What had she done to earn these people’s brutally benign disfavor? Something prurient, certainly. Something bold, perhaps. Whatever it was, it made Mirabella want to like her a little bit.
Except that she kept touching Paolo and beaming bright smiles at him. It was one thing to bestow a smile or two, but something entirely different to set her hand on his arm, or his thigh, while she did so.
Mirabella considered her place setting and evaluated the pieces for weapons. She supposed a stabbing would be impolite. But perhaps a face full of flavorless soup?
“Miss Montanari, is it?” The sturdy middle-aged woman at her side asked.
Turning her attention from Paolo and the woman who seemed to wish to be her rival, Mirabella turned to woman beside her. “Yes. Mirabella.”
The offer of her first name earned her a prim smile. “Your accent is lovely, dear. Have you been long in the country?”
The whole meal went like that: Mirabella and Paolo angry and ignoring each other, Paolo flirting with Miss Barton, and Mirabella fielding questions from Miss Pritchard and her friend, Miss Conway. They ate bland soup, flaccid beef in a dull sauce, potatoes that might have been tasty with a bit more cheese, and a mushed green paste she was told was made of peas. Even the bread was floury and tasteless.
But the wine was good, and Mirabella salved her bruised ego with that. Each time her glass emptied, she found the carafe and solved that problem.
Then, after the last course had been cleared and they were waiting for whatever uninspiring food these people would call a dessert, their host stood and chimed his glass for attention.
“I’m terribly sorry. There’s been a slight delay with the desserts—we’ve got plum puddings, but we need about twenty more minutes. While we wait, in the spirit of the holiday season, why don’t we sing some carols? Is there anyone who’d be willing to lead us?
A string quartet and a harpist had been playing throughout the meal. Mr. March indicated the musicians now, as if they were an enticement in and of themselves.
Mirabella was on her feet before she’d had the thought. The men at her table hurried to stand with her. Paolo reached for her arm, muttering “Bella, no,” in a warning growl.
As if she were his dog, trained to do his bidding.
She snatched her arm from his reach. She had had just about enough of being discounted and ignored. She was no ornament, no wallflower, no castoff. And no whore.
Walking to the front of the room, she felt the effects of the wine she’d been drinking, and once or twice she needed an extra step as she wended around the tables and their occupants.
The whole room was watching her. Most of the faces she saw were either aghast or simply confused. She didn’t care. In fact, she liked it. They’d thought to hide her in a corner? Well, this was her answer. These people would reckon with her, one way or another.
She walked straight past Mr. Frederick March and went to the musicians. To the harpist, she asked, “You know ‘Ave Maria,’ yes?”
If someone wanted to lead the room in carols, they could. She had something else in mind.
He gave her a look she couldn’t read. “Of course.” Then he turned and nodded to the others, which seemed all the communication they needed.
They began to play, and Mirabella turned to the crowd.
She had never been, and had never wanted to be, a professional singer. But her mother had been, and she had passed some of her talent to her daughter.
Her mother had been Antonella Confortola, the great soprano of Italian opera.
Until Mirabella had come along and ended her career in scandal.
Her mother had never made her feel like anything other than a gift in her life, but Mirabella could look back from her own adulthood, peruse her memories, and know that the loss of her mother’s career and status had mattered.
Now, before this vast room full of snobbish people—an audience not unlike the hundreds of audiences for whom her mother had performed—Mirabella opened her heart to all she remembered of her childhood and sang.
She sang as if the spirit of her mother had been nearby all this time and had floated into her mouth at the first note. Her voice rose up powerfully, and she hit notes with a precision she’d never felt before. She was a natural alto, with some range into the higher notes, but she had nothing like the command of her mother’s trained voice. Until tonight.
Perhaps it was the wine, fogging up the sight of her audience, softening the sharp points of her jealousy, dampening the sound of Paolo’s voice speaking to Lilith Barton rather than her. Or perhaps it was Mirabella’s ghostly mother setting her hand on her chest and urging her to find her power. Whatever it was, Mirabella sang before that crowd of snobs and snoots like she’d never sung before.
When she finished, the instruments’ final notes lingered in the air, because there was no other sound. Two hundred people sat in utter silence, perfect stillness, and stared.
Then someone clapped, and a wave of applause took over the room, until people were on their feet, cheering and crying out “Brava! Brava!”
She couldn’t see Paolo through the sudden forest of bodies—and she felt wholly alone, standing before these people who cheered for her talent, but not one of them cared to know her or associate with her.
A whirling eddy of emotions rose in her chest—she was angry and jealous, defensive and insulted, sad and sullen. She missed her mother with a sudden crash of desperation. She was in love with a man who couldn’t identify the feeling. She’d disappointed her father to be with him. And he’d brought her to this glittering, elegant room, where she stood now, on display, being judged worthy or not according to the entertainment she provided to people she despised.
A set of large doors stood open to her right. Mirabella turned and fled.
XVIII
Escaping the dining room, Mirabella found herself in a bustle of servants—the doors she’d gone through led via a spartan corridor to the kitchen. They seemed all in a frenzy, probably over the delayed plum puddings, and she tried to stay out of their rushing ways while she searched for another exit. The people here were speaking a language she thought was English, but with an accent she didn’t know, and she wasn’t sure how to ask anyone for help.
