“No.” I shook my head, vibrating with the suppressed need to burst from my skin and do something violent to a man who would betray my family. Mywife. Did he watch her, protect her? Did she feed him with our food, smile at him? Was he close to my child? “I won’t allow it.”
“It’s so odd. The feeling. He’s not here, do you hear me? The man, he’s not here. Not in this house. He’s not close but close enough that—something made me take notice.”
Fuck me. Her behavior made sense in that moment. She’d been baking, demanding that she deliver all the goods to all the chalets and cabins and hotel rooms herself. She wanted to get in to feel, under the guise that she was feeling more domestic than usual.
She wanted to do it again. Deliver the bread she’d been baking.
“He exists though?”
“Yes.” She nodded. “Someone close to us. I just can’t—” She growled. “I can’t figure out who it is! It’s like having a word on the tip of your tongue and not being able to speak it! Hidden lies warring with blatant truth. I’m so effing frustrated!”
The growl that built up in my own chest threatened to erupt. All these riddles she spoke in that neither of us could understand made me insane with an impulse to kill, like an animal surviving on pure instinct.
I knew what that monster intended to do to her.
At the thought, I felt a chain aroundmyneck, beads cutting intomythroat, and thenmyheart being ripped frommychest in an explosive spray of blood that not even the snow could cover.
“I wish I could—!” She refused to finish the thought.
She pounded her fists against my chest, but not to hurt me, just to expel some of the pressure. Her frustration was making her angry. Part of it was that she was feeding off my energy. What went through me went through her too.
“Two men,” she whispered after a few seconds had passed. “Two men can fool me. Ettore and—”
“Vincenzo,” I said.
“Yes.” She studied me for a second. “My gut tells me it’s not them.”
“Ettore is too afraid of Luca, of you—”
“Yes,” she said. “But he has nothing to lose. He’s dying. Still. It’s not him. Vincenzo—”
“Fell in love with you,” I said, and she wiggled out of my grasp. My hold on her had tightened without me realizing it. “Better to get rid of me, so he could take care of you.”
“He’s married,” she said.
“Inconsequential detail to some.”
“Is it an inconsequential detail to you?”
“It’s the core of my entire story.”
“It will be his too.”
Our gazes held and locked. I brought my arms around her, pulling her close, feeling her heartbeat against mine. I swam us to the steps of the pool, where our bodies lay half in and half out of the water. The room was warm, tempered to match the pool, and a crystal bead of sweat ran down her throat. I came up, using my tongue to claim it as mine.
Mine to keep.
Behind her the moon hung in a monstrous orb, silver light made liquid, coating the surface of the pool and her smooth skin in molten mercury.
I stared at the light for a minute or two, and when I turned my eyes back to hers, her breath rushed out.
“I—” She licked her lips. “I’m so tired, and I can’t sleep.” Her hands reached out, her nails barely raking my skin from throat to stomach.
Lifting a hand, I twirled a piece of her hair around my finger. “Take what you need from me, my wife,” I spoke quietly in Italian. “I’m yours forever.”
She stood, water rushing down her body, the moon outlining her shape. The breath hissed out of me as she came down, so fucking slow, taking her time, claiming what she needed.
As she sank deeper, her eyes rolled, and her body took over.
