Obviously, the fearsome Beast was gravely ill. Possibly, he was dying. The tone in all those incomprehensible voices was of concern and desperation. There were arguments and noises of frustration.
She should have been glad. Even if it meant her death—and of course, if the don died, they would kill her for it—she should have been glad. Not quite a week earlier, she had snatched the scissors from her father’s table and run after the don, with every intention of killing him on the street and a complete understanding that she’d be killed so quickly afterward she might have fallen on his body.
Yet now, she wasn’t glad. She didn’t want his death on her conscience, or the sin of it on her soul.
That was it, this guilt she’d struggled against the past day or so: she’d simply realized the sin of it. She was not a murderer. It had nothing to do with the man; nothing in him inspired any soft feeling. She simply regretted the sin. Wrath was a cardinal sin, after all.
Mirabella scoffed at herself and shook her head. She couldn’t make herself quite believe that. Wrath was her most powerful emotion, and its sinfulness had never pricked her conscience much before. Nor lust, nor pride. She was full to the brim with sinfulness, truly, without much compunction about it.
But she did not want to be responsible for Paolo Romano’s death. Not anymore.
The why of it didn’t matter.
Eventually, the silent Maria brought dinner to her room, but Gus blocked the door and was far too big for Mirabella to have seen around him.
Maria left, and Mirabella considered the food on the tray: chicken cacciatore on linguine, bread, a small glass carafe of red wine, and another, larger carafe of water. They were feeding her well.
She tried to eat, but the busyness outside the room continued: talking, creaking floorboards, doors opening and closing. Hours, it had been going on. Hours.
And then it was quiet. Mirabella stood and went to the door, pressing her ear against it so that she might hear any whispers. Though she’d heard few Italian words this afternoon and evening, she’d been able to comprehend their urgency. The quiet told her nothing and made her worry more.
But the quiet continued, and finally she gave up and returned to her meal. Without an appetite, she picked fitfully at the dish for a while and then left it. Taking up the water carafe and glass and putting it on the bedside table, she sat up in bed and opened Little Women again.
She needed to be somewhere other than here, if only in the pages of a story.
She was finishing Part One of the novel when she heard talking in the hallway again, and the floor creaking outside her door. Then a key pushed into the lock and turned, and the door swung open.
Dr. Goldman, the doctor who had cleaned and stitched her uncle’s stump and taken care of him afterward, and who had wrapped her ankle after her last failed escape, stood there, with Gus right behind him. Gus looked furious. The doctor looked exhausted. His suitcoat was draped over one arm, and his bag dangled from the other hand. There was blood on his shirt.
In Italian with another strange accent, he said, “Hello, dear. How are you?”
Dr. Goldman was a good man. Paolo had sent her to him and paid for her uncle’s care.
The man who’d removed his hand had paid for good care afterward. She hadn’t understood it then, and didn’t now, but now her mind wanted to put that fact with the other strange things she’d learned about Paolo Romano that suddenly made her question how terrible he was.
The doctor smiled grimly. “I’m told you had a spill today. Are you hurt?”
“No, sir,” she answered, despite the sharp ache in her ankle and dull throb in her head. “Thank you.”
He looked back at Gus, who grunted and pulled the door closed, leaving the doctor alone in the room with her.
Facing Mirabella, he said, “Do you mind if I have a look, see how your ankle is faring?”
She didn’t mind. Moreover, here was a man who might know what was going on—who most likely knew everything that was going on, because he’d obviously been called to care for Paolo. So she shook her head and sat down on the bed.
He pulled the hard chair over and lifted her leg, setting it on his lap.
For all the comforts the men had returned to her, for the clean clothes and hair care items she’d been given, they hadn’t given her stockings or shoes.
Dr. Goldman examined her ankle, pressing it gently at a few points. Mirabella didn’t show pain, though a few points were quite sore.
“The sprain doesn’t seem much worse, but there’s a touch of new bruising across the bridge of your foot here. I’m going to wrap it again, if you don’t mind.”
“I don’t mind,” she said, and he opened his bag.
“How are you, Mirabella? Have they been harsh with you?”
She answered him honestly. “No. I miss my father, though. I worry he’s worried.”
“He is. Quite. But I’ll see him and tell him you’re well.”
“Thank you.”
Mirabella wanted to ask him why he hadn’t called the police on her behalf, but she knew the answer. After only a few weeks in this country, this city, she’d seen that the police here were as corrupt, if not more, than the police in Firenze, and no help at all to someone who couldn’t pay. No doubt Paolo paid.
Instead, she asked, “How is he?”
“Your father? He’s well, considering.”
“I’m glad. But how is he?”
The question made Dr. Goldman’s head snap up, and he stared at her through his spectacles. “You mean Paolo? Don Romano?”
Suddenly abashed, Mirabella couldn’t hold his shocked gaze. Her eyes slid to the coverlet as she nodded. “What I did … I don’t want him to die.”
“Neither do I.” He sighed. “I know he wouldn’t want me to tell you, and I’m sure none of the others would, either, but … he’s not well. There was infection right away, and he looked like he’d beaten it, but then …” another sigh, and the doctor went back to wrapping her ankle. “The infection is back, and worse than before.”
