Into so much ash and dust, just like that.
Chapter Eleven
Leontina could feelher heartbeat going wild inside her. She couldn’t tell if she was terrified or determined or some mix of both, and all of it seemed to be wrapped up in how much she didn’t want to say any of the things she’d just said to him.
But it was all true. She’d felt like a kind of warrior queen walking into the front hall of the monastery in Spain today. She’d felt powerful and she’d known that it got to him. That she did. That her silence worked its way beneath his skin.
She’d been able to ride that wave all the way here. It had held even after she’d walked into the castle, finding it as unpleasant and oppressive as ever. It had been a struggle not to run for one of her hiding places. But Pau had been at her side and the truth was, Leontina found she really didn’t mind the idea of sticking it to her father.
He’d certainly had it coming.
The reality of that moment, on the other hand, she’d found had made her feel hollow.
After Umberto had first looked as if he’d meant to strike her belly—her child—and had then thrown himself through the air in her direction as if he dearly wished to do her—hischild—bodily harm, she’d understood what that hollowness was.
A kind of grief. It tasted like despair, but it wasn’t. It was a mourning.
For the little girl she’d been here who had learned how to hide because solitude and concealing herself was an act of love, one she showed herself, and it was all she got. For the young woman who had been told all the ways she could beuseful, but was never valued as anything but an object to trade at a market. Little more than a trinket who mattered only if some man could be convinced her price was worth paying.
It wasn’t like these things were new. Leontina had been quite aware of what her life was all along. What was different was her. Or more accurately, the baby she carried inside her.
Leontina had understood in a flash, while her father lay in a heap on the floor, his face red and his head bloodied from the impact, that the things she had put up with, the life she’d lived, the entire toxic swamp of this place and her father and everything that came with it were going to end right here.
She wished she could care about her father’s welfare, but she couldn’t.
What she knew was that she would never let that man anywhere near her child. Not only that,herchild would never experience the things she had as a girl. Her son was already loved and adored beyond reason and Leontina hadn’t even met him yet. And her son would only hide if he was playing a game. She could feel the sheer intensity of how much she loved him and what she would do to protect him and how she would make certain that even if no one else in the world loved her boy, he would know that she did. He wouldknow.
And as all of that had rushed through her, she’d known that she needed to be done with these schemes and plots, these revenge scenarios and where they led.
Because it was always to the same place, wasn’t it?
Her father had tripped and fallen on the cold stone floor and no one had rushed to him. He had done nothing but bully and plot his whole life, and this was where it ended.
She loved Pau. The more she accepted that, the more she was sure that it had been there from the moment she’d met his gaze. From the moment she’d felt the intensity he carried within him, before she’d felt how he expressed it.
Like she had been waiting for him all her life and it was worth it, to be locked away in a castle all that time, if it meant she got to have him after all. Leontina thought she would dream about the time they’d spent together for the rest of her life.
But there was no way in hell that she would raise her child in this mess. No possible way.
And she’d said these things to him here, in the castle, where she could hide from almost anything but the reality of her life here. She’d said it so she couldn’t think better of it and let years pass, only to end up trapped in exactly the place she knew she didn’t want to go.
The truth was she expected Pau to go arctic again, and walk away.
But instead, he went pale.
Then suddenly, everything about himblazed.
Pau moved toward her so swiftly that she didn’t have time to react. Then his hands were on her upper arms, holding her to him. His face was so close to hers that she almost thought she could taste him, and there was a look she’d never seen before in his eyes.
She found she was holding her breath.
“I will not live without you, Leontina,” he hurled at her. “I will not do it. And you will not raise this child—my child—without me, either.”
Of all the things she’d thought he might say, it wasn’t that. She’d thought maybe he would sternly lecture her about legacies. Or the papers they’d signed. Or the promises they’d made, none having anything to do with spite or love or anything but the kind of coolheaded, emotionless agreements that Pau Calixto was known for.
But she couldn’t let herself believe him. She might have been willing to risk herself because her heart told her sheneededto, but this wasn’t about her. It couldn’t be.
“I will not raise a child with you in a cauldron of spite,” she shot right back at him.
