I turn back just in time to see Giovanni nudge his chin towards him.
Marcel steps directly into my path when I try to go behind the bar. “No,” he murmurs.
Blind rage surges. I pivot sharply and march into the walk-in freezer, slamming the door behind me and locking it.
Cold hits me instantly and I wrap my arms around myself, breath fogging, chest heaving.
Let him pound on the door. Let him shout. Let him?—
“Lucia.”
“Fuck you, Giovanni. And fuck off all the way back to New York. I. Don’t. Want. You. Here.”
Silence greets my shrill words. Then I hear a firm sigh.
“Do you truly believe,” Giovanni’s voice cuts in calmly through the steel, “that a simple freezer door is going to stand between me and my wife?”
I close my eyes.
“Freezing yourself to death as a final, dramatic protest is out of the question,” he continues. “I will not allow it. Especially not when we have several decades of giddy marital bliss ahead of us.”
My jaw clenches.
“Come out, my angel. These arms have stayed empty for too long.”
I laugh sharply. “You really expect me to believe that?”
Somehow the silence grows more edgy. Definitely more lethal. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Vicious claws tear down my insides as I try to suppress thoughts I’ve had more times than I want to acknowledge these last eighteen months. “You know exactly what I mean. You think I didn’t see how women threw themselves at you? You expect me to think you’ve remained celibate all this time?”
“Si. Absolutely I do,” he returns in a voice filled with the ice surrounding me. “And the fucking same better have been the case for you,dragunnida.”
Little dragon. His nickname for me straight after I burst into tears, screaming yes, yes, yes, when he asked me to marry him. What a stupid, blind fool I was.
“Or what, Giovanni? You’ll divorce me? I mean, you said this island suits me, right? For all you know, I’ve allowed it to suit me so much, I’ve been slutting it up since I left you.”
There’s a pause.
Then a smile in his voice. Real. Almost amused. “For three seconds, that was very funny.”
Silence. I squeeze my eyes shut as I exhale.
Then: “I know you haven’t cheated on me, dear wife.”
“Because you know better?” I demand.
“Yes.”
“And how exactly do you know better?” My laugh is brittle. “Let me guess. Because I know you’d kill me if I cheated on you?”
“No.” His voice is velvet over steel. “Because you know I would find those unfortunate fools. Line them up. One by one. And let you watch as I sliced off whichever body part took my fancy. Then I would slit their throats to put them out of their misery.”
A shudder racks me. “I never knew you at all,” I whisper.
“Ah, sweetheart. Did you even want to?” he asks quietly. “Or did you allow yourself to be dazzled by the gloss without wondering what made it shine?”
My throat closes as past fears and fury congeal in a sickly lump. As every horrific reason why I fled my barely one-day-old marriage comes flowing back.