“Will he die? Have I killed him?”
“I don’t know, dear.” Finished with the wrapping, he put the remaining supplies in his bag and then rested his hand on her leg. “I know why you did what you did. I understand. I think Paolo, deep in his heart, understands, too. I know him. In some ways, I think I know him better than anyone else in Manhattan. He was a good young man when I met him. A very angry young man, but someone who wanted to do good. To take care of his family and do what was right.
I only wanted to protect you. I only ever wanted to keep you safe.
The words he’d rasped out like dying gasps echoed in her mind. He’d been out of his senses and speaking to someone he’d thought she was.
“Who is Rina?” she asked the doctor.
Again, she’d surprised him. “Caterina. His younger sister. They came from Sicily together—oh, six years ago, I think it was. Yes. Now that I think of it, six years almost exactly. How do you know of her?”
Not knowing how to explain, Mirabella didn’t. “Where is she?”
He hesitated, then answered, “On Long Island, with her husband and children. They went from here a few years ago.”
I only wanted to protect you. I only ever wanted to keep you safe.
She needed no more information to be somehow certain they were estranged. That was his regret: Paolo had done something in protection of his sister that she’d objected to—or he’d failed to protect her from some kind of harm—and now they were estranged. The only family he’d had in New York.
I only wanted to protect you. I only ever wanted to keep you safe.
The doctor grasped her hands and claimed her attention. He gazed at her somberly. “I don’t think it’s right that he’s keeping you here, but I think under his charge, you’re safe. But Mirabella, if he dies … I worry for you.”
“If he dies, I will have killed him. I’ll deserve what they do to me.”
“No, I don’t think you will.” With a qu
ick squeeze, he let her hands go and dropped the subject. “Any other injuries?”
She let him check the lump at the back of her head. He pressed on it, too, finding tender spots, and asked her to follow his finger with her eyes as it moved around. Then he proclaimed the bump minor and prescribed resting with a cool, wet cloth.
As he was ready to go, before he went to the door and called for Gus, he leaned close and said, “If he dies, I’ll do everything I can to get you out of here. I promise.”
Mirabella thanked him, but she wasn’t sure she’d try to run if it happened.
Fate seemed to operate on a pendulum, swinging to and fro, giving and taking.
Paolo had chopped off her uncle’s hand, but that hadn’t been the end of it. Her uncle had lost his business and then his life, all on the same swing.
Then it had swung in the other direction. Mirabella had stabbed Paolo for revenge—truly, out of a blast of pure rage and hatred more than an intentional attempt at revenge. If the pendulum kept moving in that direction, he would die.
And then it would swing back, and come for her.
IX
Days passed.
Each of Mirabella’s days was the same: a meal brought to her three times a day. An opportunity to use the bathroom a few times a day. An opportunity to bathe and wear fresh clothing every few days.
The same men guarded her, the same woman brought her food and cleaned her room, but no one spoke to her more than the few words required to convey a need or make a demand.
The house itself had gone strangely silent, despite the movement of people in it. There was a sense that something dark and significant loomed over them all.
Mirabella thought the don was dying, and doing it slowly and painfully.
The pendulum hovered over him, and her, poised in that moment of potential, the peak of its arc, when it would shift its direction.
She spent her days in quiet suspense, waiting for word that he’d died and she’d be made to pay for it. With nothing else to do but worry, she read all three of the books they’d given her repeatedly. When she asked for others, she was ignored. Soon she’d have Little Women memorized, but she flipped to the front and started again as soon as she reached the last word.
Dr. Goldman came one more time to check her ankle and declare her sufficiently healed, but this time, he wouldn’t give her any information about the don. He only promised, again, to do what he could to save her if Paolo died.
Which meant he hadn’t yet, but still might.
At night, Mirabella lay in the dark and quiet and tried to pick apart her predicament, to understand each element and find the right solution—if there was a solution at all. She was worried about her father. Dr. Goldman had spoken to him and told him she was well and unharmed, but as each day passed, she wondered when he might try something reckless to help her. She was worried about herself, too, of course. Each day might be her last, and she wouldn’t welcome death. There was a whole life yet to live.
And she was worried about Paolo Romano.
That worry consumed her wakeful nights more than any other, as she tried to understand its root. Somehow, while he’d been holding her captive, her hatred of him had cooled. They’d had very little contact, and he’d hardly been warm and welcoming in those brief events, yet she’d begun to see him as a complicated man rather than a monster.
It dawned on her that she’d stopped thinking of him as the Beast, and she couldn’t remember when that had happened. But he was Paolo to her now, or Don Romano.
She was worried that he’d die, because of what that would mean for her, yes. For her life, and for her soul.
But she was also simply worried for him. She wanted him to survive. She didn’t want to be responsible for his death—and she simply wanted him to live.
Facing that truth, Mirabella tried to find the sense in it, the reason for the change in her feeling. One idea rose to her mind every time until it was the only clear answer.
She recognized him.
She was angry. She was capable of brutal violence—obviously, she was.
And so was he.
