“Of course, in your case, everything is different,” he said, forcing himself to keep going. “I always leave after the wedding. Usually while they are locked in the bathroom, pretending not to be terrified that I might claim a wedding night. Then I wait to see how long it takes each wife to open the door to this tower. Once she does, we have this discussion.”
Again, the way she looked at him was…different.
He cleared his throat. “But your choices might be more limited, regrettably, because you could already be pregnant. I’ll confess this has never happened before.”
Her lips parted then, and she made a sound that he couldn’t quite define. “Are you telling me…? Are you…? Did you not sleep with all your wives on your wedding night? On all your wedding nights?”
“Of course not.” He belted that out without thinking. “Nor do I touch them beforehand. I may be considered a monster far and wide, Angelina, but I do try not to act like one.”
She let out a laugh, a harsh sound against the storm that battered at the windows outside. “Except with me.”
Benedetto ran a hand over his face, finding he was only more unsettled as this conversation wore on. Instead of less, as was customary—because he always knew what his wives would choose. He always knew none of them had married him. They’d married his money and hoped for the best, and this was him giving it to them.
“The truth is that you were different from the start,” he told Angelina, grudgingly. “I had no trouble whatsoever keeping my hands to myself with the rest. It was all so much more…civilized.”
He found himself closing the distance between them, when he shouldn’t. And he expected her to flinch, but she didn’t. She stood her ground, even tilting up her chin, as if she wanted him to do exactly this. As if she wanted him to make it all worse.
Benedetto slid his hand along her cheek, finding it hot and soft, and that didn’t solve a single one of his problems. “But you played for me, Angelina. And you wrecked me. And I have been reeling ever since.”
Her mouth moved into something far too stark to be a smile. Far too sad to be hers. “That would sound more romantic if you weren’t threatening to kill me, one way or another.”
“No,” he gritted out. “As it happens, you are the only wife I have slept with on a wedding night.”
Her eyes seemed remarkably blue then. “What about your second wife? Your mistress? Surely she—”
“She was paralytically drunk after our reception,” he said, not sure if that darkness in him was fury, anticipation, or something else he’d never felt before. Something as overwhelming and electric as the storm outside. “And I was little better. I am afraid, Angelina, that you are unique.”
“I feel so special,” she whispered in that same rough tone, but she didn’t jerk her cheek away.
Even so, Benedetto dropped his hand. And for a moment, they stood there, gazing at each other with all these secrets and lies exposed and laid out between them.
He could feel the walls all around him, claiming him anew. For good this time.
When she left him, as he knew she would because they always did, perhaps he would give up the fight altogether. In another year he could be nothing more than another statue, right here in this room. Another stop along the tour.
There was a part of him that longed for the oblivion of stone.
There was a part of him that always would.
“Why?” she asked, her voice a quiet scrape of roughness that reminded him, forcefully, that there was no part of him that was stone. That there never had been, especially where she was concerned. “Why would anyone go to all this trouble?”
“I will answer any and all questions you might have,” he told her, sounding more formal than he intended. Perhaps that was his last refuge. The closest he could get to becoming a statue after all. “But first you must choose.”
“As you pointed out, I might already be pregnant,” she replied, her arms crossed and even the wildness of her long blond hair a kind of resistance, silver and bright against the bare walls.
Why did he want nothing more than to lose himself in her—forever? How had he let this happen?
“It is true. You might be. I used nothing to prevent it.”
“Neither did I. There seemed little need when my life expectancy was all of three months.”
And she stared at him, the rebuke like a slap.
He felt it more like a kick to the gut.
“What if I’m pregnant and still choose to disappear tonight?” she asked after a moment, sounding unnervingly calm. “What then? Will you surrender your own child? Or will you force me to stay here despite the choice I make?”
He shook his head, everything in him going cold. “I told you, you are unique. This has never happened before. That doesn’t mean that the possibility is unforeseen. Your choice will hold, no matter your condition.”
“You would give up your own child,” she murmured. Her eyes widened. “But I thought I was the martyr here.”
Benedetto realized his hands were in fists. He didn’t know which was worse, that he would have to live without her, which he should have figured out how to handle already, or that it was distinctly possible that she would go off into whatever new life she wished and raise his child without him.
But the rules to this game had been always been perfectly clear.
He and his grandfather had laid them out together.
Half in penance, half for protection. He had already
