Page 47 of My Ruthless Duke

“No matter how it happened, nor my intentions, does anything to change the fact that his death is in my hands. I am nothing more than the murderer that everyone presumes me to be.”

With his story concluded, Dorian waited. He had no idea how much time must have passed between his final words and when the tears stopped pouring down her face and over her fingers. He longed for her to say something, to do something, anything.

“Cordelia,” Dorian said when he could not take the silence for a moment longer. He turned toward her, his hand reaching—but she flinched away.

“Do not touch me,” she hissed, her eyes still brimmed with unshed tears. “You promised me that you would not lie. And you have done nothing else since the day I met you.”

Dorian flinched, out of all of the things that he had expected her to say, it was not that.

“I–I did not know how you would react; this is not exactly the ordinary sort of secret.”

“The scar on your stomach is not from the greenhouse then, like you claimed that it was, but it was from my… when he…” Her breath hitched, wholly unable to say the words, and he could not blame her. Dorian had been worried that she would call him a liar in the capacity that he had made up the story or that she was going to try to defend her late father or something of the sort.

“Cordelia, I–”

“No lies!” Cordelia choked as she swallowed back the tears in favor of what seemed to be rage. “You had the nerve to marry me, to bring me here! All the while sitting there, giving my mother false hope of stories or closure when you haveknownthis whole time.”

“I did it to help you.”

“Help?” Cordelia asked incredulously. “Get out of my room.”

There it was, the look that he had been dreading this whole time—the look of pure disappointment and heartbreak that she was finally seeing him for the monster he truly was. All he had done was prolong the inevitable.

“Get out!” Cordelia sobbed. “I never wish to see you again!”

Something in Dorian’s chest broke, seeing her shudder like that, the pure desperation in her voice as he pushed off of her bed. What else could he do? While every instinct begged to pull her into his arms and make it all better, he knew that would never be possible.

Dorian left her room and softly shut the door behind her.

He heard her sobs all the way down the hall.

Sleep was an impossible goal for Cordelia.

Outside of her window, the sky was still and quiet. She had sat in her window seat for a good long while, watching the stars above her. She must have played the conversation with her husband in her mind at least a dozen times over. It did not make better sense the twelfth time she had replayed it any more than it had when it had first happened.

For hours, she had been drifting in and out of sleep. It felt as if every time she closed her eyes, she drifted back into the nightmare that normally only plagued her when it rained. She kept waking herself, over and over, with the intention of pushing the nightmare away. Yet, it just kept coming back, pulling her further and more deeply into the nightmare.

First, she was lost in the storm.

Then, she was lost in the maze.

Every time, her childhood self would start screaming, pleading for help, and wishing to be rescued. She woke up each time, only to fall fitfully right back where she left off. Hours of restlessness as the moon moved further across the sky.

Most troubling of all, was when she found herself in the clearing in the middle of the gardens.

She was looking up at the sky in her young body, and the sky seemed so far, and so high up over her and such a plain gray. The rain had stopped, it was like the scene that she found herself in was frozen in time, the moment still. Impossibly, her adult self walked behind her own smaller frame. Each step perfectly mirrored. Surreal as it was to see herself from outside of her own body as it was, it felt as if she could see more of the nightmare than she had ever been able to before.

Up ahead was their gazebo, the focal point of so many of her parent’s parties. Mama liked to have her tea out in the gazebo more than anything else. But, the person up ahead of herhad frightened her so deeply last night that she had had this nightmare, and no one was there to rescue her.

The body of the second person had been hidden behind the other. The man’s broad shoulders nearly obscured the woman’s body from view entirely until she could see hands, pushing at the man’s shoulders—a scream that was just barely hidden under the clap of thunder as the nightmare suddenly spurred right back into motion.

Rain poured down as the couple in front of her struggled with one another. The man’s hand lifted, striking the side of the woman’s face, and she collapsed to the ground in a heap. Cordelia could hear herself yelling, screaming even louder and the man spun, looking at her with wide, frightened eyes.

Cordelia woke in a cold sweat, and could not sleep again.

Chapter 22

“Are you sure that you want to do this?” Penelope asked as the pair of women stood outside a pub labeled only as ‘The Boot’. The wooden sign hung above the wood, swinging in the light breeze. Cordelia stood with a small scrap of paper clutched in her hand tightly, blinking at the door as she tried to come up with an answer to that very question.

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