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‘I didn’t lie to you,’ Marco said angrily. ‘I simply didn’t tell you the whole of my life story.’
‘What’s the difference?’ she asked. ‘It comes to the same thing if you deliberately mislead someone.’
‘I was simply playing you at your own game,’ Marco responded.
‘I wasn’t playing a game. My friendship with Bianca was genuine, and I believed that what you and I had together was genuine,’ she said. Then, suddenly, an awful thought occurred to her. ‘Did Bianca know too? Is that why she dropped me?’
‘I stopped her contacting you,’ Marco said. ‘I took her away to America, to get her as far from you as possible.’
‘I felt so bad when you disappeared,’ Claudia said. ‘I thought you didn’t care any more—that you had better things to do. Now I know that you wanted to hurt me! That you were laughing at me!’
‘I was never laughing at you. It was never that trivial.’ He looked at her coldly, through dangerously narrowed eyes.
‘If Rosa hadn’t recognised you, I still wouldn’t know about your family.’ Claudia stood tall and looked straight back at him, although a horrible threatening sensation scratched down her spine as their eyes met.
‘I was going to bring everything into the open today,’ Marco said.
‘Why today?’ she said. ‘Why should I believe you were finally going to reveal your awful secret today?’
‘My awful secret?’ Marco bit out, echoing her words. He clenched his fists by his sides, suddenly seeing red. How dared she stand there and continue to pretend ignorance? ‘You know the bare facts of the story as well as I do. What you don’t know is what it was really like for my family when it happened.’
Her face was as white as a sheet as she looked up at him. He could tell she was shaken by their confrontation, but he did
n’t care. He wanted her to feel the pain he had felt—the pain he still felt when he remembered what had happened.
‘Of course I don’t know what it was like—I don’t even know what happened,’ she said in her defence.
‘You don’t know how many nights I lay awake—tortured by thoughts that perhaps I could have saved my family from the worst of it,’ he said bitterly. ‘Or maybe even could have prevented it altogether.’
‘Prevented what?’ she asked, still acting as if she didn’t know what had taken place.
‘The destruction of my family,’ he said.
There was an ominous pause and his words seemed to echo around the room. Marco watched as a change came over her. Her body stiffened and suddenly she was standing very still.
‘Destruction,’ she said at last. ‘That’s a very strong word. How were your family destroyed?’
Her voice was so quiet and shaky that he could hardly hear her. But that didn’t matter. He was on a roll now. He was going to tell her something that had been weighing on him for twelve years.
He wanted her to share his pain at the memory. He wanted her to feel his guilt over not stopping what happened.
‘The last time I saw my father alive he was sitting at that very desk. He was drunk,’ he said, raking his fingers roughly through his hair. ‘He was bawling into his drink, saying that my mother was having an affair.’
He paused for a moment as an image of that scene flared horribly in his mind.
‘He told me the family business and estate were in danger,’ Marco continued. ‘I didn’t take him seriously. I was ashamed of him—disgusted that he was drinking and that he couldn’t hold on to his wife. I told him to pull himself together.’
‘You must have been very young.’ Claudia’s voice revealed her shock. ‘What did he expect you to do? What could you have done to make a difference?’
‘I was a man—eighteen years old. Old enough to take responsibility. I may not have known that my family was on the brink of destruction—or that a man called Primo Vasile had seduced my mother and persuaded her to betray my father. But I did know that my father was upset.’ Marco paused, his heart pumping fiercely under his ribs. ‘I didn’t know what I could do to help. So I stuck to what I already had planned and left the country.’
Claudia didn’t say anything. She just stared up at him with a stunned expression on her face.
‘When I returned, everything had gone to hell,’ Marco said. ‘My father and grandfather were dead. My mother had fled in shame. And Bianca, my sweet, innocent little sister, was a virtual orphan, living at the mercy of state care.’
He turned away, looking blindly out of the window. The pain and shame that he normally kept so well clamped down seared into him like a brand. He had failed his family. And they—not him—had paid dearly for that failure.
‘How did they die?’ Claudia gasped.
