But knelt down the hard stone floor of this tower with Benedetto before her, his shoulders wider than the world, she counted back.
And she knew.
Just like that, she knew.
All this time she’d considered herself alone, she hadn’t been. Benedetto had been here in the shadows and more, she’d been carrying a part of the both of them deep inside her.
Her heart thumped in her chest, so severely it made her shiver.
“My grandfather reminded me that I have a distant cousin who lives a perfectly unobjectionable life in Brussels. Why should he not leave all this wealth and power to this cousin rather than to me if I found it all so troublesome that I had not only married the most unsuitable woman imaginable, but failed to protect her?” Benedetto shook his head. “He told me that if I wanted to take my rightful place in history, I must subject myself to a test. A test, he made sure to tell me, he did not imagine there was any possibility I would win given my past behavior.”
“Did he want you to win?”
He took a moment with that. “All this time I’ve assumed he wanted to teach me a lesson about loneliness. But I suspect now it was supposed to be a lesson about love.”
Benedetto gathered her hands in his again, tugging her closer, and all of this felt like far more important ceremony than the one that had taken place in her father’s house. There were no witnesses here but the sky and the sea. The storm. No family members littered about with agendas of their own.
It was only the two of them and the last of the secrets between them.
“My grandfather tasked me with finding women like you,” Benedetto said. “Precisely the sort my father had preyed upon, in his time. Women with careless families. Women who might want to run. Women who deserved better than a man with a list of dead wives behind them. I would marry them, but I would not make them easy about my reputation. I would bring them here. Then I would leave them after the wedding night and let them sit in this castle with all its history and Signora Malandra, who is always only too happy to play her role.”
“She’s a little too good at her role.”
“She, too, always thought I ought to have been a better man,” Benedetto said. He shook his head. “When they found their way to this tower I was to offer them a way out. One that kept them safe, gave them whatever they wanted, and made me seem darker and more villainous to the outside world. And he made me vow that I would continue to do this forever, until one of these women gave me a son. And even then, I was to allow her to leave me. Or stay, but live a fully supported, separate life. ‘You had two chances and you blew them both,’ he told me. ‘You don’t get any more.’”
“How many chances did he get?” Angelina demanded, her voice as hot as that flash of lightning in her eyes.
“But that was the problem,” Benedetto said in the same way he’d told her, on their wedding night, that he missed the man who had created this prison for him. “My grandfather was a hard man. I do not think he was particularly kind. But he loved my grandmother to distraction and never quite recovered from her loss. She was the best of us. He told me that he was glad she had died before she could see all the ways in which I failed to live up to what she dreamed for me, because after my father had proved so disappointing, they had had such hopes that I would be better.”
Angelina frowned. “I’m not sure how you were responsible for Carlota’s choices on the one hand—in the face of her own family’s pressure, presumably—and an act of nature on the other.”
“It was not that I was personally responsible for what happened to them,” Benedetto said quietly. “It was that I was so arrogant about both of them. Boorish and self-centered. It never occurred to me to inquire into Carlota’s emotional state. And everything Sylvia and I did together was irresponsible. Would a decent man ever have let her out of his sight, knowing the state she was in?”
“A question one could ask of your grandfather,” Angelina said.
“But you see, he didn’t force me into this. He suggested I bore responsibility and suggested I test myself. I was the one who had spent the happy parts of my childhood playing out involved fantasies in these walls. Ogres and kings. Spells and enchantments. I thought I was already cursed after what had happened to Carlota and Sylvia. Why not prove it? Because the truth is, I never got over the loss of my grandmother either, and she was the one who had always encouraged the games I played. In some twisted way, it seemed like a tribute.” Benedetto reached over and touched her face again, smoothing her hair back with one big hand. “And if my grandfather had not agreed, because without her we were both incapable of loving anything—too much like my father—could I have found my way to you?”
She let go the breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.
“I don’t care how you got here,” Angelina told him, like another vow. “Just as long as you stay here now you’ve come.”
Outside, lightning flashed and the storm rumbled. The sea fought back.
But inside this tower, empty of everything but the feelings they felt for one another, Angelina felt something bright and big swell up inside her.
It felt like a sob. It felt overwhelming, like grief.
She had the strangest feeling that it was something else altogether.
Something like joy.
“I don’t want to leave you,” she told him. “I
