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Benedetto had already dismissed her. He expected her to be callow and dull, having been cloistered her whole life. What else could she be?
He had met the inimitable Madame Charteris upon arrival tonight. The woman had desperately wanted him to know that, once upon a time, she had been a woman of great fortune and beauty herself.
“My father was Sebastian Laurent,” she had informed him, then paused. Portentously. Indicating that Benedetto was meant to react to that. Flutter, perhaps. Bend a knee.
As he did neither of those things, ever, he had merely stared at the woman until she had colored in some confusion, then swept away.
Someday, Benedetto would no longer have to subject himself to these situations. Someday, he would be free...
But he realized, as the room grew silent around him, that his host was peering at him quizzically.
Someday, sadly, was not today.
Benedetto took his time rising, and not only because he was so much bigger than Charteris that the act of rising was likely to be perceived as an assault. He did not know if regret and self-recrimination had shrunk the man opposite him, as it should have if there was any justice, but the result was the same. And Benedetto was not above using every weapon available to him without him having to do anything but smile.
Anyone who saw that smile claimed they could see his evil, murderous intent in it. It was as good as prancing about with a sign above his head that saidLEAVE ME ALONE OR DIE, which he had also considered in his time.
He smiled now, placing his drink down on the desk before him with a click that sounded as loud as a bullet in the quiet room.
Charteris gulped. Benedetto’s smile deepened, because he knew his role.
Had come to enjoy it, in parts, if he was honest.
“Better not to do something than to do it ill,”his grandfather had often told him.
“If you’ll c-come with me,” Charteris said, stuttering as he remembered, no doubt, every fanciful tale he’d ever heard about the devil he’d invited into his home, “we can go through to the dining room. Where all of my daughters await you.”
“With joy at their prospects, one assumes.”
“N-naturally. Tremendous joy.”
“And do you love them all equally?” Benedetto asked silkily.
The other man frowned. “Of course.”
But Benedetto rather thought that a man like this loved nothing at all.
After all, he’d been fathered, however indifferently, by a man just like this.
He inclined his head to his host, then followed the small man out of what he’d defiantly announced was his “office” when it looked more like one of those dreadful cubicles Benedetto had seen in films of lowbrow places, out into the dark, dimly lit halls of this cold, crumbling house.
Once upon a time, the Charteris home had been a manor.A château,he corrected himself, as they were in France. Benedetto could fix the house first and easily. That way, no matter what happened with his newest acquisition, her father would not raise any alarms. He would be too happy to be restored to a sense of himself to bother questioning the story he received.
Benedetto had played this game before. He liked to believe that someday there would be no games at all.
But he needed to stop torturing himself withsomeday,because it was unlikely that tonight would be any different. Wasn’t that what he’d learned? No matter how much penance he paid, nothing changed.
Really, he should have been used to it. He was. It was this part that he could have done without, layered as it was with those faint shreds of hope. All the rest of it was an extended, baroque reconfirmation that he was, if not precisely the monster the world imagined him, a monster all the same.
It was the hope that made him imagine otherwise, however briefly.
This was not the first time he’d wished he could excise it with his own hands, then cast it aside at last.
The house was not overly large, especially with so much of it unusable in its current state, so it took no time at all before they reached the dining room on the main floor. His host offered an unctuous half bow, then waved his arm as if he was an emcee at a cabaret. A horrifying notion.
Benedetto prowled into the room, pleased to find that this part of the house, unlike the rest with its drafts and cold walls despite the season, was appropriately warm.
Perhaps too warm, he thought in the next moment. Because as he swept his gaze across the room, finding the oldest and middle daughter to be exactly as he’d expected, it was as if someone had thrown gas on a fire he could not see. But could feel inside of him, cranked up to high.
