“Angelina…” His voice was a low whisper that she knew, without a shred of doubt, came from the deepest, truest parts of him. “Angelina, you should know. I had read all about the Charteris sisters before I ever came to your father’s house. And I assumed that I would pick the one who seemed best suited for me, on paper.”
“If you are a wise man,” she replied dryly, “you will never tell me which one you mean.”
And just like that, both of them were smiling.
As if the sun had come up outside when the rain still fell.
“I walked into that dining room and saw an angel,” he told her, wonder in his eyes. In the hands that touched her face. “And I knew better, because I knew that no matter who I chose, it would end up here. Here in the locked tower where all my bodies are buried, one way or another. And still, I looked at you and saw the kind of light I have never believed could exist. Not for me.”
“Benedetto…” she whispered, the joy and the hope so thick it choked her.
“I had no intention of touching you, but I couldn’t help myself. How could you be anything but an angel, when you could make a piano sing like that? You have entranced me and ruined me, and I have spent two months trying to come to terms with the fact you will leave me like all the rest. I can’t.”
“You don’t have to come to terms with that.”
“Maybe this is crazy,” he continued, wonder and intensity in every line of his body. “Maybe I’m a fool to imagine that anything that starts in Castello Nero could end well. But I look at you, Angelina, and you make me imagine that anything is possible. Even love, if we do it together.”
And for a moment, she forgot to breathe.
Then she did, and the breath was a sob, and there were tears on her face that tasted like the waiting, brooding sea.
Angelina thought, This is what happiness can be, if you let it.
If for once she believed in the future before her, not tired old stories of a past she’d never liked all that much to begin with.
If she believed in her heart and her hands, the man before her, and the baby she knew they’d already made.
“Our children will fill these halls with laughter,” she promised him. “And you and I will make love in that bed, where there is nothing but the sea and the sky. It will no more be a chamber of blood, but of life. Love. The two of us, and the good we do. I promise you, Benedetto.”
“The sky and the sea are the least of the things I will give you, little one,” he vowed in return.
And the stone was cold and hard beneath her, but he was warm. Hot to the touch, and the way he looked at her made her feel as if angels really did sing inside her, after all.
She wrapped herself around him, high up in that tower that she understood, now, wasn’t an empty room at all. It was his heart. These stones had only ever held his heart.
Now she would do the honors.
Because she was the seventh wife of the Butcher of Castello Nero. The first one to love him, the only one to survive intact, and soon enough the mother of his children besides.
There was no storm greater than the way she planned to love this man.
Deeper and longer than the castle itself could stand—and it had lasted centuries already.
And she started here, on the floor of this tower, where he settled her on top of him and gazed up at her as if she was the sun.
And then, together, moment by moment and year by year, they both learned how to shine.
Bright enough to scare away the darkest shadows.
Even the ones they made themselves.
Forever.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE SEVENTH WIFE of the terrifying Butcher of Castello Nero confounded the whole world by living.
She lived, and well, by all accounts. She appeared in public on Benedetto’s arm and gave every appearance of actually enjoying her husband’s company. As months passed, it became apparent that she was expecting his child, and that, too, sent shock waves across the planet.
The tabloids hardly knew what to do with themselves.
And as the years passed without the faintest hint of blood or butchery, Benedetto found himself becoming something he’d never imagined he could. Boring.
Beautifully, magnificently boring to the outside world, at last.
Their first child, a little boy they called Amadeo to celebrate some of the music that had bound them to each other, thrived. When he was four, he was joined by a little brother. Two years later, a sister followed. And a year after that, another little girl joined the loud, chaotic clan in the castle on its tidal island.
A place only Angelina had seemed to love the way he always had, deny it though he might.
And Benedetto’s children were not forced to secrete themselves in hidden places, kept out of sight from tourist groups, or permitted only a weekly hour with him. Nor were they sent off to boarding school on their fifth birthdays. His children raced up and down the long hallways, exactly as Angelina had said they would. The stone walls themselves seemed lighter with the force of all that laughter and the inevitable meltdowns, and the family wing was soon anything but lonely. There was an endless parade between the nursery at one end, the master suite on the other, and all the rooms in between.
Ten years to the day that Benedetto had brought his last, best wife home, he stood at that wall of windows that looked out over the sea, the
