Alexandra found herself locked in his arms with such fierce tenderness, she collapsed against him, grateful sobs welling in her throat.
“My God. My wife…” He clutched her tighter, shaking with a barely leashed rage. “To think what you’ve suffered. I can’t—”
“The world will know.” Julia’s voice climbed to a manic, hysterical pitch. “I can prove it! You’ll both be ruined.”
“What evidence do you have?” Redmayne demanded.
Julia addressed Alexandra. “The three of you Red Rogues considered yourselves so perfect. So much more brilliant than everyone else.” She laughed as though no one had stated a more ridiculous notion in her life.
“I had naught but the razor and my word, at first,” she admitted victoriously. “Which would have been little in the way of proof … until you started wiring me money. Now I have a paper trail. Letters from you as a girl, begging me not to tell. It’s all as damning as a confession.” She turned on Redmayne. “One that will be sent to the authorities by my solicitor should anything happen to me, condemning both you and your ridiculous Rogues.”
“You forget, Lady Julia, that my brother owns the authorities.” His voice was laced with a similar black victory. “I’m the bloody Duke of Redmayne, my line and my name is older and more unbroken than that of the queen. Against mine, your word will hold as much weight as a whisper in a whirlwind. And if you breathe a word against my wife, you’ll never see the outside of an asylum. Now get. The fuck. Out of my sight.”
Suddenly—blessedly—speechless, Julia pushed away from the dais, skirting the edge of the room. “I’ll find a way…” she said tightly.
“Not if you know what’s good for you,” her husband warned. “Or I’ll have you arrested for the attempts on my life. You’ll hang if that’s what it takes.”
Alexandra lifted her head from where she’d buried it in her husband’s chest, a question burning through her.
“How did you do it, Julia?” she asked, stopping the woman from slinking away. “How did you orchestrate all the mayhem? Did you really want to hurt me so much that you’d threaten innocent lives?”
The glint of a shotgun barrel preceded another set of wide shoulders into the chamber. Julia stumbled backward on her bejeweled, heeled slippers, staggering toward Alexandra.
“Do you think this simple cunt could pull off such clever machinations as that?” Thomas Forsythe raked Julia with a withering, dismissive glance that reduced her to tears. “She couldn’t even manage a passable fuck.”
Alexandra lifted her pistol, feeling her husband turn from warm muscle to cold steel at her back as his arms tightened around her.
“Thomas!” She gaped at the man she’d considered her friend. He’d deserted all sense of affability, adopting a stark and hard mask.
“Put that ridiculous weapon away, Dr. Lane.” He sighed with a note of feigned boredom. “And kick it over here.”
“I will not!”
“Do it,” Redmayne asserted from behind her.
Stunned at his capitulation, Alexandra gaped. “But—but.”
“Your husband is wise.” Forsythe stepped deeper into the crypt, circling for three paces until he was in between the door and the dais. “He recognizes an L. H. Parker field grade shotgun. This ingenious piece of handmade machinery is able to drop an elk at fifty paces, and has been rumored to stop a charging bear. If I were to pull the trigger now, not one of you would escape being wounded.” He adjusted the weapon on his shoulder.
“But you, dear Doctor, would be blown to shreds.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
If Piers ever had a nightmare scenario, this was it. His wife between him and his enemy, a delicate shield. His own pistol tucked in his jacket.
If he were to reach for it now, Forsythe would fire. The blackguard wanted to. The desire for blood was written all over him.
Unused to feeling helpless, Piers glared at him over his wife’s head, silently promising a slow and painful death. Vowing retribution. This man had awoken this morning, unaware that it was his last.
But before he could kill the fucking blighter, Piers needed to get Alexandra out of range.
Because even if the bastard doctor put a hole the size of Blighty in Piers’s middle, he’d take Forsythe to hell with him before he gave up the ghost.
“Piers?” Alexandra whimpered, her pistol still trained forward.
“Drop it, Doctor.” Forsythe took a threatening step forward, stopping five paces away. “Or I drop you. You know I don’t want to do that, Alexandra. But I think you know that I will.”
Leaning down, Redmayne whispered into Alexandra’s ear, as Julia’s shrill voice fractured against the dome of the crypt, shouting, “How could you say such awful things after what I did for you last night? You weren’t moaning words like ‘passable’ as I was swallowing your disgusting—”
“Shut up for once in your life, you ignorant slut!” Forsythe inched the barrel of his weapon in her direction, only an arm’s reach to Alexandra’s left.
Alexandra bent her knees, lowering to the ground as she placed her small pistol in the dirt. “You don’t want to shoot that in here,” she warned. “We’re not certain it wouldn’t cause another cave-in. We’d all be crushed into the dust.”
“Push it toward me,” Forsythe ordered, ignoring her.
Alexandra did, and in her panic, she fell. Scrambling backward on the ground, she didn’t stop retreating until she ran into Piers’s legs.
Julia made a desperate, humiliated sound. “How dare you insult me like this! Was it her you wanted all along? Tell me, you craven bastard! Did you use me to get to her?”
Piers bent down, helping his wife to her feet, accepting the hilt of what she’d surreptitiously pulled from his boot.
“There’s no need for jealousy.” Forsythe sneered at Julia. “My tastes never tended toward boring little bluestockings always prattling on. Correcting me, condescending to me.” Forsythe’s lip curled into a sneer of disdain. “What man wants to fuck a woman who thinks she’s smarter than he is? Though, now that I know you have blood on your hands … I have to admit you’re much more interesting.”
“What do you want, Forsythe?” Piers demanded, his hands itching to close around the man’s throat. To watch the life drain from his eyes as he strangled an apology from the smarmy bastard for disrespecting his wife.
“My passion for history pays little, I’m afraid,” Forsythe admitted blithely, eyeing Alexandra’s purse. “And so one does what one must…”
“Here,” she said, tossing it at his feet. “Take it and begone.”
He didn’t even glance down. “I’ve been promised so much more than that…” He lifted the shotgun higher, drawing a bead and closing one eye. “To kill the Duke of Redmayne and make it look like an accident.”
Piers didn’t have to ask by whom. He already knew.
The only people who would profit from his death. Patrick and Rose Atherton.
“A gunshot wound is impossible to pose as an accident,” Piers said drolly.