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He dropped his hand from her arm, but only so he could glare down at her as if his will alone could transform her into whatever shape he wished. And staring up at him, Victoria couldn’t quite imagine how she’d ever seen anything in him but this unbending sternness. This ruthless disregard for anything but this, his favorite topic.
“But here you are, on Christmas, attempting to run off yet again,” Ago said with a quiet intensity that seemed to jar her, deep inside. “You do not wish to be treated like a pet, so perhaps you should cease behaving like a recalcitrant one. But it doesn’t matter. Because I am finished.”
She felt wobbly, and tried to lecture herself. She needed to straighten her knees. She needed to stand tall and proud as she faced whatever terrible thing he was about to say to her. “Finished?”
Victoria knew that he did not mean divorce. That was not who he was. But somehow, that was not as comforting as it ought to have been.
“You may think that this has been difficult for you, but you haven’t seen anything,” he told her, his voice grimmer with every word. “I spent my entire childhood watching as my mother was kept medicated. Under lock and key, not even permitted to visit a bathroom on her own, in the bad years. Do you imagine I would do anything less if I deemed it necessary?”
“My understanding is that your mother was very ill,” she managed to get out.
“Did she start that way or did she become that way?” Ago shook his head, his dark eyes flashing. “On some level, I thought my own father a monster for containing my mother here as he did, no matter how often he professed his love. But now I must assume he did what was required, no matter how unsavory. Because my mother knew nothing of a world like this. Of the things that the Accardi name asked of her.”
Victoria could hardly breathe, but he wasn’t finished.
“She wasn’t like you, Victoria,” Ago told her, as if he was already locking her away. “She was not specifically crafted for a life like this. I can find it within me to excuse my mother’s failures. But yours?” He shook his head. “I will not tolerate this. I will chain you up if I have to. I will do anything and everything to protect the legacy I’ve given the whole of my life to. I will not play these games with you.”
And everything around her seemed uneven, as if the stair she stood upon had become the sea, and wave after wave attempted to take her feet out from under her. But somehow, she managed to focus. On Ago, gleaming in the moonlight.
On Ago, who she loved despite herself.
“Your legacy,” she managed to say. “It’s really the only thing you speak of, isn’t it? And yet you keep missing the point.”
“Wrong again,” he growled at her.
“All of this is nothing,” she told him. Her tongue felt fuzzy. But she stepped back, off that last step, so she could swing her arm wide to take in the villa, him, and all of Tuscany slumbering in the moonlight outside. “It’s a house. It’sstuff.And most of all it’s stories that people told you, that you accepted whole. Uncritically. But at the end of the day, what can any of that matter?”
“At the end of the day,” he said, with great deliberation, “it’s the only thing that matters. And I will succeed in preserving it if it is the last thing I do.”
“But that’s the thing, Ago,” she said, even as she could no longer tell the difference between the floor beneath her and the walls all around. Even though she could no longer seem to focus on him the way she knew she should. “You’re going to fail. You already have. Because the only thing in this life that really matters is love, and you think it’s a weakness.”
Victoria wanted to say more. She wanted to tell him so many things. That she loved him anyway, against her own interests. That she thought she would have loved him even if there was no baby, and no reason for them to be thrown together like this. She wanted to tell him that she wished they could start over, way back a year ago, when Ago had come to her father’s house for what she realized only in retrospect was an audition.
What would have happened if she’d followed that strange compulsion she’d had that night? If she’d ignored her father’s posturing and told this man, no matter how forbidding he looked, that he was the only one of the many suitors her father had made her perform in front of that actually made her feel something?
She wanted to touch him, one last time, so she could carry it with her when she left.
But she didn’t do any of those things.
Because everything inside her seemed to scrape to a terrible stop. A wave of something terrible shuddered through her.
And the last thing Victoria saw was a look of terrible alarm on Ago’s face before everything went black.
CHAPTER TEN
AGOSAWTHEcolor drain from her face, and was moving without thought, lunging across the very little space between them to catch Victoria in his arms as she toppled toward the floor.
And when he could not get her eyes to open, nor any response, he began to shout.
Like the world was ending.
Because that was how it felt.
Especially when his own harsh words echoed inside him.
It seemed to take lifetimes for his staff to respond. To catch up with him as he strode through the house and out into the courtyard, headed for the stables where the medical team was stationed.
Lifetimes with her lifeless form in his arms while inside, something beat at him, low and hard, shame and horror, because he knew this was his fault.
