Page 5 of How to Love a Duke in Ten Days

She screamed it as he reached between them to grapple with his trousers.

“Fight me all you like,” he breathed into her ear as he found the convenient opening in her drawers. “This won’t take long.”

And it didn’t.

Alexandra watched her rhythmic breaths spreading over the lacquered wood of the desk in a fleeting vapor.

They disappeared with every painful inhale.

Perhaps she could just stop breathing.

This won’t take long.

It didn’t have to.

Time, she thought, was of very little consequence. It only took a moment to lose everything. One’s virginity. One’s dignity. One’s ability to trust. To ever feel safe again.

One’s sanity.

One’s self.

Her eyes scanned the space before her, noting the inconsequential—the grain in the wood, the books on the shelf, the curtain the color of blood, a glint in the moonlight before her. The vision of Francesca pulling an object from her pocket flashed in her mind

A pearl handle.

The first item they’d ever taken from him.

The reason he now took her innocence from her.

The razor was cool and smooth in her palm, but when had she reached for it?

It could make him stop,she thought.I must make him stop.

She twisted suddenly, slashing the sharp blade across his throat.

The sounds he made now were not unlike the grunts and moans from before. And then they were wetter. Softer. Garbled.

He stumbled away from her. Out of her. Into the shadows. His hands clutched at his throat as though he could hold it together. His mouth formed words his windpipe could no longer lend voice to.

Blood disappeared into the collar of his black headmaster’s robes.

Her skirts whispered to the ground as she walked away, still clutching the razor in her aching fist. He reached for her, lurched toward her, and fell facefirst on the rug.

Silently, Alexandra closed the door behind her. She floated like a specter through halls of shadows which were interrupted only by the long, crooked crosses where the moon shone through the windowpanes. She climbed the stairs to the tower in which she and the Red Rogues shared a magnificent room.

The noises he’d made echoed inside her head, stole any other sounds, even the sound of her own voice as she whispered her confession.

“I killed him.”

The Red Rogues stood panting with exhaustion beneath a silver night sky as they watched Jean-Yves, the groundskeeper at de Chardonne, plant a stunning array of poppies. It was late enough to be early, and even at this hour theflowers all but glowed with sunset hues. He didn’t make neat little rows, but artful gathers of blooms, arranged with the perfect balance of natural chaos and controlled synchronicity.

“De Marchand has always been shit,” he spat in weighty, guttural French. “Now, at least, he will be useful shit. Fertilizing the gardens.” He took off his cap and swiped his balding pate as he glanced up at Alexandra with an expression of sorrow so complete, it threatened her composure. The drooping bags beneath his eyes were heavier than ever. Alexandra watched the wild tufts of hair above his ears flutter in a gentle breeze off the lake. “His behavior has escalated with no reprisal for too long. I’ve said for so long that de Marchand would forget himself and… and no one listened.”

Alexandra lowered her lashes. She hadn’t yet shed a tear.

Not as Francesca, in her long blue dressing gown and sleek carrot plaits, had tucked the razor into de Marchand’s pocket. Nor when stalwart Cecelia, her heart-shaped face pinched with determination, had rolled the body up in the bloodstained carpet and assisted Jean-Yves in hauling it out to the gardens.

Not even as the three of them had begun to cover his gray skin with black earth did a single tear fall.