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So. She’d effectively been abandoned by the one person in the world who should have looked after her. At sixteen.
‘What did you do?’ he asked quietly.
She lifted a shoulder. ‘Eventually I was evicted from our apartment. No one seemed to notice I was gone.’
He felt as if a fist was closing around his ribs and squeezing, and he wanted to reach out, touch that petal-soft cheek. Tell her that he would have noticed. That he would have looked for her.
But then she glanced up at him again, a fierce expression in her eyes. ‘Don’t you dare pity me. I survived on my own quite well, thank you very much.’
‘Survived, maybe,’ he said. ‘But life isn’t just survival, Leonie.’
‘It’s better than being dead.’
Proud, stubborn girl.
‘You should have had more than that.’ This time it was his turn to study her. ‘You deserved more than that.’
Colour flooded her pale cheeks, shock flickering in her eyes. ‘Yes, well, I didn’t get it. And you didn’t answer my question.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Mine were not good parents.’
She blinked, as if she hadn’t expected him to capitulate so quickly. ‘Oh. Do you have brothers or sisters?’
‘No.’
‘So it was just you? All alone in this big castle by yourself?’ There was a certain knowledge in her eyes, an understanding that he’d never thought he’d find in anyone else.
She knew loneliness—of course she did.
‘Yes.’ He lifted a shoulder. ‘I was alone in this big castle by myself. This mausoleum was my inheritance.’
‘Is that what it felt like? A mausoleum?’
‘Don’t you feel it?’ He moved his gaze around the soaring ceilings and bare stone walls. ‘All that cold stone and nothing but dead faces everywhere. I never come here if I can help it. In fact, I haven’t been here in fifteen years.’
There was silence, but he could feel her looking at him, studying him like an archaeologist studying a dig site, excavating him.
‘What happened here, Cristiano?’
That was hisgatita. Always so curious and always so blunt.
‘Do I really have to go into my long and tedious history?’ he drawled. ‘Don’t you want to see where you’re going to be sleeping?’
‘No. And isn’t your tedious history something I should know? Especially if I’m going to be marrying you.’
He looked at her. She was so small; she was on the stair above him but she was still only barely level with him. He didn’t want to talk about this any more. He wanted his hands on her instead. He wanted her warmth melting away the relentless cold of this damn tomb.
‘What is there to say?’
He kept his gaze on her, hiding nothing. Because she was right. She should know his history. So she knew what to be wary of.
‘It was my seventeenth birthday, but my parents had some government party they had to attend. I was lonely. I was angry. And it was the second birthday in a row that they’d missed. So I took a match to my father’s library and set it on fire.’
Leonie’s gaze widened. ‘What?’
‘You think that’s the worst part? It’s not.’ He smiled, but it was bitter. ‘One of my father’s staff called him to let him know thecastillowas on fire. So he and my mother rushed back from the party. But he drove too fast and there was an accident. They were both killed.’
She hadn’t understood until that moment why he so obviously hated this place, with its ancient stones and the deep silence of history. She’d thought it was wonderful—a fortress that no one could get into. A place of security and safety. She’d never been anywhere so fascinating and she wanted to explore it from top to bottom.
