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Because it wasn’t long after those dreamy days that he’d understood different truths about this place. These ancient walls and the terrible price those who lived here had paid, and would pay. Some would call it a privilege. Some would see only the trappings, the art and the antiques, the marble gleaming in all directions. Some would assume it was the shine of such things that made the difference.
They never saw any blood on their hands. They never heard the screams from the now defunct dungeons. They walked the halls and thought only of glory, never noticing the ghosts that lurked around every corner.
Or the ghosts that lived in him.
But as Angelina played, Benedetto imagined that she could see him.
The real him.
The music crashed and soared, whispered then shouted. The hardest part of him stood at attention, aching for her touch—and yet feeling it, all the same, in the music she played, here in the tower he had made a music room, just for her.
She played and played, while outside the tide rose, the waves swelled, and the moon began to rise before the sun was down.
That, too, felt like a sign.
And when she stopped playing, it took Benedetto too long to realize it. Because the storm was inside him, then.Shewas. Her music filled every part of him, making him imagine for a moment that he was free.
That he could ever be free.
That this little slip of a woman, sheltered and sold off, held the key that could unlock the chains that had held him all his life.
It was a farce. He knew it was a farce.
And still, when she turned to look at him, her blue eyes dark with passion and need and all that same madness he felt inside him, he...forgot.
He forgot everything but her.
“Benedetto...” she began, her voice a harsh croak against the sudden, bruised silence.
“I know,” he heard himself say, as if from a distance. As if he was the man he’d imagined he’d become, so many years ago, instead of the man he became instead. The man he doubted his grandmother would recognize. “I know, little one.”
He pushed himself off from the wall and had the same sensation he always did, that thecastelloitself tried to hold on to him. Tried to tug him back, grip him hard, smother him, until he became one more stone statue.
Some years he felt more like stone than others, but not today.
But Angelina sat on the piano bench, her wedding gown flowing in all directions, and her chest heaving with the force of all the emotions she’d let sing through her fingers.
And she was so obviously, inarguablyalivethat he could not be stone. She was so vibrant, so filled with color and heat, that he could not possibly look down and find himself made into marble, no matter how the walls seemed to cling to him.
Benedetto crossed the floor, his gaze on hers as if the heat between them was a lifeline. As if she was saving him, here in this tower where no one was safe. And then he was touching her, his hands against her flushed cheeks, his fingers finding their way into the heavy, silvery mass of her blond hair.
At last,something in him cried.
“What are you doing?” she asked, though there was heat in her gaze.
“Surely you know,” Benedetto said as he swept her up into his arms. “Surely your mother—or the internet—should have prepared you.”
“Neither are as useful as advertised,” she said, her head against his shoulder. And that dry note in her voice gone husky.
He had not planned to take her, as he had not taken the rest. They were offerings to fate, not to him. They were meant to worry over the bed that made his chamber look blooded, like so much stage dressing. They were never meant to share it with him. Not like this, dressed like a bride and at the beginning of this bizarre journey.
But Angelina was nothing like the others.
She never had been.
She was music, and she was light. She was every dream he’d told himself wasn’t for him, could never be for him.
And every time he tasted her, he felt the chains that bound him weaken, somehow.
