“Don’t worry about who sent me. Worry about waking to take your daily jaunt through Hyde Park tomorrow.”
“You vile bastard.” Blood seeped through Rossby’s clenched fingers, dribbling to his wrist.
Finn released a measured smile, delighted when Rossby’s skin paled. “Is that the best you can do? Disappointing.”
“You won’t get away with this.”
Finn wasn’t sure he would, either, but for Victoria’s sake, he was willing to risk it. Leaning down until Rossby’s fetid breath struck his cheek, he ran the stained blade beneath the man’s chin. “Oh, yes, I will. Because I know what you have on her father. I know everything.”
Rossby’s gaze darted around the room, frantic, before circling back to Finn. His body spasmed beneath the sheet he’d drawn to his chest in defense. “You couldn’t. No one would talk. We have an agreement.” And then, of course, he started thinking about everything Finn could know, what might have been said because you couldn’t fully trust anyone.
Having never been more appreciative of his gift, Finn closed his eyes, brushed the tip of his pinkie over the ticking pulse beneath the baron’s ear, and let the man’s thoughts tumble through him. Finn shuddered because mixed in with a detailed account of certain reprehensible and quite illegal business dealings, were images of what Rossby had been hoping to do to Victoria.
Finn swallowed hard and removed the blade from beneath the baron’s chin before he made a snap decision and gutted him in his bed. Stepping back, he wiped the knife on his trousers, metal glinting in the moonlight spilling in around him. “I want the file. And don’t argue, because I’m either leaving with it or with a man’s death burdening my conscience.” He shrugged, meaning his next words with every beat of his heart. “It’s completely your choice.”
“You can’t do this,” the baron whispered, but he was rising from the bed, and Finn had ascertained from his thoughts that he was going to retrieve the file.
“I already have,” Finn said with a sigh, snagging his hand through his hair with a dull pulse of misery. “But don’t despair, she’s gaining a duke. An incredibly high step from a lowly baron. Such a benevolent decision you’re making.”
“I suppose you feel good about this,” Rossby snarled and yanked open a drawer on the escritoire desk just visible in the shadowed corner. He pulled a file out and crossing the room, thrust it at Finn. “Helping the duke marry his ladylove. I’d heard you were friends. And everyone knows the Alexander brothers think themselves noble. Tell Ashcroft I won’t forget this.”
Finn grasped the file and turned to the door. He wasn’t leaving through the damned window, he didn’t care how many servants saw him. He held all the cards now. “Remember what you will, Rossby, just know I have this information, and it implicates you in a very damaging manner should I decide to throw you to the wolves. Next week, next year, in ten years. What you’d best understand is that I’ll never forget.”
Exiting the townhouse, Finn closed the door behind him and sagged against it. He tipped his head to stare at a festal sky filled with winking specks of silver and a low, velvety gray haze. He gulped a breath of the river and coal smoke and the scent of fear lifting from his skin, carriages and people and even a stray dog moving past him, unconcerned with one man’s marginal island of desolation. He felt disassociated from the sounds of life around him. His heart was racing, his skin chilled, his mind teeming with unwanted images. A blinding headache was sitting just behind his eyes, and he brought his hand to his temple to push it away.
If he could only push her away.
Rossby had been dead wrong. He didn’t feel good about this.
He only felt his bloody heart breaking.
Chapter 16
There were traces of Finn all over Julian’s townhouse.
If one looked closely. Which, during her extreme and deadening misery over the past two days, she had.
Russian language texts, puzzle boxes, a handkerchief hidden in a desk drawer that carried his scent as solidly as her clothing did the faint zing of nutmeg. The pièce de résistance was a small portrait of him Agnes found her standing before, Victoria’s gaze likely as lost as it was enchanted. When she walked down the hallway the next day, the painting was gone, only a whitish mark on the wall to show where it had previously hung. Like Finn leaving her life with only a bleached mark staining her memory.
And just yesterday, she’d received a fateful memorandum from Rossby, brief but respectful, stating he couldn’t stand in the way of true love and would allow her to break their betrothal agreement. She could only stare at the missive in dry-eyed wretchedness while wondering how much Finn had to do with it. He’d removed the Grape from her life’s equation, and for this, she owed him.
But she was still stuck marrying a man she didn’t love.
Humphrey, Aggie, Belle, and the servants were handling her like someone being dispatched to the country for a recuperative period instead of what she was, a forthcoming duchess who’d yet to have a conversation with her duke. On the streets of Mayfair, the rumors connected her to Ashcroft, but inside these fashionably stenciled walls, everyone knew it was the endearing half-brother of the viscount who’d…
Victoria slumped to the marble bench hidden amidst a thicket of lilac bushes in the townhouse’s walled garden. Gazing at a turbulent sky the color of wet ash, she searched her mind, her breath scattering.
What, exactly, had Finn done to her?
Shown her a side of herself, a wanton, unaffected side she quite liked. Forced her to question her commitment to her family, to blind obedience, to sacrifice. Caused her—for the first time—to consider what she wanted from her life.
Did her happiness mean less than her father’s because she was a woman?
Were her options limited by her sex?
Everyone in her world certainly thought so. Without batting an eyelash thought so. Ashcroft had sent an admittedly agreeable message stating he’d visit her at three o’clock to discuss the details of their arrangement as if this expressed all that needed expressing.
A done deal. Which she supposed it did, and it was.
Finn understood what living on the fringe of society was like and had impressed upon her the certainty that securing her heart’s desire meant being banished to the nether reaches.
She didn’t care about being banished.
But he cared.
Enough to push her away, enough to turn his back when she’d gotten closer to him than anyone ever had. When, maybe, just maybe, he loved her, too. A flush lit her skin as she recalled the glorious things they’d done to each other in his stark bedchamber above the Blue Moon. True love or brief liaison, she couldn’t end their story for him. Not if he’d regret it every time they entered a shop, and someone gave her the cut direct.
And it appeared as if he wasn’t going to offer a way out when Ashcroft could provide everything she allegedly needed—security, wealth, standing.
Everything except love. Happiness. Contentment.
She wanted Fig Alexander’s children, not the Fireball Duke’s.
Drawing her slippered feet to the bench, Victoria dropped her cheek to her knee, cried out, hollow, absolutely empty inside. She sniffled and breathed in the overwhelming scent of lilacs, proving there were more tears in there somewhere. Finn Alexander, you coward. Except he wasn’t. He was an honorable man intent on doing the right thing, and she loved him for it. His bloody sincerity. His exemplary kindness. His sincere concern that someday she would need protection only a duke could offer.