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“It is true. You might be. I used nothing to prevent it.”
“Neither did I. There seemed little need when my life expectancy was all of three months.”
And she stared at him, the rebuke like a slap.
He felt it more like a kick to the gut.
“What if I’m pregnant and still choose to disappear tonight?” she asked after a moment, sounding unnervingly calm. “What then? Will you surrender your own child? Or will you force me to stay here despite the choice I make?”
He shook his head, everything in him going cold. “I told you, you are unique. This has never happened before. That doesn’t mean that the possibility is unforeseen. Your choice will hold, no matter your condition.”
“You would give up your own child,” she murmured. Her eyes widened. “But I thought I was the martyr here.”
Benedetto realized his hands were in fists. He didn’t know which was worse, that he would have to live without her, which he should have figured out how to handle already, or that it was distinctly possible that she would go off into whatever new life she wished and raise his child without him.
But the rules to this game had been always been perfectly clear.
He and his grandfather had laid them out together.
Half in penance, half for protection. He had already lost two wives. Why not more?
Benedetto had never imagined his heart would be involved. He’d been certain he’d buried that along with his grandmother.
“You must choose,” he gritted out, little as he wanted to.
And for moment, he thought maybe they were dead, after all. Two ghosts running around and around in this terrible castle, cut off from the rest of the world. That the two of them had done this a thousand times before.
Because that was the way she looked at him. As if she’d despaired of him in precisely this way too many times to count already.
He could have sworn he heard her playing then, though there was no piano in sight. Still, the blood in his veins turned to symphonies instead, and he was lit up and lost.
For the first time since he’d started this terrible journey, he honestly didn’t know if he could complete it. Or even if he could continue.
And all the while, his seventh wife—and first love, for all the good it would do him in this long, involved exercise in futility—gazed back at him, an expression on her face he’d never seen before.
It made everything in him tighten, like hands around his throat.
“What if I choose a third option instead?” she asked.
Quietly. So very quietly.
Outside, the sea raged and the sky cracked open, again and again. But all he could focus on was Angelina. And those unearthly blue eyes that he was sure could see straight through him and worse, always had.
“There is no third option,” he gritted out.
“But of course there is,” she said.
And she smiled the way she had when he’d been deep inside her, on that night that shouldn’t have happened. The night he couldn’t forget.
He heard a great roaring thing and knew, somehow, that it was happening inside him.
“I could stay here,” Angelina said with that same quiet strength. “I could have your babies and truly be your wife. No games. No locked towers or forbidden keys. Just you, Benedetto. And me. And whatever children we make between us.”
He couldn’t speak. The world was a storm, and he was a part of it, and only Angelina stood apart from it all. A beacon in all the dark.
“We don’t have to play games. We don’t have to do...whatever this is.” Angelina stood there andshinedat him. He’d never seen that shade of blue before. His heart had never felt so full. “We can do what we want instead.”
No one, in the whole of Benedetto’s life, had ever looked at him the way she did. As if he was neither her savior nor her hero nor even her worst nightmare. He could have handled any of those. All of them.
