It’s another question to ask her, but I’m getting distracted. Because the electricity we both felt during that moment of our wedding ceremony is filling the air again. It’s making her eyes widen and pupils dilate, her red lips parting.
The wolf in me wants to get rid of the table between us, snatch her up from her chair and rip her dress clean off, put her down on the ground and make her mine completely. But I’m not a teenage boy with no control over himself, and the wolf doesn’t control me either, so I fight it.
The wolf is merely an aspect of myself that came into being after I was punished for my failure to kill the entire Salvatore family. In the dank little room in the basement of this villa, my father gave me scars to ensure I never forgot what it was to disappoint him. And in that very same room I became the predator I needed to be in order to take him down eventually. A wolf to protect those who were mine and to hunt down those who were not.
Yet the wolf is not in charge. I am. And I’m not giving into it yet. My new wife clearly has no love for me, though her body might disagree, and I’m not in the mood to change her mind tonight. If I want sex that badly, I can wait and see Annika tomorrow, or maybe the night after. It doesn’t have to be now.
‘You’re very demanding for a kidnapped woman,’ I murmur. ‘Especially when I’m still waiting for your father to give me his loyalty on pain of your death.’
She says nothing, sitting stiff in her chair, that gaze of hers not letting up.
I take a sip of my champagne and then glance over the terrace at the view of the sun sinking majestically into the sea. ‘Sundown is approaching very rapidly.’
Her jaw is tight, every line of her body tense. ‘And if he doesn’t give it? You’ll kill me?’
Surely she can’t still think that I would? When I saved her all those years ago? When I told her in the car back in Rome that if I wanted her dead, she would be?
‘Of course not,gattina,’ I say with some impatience. ‘I’ve already made that very clear. But your father doesn’t know that.’
Her thick black lashes flutter and abruptly she looks down at the white tablecloth, lovely mouth in a grim line. ‘He hasn’t given it yet?’
‘No,’ I confirm, studying her.
She nods and swallows, keeping her gaze on the table. The flickering of the candlelight betrays her, though. I can see the sheen of tears in her eyes, and it hits me somewhere I wasn’t expecting. Somewhere…painful.
A woman’s tears have never moved me before, so why they’re doing so now, I have no idea. Perhaps it’s because I don’t like to see a woman with so much spirit and fire in pain. Again, it reminds me of my mother, slowly fading before my eyes as my father kept her trapped here in the villa, using her as his brood mare when it suited him, ignoring her when it didn’t.
‘You’re upset,’ I say, not liking her distress.
She doesn’t look at me, only blinks furiously. ‘No, I’m not.’
I ignore her. ‘Are you afraid for him? Or are you afraid for yourself?’
She continues to look at the tablecloth for a long moment. Then, quite abruptly, she looks up at me and I can see pain in her eyes. But also something else.
Fury again. It smoulders in her eyes like a hot, green coal.
‘He won’t give you his loyalty,’ she says. ‘He’d rather let me die. I’m a pawn to him, nothing more.’
Her anger colours every word, matching the heat in her eyes, and she throws them at me like spears, each sharp point finding their mark.
I know exactly what it means to be only a pawn to one’s father. That’s all I was too. After my mother retreated to her bedroom for good, he took charge of me, thoughIdidn’t matter to him as much as the fact that I was his heir. I had to look like him and talk like him, make the decisions he would make. If I stepped out of line even slightly, I was punished for it.
But isn’t that how you’ve been treating her too? Like a pawn?
A cold current of awareness winds through me. Yes, it’s true and I’ve acknowledged it more than once. But putting my thoughts about her in the context of my own father’s behaviour is…disturbing.
Again, I’mnothim and I never was. Once, perhaps, after my mother died and he was the only family I had left, I wanted to be the perfect son for him. But then he ordered me to kill a child and everything changed. As I took the punishment he doled out, his spiked belt gouging holes in my flesh as he laid it across my back, that’s when I decided he was a stain on the honour of the Argentis. A stain that needed to be cleaned, and that I would be the one to clean it. I would be the one to set a new example of what the head of a family could be, a better example.
How is the way you’re treating her better?
She sits across the table from me, that fury in her eyes glowing hot, and along with it the pain, and I understand all at once that the way I’m treating her isnotbetter. That to actually be a better man and not merely paying lip service to the idea, I need to change my thinking. I need to change how I treat her.
I don’t look away. ‘What makes you think you’re only a pawn?’
‘Because he told me so. Basically every day since my mother and brother died. He blamed me for their deaths.’
I frown, puzzled by this. ‘How could he do that? You were only a child.’
