She already knew too well the kind of magic he could work on her when she was wide awake.
Outside, she could hear the thunder of the sea. The disconcerting summer sky stretched off into the horizon.
But here in this castle filled with the plunder and fragments of long-ago lives, she was suspended in her white dress. Between the bloodred bed and the husband who stood like a wall between her and what remained of her girlhood. Of her innocence.
Whatever was left of it.
And suddenly, she wanted to tear it all off. She wanted to pile all the girlish things that remained inside her into that fireplace, then light a match.
Angelina was tired of being played with. She was tired of that dark, mocking gleam in his eye and that sardonic curve to his mouth. Of being led through a castle cut off from the mainland by a man who trafficked in nightmares.
She’d married him in a veil, but he had peeled it back when he claimed her mouth with his, there in front of witnesses.
She wanted to burn that down, too. No more veils of lace or ignorance.
If this was her life, or what remained of it, she would claim it as best she could.
She pressed her palm down harder on the coverlet, until it ached as much as she did between her legs.
Then Angelina faced the husband she couldn’t quite believe was going to kill her like the rest. But she had to know if that was the real dream. Or a false sense of security six other women had already felt, standing right where she was now.
“I don’t want to talk about screaming,” she said.
He looked amused. “That is your loss.”
“I have a question, Benedetto.”
She thought he knew what she wanted to ask him. There was that tightening in his jaw. And for a moment, his black eyes seemed even darker than usual.
“You can ask me anything you like,” he said.
She noticed he did not promise to answer her.
But Angelina focused on the question that was burning a hole inside her. “Don’t you think it’s time you told me what happened to the six who came before me?”
CHAPTER SEVEN
“AS YOU WISH,” Benedetto said. His own voice was a rumbling thing in the bedchamber of stone, like thunder. Though outside it was a mild summer afternoon inching its way towards evening. “If you feel the shade of the marital bed is the place for such conversations.”
He did not wish. He would prefer not to do this part of the dance—and he would particularly prefer not to do it with her.
The things he wanted to do with her deserved better than a castle made of unbreakable vows to dead men. She deserved light, not darkness. She deserved a whole man, not the part he played.
His still-innocent angel, who came apart so beautifully while the sea closed in around them. His curious Angelina, who would open doors she shouldn’t and doom them both—it was only a matter of time.
His brand-new wife, who thought he was a killer, and still faced him like this.
Benedetto had expected her to be lovely to look at and reasonably entertaining, because she’d showed both at her dinner table the night they’d met. He had developed a deep yearning for her body over the course of the past month.
But he didn’t understand how she’d wedged herself beneath his skin like this.
It wasn’t going to end well. That he knew.
It never did.
And he had a feeling she was going to leave her mark in a way the others never had.
“Do you do the same thing every time?” she asked, as if she knew what he was thinking.
Benedetto couldn’t quite read her, then. It only made him want her more. There was a hint of defiance in the way she stood and in the directness of her blue gaze. The hand on the wide bed shook slightly, but she didn’t move it. Or hide it.
And he could see fear and arousal all over her body, perhaps more entwined than she imagined. He didn’t share his father’s proclivities. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t admire the things trembling uncertainty mixed with lust could do to a pretty face.
She tipped up her chin, and kept going. “Did you marry them all in bright white dresses, then bring them here to this room of salt and blood?”
It was a poetic description of the chamber, and he despised poetry. But it was also the most apt description he’d ever heard of what he’d done to this room after his grandfather had died. Benedetto had gutted it and removed every personal item, every hint of the man who’d lived and died here, every scrap that a ghost might cling to.
Because that was what he and his grandfather had done together after his grandmother had died, and it seemed only right to continue in the same vein.
And because he was haunted enough already.
“Where else would I bring them?” he asked softly.
“Tell me.” Her gaze was too bright, her voice too urgent. “Tell me who they were.”
“But surely you already know. Their names are in every paper, in every language spoken in Europe and beyond.”
“I want to hear you say them.”
And Benedetto wanted things he knew he could never have.
He wanted those nights in that stark conservatory in her father’s ruined house, the wild tangle of music like a cloud all around them, and her sweetness in his mouth. He had wished more than once over this past month that he could stop time and stay there forever, but of all the mad powers people whispered he possessed, that had never been one of them.
And innocence was too easily tarnished, he knew. Besides, Benedetto had long since resigned himself to the role he must play in this game. Monster of monsters. Despoiler of the unblemished.
He had long since stopped caring what the outside world thought of him. He had made an art out of shrugging off the names they called him. His wealth
