“That’s what we both signed up for, but continue,” I say.
“I was unhappy,” she says, voice shaking now with anger instead of fear. “Miserable. I thought sleeping with Lucien might help. I thought maybe if someone looked at me and actually wanted me, if I could just have one thing in this marriage that felt…” She cuts herself off with a harsh laugh. “It didn’t help. It made it worse.”
That gets my attention more than the affair itself did. “Worse how?”
Her eyes flick toward Lucien, then back at me pointedly. I frown, waiting for her to continue, but she doesn’t. She bites the inside of her cheek hard enough that I see it, then glances at him again, and it clicks all at once.
She isn’t looking at him like he’s the problem; she’s looking at him like he’s the witness.
I cross the room in three strides before either of them fully realizes I’ve moved. Lucien starts to speak again, maybe to explain, maybe to defend her, maybe to save himself, but I don’t care.
I bring the gun down, catch him across the side of the head with the solid back end of it, and he drops immediately, hitting the floor with a graceless thud and one last half-formed curse.
Arabella gasps. “Vincenzo!”
“He’ll live,” I say, stepping over him and setting the gun on the dresser now that the room has one less source of pointless noise. I lean one shoulder against the wardrobe and wait. “Now speak.”
She stares down at Lucien sprawled unconscious on the carpet, then back up at me, and I see that she’s more exhausted than afraid. It’s all over her face. Years of trying to contort herself into something this house could use. Years of sleeping alone, being decorative, and trying not to rot inside it.
“I was in love before I married you, but it could never work,” she says finally, voice thinner now, less rage and more old grief. “So, I did what everyone expected. I married you and did my duty. I smiled. I hosted. I dressed properly. I sat through dinners and board meetings and charity events and all of it, and I told myself I’d get over it.”
My expression must shift because she laughs again, bitterly. “You understand that word at least. Duty.”
I don’t answer.
“Lucien wasn’t…” She glances down at the floor where he’s out cold and snorts softly through her tears. “He wasn’t the point. He was convenient, and I was desperate to feel wanted by anyone. But it only made things worse because every time he touched me, all I could think about was the person I actually wanted.”
I fold my arms. “Who?”
She goes red. It’s almost comical, given the circumstances. Here she is in my bed with my unconscious second at her feet, tears on her face, silk sheets clutched to her chest, and somehow this is the part that embarrasses her.
“Arabella.”
Her eyes cut away. “Marie.”
I’m genuinely shocked at this revelation. “Marie,” I repeat, because apparently my brain needs to hear it twice to believe it.
She nods without looking up.
Marie. Her best friend and constant companion at luncheons, fittings, charity meetings, gallery openings, and private holidays I politely declined. Marie, with the soft voice and the cut-glass manners and the way she always looked at Arabella just a shade too long when she thought no one else was paying attention. Marie, whom I vaguely liked because she never tried too hard with me and always seemed relieved when I disappeared into my office after dinner.
“Does Marie know?” I ask.
Arabella’s mouth trembles. “Of course she knows. We were together before this. Before you.”
That rewrites years of social memory in one ugly sweep. The lunches. The glances. The way Arabella’s mood always lifted after visits from Marie, but not from any of the other women in her circle. Marie never married despite an endless parade of suitable offers.
I look at her and, for the first time in years, see her more clearly, and more than as a function, ornament, or ally by marriage. She looks miserable. Not embarrassed or alone, not simply caught, but genuinely miserable in the deep, private way of a woman who has spent years performing the wrong life and is finally too exhausted to keep smiling through the mismatch.
Whatever else she is, Arabella is not built for furtive scraps of affection in bedrooms that belong to other contracts. Neither, apparently, am I.
So, I do the only thing that makes sense in a marriage like ours—I solve it.
“What if Marie moved in?”
Arabella stares at me as if I’ve lost my mind, but I go on before she can talk herself into disbelief.
“The east guest wing is half-empty all year. If she took rooms there, no one would question it. People already think she’spractically part of the household. We could put a philanthropic angle on it, some joint initiative, women’s advocacy, foundation work, whatever nonsense the press swallows this season. She’d be here, and you’d be together. Publicly enough to breathe, privately enough to survive it.”
