Surely if he could rid himself of the thing the way he thought he had a lifetime ago, all of this would be easier.
“I am not going to kill you,” he told her, his voice severe as he tried to draw the cloak of his usual remoteness around him. But he couldn’t quite get there. “Nonetheless, you have a choice of deaths before you. You can consider this chamber a passageway, of sorts. A bridge between the life you knew until today, and one in which you can be anyone you choose. Assuming you meet the criteria, that is.”
She swayed slightly on her feet. “The criteria?”
And he had done this so many times. It should have come as easily to him as breath.
But his chest was too tight. That damned heart of his was too big. “The criteria for escape is simple, Angelina. If you meet it, we will create a new identity for you. You can go anywhere you wish in the world under this new name. You will not have to worry about supporting yourself, because I will take care of your financial arrangements in perpetuity.”
“Wait…” Angelina shook her head slightly. “Does that mean…?”
He nodded. “My third wife runs a scuba diving business on an island you would never have heard of, off the coast of Venezuela. My fourth wife lives a nomadic lifestyle, currently traveling about mainland Europe in a converted van. It looks modest from the outside but is, I am assured, the very height of technology within. My fifth wife prefers the frenetic pace of Hong Kong, where she runs a spa. And Veronica, my most famous wife, never able to have a moment to herself in all her days, has settled down on a farm in a temperate valley on the west coast of America. Where she tends to grapes on the vine, raises goats, and makes her own cheese.” His smile was a grim and terrible thing. He could taste it. “You can have any life you wish, Angelina. At my expense. All you need to do is disappear forever.”
“But if they’re not… If you didn’t…” She pulled in a visible breath with a ragged sound. “Are you married to all these women at the same time?”
He actually laughed at that. “That is not usually the first question. No, I’m not a bigamist, though I commend you for adding yet another sin to my collection. Murderer and bigamist, imagine! I’m almost sorry to tell you that my marriages have all been quietly and privately annulled. Save the first.”
Angelina shifted, hugging herself she stared back at him. “I don’t understand. Why would you set yourself up to be some sort of…one-man smuggling operation for women in search of better lives? When you know that the whole world thinks the worst of you?”
“Who better?” Benedetto shrugged. “I don’t care in the slightest what the world thinks of me. And you’ve spent two months acquainting yourself with this castle. It is the tip of the iceberg of the kind of money I have. I could marry a hundred women, support them all, and never feel a pinch in my own pocket.”
“So it’s altruism then?” She looked dubious, and if he wasn’t mistaken, something like…affronted. “If that was true, why not give all that money to charity? Shouldn’t there be a way to do it that doesn’t brand you the monster beneath every bed in Europe?”
“What would be the fun in that?”
This was the part where normally, the women he’d married—despite their cynicism or inability to trust a word he said because they feared him so deeply, yet not quite deeply enough to refuse to marry him—began to waver. Hope began to creep in. He would watch them imagine, as they stood there before him, that he might be telling them the truth. And if he was, if he could really give them what he was offering, did that mean that they could really, truly be free?
Of him—and of everything else that had brought them here?
But Angelina was staring at him as if what he was telling her was a far worse betrayal than games with his fearsome housekeeper and a key to a locked tower door.
“What do I have to do to qualify for this extraordinary death?” she asked.
He wanted to go to her. He wanted his hands on her. But the point of this, all this, was that Benedetto wasn’t supposed to want such things.
He never had before.
“I already told you that the primary purpose of my existence is to produce an heir,” he told her stiffly. “It was why I married Carlota and why we planned to consummate a union that was never passionate.”
“I remember the story. But that hardly sounds like reason enough to inflict your unhappy childhood on another baby.”
“My childhood wasn’t unhappy.” He heard the outrage in his voice and tried to rein it in. “My grandmother—” But he stopped himself. Because Angelina already knew too much about him. He had already given her too much. Benedetto gritted his teeth and pushed on. “Ordinarily, this is when I offer my wives the opportunity to produce the Franceschi heir themselves.”
“Surely they signed up for that when they said, ‘I do’?”
He ignored that, and the flash of temper in her blue gaze. “Should you choose that route, life here will continue as is. At the end of a year, if no heir is forthcoming, the same offer for a new life will be made to you. If you’re pregnant, however, the expectation would be that you remain until the child is five. At which point, a final offer will be made. If you choose to go, you can do so, with one stipulation. That being, obviously, that you cannot take the child with you. If you choose to stay, we will have contracts drawn up to indicate that you may remain as much a stranger to the marriage as you wish.”
He cleared his throat, because this was
