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But it opened soundlessly on a stair, very much like the one she climbed every day to her own tower.
Thunder rumbled outside, the storm coming closer. She couldn’t see a thing, so she inched inside, then reached out her hand into the darkness, sliding it along the stone, her whole body prickling with a kind of premonition. Or fear. Panic that she would thrust her hand into something terrible—
But she found a light switch where she expected to, in the same place it was in her stairwell. She flicked it on and then began to climb.
Each step felt like a marathon. So she went faster and faster, climbing high, until she reached another door at the top. And her heart was beating too hard for her to stop now. There was too much thunder outside and in her, too.
She threw open the second door and stepped inside, reaching and finding another light and switching it on.
And then she blinked. Once, then again, unable to believe her eyes. Angelina dropped her hand to her side, drifted in a few more steps, and looked around as if she expected something to change...
But nothing changed.
It was an empty room with windows over the sea, just like the tower room she spent her days in. There were stone walls, a bare floor, and a high ceiling where a light fixture hung, illuminating the fact that there was nothing here.
Benedetto had demanded she stay out of an empty room.
That sparked something in her, half a laugh, half a sob.
Angelina thought she heard a noise and she jumped, expectingsomething...But that was the trouble. She didn’t know what she wanted. And the room was empty. No monsters. No dead wives. No words scrawled on a paper, or carved into the stone. Just...nothing.
The same nothing these last two months had been.
That made something in her begin to throb, painfully.
She was disgusted with herself. She didn’t know if she wanted to go play her piano until she felt either settled or too wound up to breathe, or if she should crawl beneath that heavy coverlet again to dream her unsettling dreams.
But when she turned around to go, she stopped dead.
Because Benedetto stood in the doorway to the empty chamber, the expression on his face a far more terrible thunder than the storm outside.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
BENEDETTOHADSTAYEDaway for six weeks. It was easy enough to do, touring his various business concerns. Such a tour would normally have claimed all of his attention, but this time he had found himself distracted. Unable to focus on what was in front of him because he was far more concerned with what he’d left behind.
That hadn’t happened in as long as he could remember.
He wasn’t sure it had ever happened. But that was Angelina. She was singular even when she wasn’t with him.
And since his return to this castle he’d forgotten how to love the way he had as a child, he had become a ghost.
The irony wasn’t lost on him. That he should be the one to haunt these old halls, staying in the servants’ quarters and wandering in the shadows, both part of the castle and apart from it... Perhaps it was a preview of what awaited him.
Because the other option was that it was a memory of his time here when he was young and had seen thecastelloas his personal playground, magical and inviting in every respect, and that was worse, somehow.
But Angelina had cracked, as he’d known she would. He’d hoped her singularity would extend to this and she might be the one to resist temptation, but she didn’t. None of them managed it. Sooner or later, they ended up right here in this empty room above the sea, staring at him as if they truly expected him to come in wielding an ax.
He had come to enjoy, on some level, that they believed all the stories they heard about him and married him anyway. The triumph of his wealth over their fear.
It wasn’t as if any of them had touched him the way Angelina had. None of them had seen him, listened to him, or made love to him. None of them had played him music or treated him as if he was a man instead of a monster.
They had married his money. And they all came into this empty room, sooner or later, despite his request they stay away, expecting to come face-to-face with the monster they believed he was. The monster theyknewhe was.
Benedetto had long since stopped minding the way they looked at him when they saw him in the door, as if they couldseethe machete he did not carry with him.
This time, it hurt.
This time, it was a body blow.
