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Her father let out a kind of roar—enraged and humiliated and broken. It made her mother jerk in her chair. It made Adriana want to cry. But instead, she wrapped her arms around her middle and watched him, waiting for his eyes to meet hers again.
When they did, she thought the look in them might leave marks.
“You don’t understand,” she said quickly, desperately.
“I cannot bear to look at you.” He sounded deeply, irreversibly disgusted. It made her eyes fill with tears. “All I see are his fingerprints, sullying you. Ruining you. Making you nothing more than one more Righetti whore, like all the rest.” He shook his head. “You have proved to the world that we are tainted. Dirty. You have destroyed us all over again, Adriana, and for what? The chance to be one more conquest in an endless line? The opportunity to warm a bed that has never gone cold? How could you?”
She shook, but she didn’t move, not even when he turned and slammed out of the room, the silence he left behind heavy and loud, pressing into her, making her want to slide into a ball on the floor. But she didn’t do it. She forced herself to look at her mother instead.
“Mama—” she began, but her mother shook her head hard, her lips pressed together in a tight line.
“You knew better,” she said in a harsh whisper. “From the time you were small, you knew better than this. Righettis can’t put a single foot wrong. Righettis must be above reproach—especially a girl who looks like you, as if you stepped out of one of those paintings. I took you to meet Sandrine myself—living out her days in a foreign country with a man who should have been a duke, cast out from her home forever. You knew better.”
It was such an unexpected slap that Adriana took a step back from the table, as if her mother really had hit her.
“I never did anything to be ashamed of,” she blurted out, something reckless moving in her then, impossible to contain, as if she’d waited all her life for this conversation. “And yet the first thing you taught me was shame. Why do we punish ourselves before anyone else does?” Her voice cracked. “Why did you?”
But that made it worse. Her mother stood then, straight and sorrowful, both hands at her heart and her eyes like nails, staring at Adriana as if she was a stranger.
“You’ve made your bed, Adriana,” she said coldly. “We’ll all have to lie in it, won’t we? I certainly hope it was worth it. Sandrine always thought so, but then, she died alone and far away, in a cloud of disgrace. And so will you.”
Her mother didn’t slam the door when she left. She simply walked away and didn’t look back, which was worse. Worse than a slap.
And Adriana stood there in all that silence, awful and simmering and ugly, and tried to keep herself from falling apart.
She looked around desperately, as if a solution might rise up from the tiled floor, and that was when she saw the paper spread out in the middle of the wooden table as if her parents had pored over it together.
The paper.
For a moment she couldn’t bring herself to look, because she could imagine what she’d see. She’d been imagining it, in one form or another, since she was a girl. She’d had nightmares about it more than once. She stared at the paper as if it were a serpent coiled up in the middle of the kitchen, fangs extended.
But in the end, she couldn’t help herself.
Playboy Pato Succumbs to Witchy Righetti’s Spell! Well known for her notorious wiles, Adriana Righetti—very much an heir to her family’s storied charms—has made a shocking play for the kingdom’s favorite bachelor—
She couldn’t do it, she told herself, squeezing her eyes shut, her hand at her throat as if her pulse might leap out from beneath her skin.
But there was more. She had to look.
There was the helpful sidebar that ran down all the infamous members of the Righetti family, complete with pictures and a few snide lines detailing their sins. Carolina, shameless mistress to Crown Prince and later King Philip. Maria, rumored to have slept with all three royal princes and some assorted cousins with dukedoms in an effort to trade upward, until she reached Eduardo, the future king. Francesca, lifelong consort of Prince Vidal. Sandrine, who’d disrupted the Reinsmark dukedom. And Almado the traitor, who had assassinated King Oktav. And somehow it managed to suggest, without ever doing so directly, that Adriana herself had been mistress to all those Kitzinian royals before going on to personally betray the country, before taking her position in the palace and turning her attention to the easily seduced and obviously beguiled Pato.
And then there were the pictures.
They’d been taken the day before yesterday, she saw at once. She reached out to run a shaky finger over the series of photos before her, smudging the newspaper ink. She’d thought they were alone. Pato had spent the morning at an event, and they had been waiting in the antechamber of the hall for his driver to pull around. She’d been certain they were alone.
