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‘You are disgusting,’ she said furiously. ‘I wish I’d never met you. There is no way I’ll be part of your scheme.’
‘I’ll drag you there with me.’ Marco looked at her through dangerously narrowed eyes. ‘Kicking and screaming if need be.’
‘I will be kicking and screaming—and worse,’ Claudia replied, not letting herself be affected by the threat in his words. ‘You just try to take me somewhere else against my will, and you’ll find out how hard I’ll fight you.’
‘What a relief that you are finally showing your true colours,’ Marco said, walking menacingly across the room towards her. ‘Rather like a cornered rat.’
‘No—but that’s just it.’ Claudia stood her ground and squared her shoulders to him. ‘You never let me show my true colours.’
‘I was waiting to see what you’d do,’ Marco said. He was standing so close to her that she could feel his hot breath on her face, but he made no move to touch her. ‘I was simply giving you enough rope to hang yourself—I wanted to be there to enjoy that moment.’
‘You judged me by your own depraved standards!’ Claudia cried, raking her hands roughly through her hair to pull it back from her flushed face. ‘For no good reason whatsoever, you simply assumed I was capable of the same disgusting behaviour that you are.’
‘I had a good reason,’ Marco said through gritted teeth.
‘No. You didn’t.’ Claudia took a step closer to him and glared up into his face. ‘You dragged me maliciously into your sick vendetta because that was what you wanted. And you never allowed me the simple courtesy of defending myself against crimes I didn’t even know you believed me guilty of.’
‘What courtesy did Vasile give my family?’ Marco demanded. ‘Did he ask my father’s permission to seduce my mother into betraying him?’
‘That’s horrible,’ Claudia said. ‘But it has nothing to do with me.’
‘You’ve been involved with him,’ Marco accused.
‘No, I haven’t,’ Claudia declared. ‘Until a few days ago I hardly gave him any thought. I had no idea what he was like.’
‘Of course you knew,’ Marco said. ‘You told me he made your skin crawl.’
‘Just because I didn’t take to him on the few occasions I met him does not mean I knew what terrible things he was capable of,’ she said. ‘And Bianca didn’t know what he was like either.’
‘Don’t you dare bring Bianca into this,’ Marco said angrily.
‘Why shouldn’t I? This all started with Bianca.’ Claudia was picking up speed and there was no way she was going to let Marco dictate what she could and couldn’t talk about. ‘If you’d ever told her to watch out for Primo Vasile, she wouldn’t have been so vulnerable to him. She would never have talked to him or accepted a drink from him.’
‘Don’t tell me how to look after my sister,’ Marco grated. A surge of cold fury powered through him as he looked at Claudia. She would regret using his sister to argue against him.
‘Why not? You did a lousy job of it,’ she said. ‘You were so arrogant you assumed your protection of her was all encompassing. You tried to control her life—but instead you took her away from a true friend and kept her ignorant of a genuine threat to her safety.’
‘She would never have encountered Vasile if you hadn’t invited her to that party,’ Marco said. ‘She didn’t need to know about him and the level of depravity he stooped to when he destroyed our family.’
He glared at Claudia. How did she have the audacity to stand there and accuse him of failing his sister? She was the one who had done wrong. She was the betrayer—the snake in the grass.
‘Not when she was a child, I agree,’ Claudia said. ‘But, although she was still young when we met, she was a grown woman. There was every chance she was going to come across Vasile at some point.’
‘Not without a helping hand from you,’ Marco said, but a nasty stab of doubt pricked him.
Claudia was wrong. She had to be. He would have done everything to keep Bianca safe—she hadn’t needed to have her innocence sullied by knowledge of Vasile.
Except he hadn’t kept her safe. That harsh, uncompromising truth thrust itself into the front of his mind.
‘I knew nothing about it,’ Claudia said. ‘But a few days in your company and I’m starting to see how people like you and Vasile operate. I admit it’s perfectly feasible that somehow Vasile was tracking my friends and contacts. Maybe it was even Francesca who took me to the first event where I met Bianca. I don’t remember and it doesn’t matter.’ She took a breath and carried on. ‘If you were even halfway decent you would have genuinely given me the benefit of the doubt and talked to me. And I promise I would never have let Bianca come anywhere near Primo Vasile.’
‘Don’t compare me to a bastard like Vasile,’ Marco said, anger making his voice hard. ‘He is nothing but filth. The lowest sort of scum on this earth.’
‘You’re exactly the same,’ Claudia retorted. ‘You’ve been blinded by hate—it’s turned into an obsession. You’re so hell bent on revenge that you’ve lost any sense of right and wrong.’
‘I’m not like him.’ Marco rejected the idea furiously. ‘I would never do what he has done.’
‘You’ve already done it,’ Claudia cried. ‘You are guilty of all the same crimes.’
