But because real life was complicated. It had layers and tragedies. It was never as simple as a bad man. It was never black and white, no matter how people wanted it to be.
There was nothing in the room, not even bedside tables, and she thought the housekeeper must have been playing with her.
Even as she breathed a little easier, however, she realized with a start that the mantel over the fire didn’t look the way it should. She drifted closer to the fireplace, her heart in her throat, because there was a bit of paper there with an object weighting it down.
She could have sworn it hadn’t been there when she woke up. Then again, her attention had been on that happiness within her that now felt curdled, and the watching, waiting sea.
Her whole body felt heavy, as if her feet were encased in concrete as she moved across the floor. But then, at the last moment—almost as if she feared that someone would come up behind her and shove her into the enormous hearth if she wasn’t careful—she reached out and swiped the paper and its paperweight up. Then moved away from the fireplace.
The object was a key. Big and ornate and attached to a long chain.
She stared at it, the weight of it feeling malevolent, somehow. Only when she jerked her gaze from it did she look at the thick sheaf of paper with a few bold lines scrawled across it.
This is the key to the door you must not open.
Benedetto had written that. Because of course, this was his handwriting. She had no doubt. It looked like him—dark and black and unreasonably self-assured.
You must wear the key around your neck, but never use it. Can I trust you, little one?
And for a long time after that, weeks that turned to fortnights and more, Angelina careened between disbelief and fury.
On the days that she was certain it was no more than a test, and one she could handily win, she achieved a kind of serenity. She woke in the morning, entertained herself by sparring with the always unpleasant housekeeper, and then tended to her walk. When the weather was fine, and the tide agreeable, she did in fact walk the causeway. Out there on that tiny strip of not quite land, she felt the way she did when she was playing the piano. As if she was simultaneously the most important life in the universe, and nothing at all—a speck in the vastness. The sea surged around her, birds cried overhead, and in the distance, Italy waited. Wholly unaware of the loneliness of a brand-new bride on a notorious island where a killer was said to live. When the man she’d married had been a dark and stirring lover instead.
Her husband did not call. He did not send her email. She might have thought she’d dreamed him altogether, but she could track his movements online. She could see that he was at meetings. The odd charity ball. She could almost convince herself that he was sending her coded messages through these photographs that appeared in the society pages of various international cities.
Silly girl, she sometimes chided herself. He is sending you nothing. You don’t know this man at all.
But that was the trouble. She felt as if she did.
She didn’t need him to tell her any more of his story. She knew—she just knew—that her heart was right about him, no matter what the world said.
Those were the good days.
On the bad days, she brooded. She walked the lonely halls of the hushed castle, learning her way around a building that time had made haphazard. Stone piled upon stone, this wing doubling back over that. She walked the galleries as if she was having conversations with the art. Particularly the hall of Franceschis past. All those dark, mysterious eyes. All those grim, forbidding mouths.
How many of them had locked their women away? Leaving them behind as they marched off to this crusade or that very important business negotiation, or whatever it was men did across time to convince themselves their lives were greater than what they left behind.
On those days, the portraits she found online of the stranger she’d married felt like an assault. As if he was taunting her from London, Paris, Milan.
And all the while, she played.
Her tower was an escape. The safest place in the castle. She played and she played, and sometimes, she would stagger to the chaise, exhausted, so she could sleep a bit, then start to play all over again.
And if she didn’t know better, if food didn’t appear at regular intervals, hot tea and hard rolls, or sometimes cakes and coffee, she might have imagined that she was all alone in this lonely place. Like some kind of enchanted princess in a half-forgotten fairy tale.
She played and she played.
And the weeks inched by.
One month. Another.
“Sweet God,” said Petronella, when Angelina was finally stir crazy enough to call her parents’ home. “I convinced myself he’d killed you already and was merely hiding the evidence.”
“Don’t be melodramatic,” Angelina replied primly, because that was easier. And so familiar, it actually felt good. “He’s done nothing of the kind.”
Or not in the way that Petronella meant it, anyway. They put her on speaker, and she regaled her mother and sisters with tales of the castle. She’d tagged along on enough of Signora Malandra’s tours by then that she could have given them herself, and so spared no flourish or aside as she shared the details of the notorious Castello Nero with her family.
Because she knew they would think wealth meant happiness.
Because to them, it did.
“Everywhere I look there’s another fortune or two,” she assured her mother. “It’s really spectacular.”
“I should hope so,” Margrete said, in her chilliest voice. “That was the bargain we
