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Angelina bit back a gasp. Her mother only glared.
Out in the cavernous hallways, empty of so much of their former splendor, the clock rang out the half hour.
Margrete stiffened. “It is time. Come now, girls. We must not keep destiny waiting, no matter how you feel about it.”
And there was no mutiny. No revolt.
They all lived in what remained of this sad place, after all. This pile of stone and regret.
Angelina rose obediently, falling into place behind her sisters as they headed out.
“To the death,” Petronella kept whispering to Dorothea, who was uncharacteristically silent.
But it would be worth the risk, Angelina couldn’t help but think—a sense of giddy defiance sweeping over her—if it meant she got to live, even briefly.
Somewhere other than here.
CHAPTER TWO
WHENAMANwas a known monster, there was no need for posturing.
Benedetto Franceschi did not hide his reputation.
On the contrary, he indulged it. He leaned into it.
He knew the truth of it, after all.
He dressed all in black, the better to highlight the dark, sensual features he’d been told many times were sin personified. Evil, even. He lounged where others sat, waved languid fingers where others offered detailed explanations, and most of the time, allowed his great wealth and the power that came with it—not to mention his fearsome, unsavory reputation—to do his talking for him.
But here he was again, parading out likel’uomo nero, the boogeyman, in a crumbling old house in France that had once been the seat of its own kind of greatness. He could see the bones of it, everywhere he looked. The house itself was a shambles. And what was left of the grounds were tangled and overgrown, gardeners and landscapers long since let go as the family fortune slipped away thanks to Anthony Charteris’s bad gambles and failed business deals.
Benedetto had even had what was, for him, an unusual moment of something like shame as he’d faced once more the charade he was reduced to performing, seemingly preying on the desperation of fools—
But all men were fools, in one form or another. Why not entertain himself while living out what so many called the Franceschi Curse?
The curse is not supposed to mean you,a voice inside him reminded him.But rather your so-called victims.
He shrugged that away, as ever, and attempted to focus on the task at hand. He had little to no interest in Anthony Charteris himself, or the portly little man’s near slavering devotion to him tonight. He had suffered through a spate of twittering on that he had only half listened to, and could not therefore swear had been a kind of “business” presentation. Whatever that meant. Benedetto had any number of fortunes and could certainly afford to waste one on a man like this. Such was his lot in life, and Charteris could do with it what he liked. Benedetto already failed to care in the slightest, and maybe this time, Benedetto would get what he wanted out of the bargain.
Surely number seven will be the charm,he assured himself.
Darkly.
His men had already gathered all the necessary background information on the once proud Charteris family and their precipitous slide into dire straits. Anthony’s lack of business acumen did not interest him. Benedetto was focused on the man’s daughters.
One of them was to be his future wife, whether he liked it or not.
But what he liked or disliked was one more thing he’d surrendered a long time ago.
Benedetto knew that the eldest Charteris daughter had been considered something of a catch for all of five minutes in what must seem to her now like another lifetime. She could have spent the last eight years as the wife of a very wealthy banker whose current life expectancy rivaled that of a fragile flower, meaning she could have looked forward to a very well-upholstered widowhood. Instead, she had refused the offer in the flush of Anthony’s brief success as a hotelier only to watch her father’s fortunes—and her appeal—decline rapidly thereafter.
The possibilities of further offers from wealthy men were scant indeed, which meant Dorothea would likely jump at the chance to marry him, his reputation notwithstanding.
Unlike her sister, the middle daughter had shared her favors freely on as many continents as she could access by private jet, as long as one of the far wealthier friends she cozied up to were game to foot the bill for her travels. She had been documenting her lovers and her lifestyle online for years. And Benedetto was no Puritan. What was it to him if a single woman wished to indulge in indiscriminate sex? He had always enjoyed the same himself. Nor was he particularly averse to a woman whose avariciousness trumped her shame.
Of them all, Petronella seemed the most perfect for him on paper, save the part of her life she insisted on living in public. He could not allow that and he suspected that she would not give it up. Which would not matter if she possessed the sort of curiosity that would lead her to stick her nose into his secrets and make a choice she couldn’t take back—but he doubted very much that she was curious about much outside her mobile.
The third daughter was ten years younger than the eldest, six years younger than the next, and had proved the hardest to dig into. There were very few pictures of her, as the family had already been neck deep in ruin by the time she might have followed in her sisters’ footsteps and begun to frequent the tiresome charity ball circuit of Europe’s elite families. What photographs existed dated back to her school days, where she had been a rosy-cheeked thing in a plaid skirt and plaits. Since graduating from the convent, Angelina had disappeared into the grim maw of what remained of the family estate, never to be heard from again.
