he became when he did so. You even admitted to him that you knew he liked to cause pain. That it made him harder than a—”

Alexandra cocked the pistol and pointed it at Julia’s chest. Or somewhere thereabouts; she shook so violently, she couldn’t be sure. “He… he raped me, Julia. Why didn’t you stop him?”

“I can’t tell if you’re lying to me, or to yourself.” Julia eyed the pistol pensively, without fear, but like a puzzle in need of solving. “You barely fought him. God, once he got inside you, you just lay there like a cold fish—”

“Stop. Juststopit!” Alexandra screamed.

She could pull the trigger.

If she did, Cecelia and Francesca would be safe. Herhusband would be free. She might bring the entire tomb down upon them, but what did it matter? This nightmare would be over.

Her finger brushed the trigger, her breaths shortened. Focused.