Anyone who saw that smile claimed they could see his evil, murderous intent in it. It was as good as prancing about with a sign above his head that said LEAVE ME ALONE OR DIE, which he had also considered in his time.
He smiled now, placing his drink down on the desk before him with a click that sounded as loud as a bullet in the quiet room.
Charteris gulped. Benedetto’s smile deepened, because he knew his role.
Had come to enjoy it, in parts, if he was honest.
“Better not to do something than to do it ill,” his grandfather had often told him.
“If you’ll c-come with me,” Charteris said, stuttering as he remembered, no doubt, every fanciful tale he’d ever heard about the devil he’d invited into his home, “we can go through to the dining room. Where all of my daughters await you.”
“With joy at their prospects, one assumes.”
“N-naturally. Tremendous joy.”
“And do you love them all equally?” Benedetto asked silkily.
The other man frowned. “Of course.”
But Benedetto rather thought that a man like this loved nothing at all.
After all, he’d been fathered, however indifferently, by a man just like this.
He inclined his head to his host, then followed the small man out of what he’d defiantly announced was his “office” when it looked more like one of those dreadful cubicles Benedetto had seen in films of lowbrow places, out into the dark, dimly lit halls of this cold, crumbling house.
Once upon a time, the Charteris home had been a manor. A château, he corrected himself, as they were in France. Benedetto could fix the house first and easily. That way, no matter what happened with his newest acquisition, her father would not raise any alarms. He would be too happy to be restored to a sense of himself to bother questioning the story he received.
Benedetto had played this game before. He liked to believe that someday there would be no games at all.
But he needed to stop torturing himself with someday, because it was unlikely that tonight would be any different. Wasn’t that what he’d learned? No matter how much penance he paid, nothing changed.
Really, he should have been used to it. He was. It was this part that he could have done without, layered as it was with those faint shreds of hope. All the rest of it was an extended, baroque reconfirmation that he was, if not precisely the monster the world imagined him, a monster all the same.
It was the hope that made him imagine otherwise, however briefly.
This was not the first time he’d wished he could excise it with his own hands, then cast it aside at last.
The house was not overly large, especially with so much of it unusable in its current state, so it took no time at all before they reached the dining room on the main floor. His host offered an unctuous half bow, then waved his arm as if he was an emcee at a cabaret. A horrifying notion.
Benedetto prowled into the room, pleased to find that this part of the house, unlike the rest with its drafts and cold walls despite the season, was appropriately warm.
Perhaps too warm, he thought in the next moment. Because as he swept his gaze across the room, finding the oldest and middle daughter to be exactly as he’d expected, it was as if someone had thrown gas on a fire he could not see. But could feel inside of him, cranked up to high.
The flames rose higher.
He felt scalded. But what he saw was an angel.
Angelina, something in him whispered.
For it could be no other.
Her sisters were attractive enough, but he had already forgotten them. Because the third, least known Charteris daughter stood next to her mother along one side of a formally set table, wearing a simple dress in a muted hue and a necklace of complicated pearls that seemed to sing out her beauty.
But then, she required no embellishment for that. She was luminous.
Her hair was so blond it shone silver beneath the flickering flames of a chandelier set with real candles. Economy, not atmosphere, he was certain, but it made Angelina all the more lovely. She’d caught the silvery mass back at the nape of her neck in a graceful chignon that he longed to pick apart with his hands. Her features should have been set in marble or used to launch ships into wars. They made him long to paint, though he had never wielded a brush in all his days.
But he thought he might learn the art of oils against canvas for the express purpose of capturing her. Or trying. Her high cheekbones, her soft lips, her elegant neck.
He felt his heart, that traitorous beast, beat too hard.
“Here we all are,” said Anthony Charteris, all but chortling with glee.
And in that moment, Benedetto wanted to do him damage. He wanted to grab the man around his portly neck and shake him the way a cat shook its prey. He wanted to make the man think about what it was he was doing here. Selling off a daughter to a would-be groom with a reputation such as Benedetto’s? Selling off an angel to a devil, and for what?
But almost as soon as those thoughts caught at him, he let them go.
Each man made his own prison. His own had contained him for the whole of his adult life and he had walked inside, turned the key, and fashioned his own steel bars. Who was he to cast stones?
“This is Benedetto Franceschi,” Charteris announced, and then frowned officiously at his daughters. “He is a very important friend and business partner. Very important.”
Some sort of look passed between the man and his wife. Margrete, once a Laurent, drew herself up—no doubt so she could present her bosom to Benedetto once more. Then again, perhaps that was how she communicated.
He remained