Hot impulse had not been the driving force when he’d severed her uncle’s hand. His anger was stony and cold, where hers was like a fire in her veins. But she felt sure, each tiny sliver of insight into the man who had become her nemesis convinced her more, that his stone had been earned. His rage had once been hot and raw.
He’d harnessed it, made it something that worked for him, not against him.
And she admired that.
His argument that Uncle Fredo had gambled away his hand hadn’t convinced her, but she’d come to understand it. It was Newton’s Laws of Motion enacted in vengeance:
One: inertia.
Two: acceleration.
Three: For every action, there is an equal an opposite reaction.
It was the pendulum: cause and effect, act and retaliation, and they were both swinging the same arc, reaching greater extremes with each pass, trapped together in inertia.
Until he died, and she was punished for it.
Eight days after Paolo collapsed on her, two weeks after she’d run after him with her father’s shears grasped like a dagger, the lock turned in the door to Mirabella’s bedroom prison. When the door swung open, Paolo Romano stood at the threshold.
He’d lost obvious weight; his cheekbones jutted from his face like wings, and his collar gapped around his neck. But he was fully dressed, in collar and cuffs, and a sharply tailored suit. His skin was pale but not sallow. He looked depleted but no longer truly ill.
There were lines on his face now, she noticed. Faint creases at and under his eyes.
Her surprise and relief loosened her tongue, and she spoke first. “Don Romano. You look …” Not well. Not healthy. But not dying. Unable to choose the right word, she let his imagination choose one.
“Hello, Mirabella. Your father is downstairs. Would you like to visit with him, as I promised?”
That surprise coming on the heels of the first surprise, after long days where not even Aldo would talk with her, made a dam in her mind, and for a moment she wasn’t sure she could believe what she was hearing. “My father is here?”
“He is. Come.” Don Romano held out his hand.
She was too stunned to do anything but take it.
As he drew her from the room, he said, “You have no shoes?”
Looking down, she considered her bare toes showing beneath the hem of her skirt. “No, nor stockings. They took them the last time I tried to run.”
“How many times did you try?”
Mirabella thought back. “Six.”
Paolo smiled then, and Mirabella’s breath caught. She’d never seen him do it before. All the cold stone cracked and shattered, and he was a man—young and handsome, despite his scars. That smile reached his eyes and gave them life.
It made him beautiful.
“Did you stop trying because you had no shoes?” he asked, still smiling.
“No. I stopped because it was a waste of energy. To get out of this I need to use my mind and not my legs—” she cut herself off abruptly, shocked that she’d said that out loud, without the slightest hesitation.
That smile had utterly disarmed her.
It faded, but the warmth in his eyes did not. “You have wisdom for someone so young.”
She didn’t think he was so very much older—ten years, perhaps—but she didn’t say so. With a tip of her head, she acknowledged the compliment.
“Since you’ve chosen wisdom over recklessness, I’ll make sure there are shoes and stockings for you this afternoon,” he said and cast a glance at Gus, standing outside her room. Gus nodded, taking it as an order.
Then the don ushered her along the corridor to the top of the staircase. He set his hand at the small of her back; its warmth seemed to radiate widely around that touch, but it was merely warmth, not feverish heat. He was recovering.
They walked down slowly, but he didn’t show any disc
omfort in the movement.
As they neared the foot, her father came near.
“Mira,” he said filling her name with love and tears. “Thank God.”
“Hello, Pappa.”
She was in his arms before she could step down from the last stair.
“An hour,” Paolo said as Mirabella and her father held each other. “The parlor is empty. You’ll have as much privacy there as I can afford you to have, but there are guards, so remember your wisdom, Mirabella. And your promise, Luciano. I’ll be in my office.”
With that, Paolo left them. Mirabella and her father watched him cross the foyer and go through a door.
One of Paolo’s guards was seated on a cushioned bench near the front door. He held the newspaper up in his hands, but she entertained no delusion that he wasn’t paying keen attention.
Her father clasped her face in both his hands. “How are you, my love? I’ve been sick with worry.”
“I’m well, Pappa. Not hurt. They’ve kept me comfortable.” That was true enough. She took his hand and led him into the parlor.
Paolo had been truthful—there was no one in the large room. It was arranged more like the main area of a men’s club than a private parlor, with seating clusters and two substantial tables that looked as if they could have been meant for gaming or dining. Maps in heavy frames served as the wall décor. Mirabella studied the nearest—a large map of Sicily. The others were all maps of areas of mainland Italy, she realized. From the toe of its boot to the top of its cuff.
She found a map of Tuscany. Home.
These weeks as Paolo’s prisoner had folded Mirabella’s sense of time somewhat. She’d been able to keep track of the passing days, but removed from the life those days had lived, she had a disorienting sense of the world having stood still, even as the days and nights cycled. Now, studying the map of a world familiar to her, she tried to think how long it had been since she’d seen it.
How long since they’d left Firenze?
Less than two months, she thought.
Yet that girl she’d been seemed lifetimes away.
“Mira,” her father said, standing beside her. “Tell me what has happened. What can I do?”
Il Bestione (The Golden Door Duet Book 2) Page 10