His eyes up close were like twin moons, pale with silver star light but dark and cratered with mysteries I wanted to discover like an ancient astronomer.
He was abnormally tall, wide through the shoulders and narrow in the waist the way a swimmer was, with big hands that were elegant despite their breadth. I’d wondered what they might feel like on my body.
And now I knew.
No, I might have judged Alexander by the cover, but that didn’t discount the horror of the monster depicted on it.
“I’ll have one of the maids bring some supper for you. Master Alexander went to London, and we don’t expect him back until late this evening so you can dine in your room. I imagine you’ll want to rest early.” Mrs. White clapped her hands and then stared at me as I wandered to the windows to look past the drapes.
The bedroom overlooked an immaculately laid out garden of sculpted hedgerows and brightly coloured flowerbeds. It was perfectly ordered with each wild thing put in its place. I thought wryly that it was a suitable view for a slave.
Beyond that, the land gently crested, then erupted into a thicket of dense trees like something out of a sinister fairy tale.
That, too, made sense.
“There’s one more thing before I leave, Ruthie.”
I jerked away from the window to look at Mrs. White, shocked that she would call me that.
“Excuse me?”
“Oh, Lord Greythorn has instructed the staff to call you by the name of Ruthie. He is excessively kind that way.”
“Kind?”
“Yes, well, he knew some of us would find it hard to remember such a strange name, and he knew you would have a difficult enough time as it is assimilating to British culture. It’s a wonderful remedy, really.”
“I would prefer Cosima,” I told her as my spine cooled and hardened with steel.
“Well, what’s done is done.” She ignored my statement with a wave of her hand and then clapped when someone knocked on the door. A moment later, a maid entered bearing a ridiculously ornate golden telephone and cradle. “You’re second surprise is here, my dear. A telephone call home.”
My previous irritation evaporated as I was struck down by her words.
Telephone call home.
Home.
I lunged for the phone and ripped it out of the maid’s hands, feeling like a beggar faced with her first meal in weeks.
My finger was rotating the ancient dial before I had even taken a seat on the soft bed. Distantly, I heard Mrs. White usher the other woman out of the room before closing the door behind the both.
But I was preoccupied by the utterly melodic ringing of the phone in my ear.
My heart was suspended in my throat, blocking the passage of my breath, but I didn’t care.
There was a pause in the ringing and then a brief click before, “Pronto.”
A sob bubbled up through my lips before I could clamp my hand over my mouth to contain.
“Patatino, sono Cosi,” I half hiccoughed into the phone. My heart seemed to break and reform against the familiar Italian the words over the feel of Sebastian’s childhood nickname ‘little potato.’
“Mia bella sorella,” he said after a weighty pause. “My Cosima.”
We breathed through the phone line for a long moment as we both digested the enormity of our feelings. I cradled the phone against my cheek and closed my eyes against the burn of tears that spilled beneath my lashes. It was too easy to picture Seb’s handsome face, the strong bones in his face that hollowed out his cheeks and the square point of his chin contrasting the fullness of his mouth. I knew the exact shade of black in his hair and the thickness of the eyelashes cresting his cheek because I’d grown up staring into his face almost more than I had my own even as a model.
No sight in the world was as dear to me as my brother; not even my sisters, as treasured as they were in my heart.
There was a unity to twins that was impossible to explain to others. I felt a fundamental lack of ease if I was separated from him for too long even though I was all too used to it after the last year I’d spent mostly in Milano.
To simply breathe in tandem through a phone line was an intimacy we craved.
“How is everyone?” I asked finally, suddenly nervous Mrs. White would return to cut my conversation short.
“Missing you, always,” he responded instantly. “Even when Salvatore came calling to wish me a happy birthday, he seemed miserable that you weren’t in town.”
I bit my lip at that because the Camorra capo was the one who signed the dotted line of my terms of sale.
“Did he ask where I was?”
“No, he only stayed to have another rousing fight with Mama and to give me a fine bottle of Tuscan wine as a birthday present.”