Claimed In The Italian's Castle
Angelina waited for her mother to sigh and recommend her daughters take to the stage, as she did with regularity—something that would have caused instant, shame-induced cardiac arrest should they ever have followed her advice. But when Mother only stared back at her older daughters, stone-faced, that prickle at the back of Angelina’s neck started to intensify. She sat straighter.
“Surely we all knew that the expectation was that we would find rich husbands, someday,” Angelina said, carefully. Because that was one of the topics she avoided, having always assumed that long before she did as expected and married well enough to suit her mother’s aspirations, if not her father’s wallet, she would make her escape. “Assuming any such men exist who wished to take on charity cases such as ours.”
“Charity cases!” Margrete looked affronted. “I hope your father never hears you utter such a phrase, Angelina. Such an ungrateful, vicious thing to say. That the Charteris name should be treated with such contempt by one who bears it! If I had not been present at your birth I would doubt you were my daughter.”
Given that Margrete expressed such doubts in a near constant refrain, Angelina did not find that notion as hurtful she might have otherwise.
“This isn’t about marrying,” Petronella said, the hint of tears in her voice, though there was no trace of moisture in her eyes. “I’ve always wanted to marry, personally.”
Dorothea sniffed. “Just last week you claimed it was positively medieval to expect you to pay attention to men simply because they met Father’s requirements.”
Petronella waved an impatient hand. The fact she didn’t snap at Dorothea for saying such a thing—or attempting to say such a thing—made the prickle at Angelina’s nape bloom into something far colder. And sharper, as it began to slide down her spine.
“This isn’t about men or marriage. It’s about murder.” Petronella actually sat up straight to say that part, a surprise indeed, given that her spine better resembled melted candle wax most of the time. “We’re talking about the Butcher of Castello Nero.”
Invoking one of the most infamous villains in Europe—maybe in the whole of the world—took Angelina’s breath away. “Is someone going to tell me what we’re talking about?”
“I invite you to call our guest that vile nickname to his face, Petronella,” Margrete suggested, her voice a quiet fury as she glared at the larger settee. “If he really is what you say he is, how do you imagine he will react?”
And to Angelina’s astonishment, her selfish, spoiled rotten sister—who very rarely bothered to lift her face from a contemplation of the many self-portraits she took with her mobile phone—paled.
“Benedetto Franceschi,” Dorothea intoned. “The richest man in all of Europe.” She was in such a state that her bob actually trembled against her jawline. “And the most murderous.”
“Stop this right now.” Margrete cast her needlepoint aside and rose in an outraged rustle of skirts and fury. Then she gazed down at all of them over her magnificent, affronted bosom. “I will tolerate this self-centered spitefulness no longer.”
“I still don’t know what’s going on,” Angelina pointed out.
“Because you prefer to live in your little world of piano playing and secret excursions up and down the servants’ stairs, Angelina,” Margrete snapped. “This is reality, I’m afraid.”
And that, at last, made Angelina feel real fear.
It was not that she thought she’d actually managed to pull something over on her mother. It was that she’d lived in this pleasant fiction they’d all created for the whole of her life. That they were not on the brink of destitution. That her father would turn it all around tomorrow. That they were ladies of leisure, lounging about the ruined old house because they chose it, not because there were no funds to do much of anything else.
Angelina hadn’t had the slightest notion that her mother paid such close attention to her movements. She preferred to imagine herself the ignored daughter.
Here, now, what could she do but lower her gaze?
“And you two.” Margrete turned her cold glare to the other settee. “Petronella, forever whoring about as if giving away for free what we might have sold does anything but make you undesirable and useless. Wealthy heiresses can do as they like, because the money makes up for it. What is it you intend to bring to the table?”
When Petronella said nothing, Mother’s frosty gaze moved to her oldest daughter. “And you, Dorothea. You turned up your nose at a perfectly acceptable marriage offer, and for what? To traipse about the Continent, trailing after the heirs to lesser houses as if half of France doesn’t claim they’re related to some other dauphin?”