She wanted to go home. To her father, at least. To Firenze, in her dreams. Away from this beautiful, awful house and these fabulous, terrible people. Away from Paolo, who thought nothing of paying attention to another woman while Mirabella sat at his side.
Self-pity wasn’t an emotion Mirabella countenanced in anyone, least of all herself. Rather than wallow, she acted—to change what she didn’t like or to make someone who’d hurt her pay. But right now, lost behind the scenes of this grand mansion, Mirabella could only wallow. She wanted to go home.
Finally, she found a door that seemed to open into another corridor, this one wider and more elegant. Several doors lined one side, each one tucked discreetly into a small alcove. At one end was a set of stairs; at the other end, an opening to what she thought was the foyer.
She heard sounds from the ballroom—they were singing carols now—and thought, at the least, she could find her way to the front door and escape to the carriage. Cosimo wouldn’t leave without Paolo, but Mirabella would prefer to sit alone in the cold carriage than go back for more humiliation at Paolo’s side.
The wine she’d drunk, and the unappealing food, churned unhappily in her stomach. Not enough to make her ill, but the feeling gave her the idea of a place she could go to be alone for a moment and draw her emotions back under control.
This house was sure to have an indoor bathroom somewhere. She turned away from the sound of the guests and took a few steps down the corridor, hoping to find an open door that would make it obvious she’d found a toilet.
A door near her opened, and a tall, heavyset man in white tie and tails—a guest—stepped into the hall. Mirabella peeked around him and was relieved to see he was coming from a bathroom.
“Well!” he said.
“Our little songbird.”
She gave him a smile she hoped was polite. “Scusi.” When she realized she’d spoken the wrong language, she amended, “Excuse me, please.”
He didn’t move—just stood there, mostly blocking the door, grinning at her. As she tried to scoot past him, he grabbed her arm.
Mirabella shot him a murderous look and tried to yank herself free of him, but he clamped down with force, hard enough to make her arm ache. “Where are you going, little songbird?”
“Where you think?” she yanked again, and he tightened his grip more. She could feel the bruise forming.
“Not yet.” He turned and pushed her against the wall of the alcove. “You’re a pretty little bird, aren’t you?”
Full of rage and not one drop of fear, Mirabella snapped out her free hand and went for his crotch, but his reflexes were quick—or hers were wine-slowed—and he grabbed her wrist before she could get hold.
“Ah-ah-ah,” he chided as if he were speaking to a child. “I know you people don’t know how to behave decently, but it’s impolite to grab a man like that, particularly when he’s paying you a compliment. Let that be your first lesson.”
“You are …” she tried to think of a suitable insult in his ugly language. “Pig.” That wasn’t nearly disgusting enough, so she enhanced it by spitting in his face.
When she’d spat in Paolo’s face, all those months ago, he’d blinked and wiped her spittle away, but he hadn’t reacted otherwise. Cold as ice, as if he had expected nothing less. In fact, he’d seemed almost respectful of her brazenness.
This man reared back in shock and then gaped at her in outrage. But he didn’t loosen his grip on either of her arms. Instead he slammed her arms to the wall beside her head and leaned in. Now he wasn’t pretending to be friendly. Now he looked at her like he meant to pull her to pieces.
Then his eyes went wide, and he sucked in a breath.
Paolo leaned in from behind him. “Right now,” he said, in a voice like a distant rumble of thunder, “You’ll bleed for a while and then be fine. If I push another two inches, I’ll pierce your kidney. Then I’ll open it wide, and you’ll drown in your own piss. Your choice.”
“What do you want?” the man gasped. He still held Mirabella, he was frozen in place, but his gaze had shifted to the side.
“Let her go. Or I open your kidney. And leave you to die in this hall.”
The punishing grip around Mirabella’s arms dropped away. Immediately, she moved out of the man’s reach and stood by Paolo, rubbing her arms, as he pulled his switchblade from the man’s back and wiped it on the man’s coat.
“People like us know better than people like you how to behave decently,” he said. Closing his knife, he slipped it into his coat, then turned and took Mirabella’s arm. “Let’s go home.”
She was still furious with him, but she nodded. She wanted to go home.
Angry and shaken, Mirabella wedged herself into the corner of the carriage seat and kept her attention fixed firmly on the window. Paolo made a few attempts to talk—he asked her if she was well, he asked her what had happened in the corridor—but she didn’t wish to speak to him, so she didn’t.
He finally leaned back and let her be quiet, and they rode all the way to the Five Points in surly silence.
Her arms ached, and she resented the bruises she’d have more than any other pain she’d experienced at the hands of a man. It was, in fact, the worst thing a man had ever done to her—setting aside Paolo and his myriad offenses—and she hated how powerless that terrible man had made her feel. She hated Paolo for putting her in that house. She hated New York for being the ground on which that house was built.
When Cosimo finally, finally pulled the carriage up before Paolo’s building, Mirabella ignored Paolo’s hand as she climbed down—and then she turned at once and headed down the street.
