Page 53 of Marrying the Savage

Inside, the house is even more magnificent.

And even worse.

Not ugly, never ugly. It’s too beautiful for that. The foyer is vast, with dark marble floors and a sweeping staircase that rises beneath a chandelier made of black iron and glass. Tall windows overlook the cliffside and the water beyond. There are old portraits along one wall, their faces solemn beneath layers of varnish. The air smells faintly of woodsmoke, leather, and something colder I can’t name.

But the thing I notice most is the quiet.

There are men, yes. Guards near the door. Mikhail behind us. Two others entering from a side hall. But no wife waiting. No mother. No children. No female voices upstairs. No staff bustling with trays or flowers or instructions.

He lives alone.

Damir takes off his coat and hands it to a man without looking away from me.

“You’re staring,” he says.

“I’m absorbing.”

“That’s not what I’m seeing on your face right now. You’re suspicious,” he says without accusation.

“Because I am in the cliff house of a man my uncle says killed his wife.” The words leave my mouth before I can soften them.

Mikhail goes still behind me. So do the guards.

Damir does not. He looks at me calmly, as if I have asked whether he takes his coffee black. “Did he?”

I lift my chin. “Did he what?”

“Tell you I killed her.”

The silence stretches. There’s no point lying.

“Yes.”

For a moment, his face gives me nothing. Then he turns and walks toward the staircase. “Come.”

I stare after him. “That is not an answer.”

“No.”

“Do you always respond to murder accusations with interior tours?”

“Only on special occasions.”

“I’m not reassured.”

“You were not meant to be.”

I follow him because apparently that is the kind of woman I am now: one who walks deeper into Bluebeard’s house while arguing about manners.

He stops halfway across the foyer, beneath a portrait of a dark-haired woman with sharp eyes and a string of pearls around her throat. Beside her, in a smaller portrait, is a man with the same severe bone structure as Damir, only younger, less hardened. There are children too, painted in old-fashioned formal clothes, their faces solemn and pale.

Damir looks up at them. For the first time since I met him, something in his face closes in a way that is not calculation.

It’s older. Deeper.

“My family lived here before the fire,” he says. The words are quiet.

I stop beside him. “The fire?”