devil you wondered about…” He held out his hands, saying, here I am, before lowering them to his side.
Nicolas waited, allowing it to resound with the duke that all his financial losses of the past three years that had taken his dukedom to this level of insolvency were all at his ends.
When it dawned, his face flushed with rage. “You goddamn bastard! Why would you do this?”
“Because the ruination of Miss Arianna Burges demands it,” Nicolas said with icy contempt.
Bewilderment settled on his face. “Who?”
“The Golden Lion Inn. The only time you were ever there with your friends. All four of you were cronies from Eton who were studying at Oxford. Together you visited a friend in Wiltshire for a garden party. All five of you returned to town and stopped at the inn with plans to stay overnight. As you laughed, ate, and drank, a lone young girl entered and caught your attention.”
He twirled the head of his cane, fighting down the dark rage stirring in his gut and the pain in his heart. Nicolas continued dispassionately, “She was young, sixteen years of age, and astoundingly pretty. Her clothes and the knowledge she traveled alone would have revealed her station. Not her speech. For it was I who taught her to read…to write…and to play the pianoforte. She was invited to sup at your table. Which she did…because there was a wolf amongst you whom she trusted.”
The duke staggered, knowledge seeping into his gaze. His throat worked on a swallow, and he glanced away briefly into the fire before looking back at Nicolas, his gaze rage filled. “That was years ago.”
“Ten,” Nicolas snapped. “And three months!”
“I was but nineteen and only having a spot of fun, and for that…for that you have ruined me financially and my sister for a goddamn no-account gel?”
“A spot of fun,” Nicolas murmured, the need to draw his sword and slice open the man’s throat to let out the blood beating in his veins. He fought back the need, for he had committed no proven crime so that his family would not lose him to prison, which was where he would surely head if he killed a peer of the realm. It had also been the reason he had not challenged them to duels, not wanting to be pressed into fleeing England and to leave his sisters behind. So Nicolas had waged his well-calculated war to take the things from them they loved—their wealth, beautiful homes, and the vaunted reputations they enjoyed.
“You all violated her…except for one who stood silent, too afraid to partake, but too much of a coward to fight for her. But those who stand in the face of evil and do nothing…are just as complicit!”
The duke’s throat worked. “Goddamn it, it was not like that! She…” He scrubbed a hand over his face. “We gave her coins after. It was not like that.”
A sound of rage trapped behind Nicolas’s throat.
My tears are like endless rainfall.
Another line from her letter left behind whispered in his head in her haunting tone.
“Which of your friends stood by and only watched, and who did she see at your table and thought a friend?”
The duke stiffened. “By God, you do not know who we really are, do you?”
Nicolas stared at him. If not for the signet ring Farringdon wore, he would not have suspected him of being Arianna’s dragon. Nicolas had known them all from his days at Eton and they had been friends with several other young future lords. “Viscount Barton, Viscount Weychell, You, Earl of Marsh…and one other. Who is he?”
Nothing in the duke’s expression gave him away, and a sneer twisted his lips. “You are guessing. Lord Barton you have proven was clearly there since you’ve run him out of England nearly two years ago! And now me! If you were so certain that Weychell and Marsh were involved, why have you not ruined them, too? All this for a damn nobody!”
“How loyal you are,” he drawled bitingly.
The first of them he’d ruined, Lord Barton, a well-loved golden boy, had been the same. Nicolas had ruthlessly taken out one of the man’s teeth and given him a day to rethink his answer. Upon Nicolas’s return to the man’s home, he had packed and left for Europe. Nicolas hadn’t wasted any time chasing the viscount.
Nicolas carefully kept his expression composed lest he revealed the doubt around the wolf’s and the black Dahlia’s identity. “I will see every one of you ruined without any