Page 23 of From Duke Till Dawn
Her worst fear had come true. He’d heard her and Martin. Referring to Alex as one of her marks. The revelation that neither she nor Martin were who they’d claimed to be. He knew it all.
Horror, misery, and shame welled as the scab of her lies was scraped off. She wanted to crawl into a chasm and never emerge. But that wouldn’t change the fact that he knew who she was, what she was. A creature beneath contempt.
Her heart splintered apart. He was beyond her, now and always.
There was only one way to play this, one way to protect herself—and him.
“So,” she said frostily, drawing anger and iciness around her like a cloak, “now you know. Thank God.”
Shock and fury ricocheted through Alex’s body like a bullet but his injury was invisible, all-consuming. How was he still standing?
Thoughts and feelings crashed against each other, no end and no beginning. Only disbelief and rage, pushing against the seams of his body so that he nearly exploded with the force of it all.
He wanted to rip down the columns lining the chamber. He clenched his fists to keep from flipping over the gaming tables, sending cards and dice and people scattering everywhere like leaves shaken from a tree. His gaze burned into Cassandra, who stared back at him with an ashen face. The face he had hoped to see every day for the rest of his life.
He’d come intending to make her his forever. Instead, he found himself flung into the depths of a jagged hell.
Someone had finally loved him. But that wasn’t true. None of it was. He was as unworthy of love as ever, and the one person he thought had cared for him had been pretending the whole time.
Pain pushed him from the inside out, shoving against his muscles, his bones, in an all-consuming agony. Sorrow and fury smashed against each other like craggy cliffs, crushing him between them.
“Trickery,” he finally managed to say through clenched teeth. “All of it. Every word from your mouth.” His gaze flicked to her lips, full and rosy even though they were set in a grim line. “Every glance from your eyes.” He looked into those green-brown depths gleaming with wariness. She was afraid of him. Good. “Each touch and whisper. Nothing but deceit.”
She didn’t cry. Didn’t rage and scream or faint. Instead, she simply looked back at him, with that damned cool façade of hers that had enticed him in the first place. Yet her jaw looked too firm, as if she was forcing herself to keep from shouting.
Was that also part of her game? Would she play this as a wronged woman? She’d already spun one tale; she might again. Would she try to convince him that everything he thought he heard had been misinterpreted? He couldn’t pick the gold from the straw and was left wondering what was true and what was illusion.
“Survival,” she said tightly. “That’s all I try for.”
He stared at her. She didn’t even attempt to refute her duplicity. Merely accepted it as the truth. Damned brazen wench.
“You sleep soundly each night, knowing that you’re a parasite?”
Her eyes blazed, though she held herself perfectly still. Her face changed. The cool wall of her dispassion dropped, and anger simmered to the surface. Her lips were cruel, her eyes glittering. “Words from a man who doesn’t do a drop of work and lives on the lifeblood of his tenants.” She looked briefly horrified at her words, as if she’d lashed out without thought, but then that shock was hidden behind more hostility.
He stared at her, shocked by her transformation. Gone was the proud but noble widow. In her place was a wrathful woman whose words cut like blades. Her accent changed, too. It was harder now, more of the streets.
Did he know her at all?
He pointed a finger at her. “Do. Not. Dare.”
“You think to judge me, yet you know nothing of who I truly am.”
“I should bring you before a fucking magistrate,” he growled.
More color left her face at his curse. She pushed past him—possibly seeking safety in the crowds—and he gave chase. He caught up with her between the tables. The throng had grown thicker now. No one saw that he grabbed hold of her wrist in an iron grip.
“Get your hands off me,” she said through clenched teeth.
“You’re not going anywhere,” he said lowly. “Not unless you want me to shout to these people that this hell is crooked. That would be pretty, wouldn’t it? A duke’s accusations of cheating. Who do you think they’d believe? A base-born nobody, or me?”
She swallowed as hectic color bloomed in her cheeks. “Come with me.”
He didn’t let go of her as they made their way toward a corridor. Her pulse hammered beneath his fingers. She tested a handle, and then opened the door to reveal a cramped storage room. Tables and chairs and cheap statuary were heaped in random piles, and a print of a fashionable couple hung on the wall, its glass cracked and the gilt on the frame peeling.
She stepped in and he followed, closing the door behind them. There were no candles or lamps, but light crept under the doorjamb and cast him and Cassandra as ghosts in a chaotic Purgatory.
“How many others?” he demanded. “How many men have you ensnared with your stories? With your body?”
