Page 75 of The Feared Duke’s Found Family

Veronica’s hands, still folded over her waist, twitched once. The lace handkerchief clutched in her fingers crumpled into her palm. She kept her modest, chin-down posture, though her gaze flicked up to his eyes for a fraction of a second before darting away.

“The poor, dear boy,” Veronica murmured, her tone dripping with measured, tragic pity. “He is delirious from the fever, Your Grace. He does not know what he is saying.”

“He pointed at the cup, Veronica.” Lysander took a single, deliberate step forward, his shadow engulfing her. “And he spoke your name.”

Veronica’s eyes went wide, swimming with sudden, dramatic tears as she clutched her mending cloth to her chest.

“Your Grace, how could you even suggest such a horrific thing?” Veronica’s voice trembled, small and fragile as she looked up at Lysander with desperate innocence. “I have done nothing but serve this family with devotion! If the dear boy was poisoned by that tea, then you must look to the one who prepared and served it to him—not to a servant who was nowhere near the nursery!”

Lysander stepped forward, his silhouette blocking out the light from the corridor, his shadow falling heavily across her.

“You were seen in the pantry before the ball, Veronica,” Lysander said, his voice dropped to a lethal, quiet register. “Say the truth.”

A long, suffocating silence stretched across the room.

Veronica’s chin lifted slowly. The performative sorrow on her face began to peel away, layer by layer, revealing the cold, porcelain mask beneath. Her dark eyes lost their soft, watery sheen, flattening into something hard, bright, and utterly devoid of remorse.

“He was always too sharp for his own good,” she said. Her voice had lost its gentle, breathy cadence. It was dry, cold, and razor-thin. “A quiet, watchful little creature, always lurking in the corners, seeing things he had no business seeing.”

Lysander felt the blood drain from his face, replaced by a burning, suffocating heat. “You poisoned him.”

“I gave him what he deserved!” Veronica spat, taking a step toward him, her calm composure finally cracking to expose a jagged, festering venom. “I put the arsenic in the tea while Her Grace was fussing over her hair in the next room. It was so remarkably easy. She carried the silver tray right into his nursery herself, like a dutiful little lamb.”

“He is seven years old!” Lysander’s voice roared through the quiet room, a sound so violent it made the glass panes in the cabinets rattle. “He is a child! My son!”

“He is the reason she is gone!” Veronica shrieked, her small frame quivering with fury. She thrust a finger toward the door, toward the nursery wing. “That night! If he had not cried, you would never have left your study. You would never have gone to the nursery. And you would never have discovered Her Grace with Lord Sterling!”

Her voice broke with years of bitterness.

“She could have stayed. She could have kept her life, her home, everything she had ever known. But you found out because of him! His crying brought you there, and you drove her away!”

Veronica's eyes burned with conviction.

Lysander went utterly still.

“You were there,” he said, his voice dropping into a raw, disbelieving rasp. “That night. You knew.”

“Of course I knew; I am her maid,” Veronica whispered, her eyes burning with a bright, unhinged light, tears of old, unwashed grief finally spilling over her lashes. “She told me everything. She trusted me above all others. She always trusted me.”

Her jaw tightened, her chest heaving. “And then you caught her, and a year later she was dead in the south from a fever.”

She took a sharp, gasping breath, her chest heaving as years of buried hatred poured out of her in a toxic rush.

“For years I stayed here,” she whispered, her voice dropping into a ragged, venomous hiss. “I guarded her memory. I kept her rooms untouched. I made sure this house remembered who its true mistress was. And then… then you brought her here.”

Veronica’s mouth twisted into a bitter, disgusted sneer.

“A fake, low-born duchess,” Veronica snarled, her hands clenching into tight, trembling fists at her sides. “A pretty little usurper sitting in Cecily’s chair, wearing Cecily’s status, smiling at Cecily’s husband. You replaced her, Your Grace. You let that woman walk into this house and pretend she belonged here. I could not let Cecily be erased. I would not allow it. Once Michael was gone, once the heartbreak drove this impostor away from this dark, cursed place, Cecily would finally have her peace.”

Lysander stood motionless, listening to the echoing madness of her confession. The grief that had threatened to tear him apart all morning suddenly crystallized into something solid, heavy, and cold as iron. He looked at the woman standing before him—a woman he had sheltered, trusted, and welcomed under his roof out of loyalty to a wife who had never deserved it—and saw only a hollow, dangerous ghost.

Lysander had chosen to bear the vile rumors of murder rather than expose the truth—letting Society believe he had banished Cecily to a quiet grave, all to keep the shameful secret of her flight with Sterling from ever touching his son.

He didn’t strike her. He didn’t yell. Slowly, Lysander closed the distance between them until he was towering directly over her. Veronica flinched, her tirade faltering as she looked up into his face.

His eyes were completely black, stripped of all warmth, all mercy, and all hesitation.

“You speak of graves, Veronica,” Lysander whispered, his voice so quiet, so flat, it chilled the air in the room. “You speak of cold, forgotten places.”