His face scrunched up. “That’s the sheriff’s daughter.”
“I caught that.”
“The sheriff’s daughter has a partner, a woman who will soon be her wife. Mia knew before anyone else and confided in me about it. She could trust us.”
“It doesn’t matter!” I screamed, still hot. “Okay, take the sheriff’s daughter off the list, but the fact still stands that you spread your seed all over the world, Matteo. You spread yourseed all over the world while I was stuck as a fucking prisoner! My best nights were when I could fall asleep in an itchy fucking bed after dancing for a woman who never showed me a penny of the money. People were convinced that I was a star. A real star, Matteo. It wasn’t symbolic, like it is to us, but REAL to them. They looked at me like I was a fatal fucking fantasy. They reached for me, groped for me, and if I didn’t deliver, I would be punished in a room full of rabid rats!
“And for those seconds that I was being punished, every second of my life after my mom left me, YOU were giving and receiving pleasure. Having a grand old fucking time without me. It just doesn’t make sense. You tell me that we have a love written in the stars, but were there faults along the road? Because when I was suffering, you were smiling, getting your fucking groove on!”
And…there it was. The center of my jealousy.
Yeah, some of it was normal. But that was what was hurting me the most. He spewed off all these beautiful things about our love being written in the stars, always beingsomeant to be, not being able to live without me…but he was going to marry to fulfill the requirements of his family to rise to the throne. He was having sex, doing his thing, and probably going to have mistresses while he was married to a songbird like Rosaria.
From the bathroom break I took at Brûler to that moment, I’d made sense of why I felt so hostile about his past. It was because my past was hell.
Why didn’t he come for me before?
Why did I have to stay with that wicked woman for so long? When my life with him was going to be my life?
And what lessons did I learn from it?
That my husband was out galivanting all over the world, sampling the women instead of the food. Yeah, they called his brother the Casanova Prince, because he was honest aboutrefusing to settle down, but his older brother had had his share of the fucking pie too. He was just more subtle about it.
While he was touchingherskin, kissingher, seducingher, I was being fucking ruled by the evil witch of France and bullied by her two wicked daughters, one of them my half-sister!
Resentment.
It was rising in me like the lava from that volcano in Sicily, while the rest of my hurt was clawing at my insides.
The heat was making me feel even sadder than I’d been feeling. It was like I was hot, and the humidity was too much to carry, and I just wanted to scream, cry, fall on the ground and claw at it, because I didn’t know what to fucking do with myself.
“Stella,” Matteo’s voice was breathless, like for the first time in his life, he had no fucking clue what to say. How to make this better. It was like, by saying my name, he was reaching out to me with his soul instead of his arms.
He couldn’t make this better!
He couldn’t take back his past.
Just like I couldn’t erase mine.
Why didn’t he feel me, if our love was written in the stars?
Why, why, why…a three-letter word that was haunting me louder than my mom’s laugh in that moment.
A car pulled up next to us and Rocco got out, fixing his suit. The family caught up to us, eyes darting from Matteo to me, to Rocco, back to Matteo and me. Rocco spoke to Matteo in Italian, but he wasn’t looking at his uncle. He was staring at me with such a helpless look in his eyes, I wondered if he had turned into a mirror and was reflecting me.
Rocco snapped his name, and he still didn’t look at his uncle.
I got the gist of how the conversation would go, though. “Go ahead!” I screamed at Matteo. “Go ahead and tend to another woman who loved you first. Who got you first. Chloe.”
Rocco hadn’t spoken a word, waiting on Matteo to turn and face him respectfully, but instinctually, I knew what he wanted. He wanted Matteo to speak to Chloe’s family, maybe even Chloe herself, in defense of Massimo.
Rocco snapped something at Matteo in Italian.
Probably something like,Get control of your wife. You’re a Fausti, and we’re on a public street, not behind our gates.
I whirled on Rocco, my fists clenched. “Maybe if you’d get control ofyourwife, your son would still have his fiancée, and my husband wouldn’t have to speak in defense of anyone! Your wife is a boil on the ass of humanity!” It was like my thoughts about Rosaria were also reflecting my thoughts on Régine Nemours.
She had me back in her haunted castle, ruling me, keeping me so fucking quiet!
