by Dani Collins
It felt like a harbinger. A warning.
She was relieved when they reached the conservatory at last, and for once didn’t care that it was more properly an abandoned sunroom. She rushed inside, shocked to see that her hands trembled in the light from the hall as she picked up the matches from the piano bench, then set about lighting the candles on the candelabra that sat atop her piano.
Because her parents only lit a portion of the house, and this room only Angelina used did not qualify.
But then it was only the two of them in the candlelight, and that made the pulse in her quicken. Then drum deep.
Especially when, overhead through the old glass, she could see the moon behind the clouds—a press of light that did not distinguish itself enough for her to determine its shape. Or fullness.
Angelina settled herself on the piano bench. And it took her a moment to understand that it wasn’t her pulse that she could hear, seeming to fill the room, but her own breathing.
Meanwhile, Benedetto stood half in shadow, half out. She found herself desperately trying to see where the edges of his body ended and the shadows began, because it seemed to her for a panicked moment there that there was no difference between the two. That he was made of shadows and inky dark spaces, and only partly of flesh and bone.
“We have electricity,” she felt compelled to say, though her voice felt like a lie on her tongue. Too loud, too strange, when his eyes were black as sin and lush with invitation. Everything in her quivered, but she pushed on. “My parents encourage us to keep things more…atmospheric.”
“If you say so.”
His voice was another dark, depthless shadow. It moved in her, swirling around and around, making all the places where she pulsed seem brighter and darker at once.
She sat, breathing too heavily, her hands curved above the smooth, worn keys of this instrument that—some years—had been her only friend.
“What do you want me to play?”
“Whatever you like.”
She did not understand how he could say something so innocuous and leave her feeling as if that mouth of his was moving against her skin, leaving trails all over her body, finding those places where she already glowed with a need she hardly recognized.
You recognize it, something in her chided her. You only wish you didn’t.
Angelina felt misshapen. Powerful sensations washed over her, beating into her until she felt as if she might explode.
Or perhaps the truth was that she wanted to explode.
She spread her hands over the keys, waiting for that usual feeling of rightness. Of coming home again. Usually this was the moment where everything felt right again. Where she found her hope, believed in her future, and could put her dreary life aside. But tonight, even the feel of the ivory beneath her fingers was a sensual act.
And somehow his doing.
“Are you afraid of me, little one?” Benedetto asked, and his voice seemed to come from everywhere at once. From inside her. From deep between her legs. From that aching hunger that grew more and more intense with every second.
She shifted on the bench. Then she stared at him, lost almost instantly in his fathomless gaze. In the dark of the room with the night pressing down outside. In the flickering candlelight that exposed and concealed them both in turn.
Angelina felt as if she was free falling, tumbling from some great height, fully aware that when she hit the ground it would break her—but she couldn’t look away.
She didn’t want to look away.
He was the most marvelous thing that had ever happened to her, even if he really was a murderer.
She didn’t know where to put that.
And again, she could hear her own breath. He leaned against the side of the piano, stretching a hand out across the folded back lid, and her eyes followed the movement. Compulsively. As if she had no choice in the matter.
She would have expected a man so wealthy and arrogant to have hands soft and tender like the belly of a small dog. She wouldn’t have been surprised to see a careful manicure. Or a set of garish rings.
But his hand was bare of any accoutrement. And it was no tender, soft thing. It looked tough, which struck her as incongruous even as the notion moved in her like heat. His fingers were long, his palms broad.
And she could not seem to keep herself from imagining them touching her skin, cupping her breasts, gripping her bottom as he pulled her beneath him and made her his.
When a different sound filled the room, she understood that she’d made it. She’d gasped. Out loud. And that darkness he wore too easily seemed to light up with a new kind of fire she couldn’t read.
“I’m accustomed to having my questions answered,” he said in a quiet tone, but all she heard was menace.
And she had already forgotten the question, and possibly herself. So she did the only thing she could under the circumstances.
Angelina began to play.
She played and she played. She played him melodies that spoke of her dreams, her hopes, and then the crushing storm of her father’s losses. She played him stories of her confinement here and the bitter drip of years in this ruined, forgotten place. Then she played him songs that felt like he did, impossible and terrifying and thrilling all the same.
She felt caught in the grip of his unwavering, relentless gaze. And the notes that crashed all around them, holding them tight even as they sang out the darkest, most hidden parts of her.
And while she played, Angelina found she couldn’t lose herself the way she usually did.
Instead, it was as if she was found. As if he had found her here, trapping her and exalting her at once.
So she played that, too.
She played and played, until he stepped out of the shadows and his face was fully in the candlelight.
Fierce. Haunted. Sensual.
And suffused with the same rich, layered hunger she could feel crashing around inside of her.
