He’d given her back her childhood so she would know exactly what she was leaving behind her when she left here today.
She got up and headed to her bathroom, walking gingerly because she could feel the neediest, greediest part of her ripe and ready—just the way he wanted her. But she paused in the doorway. Because she could no longer hear the symphony of the old pipes.
And when she turned on the water in her sink, it ran hot.
Angelina ran herself a bath and climbed in, running her hands over her slick, soapy skin. Her breasts felt larger. Her belly was so sensitive she sucked in a breath through her teeth when she touched it.
And when she ran her hands between her legs, to do as he’d commanded her, she was hotter than the water around her.
Then hotter still as she imagined his face, dark and knowing, and made the water splash over the sides of her tub onto the floor.
But too soon, then it was time to dress.
Margrete bustled in, her sisters in her wake like sulky attendants. And for a long while, the three of them worked in silence. Petronella piled Angelina’s hair on top of her head and pinned in sparkling hints of stones that looked like diamonds. Dorothea fussed with her dress, fastening each of the parade of buttons that marched down her spine. Margrete called in Matrice, the notably less surly housemaid now that there was money, and the two of them packed Angelina’s things.
Petronella did Angelina’s makeup. She made her younger sister’s face almost otherworldly, and did something with her battery of brushes and sponges that made Angelina’s eyes seemed bluer than the summer sky.
Matrice left first, wheeling out Angelina’s paltry belongings with her.
And there was no need to keep her hiding place a secret now, so Angelina let her mother and sisters watch as she walked over to the four posts of her bed, unscrewed one tall taper, and pulled out her grandmother’s pearls.
Her sisters passed a dark look between them while Angelina fastened the dark, moody pearls around her neck and let the weight of them settle there, against her collarbone.
And then her mother led her to the cheval glass.
The dress had arrived without warning two weeks before the wedding. Angelina had tried it on and let the seamstress who’d arrived with it take her measurements and make her alterations. The dress had seemed simple. Pretty. Not too much, somehow.
But now there was no escaping the dress or what it meant or what would become of her. She stared into the mirror, and a bride stared back.
The dark pearls she’d looped around her neck looked like a bruise, but everything else was white. Flowing, frothy white, while her hair seemed silvery and gleaming and impossible on top of her head.
She looked like what she was.
A virgin sacrifice to a dark king.
“You must ask him for what you want,” Margrete told her, her voice matter-of-fact, but her eyes dark. “A piano, for example.”
“He has already promised me a Steinway.”
Margrete moved the skirt of the wedding gown this way, then that. “You must not be afraid to make demands, but you must also submit to his.” Again, a touch of her dark gaze in the mirror. “No matter what, Angelina. Do you understand me? With a smile, if possible.”
Angelina expected her sisters to chime in then, making arch comments about sex and their experiences, but they were silent. She looked in the glass and found them sitting on the end of her bed, looking…she would have said lost, if they had been anyone else.
“I’m not afraid of his demands,” she said.
It wasn’t until her mother’s gaze snapped to hers again that she realized perhaps she ought to have been.
“You must remember that no matter what, you need only call and I will come to you,” Margrete said then, as if she was making her own vows.
Angelina could not have been more shocked if her mother had shared sordid details of her own sexual exploits. “I… Really?”
Margrete turned Angelina then, taking her by the shoulders so she could look into her face.
“You’re not the first girl to be ransomed off for the benefit of her family,” Margrete said in a low, direct voice. “My father lost me in a card game.”
There was a muffled sound of surprise from the bed. But their mother did not wait for that astonishing remark to sink in. Margrete lifted her chin, her fingers gripping Angelina’s shoulders so hard she was half worried they would leave a mark.
“Life is what you make of it. Some parts are unpleasant, others regretful—but those are things you cannot control. You can always control yourself. You can school your reactions. You can master your own heart. And no one can ever take that from you, Angelina. No one.”
“But Papa…” Angelina was turning over the idea of a card game and her severe grandfather in her head. “Papa was not a murderer.”
“All men are murderers.” Margrete’s dark eyes flashed. “They take a daughter and make her a woman whether she wants it or not. They kill a girl to create a wife, then a mother. It’s all a question of degrees, child.”
And with those words, Margrete took her youngest daughter by the hand and led her down the grand, restored stair to the ballroom, where she handed Angelina off to her father.
The father who had won her mother, not wooed her, as Angelina had always found so hard to imagine.
The father who did not look at the daughter he was sacrificing to line his pockets even once as he marched her down the aisle, then married her off to a monster.
CHAPTER FIVE
BENEDETTO TOLERATED THE CEREMONY.
Barely.
God knew, he was tired of weddings.
His angel walked toward him, spurred
