But Leontina kept going.
“I finally realized why.” She picked up one of the books in her lap and he realized it was a journal. “My mother left me these when she died. Her whole collection.” She shook her head. “I was quite young. I never really knew her. My father liked to tell me that she did not wish to know me, so as you can imagine, I found these journals something of a lifeline. And I excavated them for signs of her.”
She looked down at the journal in her hand. “But words on a page, even if they are direct thoughts, can only be part of the story. And with you, I only had the books you read, not your thoughts on them. I read as many of them as I could since I arrived in Spain. I treated it like a job, with a deadline.” Now, finally, she looked at him, her jade green eyes grave. “But what do I really know about you, in the end?”
Pau didn’t like where this was going. “Leontina. This has been a very emotional day.”
“So you can only have emotions when they’re negative, is that it?” she asked.
She smiled when she said it, but it wasn’t her real smile, and in any case he felt her words like a wallop across the face. He was surprised he remained standing.
“That’s neither true nor fair,” he managed to get out, though he wasn’t at all sure he wasn’t lying himself.
“My mother killed herself,” Leontina told him softly. “I think everyone knows that, but the story is always told to make it seem as if it was an accident. As if maybe she didn’t mean to do it. Or maybe she was too overwrought, too mentally ill, too…somethingto know better.”
“Your father is stable,” Pau told her. “If you’re worried about losing another parent, however substandard he might be.”
She studied him for a moment. “Today I realized something. I know my brother never read these journals, because if he had, he would know better than to think she simply effected the only escape she could. She did do that, don’t misunderstand me. But it wasn’tonlythat she wanted to escape my father.” She held up one of the journals. “She wanted to cause him pain in the only way she could. Not that it would hurt his feelings, of course, but it would embarrass him. Whether people thought she was weak or thought she hated him that much, either way, it would embarrass him that she took control like that, and so publicly. That consumed her. I think that’s what revenge does. It consumes, then it corrodes.”
“Leontina.”
She set the journal down on the arm of the chair and fixed him with that grave gaze again. Her hand snuck over her belly, though she didn’t look away. “But I want you to know that I’ve already made a vow to our son. No matter what happens, no matter who we hate or how wretched we think our enemies are, he comes first. And I intend to hold this vow, Pau. No matter what.”
It was how calmly she was saying these things, he thought. It felt like an indictment. It felt as if she was stripping him naked and baring parts of him that had never seen the light to her gaze. To his own gaze.
Revenge consumes, then corrodes.That was what she’d said.
He could not help but wonder how he’d convinced himself that keeping his focus steady and never, ever stopping this thing no matter how complicated it got between the two of them was agoodthing. How he’d been so certain that his father would applaud this from beyond the grave, if he could.
When the truth, as Pau knew too well, was that his father had been consumed and corroded in equal measure, though it wasn’t revenge that he’d chased. It was land and legacy and the perfect bottle of wine.
Standing here in Umberto’s castle, Pau found himself feeling far from victorious. He was forced to wonder if he—and his father—were more like the man who had dominated both of their lives, and ended Bernat’s, than Pau wanted to admit.
Even thinking it made him feel ill.
“I have only ever had one enemy in my life,” Pau told her, feeling that pounding in his chest again and an accompanying urgency he wasn’t sure he could explain. “And I’ll be honest with you, Leontina. Watching him effect his own undoing today did not exactly assuage my father’s death the way I thought it would.”
Saying that out loud made him feel…worse, perhaps. Messier, certainly.
“I hate being back here,” she replied after a moment. “If I’m honest, I wouldn’t mind at all if this place burned to the ground. I’d likely celebrate. Yet coming back here has made things clear to me, at last.”
He wasn’t sure why that made him want to panic. “Leontina.”
She ignored him.
“I will not disappear from my life,” she told him then, her voice strong. Sure. Her gaze intent on his. “If you don’t like the fact that I’m in love with you, that’s your problem. I will not diminish myself for you or anyone else. Ever.”
She stood up then, setting the journals aside, and he saw that she was breathing rapidly, too. He wanted to go and put his mouth on the pulse in her neck. He wanted to get his hands on her any way he could.
Hewanted herand that had changed everything.
But she wasn’t finished. “And I’ll tell you something else, Pau. I’m not going to raise our baby on revenge. On hatred. On nasty little plots that take decades and end in a sick, twisted old man on the floor with a banged-up head and no one to care about him but staff members he treats terribly.” Her eyes blazed, a wild, bright green. “My baby will be raised with hope. Love. And as much joy as he can handle.”
He said her name again, but it came out a whisper. A wish. A kind of prayer.
Leontina did not look away from him. He wasn’t sure she blinked. “If we can’t have that with you, Pau, that will break my heart. But I will leave you too if I have to.”
And he opened his mouth to tell her that none of that would be necessary, but he couldn’t seem to get the words out. All those pressure points that had been pressing on him caved him in. Because it was suddenly clear to him that all the structures inside him that held him in place, that made him who he was…crumbled.