Dorothea gasped. “He was Papa’s age! He made my skin crawl!”
“The more practical woman he made his wife is younger than you and can afford to buy herself a new skin.” Margrete adjusted her dress, though it was perfect already. Even fabric dared not challenge her. “The three of you have done nothing to help this family. All you do is take. That ends tonight.”
Angelina found herself sitting straighter. She was used to drama, but this was on a different level. For one thing, she had never seen her sisters ashen-faced before tonight.
“Your sisters know this already, but let me repeat it for everyone’s edification.” Margrete looked at each of them in turn, but then settled her cold glare on Angelina. “Benedetto Franceschi will be at dinner tonight. He is looking for a new wife and your father has told him that he can choose amongst the three of you. I am not interested in your thoughts or feelings on this matter. If he chooses you, you will say yes. Do you understand me?”
“He has had six wives so far,” Petronella hissed. “All have died or disappeared under mysterious circumstances. All, Mother!”
Angelina felt cold on the outside. Her hands, normally quick and nimble, were like blocks of ice.
But deep inside her, a dark thing pulsed.
Because she knew about Benedetto Franceschi. “The Butcher of Castello Nero,” Petronella had said. Everyone alive knew of the man so wealthy he lived in his own castle on his own private island—when the tide was high. When the tide was low, it was possible to reach the castello over a road that was little more than a sandbar, but, they whispered, those who made that trek did not always come back.
He had married six times. All of his wives had died or disappeared without a trace, declared dead in absentia. And despite public outcry, there had never been so much as an inquest.
All of those things were true.
What was also true was that when Angelina had been younger and there had still been money enough for things like tuition, she and her friends had sighed over pictures of Benedetto Franceschi in the press. That dark hair, like ink. Those flashing dark eyes that were like fire. And that mouth of his that made girls in convent schools like the one Angelina had attended feel the need to make a detailed confession. Or three.
If he chooses you, came a voice inside her, as clear as a bell, you can leave this place forever.
“He will choose one of us,” Petronella said, still pale, but not backing down from her mother’s ferocious glare. “He will pick one of us, carry her off, and then kill her. That is what our father has agreed to. Because he thinks that the loss of a daughter is worth it if he gets to keep this house and cancel out his debts. Which man is worse? The one who butchers women or the man who supplies him?”
Angelina bit back a gasp. Her mother only glared.
Out in the cavernous hallways, empty of so much of their former splendor, the clock rang out the half hour.
Margrete stiffened. “It is time. Come now, girls. We must not keep destiny waiting, no matter how you feel about it.”
And there was no mutiny. No revolt.
They all lived in what remained of this sad place, after all. This pile of stone and regret.
Angelina rose obediently, falling into place behind her sisters as they headed out.
“To the death,” Petronella kept whispering to Dorothea, who was uncharacteristically silent.
But it would be worth the risk, Angelina couldn’t help but think—a sense of giddy defiance sweeping over her—if it meant she got to live, even briefly.
Somewhere other than here.
CHAPTER TWO
WHEN A MAN was a known monster, there was no need for posturing.
Benedetto Franceschi did not hide his reputation.
On the contrary, he indulged it. He leaned into it.
He knew the truth of it, after all.
He dressed all in black, the better to highlight the dark, sensual features he’d been told many times were sin personified. Evil, even. He lounged where others sat, waved languid fingers where others offered detailed explanations, and most of the time, allowed his great wealth and the power that came with it—not to mention his fearsome, unsavory reputation—to do his talking for him.
But here he was again, parading out like l’uomo nero, the boogeyman, in a crumbling old house in France that had once been the seat of its own kind of greatness. He could see the bones of it, everywhere he looked. The house itself was a shambles. And what was left of the grounds were tangled and overgrown, gardeners and landscapers long since let go as the family fortune slipped away thanks to Anthony Charteris’s bad gambles and failed business deals.
