I’d missed female animosity. It was such good fun.
“I’ll make your life a living misery. I’ll get every woman in my circle to spread absolutely heinous rumors about you and your laughable manhood. I’ll spit in your face each time you talk to me. I’ll fight you tooth and bloody nail before I ever let you bed me, but I’ll also frighten away any slut willing to sleep with you. I. Will. Make. Your. Life. Hell,” she spat.
I crossed one foot over the other knee and leaned farther back in the chair, lounging comfortably as a king in his throne. She growled. Again, I fought the urge to laugh the manic humour out of my inflated lungs.
Instead, I raised a cool brow, and said, “I’m afraid you’d have your work cut out for you, Agatha. My life has been a living hell since I was old enough to cogitate.” I stared at her for a long moment, watched the passion flicker like flames in her eyes, how it heated her skin to a flushed and mottled red. That kind of passion could not be banked, at least not for long. She was willing to fight and probably die for that love she spoke of, and she would not be deterred.
I could understand such passion, such verve, because it had driven me for the past twelve months.
“I’ll expose your father,” she barked, then hesitated, clearly surprised by her own indiscretion. Then she straightened and narrowed those big blue eyes at me. “I’ll expose him. You see, I know something you don’t. Noel took my father’s private jet to Rome the day before your mother died.”
Everything stilled. Even the dust motes spiraling through the air, catching in the light cast by the fire burning in the pink marble hearth seemed to freeze as I held my breath and fought through the brutal impact of the new information.
It took minutes. Long moments when I reeled internally, careful to keep my exterior façade placid before because it was instinctual after so many years and because I wasn’t yet totally sure if I could trust the irascible woman across from me.
“You’re sure?” I said finally, proud of the flatness in my tone.
She blinked, then frowned, leaning forward and speaking louder as if I hadn’t heard her properly the first time. “Well, of course, I am. I wouldn’t just got about saying such a thing, no matter how much I may not want to marry you. My father and Noel were best friends before he passed away. They did everything together, and this was no exception. Obviously, Noel couldn’t fly commercial or take his own jet if he was going to do something unspeakable… something like murder his own wife.”
“You can’t possibly know if Noel did that or not,” I said by rote because Noel truly had programmed me beautifully.
“No,” she agreed. “Although, he returned the morning after her death, and he never told anyone, so far as I can tell, that he ever went to Italy around that time. Why would he keep it a secret?”
Why would he?
Well, the answer was bloody obvious, wasn’t it?
My father had really done it.
The woman he had wooed and brought back from Italy, the woman he had seemed to love despite his myriad of flaws and countless slaves, the woman who had certainly loved him back regardless of those qualms, had been murdered by her own husband.
By my father.
I closed my eyes as pain tore through every layer of my being like a fissure cracking open in the earth, shifting tectonic plates and dislodging old, settled fossils and sediment so that everything was different, everything was new and aching.
“Fuck,” I breathed on an explosive breath as the air punched from my lungs.
Dante and Salvatore had been right all along.
A small, shaky part of me had always wondered, always secretly suspected their truth was the truth. But it was so much easier in principle than in practice to turn your back on what you knew to face a new and horrible truth about what you had always believed in.
So, I had believed in my father.
What a colossal, life-altering mistake.
I fought the urge to surge out of my chair, storm down the hall, and attack him. To drag him by the hair down to the dungeon and string him up in chains like a spider’s web and slowly eat away at him with whip and weapon until he begged for death.
He had killed my mother. Taken the only family member who had ever loved or nurtured Dante or me away from us, and for what?
For what?
The question resounded through my head like a gong strike.
It was only one of the many reasons I remained seated and resolved to carry out my plan to the very end. Noel would be imprisoned, not dead, and there was greater satisfaction in knowing he would rot in the slums of some dank prison with the very sort of people he’d detested all his life.