For a long time, while the music danced from her fingers into the keys and then filled the room, it was as if she couldn’t tell which one of them was which. His hands did not touch her body, and yet somehow they were all over her. She could feel the scrape of his palm, the stirring abrasion of his calloused fingers.
And she explored him, too, with every note she coaxed from her piano. They were tossed together in the melody, tangled, while the music tied them in knots and made them one glorious note, held long and pure—
When she stopped playing, for a moment she couldn’t tell the difference.
And then the next, his hands were on her.
His beautiful, terrible hands, for real this time.
He sank his fingers into her hair, pulling it from her chignon—and not gently. And her whole body seemed to bloom. His face was over hers, his mouth as grim as his eyes were hot. And then he bent her back at an angle that should have alarmed her, but instead sent a thick delight storming through her in every direction.
He feasted on her neck like the wolf she half imagined he was, teasing his way around those sullen, moody pearls she wore.
I need, she thought, though she could not speak.
The more he tasted her flesh, the more she felt certain that he stole her words. That as his mouth moved over her skin, he was altering her.
Taking her away from here. From herself. From everything she knew.
He shifted then, spreading her out on the piano bench. She lay down where he put her, grateful to have the bench at her back. Then he lowered himself over her, the dark bespoke suit he wore seeming blacker than pitch in the candlelight. He skimmed his wicked hands down the length of her body, moving his way down until he wrenched the skirt of her shift dress up to her waist.
It didn’t occur to her to object.
Not when every part of her wanted to sing out instead, glory and hope alike, and no matter that
this man was not safe. There was no safety in staying where she was, either. There was only disappointment and the slow march of tedious years, and Benedetto felt like an antidote to that.
He touched her and she felt as if she was the piano, and he was making her a melody.
She threw her arms over her head and arched into him.
Then she felt his mouth, again. She heard his dark laugh, desire and delight. He tasted the tender flesh of her inner thigh and she could not have described the sounds she made. She could only feel them, coming out of her like an echo of those same songs she’d played for him.
When she could feel the harsh beauty of them in her fingers, she realized that she was gripping his strong shoulders instead.
“Angelina,” he said, there against her thigh where she could feel her own name like a brand against her skin. In the candlelight that danced and flickered, she lifted her head and found herself lost in his gaze with only her own body between them. “Are you afraid of me?”
“Yes,” she lied.
He laughed, a rich, dark sound that crashed over her like a new symphony, louder and more tumultuous by far.
Then he shifted, pulled her panties to one side, and licked deep into the center of her need.
And then Benedetto Franceschi, the Butcher of Castello Nero, ate her alive.
He made her scream.
She bucked against him, crying out for deliverance but receiving nothing but the slide of his tongue, the faint scrape of his teeth. A benediction by any measure.
And when she died from the pleasure of it—only to find she lived somehow after all, shuddering and ruined and shot through with some kind of hectic glee—he pulled her to her feet, letting her shift dress do what it would. He sank his hands into her hair again, and then this time, he took her mouth with his.
Sensation exploded in her all over again, hotter and wilder this time.
The madness of these melodies. The glorious terror of his possession.
The dark marvel of it all.
His mouth had been between her legs, and the knowledge of that made her shake all over again. She pulsed and shook, and she was too inexperienced to know what part of the rough, intoxicating taste was him, and which part her.
So she angled her head and met him as he devoured her.
Angelina felt debauched and destroyed. As ruined as this house they stood in.
And why had she never understood that the real price of a ruin like this was the sheer joy in it?
The dark, secret joy that coursed through her veins, pooled between her legs, and made her arch against him as if all this time, all these years, her body had been asleep. Only now had it woken up to its true purpose.
Here. With him.
Like this.
He kissed her and he kissed her.
When he finally lifted his mouth from hers, his grin was a ferocious thing. Angelina felt it inside her, as if she was made fierce, too, because of him.
And she had never known, until this moment, how deeply she wanted to be fierce.
“If you marry me,” he told her, in that dark, intense voice of his, “you can never return here. You will no more be a part of your family. You will belong to me and I am a jealous, possessive creature at the best of times. I do not share what is mine.”
Angelina hardly felt like herself. There was too much sensation coursing in her and around her, she couldn’t tell if it was the music she’d played or the way he’d played her body in turn, but she couldn’t seem to worry about that the way she should.
The way a wiser woman would have, with a man like him.
“Is that a warning or promise?” she asked instead.
“It is a fact.”
And her skirt was still rucked up. She felt uncomfortably full in the bodice of her dress. She could not tell which was more ravaged and alight, the aching center of her need between her legs or her mouth.
But the candlelight made all of that seem unimportant.
Or perhaps, whispered a voice inside her, it is not the light that seduces you, but the dark that makes it shine.