Benedetto had even had what was, for him, an unusual moment of something like shame as he’d faced once more the charade he was reduced to performing, seemingly preying on the desperation of fools—
But all men were fools, in one form or another. Why not entertain himself while living out what so many called the Franceschi Curse?
The curse is not supposed to mean you, a voice inside him reminded him. But rather your so-called victims.
He shrugged that away, as ever, and attempted to focus on the task at hand. He had little to no interest in Anthony Charteris himself, or the portly little man’s near slavering devotion to him tonight. He had suffered through a spate of twittering on that he had only half listened to, and could not therefore swear had been a kind of “business” presentation. Whatever that meant. Benedetto had any number of fortunes and could certainly afford to waste one on a man like this. Such was his lot in life, and Charteris could do with it what he liked. Benedetto already failed to care in the slightest, and maybe this time, Benedetto would get what he wanted out of the bargain.
Surely number seven will be the charm, he assured himself.
Darkly.
His men had already gathered all the necessary background information on the once proud Charteris family and their precipitous slide into dire straits. Anthony’s lack of business acumen did not interest him. Benedetto was focused on the man’s daughters.
One of them was to be his future wife, whether he liked it or not.
But what he liked or disliked was one more thing he’d surrendered a long time ago.
Benedetto knew that the eldest Charteris daughter had been considered something of a catch for all of five minutes in what must seem to her now like another lifetime. She could have spent the last eight years as the wife of a very wealthy banker whose current life expectancy rivaled that of a fragile flower, meaning she could have looked forward to a very well-upholstered widowhood. Instead, she had refused the offer in the flush of Anthony’s brief success as a hotelier only to watch her father’s fortunes—and her appeal—decline rapidly thereafter.
The possibilities of further offers from wealthy men were scant indeed, which meant Dorothea would likely jump at the chance to marry him, his reputation notwithstanding.
Unlike her sister, the middle daughter had shared her favors freely on as many continents as she could access by private jet, as long as one of the far wealthier friends she cozied up to were game to foot the bill for her travels. She had been documenting her lovers and her lifestyle online for years. And Benedetto was no Puritan. What was it to him if a single woman wished to indulge in indiscriminate sex? He had always enjoyed the same himself. Nor was he particularly averse to a woman whose avariciousness trumped her shame.
Of them all, Petronella seemed the most perfect for him on paper, save the part of her life she insisted on living in public. He could not allow that and he suspected that she would not give it up. Which would not matter if she possessed the sort of curiosity that would lead her to stick her nose into his secrets and make a choice she couldn’t take back—but he doubted very much that she was curious about much outside her mobile.
The third daughter was ten years younger than the eldest, six years younger than the next, and had proved the hardest to dig into. There were very few pictures of her, as the family had already been neck deep in ruin by the time she might have followed in her sisters’ footsteps and begun to frequent the tiresome charity ball circuit of Europe’s elite families. What photographs existed dated back to her school days, where she had been a rosy-cheeked thing in a plaid skirt and plaits. Since graduating from the convent, Angelina had disappeared into the grim maw of what remained of the family estate, never to be heard from again.
Benedetto had already dismissed her. He expected her to be callow and dull, having been cloistered her whole life. What else could she be?
He had met the inimitable Madame Charteris upon arrival tonight. The woman had desperately wanted him to know that, once upon a time, she had been a woman of great fortune and beauty herself.
“My father was Sebastian Laurent,” she had informed him, then paused. Portentously. Indicating that Benedetto was meant to react to that. Flutter, perhaps. Bend a knee.
As he did neither of those things, ever, he had merely stared at the woman until she had colored in some confusion, then swept away.
Someday, Benedetto would no longer have to subject himself to these situations. Someday, he would be free...
But he realized, as the room grew silent around him, that his host was peering at him quizzically.
Someday, sadly, was not today.
