With a blink Julia returned to the present, pinning Alexandra with a glare of hatred so poisonous, it curdled the contents her stomach.
“He loved me,” 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. She really wished 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 understand that?” 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 not lovers. 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. Everybody wanted him. You snuck into his rooms and took his most intimate things for years. 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. Just stop it!” Alexandra screamed.
She could pull the trigger.
If she did, Cecelia and Francesca would be safe. Her husband 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.
And then she dropped her arm, emitting a wounded sound of defeat.
She couldn’t do it.
Because, the truth of the matter was, Julia was just as much a victim of de Marchand as herself. Arguably more so. If he’d been with Julia two years before the rape had occurred, then he’d begun to prey upon a girl at just fifteen. He manipulated her in her formative years. Had created a zealot out of a simple adolescent.
She hoped he was burning in hell.
“Julia,” she began, hoping to reason with the unbalanced woman. “I’ve brought the money.” She held out the purse, a veritable fortune inside.
Julia eyed it like she offered her a serpent. “I decided, now that you’re a duchess, a mere fortune will no longer do.”
“What more could you want?”
Julia regarded her contemplatively, adopting a posture of scrupulous study. “I thought your husband would be a torment to you. The Terror of Torcliff, a dominant, disfigured lech. I thought he’d make you suffer, that I could watch you squirm like a worm on a hook. But, alas, it seems the two of you are disgustingly well suited.”
“Is that why you tried to hurt him?” Alexandra began to change her mind about shooting the woman. “To make me suffer?”
“Hurt him?” Julia scoffed. “I’ve devised something worse than that, I think. I want you to tell him. To confess what you did.”
“There’s no need for that.”
Alexandra whirled around, dropping her purse as Redmayne melted from the shadows of the crypt entrance, an immense specter of quiet fury.
At first her soul soared, elated at the very sight of him, at the safety and strength he brought with him. She was no longer alone. So utterly alone and afraid.
Then, as though shot out of the air by a masterful marksman, her joy plummeted to despair.
He knew. He’d heard everything.
“Your Grace,” Julia greeted him like an old friend. “Do come in, your wife has such a compelling story. Should you tell it, Alexander, or should I?”
“Stop. Calling. Me. That,” Alexandra commanded. It was folly to antagonize the woman, but what did that matter now?
Redmayne’s winter-cold gaze scanned Alexandra for a moment and then turned on Julia. “Listen to me.” He enunciated his words through his teeth, waves of malevolence rolling off him. “I’ve never in my life hurt a woman, but I will see to it that you—”
“I’m sorry, Your Grace, but if anything happens to me, it’s your wife who will be locked away.” She pursed her lips into a pretty pout. “Tell him, Alexander,” she cajoled dramatically. “Tell him what you did. How you bent over for our headmaster, how you lay there and enjoyed it until your shame drove you to—”
Redmayne lunged past Alexandra toward Julia, stabbing a warning finger toward her. “Shut your mouth, you mad bitch.”
“I killed him.” They both stopped to stare at her. Julia’s expression was rapt with triumph and Redmayne …
Alexandra swallowed, drawing the courage to look at him from wells she hadn’t known she possessed. She couldn’t identify his reaction, not exactly. Horror, maybe. Anger, surely.
Condemnation?
“I—I murdered de Marchand when he—as he—” She couldn’t say it, she couldn’t admit that her seventeen-year-old self hadn’t been able to stand the idea of him finishing inside of her. “He—he’d a razor on his desk and … I took it. I turned. And I slit his throat.”
Neither of them moved as Julia crowed from behind her. “Tell him! Tell him all of it. How you gathered your clique of snobbish wretches, and the bastard gardener, and you all buried him in the garden like so much fertilizer.”
Her husband stood abnormally erect, his fists clenched at his sides. “That’s your secret. She’s why you requested the money today.”
His voice was so remote, so utterly devoid of emotion, she couldn’t delineate a statement or a question, but she nodded anyway.
“That’s the whole of it.”
“She’s a murderer!” Julia screeched. “She took the man I loved from me, and I will pay her in kind!”
The very idea bled what life she’d left out of her.
Redmayne lifted his eyes to Julia, speared her with the full effect of his cold, monstrous regard. “I wish she’d not have killed him, Lady Julia, only because I’ve been denied the chance to butcher him, myself.”
“What?” Julia gasped.
“What?” Alexandra echoed.
“Consider yourself, and your lover, fortunate that he died so quickly.”