“If I marry you,” she said, because she was already ruined, and she wanted things she was afraid to name, “I want to live. I don’t want to die.”
And then, for the first time since they’d walked away from her family and into this chilly, barren room, it occurred to her to worry about the fact that he was a man with six dead wives. She was all alone with him and everyone believed he was a murderer.
Why did something in her want to believe otherwise?
His mouth was a bitter slash. His eyes were much too dark.
For the first time, Angelina wanted to cover herself. She felt cold straight through.
If she could have taken the words back, she would have. If she could have kept him from touching her, she—
But no. Whatever happened next, his mouth on her had been worth it.
“Every one of us must die, little one,” Benedetto said, his voice a mere thread of sound. It wound through her and then flowered into something far richer and more textured than fear, making Angelina shudder as if he was licking into her molten core again. “But we will do so in the way we live, like it or not. That I can promise you.”
CHAPTER FOUR
A MONTH LATER, Angelina woke up to the sound of hammering, the way she had almost every morning since that first night.
The only difference was that today was her wedding day, like it or not.
Construction on the old house had begun immediately. Benedetto had made good on his promise with crews arriving by truckload at first light. Since then, day after day, the hammering fused with that pulse inside her, until she couldn’t tell whether her heart beat inside or outside of her body.
It had been the longest and shortest month of her life.
Her sisters veered between something like outrage and a more simple, open astonishment. And sometimes, when they remembered themselves, a surprising show of concern.
“You must be careful,” Petronella had said very seriously, one evening. She’d come and interrupted Angelina in the conservatory, where Angelina played piece after piece as if the piano was telling stories to keep her alive. And as long as she played she would be safe. Night after night, she played until her fingers cramped, but nothing eased that ravaged, misshapen feeling inside of her. “Whatever happens, and whatever he does to you in that castle of his, you must not react.”
“I didn’t think you knew where the conservatory was.” Angelina blinked at her sister in the flickering candlelight. Outside, a bloated summer moon rose over the trees. “Are you lost?”
“I’m serious, Angelina,” Petronella snapped, scowling, which felt more like her sister than this strange appearance and stab at worry. “One dead wife could be an accident. The second could be a terrible tragedy. I could even maybe think that a third might be a stroke of very bad luck indeed. But six?”
Angelina slammed her hands on the keys, the discordant jangle of noise sounding a great deal like she felt inside. As if her ribs were piano keys she’d forgotten how to play.
Maybe that was what getting married was supposed to feel like.
“I don’t need you to remind me who he is,” she said.
Another slap of noise.
Petronella looked different in the candlelight. Younger. Softer. She lifted her hand, almost as if she intended to reach over and stroke Angelina with it. But she thought better of it, or the urge passed, and she dropped it to her side.
“I really did think he would choose me,” she said, softly.
And when Angelina looked up again, Petronella had gone.
Dorothea was far less gracious. If she was worried about her younger sister, the only way she showed it was in an officious need to micromanage the trousseau that Benedetto was funding for his new bride along with everything e
lse.
“If he’s a murderer,” Angelina had said tightly one afternoon, after Dorothea made her try on armful after armful of concoctions she’d ordered straight from atelier in Paris on Angelina’s behalf, “do you really think that choosing the right selection of negligees will save me?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Dorothea tutted, bustling about Angelina’s bedchamber as if she’d never sat on a settee wailing about her impending death. “You know how people like to talk. That’s all it is, I’m certain. A series of tragic events and too many rumors and innuendos.”
“I hope you’re right,” Angelina had said.
But Dorothea’s only response had been to lay out more soft, frilly things for Angelina to try on.
And it was a strange thing indeed to know that her life had changed completely—to understand that nothing she knew would be hers any longer, and soon—when for thirty days, only the trappings of her life changed. The manor house slowly returned to its former glory. Her father laughed again. Margrete looked less stiff and tense around the eyes.
But Angelina still woke in her same old bed. She still timed her breakfast to avoid the rest of the family, and then set off for her long morning walk, no matter the weather. She still played the piano for hours, alone in the conservatory.
If it weren’t for the endless hammering, she might have been tempted to imagine that she’d made the whole thing up.
Then again, every time that Benedetto visited—a stolen evening here, a day or two there—the balance in Angelina’s family…shifted.
Because she was shifting, she thought as she lay in her bed at night with her hands between her legs, not sure if she wanted to sob or scream out all the wildfires he’d lit inside her. With that dark gaze. With the things he did to her when they were alone. His mouth, his fingers. And always that dark, seductive laugh.
She had always thought of a seduction as something…quicker. The mistake of an evening. Something hasty and ill-considered that would take time and space to repent.
But Benedetto taught her many lessons about time. And patience.
And the exquisite torture of anticipation.