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And because he was haunted enough already.
“Where else would I bring them?” he asked softly.
“Tell me.” Her gaze was too bright, her voice too urgent. “Tell me who they were.”
“But surely you already know. Their names are in every paper, in every language spoken in Europe and beyond.”
“I want to hear you say them.”
And Benedetto wanted things he knew he could never have.
He wanted those nights in that stark conservatory in her father’s ruined house, the wild tangle of music like a cloud all around them, and her sweetness in his mouth. He had wished more than once over this past month that he could stop time and stay there forever, but of all the mad powers people whispered he possessed, that had never been one of them.
And innocence was too easily tarnished, he knew. Besides, Benedetto had long since resigned himself to the role he must play in this game. Monster of monsters. Despoiler of the unblemished.
He had long since stopped caring what the outside world thought of him. He had made an art out of shrugging off the names they called him. His wealth and power was its own fortress, and better still, he knew the truth. What did it matter what lesser men believed?
What mattered was the promise he’d made. The road he’d agreed to follow, not only to honor his grandfather’s wishes, but to pay a kind of penance along the way.
“And who knows?”his grandfather had said in his canny way. With a shrug. “Perhaps you will break your chains in no time at all.”
Benedetto had chosen his chains and had worn them proudly ever since. But today they felt more like a death sentence.
“My first wife was Carlota di Rossi,” he said now, glad that he had grown calloused to the sound of her name as it had been so long ago now. It no longer made him wince. “Her parents arranged the match with my grandfather when Carlota and I were children. We grew up together, always aware of our purpose on this planet. That being that we were destined to marry and carry on the dynastic dreams of our prominent families.”
“Did you love her?”
Benedetto smiled thinly. “That was never part of the plan. But we were friendly. Then they found her on what was meant to be our honeymoon. It was believed she had taken her own life, possibly by accident, with too many sleeping pills and wine.”
“Carlota,” Angelina murmured, as if the name was a prayer.
And Benedetto did not tell her the things he could have. The things he told no one, because what would be the point? No one wanted his memories of the girl with the big, wide smile. Her wild curls and the dirty jokes she’d liked to tell, just under her breath, at the desperately boring functions they’d been forced to attend together as teenagers. No one wanted a story about two only children who’d been raised in close proximity, always knowing they would end up married. And were therefore a kind of family to each other, in their way. The truth was Carlota was the best friend he’d ever had.
But no one wanted truth when there was a story to tell and sell.
Benedetto should have learned that by watching his parents—and their sensationalized deaths. Instead, he’d had to figure it out the hard way.
“Everyone agrees that my second wife was a rebound,” he said as if he was narrating a documentary of his own life. “Or possibly she was the mistress I’d kept before, during, and after my first marriage.”
He waited for Angelina to ask him which it was, but she didn’t. Maybe she didn’t want to know. And he doubted she would want to know the truth about the understanding he and Carlota had always had. Or how his second marriage had been fueled by guilt and rage because of it.
Benedetto knew his own story backward and forward and still he got stuck in the darkest part of it. In the man he’d allowed himself to become. A man much more like his detestable father than he’d ever imagined he could become.
When Angelina did not ask, he pushed on, his voice gritty. “Her name was Sylvia Toluca. She was an actress of some renown, at least in this country, and a disgrace to the Franceschi bloodline. But then, as most have speculated, that was likely her primary appeal. Alas, she went overboard on a stormy night in the Aegean after a well-documented row with yours truly and her body was never found.”
“Sylvia,” his new wife said. She cleared her throat. “And I find I cannot quite imagine you actually...rowing. With anyone.”
Benedetto detached himself from the wall and began to prowl toward her. His Angelina in that enormous white gown that bloomed around her like a cloud, with those dark pearls around her neck and eyes so blue they made the Italian sky seem dull by comparison.
“I was much younger then,” he told her, his voice a low growl. “I had very little control.”
He watched her swallow as if her throat hurt. “Not like now.”
“Nothing like now,” he agreed.
She swayed slightly on her feet, but straightened, still meeting his gaze. “I believe we’re up to number three.”
“Monique LeClair, Catherine DeWitt, Laura Seymour.” Angelina whispered an echo of each of their names as he closed the distance between them. “All heiresses in one degree or another, like you. There were varying lengths of courtship, but yes, I brought each of them here once we married. All lasted less than three months. All disappeared, presumed dead, though no charges were ever brought against me.”