Paolo caught her arm—grabbing the exact spot a bruise was flowering. “Bella!” A hiss of pain escaped her lips before she could catch it, and he eased his hold, slipping his hand down to an unbruised spot. “Where are you going?”
“To my father. Away from you. Away from all this.”
Surprise and hurt showed in his eyes, but then the battlements went up, and he was stony cold. “No.”
“No?” she echoed. “No?”
“No.”
“So I am a prisoner again?”
With each word she uttered, she caught tiny glimpses that she was hurting him, before they froze behind the don’s icy glare. “You are not a prisoner, Bella. We have a deal. I am making good on my part. You make good on yours. I staked your father in his shop. So you stay with me.”
“You haven’t made good on your part. Still there is nothing for me!”
“Tell me what you want, and I will help you have it.”
Her body became suddenly incandescent with rage, and she struck out. “I want to go home! I want the life I had!” she cried, slamming her free fist into his chest with every word.
Paolo took hold of her wrist but didn’t hurt her. He frowned down at her. “In Firenze?”
Yes. She wanted to go home. But the life she had there was lost to her forever. Her father was here. Her mother was dead. There was nothing left in Italy for her.
Unable to bring herself to answer his question, she didn’t. She simply stopped fighting.
“Come upstairs, Bella,” Paolo said as he saw the end of her fight. “Be with me.”
With a nod, she let the Beast draw her into his lair again.
In his apartment, Mirabella tossed her wrap at the nearest chair and walked straight through to the bedroom. She closed the door and kicked off her shoes, letting them fly in any direction. Paolo didn’t follow her, so she was closed alone in the bedroom. She sat at her dressing table and glared at herself in the oval mirror. The kohl at her eyes was smudged, and the tress she’d twisted so carefully hung limply now. And a large bruise, dark red, deepening to violet, clamped around her upper arm like a cuff. She considered her other forearm. The bruise there was lighter but visible.
When she raised her arms to search for pins in her hair, a pang clamped around her ribs, and she grunted.
Her ribs ached from the corset. Her arms hurt from the assault of a contemptuous stranger. Her head hurt from the pins holding her hair in place, and from the lingering effects of too much wine. Her pride stung, and her heart, too, from Paolo’s thoughtlessness. The night was a disaster, and she felt more homesick and disoriented than ever she had since she’d walked a gangplank onto a steamer and sailed to America.
Worst of all, she suspected she was behaving like a child—or worse than that, like a weak woman who didn’t know her own mind. She should go out to Paolo and slap his smug face. She should make him tell her why he’d brought her to that house only to make her watch while he chatted up another woman. She should make him tell her why in the name of the Father he wanted to be with those people. What did he get from it? What did he need, or want? Did he simply not see their snide disregard? Or did he not care?
Well, she cared. She hated it. It was one thing to walk through a crowd of sanctimonious hypocrites with her head high and the power to give them their contempt right back. It was something wholly different to be forced to try to fit in with them, to seek an approval they had no intention of offering.
That man in the hall infuriated her not because of how he’d touched her, or what he might have meant to do—she felt sure she could have handled him and saved herself from that. No, her fury came from a different kind of powerlessness. That man would never have touched her if he considered her worthy of the barest modicum of respect. He’d done what he’d done because her very existence was outside propriety. It didn’t matter how she dressed or how she comported herself. To a man like that, she didn’t rate, would never rate.
“Ah!” she muttered when a too-forceful pluck brought hair as well as a pin from her head.
The door swung open behind her, and Paolo stood at the threshold. Hi
s tailcoat, vest, collar, tie, and cuffs were off, and his shirt was partially unbuttoned. He hadn’t worn an undershirt, he said formal clothes were constraining enough without another layer, and Mirabella saw a bit of his chest hair in the space between the opened buttons.
No matter how angry she was, how she told herself she despised him, he pulled her attention to him. Why did he have to be so alluring and such a bastard at the same time?
“Bella.” His voice was soft, the way he spoke to her when they were alone, when he wasn’t being a bastard. Before tonight, she’d heard affection in that tone, perhaps love. “Why are you angry with me?”
She scoffed and ignored him. The last pin was out of her hair, and she fluffed the mass back to its natural curl, dragging her nails over her scalp to ease the itch of the pins away.
He came into the room, crossed to stand behind her. Despite her best efforts to ignore him, Mirabella felt every inch of the space he took up, knew where he was at every moment, whether she looked at his reflection or not. She was just that aware of him, always.
It had never occurred to her to wonder how she’d endure it if she loved him and he didn’t love her. She’d impulsively accepted a deal with him to be his … whatever she was … because he’d tantalized her with the word ‘love.’ The deal had simply been an excuse she could whisper to herself when her intellect caught up with her impulse.
But he didn’t love her, did he? He didn’t know what the word meant. In either language.
His fingers caressed her arms—light as a whisper. Mirabella shoved away the flutters his touch enlivened in her belly.
“He hurt you.”
She shrugged away from his touch and looked at the reflection of his face. “Not like you did.”
His eyes flashed up to meet hers in the glass. “How did I hurt you? I hardly touched you.”
Il Bestione (The Golden Door Duet Book 2) Page 22