“But.” Alexandra looked anxiously over her husband’s shoulder, her mask of soot mostly left on the duke’s shirtfront. “Cecil…”
“Ramsay’s with her.” Redmayne didn’t even pause.
“That’s what I’m afraid of. He wants to hang her, you know.”
“Yes, but not today,” the duke replied, as though it was the furthest worry from his mind. “We’ll deal with that after I get you home, bathed, and thoroughly examined.” His tone was neither teasing nor censorious nor even overtly sexual. Just incontestable.
Inevitable.
Cecelia and Alexandra both shrugged at each other helplessly as Redmayne conducted his wife away, but not before Cecelia caught a copper gleam of relief in her cherished friend’s eyes.
She stared at the empty doorway through which everyone had disappeared for a few moments, drifting toward it. Away from Ramsay’s proximity. Taking the moment to indulge in a few bracing breaths as she looked up into the rare bright-blue London sky.
Bracing for the storm.
“The Scarlet Lady,” Ramsay said as though he still couldn’t believe it. As though the title tasted like the scum along the shores of the Thames. “The Lord Chancellor always told me that the devil’s greatest trick is convincing ye he doesna exist.… I never truly kenned what he meant until this moment.”
“You think I’m the devil?” She whirled to face him, aghast.
“Nay.” His jaw set into a granite square, but the vein at his temple still pulsed beneath where a forelock of hair had come free of its pomade to hang over his surly brow. “Ye’re little more than a succubus.” He raked his fingers through his mane, sculpting the forelock back into place. “How did I not see it before? Ye’re built for naught but debauchery and deceit. I canna believe I allowed myself to be taken in and tempted by the likes of ye.”
“It was not my aim to tempt you—”
“Horseshit.” He regarded her with a careful gaze, barbed but also a little broken. As if there was a part of him that wanted to believe her.
“Truly. I desired peace between us. Perhaps more.” She took a tentative step toward him. “Everything I said last night was the truth. Everything that passed between us … it was real.”
The shadow of vulnerability vanished, replaced by such stony disgust, she wondered if she’d imagined it.
“Nothing about ye is real. Not yer name, not yer niceties. Yer kisses are currency and your sex is yer weapon. Doona imagine I will be fooled by ye again.”
It was difficult to pretend his cruelty didn’t sting. One would think that after so many years, she’d have perfected some sort of mask of insouciance. That a childhood spent with the Vicar Teague would have taught her to hide her emotion. That the jeers and harassment she’d suffered at university would have inured her to the pain.
She’d tried so often to be hard. To deflect and defend against the barbarism of men and the censure of other women with walls like Alexandra, or spikes like Francesca.
But to her eternal frustration, she’d remained a soft place for insults to land.
They always stung. Or burned. Hurt and humiliated her. If someone wasn’t making her feel too big, clumsy, and contemptible, then they were making her feel very, very insignificant.
How was it that men could hurt women, and they forever went unpunished?
How was it that a man could stand in the middle of the chaos that had become her life and rake her with his claws of ice as though he had the right?
Was it justice? Did this man, this arrogant, dastardly, giant of a man really consider himself the epitome of the word?
Something formed in the pit of her chest. Something dark and heavy. Bleak and hollow. She’d call it fear, but not so cold. Anger but not so hot. Hurt, but not so weak. Perhaps an amalgamation of all these things.
Brewing like a storm of her own.
He made a noise full of hostility. “Ye kiss like a virgin, I’ll give ye that.”
“And you kiss like a man who would know the difference,” she volleyed back. “A man who would turn a virgin into his whore and then blame her for the deed.”
“Never.” His eyes glinted with lightning. “Do not presume to know me. I’m not like the weak-willed men who slink like shadows through this door to pay for hollow fantasies and pretty fallacies whilst ye fleece them for money. Ye doona think I already ken that Henrietta harbored lethal secrets? That someone would want her dead? More and more often I follow the evidence of rank misdeeds right to this doorstep.” He stalked closer now. Loomed impossibly larger. “Ye know more than ye’re letting on, woman. Do ye expect me to believe ye have no idea who would want ye dead?”
“Besides you?”
“I’ve never heard anything so absurd!” He threw his hand up in frustration, and it was everything she could do not to flinch before she realized it was merely a gesture. “Doona test me.”
“Or what?” she challenged, tossing his soiled handkerchief at his feet. “How am I to know you had nothing to do with this? You certainly are single-minded in your hatred of this place. You showed up here rather instantaneously after the blast. Don’t tell me you were just in the neighborhood.”
“I was, in fact.” His expression darkened from surly to downright malevolent. Haunted by a rage too dark to be spoken. “One of the missing girls was found in a garden of an estate not far from here. Katerina Milovic, and I’ll tell ye, the bodies taken from this place would haunt ye less than what was left of her.”
Cecelia’s hand flew to her mouth in a vague attempt to keep a threatening sob from escaping.
The poor child.
She had thought of the girls often since learning of them the day before, fearing that they’d been kept belowground somewhere. Alone. Frightened. Innocent despite what was being done to them.
“Garden?” she whispered. “What—in whose garden was she found?”
“Lord Luther Kenway, the Earl of Devlin.” He watched her expression with alert eyes, no doubt to gauge her reaction. “Does that name mean anything to ye? Is he one of yer customers?”
Cecelia shook her head, more in horror than denial. “I’m telling you once more, I have no idea. It is as much a mystery to me as it is to you where Henrietta’s client ledgers are. All I know is that Genny made new ones for today. There wouldn’t be more than a page, but it’s yours if you want it.”
“Ye doona find it odd, that Katerina was found so close to yer establishment?”
“I don’t know.” She was starting to sound like a parrot. A desperate one. “But I had nothing to do with it.”
“How do ye expect me to believe ye?” he asked. “Henrietta’s fortune had to be built with more than just the revenue from this place. I still think she procured young girls for wealthy men, and I’m not convinced I can take your word regarding your ignorance. Especially since ye’ve proven to have such an aptitude for performance.”
“I would never—”
“I doona want to hear it.” He turned toward the rubble and gazed at it intently. “I’ll comb through every stone, every passage. I’ll continue to dismantle this house until I find what it has to do with those missing girls.”