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How many of them had locked their women away? Leaving them behind as they marched off to this crusade or that very important business negotiation, or whatever it was men did across time to convince themselves their lives were greater than what they left behind.
On those days, the portraits she found online of the stranger she’d married felt like an assault. As if he was taunting her from London, Paris, Milan.
And all the while, she played.
Her tower was an escape. The safest place in the castle. She played and she played, and sometimes, she would stagger to the chaise, exhausted, so she could sleep a bit, then start to play all over again.
And if she didn’t know better, if food didn’t appear at regular intervals, hot tea and hard rolls, or sometimes cakes and coffee, she might have imagined that she was all alone in this lonely place. Like some kind of enchanted princess in a half-forgotten fairy tale.
She played and she played.
And the weeks inched by.
One month. Another.
“Sweet God,” said Petronella, when Angelina was finally stir crazy enough to call her parents’ home. “I convinced myself he’d killed you already and was merely hiding the evidence.”
“Don’t be melodramatic,” Angelina replied primly, because that was easier. And so familiar, it actually felt good. “He’s done nothing of the kind.”
Or not in the way that Petronella meant it, anyway. They put her on speaker, and she regaled her mother and sisters with tales of the castle. She’d tagged along on enough of Signora Malandra’s tours by then that she could have given them herself, and so spared no flourish or aside as she shared the details of the notorious Castello Nero with her family.
Because she knew they would think wealth meant happiness.
Because to them, it did.
“Everywhere I look there’s another fortune or two,” she assured her mother. “It’s really spectacular.”
“I should hope so,” Margrete said, in her chilliest voice. “That was the bargain we made, was it not?”
And when she hung up, Angelina was shocked to find herself...sentimental. Nostalgic, even, for those pointless nights huddled together in the drawing room of the dilapidated oldchâteau, waiting to be sniped at and about. Night after night after night.
Who could have imagined she would miss that?
She would have sworn she could never possibly feel that way. But then again, she thought as she moved from one well-stocked library to the next—because the castle boasted three separate, proper libraries that would take a lifetime or two to explore—she was more emotional these days than she’d ever been in her life.
She’d woken up the other morning crying, though she couldn’t have said why. She slept in that absurd bed every night, almost as if it was an act of defiance. But she couldn’t say her dreams were pleasant. They were dark and red, and she woke with strange sensations in her body, especially in her belly.
Angelina was glad she couldn’t remember the one that had rendered her tearful. Though the truth was, everything seemed to make her cry lately. Even her own music.
That night, she followed her usual routine. She played until her fingers hurt, then she staggered down the stairs from her tower to find a cold dinner waiting for her. She ate curled up on a chilly chair out on the balcony while the sea and wind engaged in a dramatic sort of dance in front of her. There was a storm in the air, she could sense it. Smell it, even.
When she could take the slap of the wind no longer, she moved inside. She was barefoot, her hair a mess, and frozen straight through when she left the master suite and walked down that hallway. The key he’d left her hung around her neck as ordered, the chain cool against her skin and the key itself heavy and warm between her breasts.
And she stood there, on the other side of that door, and stared at it.
Some nights she touched it. Other nights she pounded on it with her fists. Once she’d even gone so far as to stick the key into the lock, though she hadn’t turned it.
Not yet.
“I am not Pandora,” she muttered to herself.
As always, her voice sounded too loud, too strange in the empty hallway.
She had no idea how long she stood there, only that the world grew darker and darker on the other side of the windows, and she’d neglected to put on any lights.
When lightning flashed outside, it lit everything up. It seemed to sizzle inside of her like a dare.
A challenge.