Benedetto took his time rising, and not only because he was so much bigger than Charteris that the act of rising was likely to be perceived as an assault. He did not know if regret and self-recrimination had shrunk the man opposite him, as it should have if there was any justice, but the result was the same. And Benedetto was not above using every weapon available to him without him having to do anything but smile.
Anyone who saw that smile claimed they could see his evil, murderous intent in it. It was as good as prancing about with a sign above his head that said LEAVE ME ALONE OR DIE, which he had also considered in his time.
He smiled now, placing his drink down on the desk before him with a click that sounded as loud as a bullet in the quiet room.
Charteris gulped. Benedetto’s smile deepened, because he knew his role.
Had come to enjoy it, in parts, if he was honest.
“Better not to do something than to do it ill,” his grandfather had often told him.
“If you’ll c-come with me,” Charteris said, stuttering as he remembered, no doubt, every fanciful tale he’d ever heard about the devil he’d invited into his home, “we can go through to the dining room. Where all of my daughters await you.”
“With joy at their prospects, one assumes.”
“N-naturally. Tremendous joy.”
“And do you love them all equally?” Benedetto asked silkily.
The other man frowned. “Of course.”
But Benedetto rather thought that a man like this loved nothing at all.
After all, he’d been fathered, however indifferently, by a man just like this.
He inclined his head to his host, then followed the small man out of what he’d defiantly announced was his “office” when it looked more like one of those dreadful cubicles Benedetto had seen in films of lowbrow places, out into the dark, dimly lit halls of this cold, crumbling house.
Once upon a time, the Charteris home had been a manor. A château, he corrected himself, as they were in France. Benedetto could fix the house first and easily. That way, no matter what happened with his newest acquisition, her father would not raise any alarms. He would be too happy to be restored to a sense of himself to bother questioning the story he received.
Benedetto had played this game before. He liked to believe that someday there would be no games at all.
But he needed to stop torturing himself with someday, because it was unlikely that tonight would be any different. Wasn’t that what he’d learned? No matter how much penance he paid, nothing changed.
Really, he should have been used to it. He was. It was this part that he could have done without, layered as it was with those faint shreds of hope. All the rest of it was an extended, baroque reconfirmation that he was, if not precisely the monster the world imagined him, a monster all the same.
It was the hope that made him imagine otherwise, however briefly.
This was not the first time he’d wished he could excise it with his own hands, then cast it aside at last.
The house was not overly large, especially with so much of it unusable in its current state, so it took no time at all before they reached the dining room on the main floor. His host offered an unctuous half bow, then waved his arm as if he was an emcee at a cabaret. A horrifying notion.
Benedetto prowled into the room, pleased to find that this part of the house, unlike the rest with its drafts and cold walls despite the season, was appropriately warm.
Perhaps too warm, he thought in the next moment. Because as he swept his gaze across the room, finding the oldest and middle daughter to be exactly as he’d expected, it was as if someone had thrown gas on a fire he could not see. But could feel inside of him, cranked up to high.
The flames rose higher.
He felt scalded. But what he saw was an angel.
Angelina, something in him whispered.
For it could be no other.
Her sisters were attractive enough, but he had already forgotten them. Because the third, least known Charteris daughter stood next to her mother along one side of a formally set table, wearing a simple dress in a muted hue and a necklace of complicated pearls that seemed to sing out her beauty.
But then, she required no embellishment for that. She was luminous.
Her hair was so blond it shone silver beneath the flickering flames of a chandelier set with real candles. Economy, not atmosphere, he was certain, but it made Angelina all the more lovely. She’d caught the silvery mass back at the nape of her neck in a graceful chignon that he longed to pick apart with his hands. Her features should have been set in marble or used to launch ships into wars. They made him long to paint, though he had never wielded a brush in all his days.
But he thought he might learn the art of oils against canvas for the express purpose of capturing her. Or trying. Her high cheekbones, her soft lips, her elegant neck.
He felt his heart, that traitorous beast, beat too hard.
