He made a broken sound, this dark, terrible man who was neither of those things.
She didn’t understand why she knew it, only that she did. Her heart had known it all along. That was why, though she’d feared for her loneliness and sanity here, she had never truly believed she was in actual, physical danger.
He wasn’t any more a butcher than she was. And once that truth had taken hold of her in this empty chamber, all the others swirling around her seemed to solidify. Then fall in behind it like dominoes.
She didn’t want to leave him. She didn’t want to learn how to scuba dive or to live in a caravan. She didn’t want to run a spa in a far-off city, or collect grapes and goats.
She wanted him.
Angelina wanted to look up from her piano to find him studying her, as if she was a piece of witchcraft all her own and only he knew the words to her spell.
Because only he did.
God help her, but she wanted all those things she’d never dared dream about before. Not for the youngest daughter in a family headed for ruin. The one least likely to be noticed and first to be sold off. She wanted everything.
“Benedetto,” she said again, because it started here. It started with the two of them and this sick game he clearly played not because he wanted to play it, but because he believed he had no other choice. “Who did this to you?”
Then she watched in astonishment as this big, strong man—this boogeyman feared across the planet, a villain so extreme grown men trembled before him—fell to his knees before her.
“I did this to me,” he gritted out. “I did all of this. I am my own curse.”
Angelina didn’t think. She sank down with him, holding his hands as he knelt there, while all around the tower, the storm outside raged and raged.
The storm in him seemed far more intense.
“Why?” she breathed. “Tell me.”
“It was after Sylvia was swept overboard,” Benedetto said in a low voice, and the words sounded rough and unused. She didn’t need him to tell her that he’d never told this story before. She knew. “You must understand, there was nothing about my relationship with her that anyone would describe as healthy. I should never have married her. As much for her sake as mine.”
He stared straight ahead, but Angelina knew he didn’t see her. There were too many ghosts in the way.
But she was fighting for a lifetime. She didn’t care if they knelt on the hard stone all night.
She held his hands tighter as he continued.
“Sylvia and I brought out the worst in each other. That was always true, but it was all much sicker after Carlota died. All we did was drink too much, fight too hard, and become less and less able to make up the difference. Then came the storm.”
His voice was ravaged. His dark eyes blind. His hands clenched around hers so hard that it might have hurt, had she not been so deeply invested in this moment. In whatever he was about to tell her.
“It took her,” Benedetto grated out. “And then I knew what kind of man I was. Because as much as I grieved her, there was a relief in it, too. As if the hand of God reached down and saved me twice, if in horrible ways. Once from a union with a woman I could never make truly happy, because she loved another, and then from a woman who made me as miserable as I made her. The rest of my life, I will have to look in a mirror and know that I’m the sort of man who thought such things when two women died. That is who I am.”
“You sound like a human being,” Angelina retorted, fiercely. “If we were all judged on the darkest thoughts that have ever crossed our minds, none of us would ever be able to show our faces in public.”
Benedetto shook his head. “My grandfather was less forgiving than you are, Angelina. He called me here, to this castle. He made me stand before him and explain how it was that I was so immoral. So devoid of empathy. Little better than my own father, by his reckoning, given that when my grandmother died he was never the same. He never really recovered.” His dark, tortured eyes met hers. “There is nothing he could have said to wound me more deeply.”
“Was your father so bad then?” She studied his face. “My own is no great example.”
He made a hollow sound. “Your father is greedy. He thinks only of himself. But at least he thinks of someone. I don’t know how to explain the kind of empty, vicious creature my father was. Only that my grandfather suggesting he and I were the same felt like a death sentence.”
“Did you point out that he could always have stepped in himself, then?” Angelina asked, somewhat tartly. “Done a little more parenting than the odd hour on a Sunday? After all, who raised your father in the first place?”
And for moment, Benedetto focused on her instead of the past. She could see it in the way his eyes changed, lightening as he focused on her. In the way that hard mouth of his almost curved in one corner.
“What have I done to earn such ferocity?” he asked, and he sounded almost…humbled.
“You saved me from a selfish man who would have sold me one way or another, if not to you,” she said, holding his hands tight. “You gave me a castle. A beautiful piano. And if I’m not very much mistaken, a child, too. What haven’t you given me, Benedetto?”
He let out another noise, then reached over, smoothing a hand down over her belly, though it was still flat. She thought of the oddly heightened emotions that had seemed to grip her this last month or so. The
