So she angled her head and met him as he devoured her.
Angelina felt debauched and destroyed. As ruined as this house they stood in.
And why had she never understood that the real price of a ruin like this was the sheer joy in it?
The dark, secret joy that coursed through her veins, pooled between her legs, and made her arch against him as if all this time, all these years, her body had been asleep. Only now had it woken up to its true purpose.
Here. With him.
Like this.
He kissed her and he kissed her.
When he finally lifted his mouth from hers, his grin was a ferocious thing. Angelina felt it inside her, as if she was made fierce, too, because of him.
And she had never known, until this moment, how deeply she wanted to be fierce.
“If you marry me,” he told her, in that dark, intense voice of his, “you can never return here. You will no more be a part of your family. You will belong to me and I am a jealous, possessive creature at the best of times. I do not share what is mine.”
Angelina hardly felt like herself. There was too much sensation coursing in her and around her, she couldn’t tell if it was the music she’d played or the way he’d played her body in turn, but she couldn’t seem to worry about that the way she should.
The way a wiser woman would have, with a man like him.
“Is that a warning or promise?” she asked instead.
“It is a fact.”
And her skirt was still rucked up. She felt uncomfortably full in the bodice of her dress. She could not tell which was more ravaged and alight, the aching center of her need between her legs or her mouth.
But the candlelight made all of that seem unimportant.
Or perhaps, whispered a voice inside her, it is not the light that seduces you, but the dark that makes it shine.
“If I marry you,” she said, because she was already ruined, and she wanted things she was afraid to name, “I want to live. I don’t want to die.”
And then, for the first time since they’d walked away from her family and into this chilly, barren room, it occurred to her to worry about the fact that he was a man with six dead wives. She was all alone with him and everyone believed he was a murderer.
Why did something in her want to believe otherwise?
His mouth was a bitter slash. His eyes were much too dark.
For the first time, Angelina wanted to cover herself. She felt cold straight through.
If she could have taken the words back, she would have. If she could have kept him from touching her, she—
But no. Whatever happened next, his mouth on her had been worth it.
“Every one of us must die, little one,” Benedetto said, his voice a mere thread of sound. It wound through her and then flowered into something far richer and more textured than fear, making Angelina shudder as if he was licking into her molten core again. “But we will do so in the way we live, like it or not. That I can promise you.”
CHAPTER FOUR
A MONTH LATER, Angelina woke up to the sound of hammering, the way she had almost every morning since that first night.
The only difference was that today was her wedding day, like it or not.
Construction on the old house had begun immediately. Benedetto had made good on his promise with crews arriving by truckload at first light. Since then, day after day, the hammering fused with that pulse inside her, until she couldn’t tell whether her heart beat inside or outside of her body.
It had been the longest and shortest month of her life.
Her sisters veered between something like outrage and a more simple, open astonishment. And sometimes, when they remembered themselves, a surprising show of concern.
“You must be careful,” Petronella had said very seriously, one evening. She’d come and interrupted Angelina in the conservatory, where Angelina played piece after piece as if the piano was telling stories to keep her alive. And as long as she played she would be safe. Night after night, she played until her fingers cramped, but nothing eased that ravaged, misshapen feeling inside of her. “Whatever happens, and whatever he does to you in that castle of his, you must not react.”
“I didn’t think you knew where the conservatory was.” Angelina blinked at her sister in the flickering candlelight. Outside, a bloated summer moon rose over the trees. “Are you lost?”
“I’m serious, Angelina,” Petronella snapped, scowling, which felt more like her sister than this strange appearance and stab at worry. “One dead wife could be an accident. The second could be a terrible tragedy. I could even maybe think that a third might be a stroke of very bad luck indeed. But six?”
Angelina slammed her hands on the keys, the discordant jangle of noise sounding a great deal like she felt inside. As if her ribs were piano keys she’d forgotten how to play.
Maybe that was what getting married was supposed to feel like.
“I don’t need you to remind me who he is,” she said.
Another slap of noise.
Petronella looked different in the candlelight. Younger. Softer. She lifted her hand, almost as if she intended to reach over and stroke Angelina with it. But she thought better of it, or the urge passed, and she dropped it to her side.
“I really did think he would choose me,” she said, softly.
And when Angelina looked up again, Petronella had gone.
Dorothea was far less gracious. If she was worried about her younger sister, the only way she showed it was in an officious need to micromanage the trousseau that Benedetto was funding for his new bride along with everything else.
“If he’s a murderer,” Angelina had said tightly one afternoon, after Dorothea made her try on armful after armful of concoctions she’d ordered straight from atelier in Paris on