“Here we all are,” said Anthony Charteris, all but chortling with glee.
And in that moment, Benedetto wanted to do him damage. He wanted to grab the man around his portly neck and shake him the way a cat shook its prey. He wanted to make the man think about what it was he was doing here. Selling off a daughter to a would-be groom with a reputation such as Benedetto’s? Selling off an angel to a devil, and for what?
But almost as soon as those thoughts caught at him, he let them go.
Each man made his own prison. His own had contained him for the whole of his adult life and he had walked inside, turned the key, and fashioned his own steel bars. Who was he to cast stones?
“This is Benedetto Franceschi,” Charteris announced, and then frowned officiously at his daughters. “He is a very important friend and business partner. Very important.”
Some sort of look passed between the man and his wife. Margrete, once a Laurent, drew herself up—no doubt so she could present her bosom to Benedetto once more. Then again, perhaps that was how she communicated.
He remained as he had been before: vaguely impressed, yet unmoved.
“May I present to you, sir, my daughters.” Margrete gestured across the table. “My eldest, Dorothea.” Her hand moved to indicate the sulky, too self-aware creature beside the eldest, who smirked a bit at him as if he had already proposed to her. “My middle daughter, Petronella.”
And at last, she indicated his angel. The most beautiful creature Benedetto had ever beheld. His seventh and last wife, God willing. “And this is my youngest, Angelina.”
Benedetto declared himself suitably enchanted, waited for the ladies to seat themselves, and then dropped into his chair with relief. Because he wanted to concentrate on Angelina, not her sisters.
He wanted to dispense with this performance. Announce that he had made his choice and avoid having to sit through an awkward meal like this one, where everyone involved was pretending that they’d never heard of the many things he was supposed to have done. Just as he was pretending he didn’t notice that the family house was falling down around them as they sat here.
“Tell me.” Benedetto interrupted the meaningless prattle from Charteris at the head of the table about his ancestors or the Napoleonic Wars or some such twaddle. “What is it you do?”
His eyes were on the youngest daughter, though she had not once looked up from her plate.
But it was the eldest who answered, after clearing her throat self-importantly. “It is a tremendous honor and privilege that I get to dedicate my life to charity,” she proclaimed, a hint of self-righteousness flirting with the corners of her mouth.
Benedetto had many appetites, but none of them were likely to be served by the indifferent food served in a place like this, where any gesture toward the celebrated national cuisine had clearly declined along with the house and grounds. He sat back, shifting his attention from the silver-haired vision to her sister.
“And what charity is it that you offer, exactly?” he asked coolly. “As I was rather under the impression that your interest in charity ball attendance had more to do with the potential of fetching yourself a husband of noble blood than any particular interest in the charities themselves.”
Then he watched, hugely entertained, as Dorothea flushed. Her mouth opened, then closed, and then she sank back against her seat without saying a word. As if he’d taken the wind out of her sails.
He did tend to have that effect.
The middle daughter was staring at him, so Benedetto merely lifted a brow. And waited for her to leap into the fray.
Petronella did not disappoint. Though she had the good sense to look at him with a measure of apprehension in her eyes, she also propped her elbows on the table and sat forward in such a way that her breasts pressed against the bodice of the dress she wore. An invitation he did not think was the least bit unconscious.
“I consider myself an influencer,” she told him, her voice a husky, throaty rasp that was itself another invitation. All of her, from head to toe, was a carefully constructed beckoning. She did not smile at him. She kept her lips in what appeared to be a natural pout while gazing at him with a directness that he could tell she’d practiced in the mirror. Extensively.
“Indeed.” His brow remained where was, arched high. “What influence do you have? And over what—or whom?”
“My personal brand is really a complicated mix of—”
“I am not interested in brands,” Benedetto said, cutting her off. “Brands are things that I own and use at will according to my wishes. The purpose of a brand is to sell things. Influence, on the other hand, suggests power. Not the peddling of products for profit. So. What power do you have?”