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He was married for the seventh time. The last time, he dared to hope, though there was no reason to imagine he could make it so.
There was no reason to imagine this would be anything but the same old grind. The lies, the distrust. In his head he saw a key in a lock, and a bare white room with nothing but the sea outside it.
Oh, yes. He knew how this would end.
But despite everything, something in him wished it could be otherwise. Her music sang in him, and though he knew better, it felt like hope.
Once the ceremony was over and Angelina was his wife, he saw no reason to subject himself to Charteris or his family any longer. With any luck, neither he nor Angelina would ever see any of them again—for one reason or another.
He left Angelina to the tender mercies of her mother and sisters for the last time. He cut through the small gathering, ignoring the guests that Charteris had invited purely to boast about his sudden reversal of fortune, something that was easy to do when they all shrank from him in fear. And when he reached the place where Anthony was holding court, he scared off the cluster around him with a single freezing stare.
“My man of business will contact you,” he told his seventh father-in-law with as little inflection as possible. “He will be your point person from now on for anything involving the house or the settlement I’ve arranged. Personal communications from you will not be necessary. And will no longer be accepted.”
“Yes, yes,” Charteris brayed pompously, already florid of cheek and glassy of eye, which told Benedetto all he needed to know about how this man had lost the fortune he’d been born with and the one he’d married into, as well. “I was thinking we might well have a ball—”
“You may have whatever you wish,” Benedetto said with a soft menace that might as well have been a growl. “You may throw a ball every weekend. You may build achâteauin every corner of France, for all I care. The money is yours to do with as you wish. But what you will not have is any familiarity with me. Or any access to your daughter without my permission. Do you understand?”
He could see the older man process the rebuke like the slap it was, and then, just as quickly, understand that it would not affect his wallet. He did not actually shrug. But it was implied.
“I wish you and my daughter every happiness,” Charteris replied.
He raised his glass. Benedetto inclined his head, disgusted.
And then he went to retrieve his seventh wife.
As he drew closer to the little knot she stood in with her mother and sisters, he felt something pierce his chest at the sight of her. Gleaming. Angelic.
All that, and the way she played the piano made him hard.
And that was nothing next to her taste.
Something in him growled like the sort of monster he tried so hard to keep hidden in public. Because people so readily saw all kinds of fiends when they looked at him—why should he confirm their worst suspicions?
“Come,” he said, when his very appearance set them all to wide-eyed silence. “It is time to take you to my castle, wife.”
He watched the ripple of that sentence move through the four of them. He could see the wordsButcher of Castello Nerohanging in the air around them.
And whatever he thought of Anthony Charteris, whatever impressions he’d gleaned of these women over the past month, they all paled in unison now.
Because everyone knew, after all, what happened to a Franceschi bride. Everyone knew the fate that awaited her.
For the first time, the things others thought about him actually...got to him.
Benedetto held out his hand.
The Charteris sisters remained white-faced. Their mother was made of stouter stuff, however, and the look she fixed on him might have been loathing, for all the good it would do her.
But it was Angelina who mattered. Angelina whose cheeks did not pale, but flushed instead with a brighter color he knew well by now.
Angelina, his seventh bride, who murmured something soothing in the direction of her mother and sisters and then slid her delicate hand into his.
Then she let him lead her from her father’s house, never to return.
Not if he had anything to say about it.
He assisted her into the back of the gleaming black car that waited for them, joining her in the back seat. He lounged there, as the voluminous skirts of her soft white wedding gown flowed in every direction, like seafoam.
Benedetto found he liked thinking of her that way, like a mermaid rising from the deep. A creature of story and fable.
