chapter TEN
ELENA NEEDED TO say something, do something.
Scream for help, at the very least. Kick off her shoes and run. She needed to get as far away from Niccolo as possible, to distance herself from that vicious retribution she saw shining in his black eyes and all across his boyishly handsome face.
But she couldn’t seem to move a single muscle.
His lip curled. “Did you really think you could outrun me forever?”
She threw a panicked glance back up the stairs. Alessandro was still there, on the far side of the glass door, but he had his back turned to the square. To what was happening. To her.
Elena didn’t know why she’d believed he could save her from this, even for an instant. Hadn’t she always known she would have to handle it herself?
Niccolo looked up at Alessandro, then back at her, and his expression grew uglier.
“You’ve never been anything but a useless little whore, Elena,” he said, his black eyes bright with malevolence. “I took you out of that fishing boat you grew up in. I made something out of you. And this is how you repay me?”
Elena straightened. Pulled in a breath. He was shorter than she remembered. Thicker and more florid. The observation gave her a burst of strength, because it meant things had changed—she had changed.
“You didn’t do any of that for my benefit,” she said, finding steel inside her, somewhere. “You did it because you wanted the land. And then you hit me.”
“You owed me that land,” he snarled at her. “I dressed you up, took the stink of fish out of your skin. And then you let a Corretti steal it.”
“He didn’t steal anything,” she told him, keeping her gaze steady on his. “And he hasn’t hit me, either.”
“Just how long were you sleeping with him?” Niccolo demanded. “I know you lied to me. There’s no way that night was the first time you met him. How long were you stringing me along?”
“You hit me, Niccolo,” she said fiercely. “You threatened me. You lied to my family. You—”
“I let you off easy,” he interrupted her, and the names he called her then, one after the next, were vile. They made her feel sick—and sicker still that she had ever loved this man, that she’d touched him, that she’d failed to see what he really was. “What I want to know is how Corretti feels every time he takes a piece of my leavings.”
His hand flashed out and he grabbed her arm in a painful grip, but she didn’t make a sound. She didn’t even flinch. She refused to give him the satisfaction of thinking he’d hurt her again.
“Does he know, Elena?” he snarled. “Does he know I’ve already been there?” He smirked, smug and mean. “He’s not the kind of man who likes to share.”
Something in her changed then. She felt it shift. Elena didn’t care that his fingers around her arm hurt. She didn’t care that the look on his face would have frightened her once.
She didn’t have to be afraid of him any longer. She didn’t have to run. Alessandro had given her that much. As she looked up at Niccolo now, Elena finally accepted that even if Niccolo had been who he’d pretended to be, it still would have been over between them.
It had been over the moment she’d met Alessandro.
Even if she’d never seen him again after that night in Rome, she would have known the truth: that she’d loved a stranger for the duration of a dance far more than she’d loved her fiancé. It would have ended her engagement one way or another. Maybe, she thought then, she’d actually been lucky that dance had forced Niccolo to reveal himself. It would have been much, much harder to leave the man she’d thought he was.
“But then,” Niccolo was saying, “he doesn’t care about you, does he? He wants the land. Do you think he would trouble himself to marry you otherwise?”
He shook her, and that hurt, too, but she didn’t try to pull away. She didn’t defend Alessandro’s motives or worry that she didn’t know what they were. She didn’t cry or protest. She stared at him, memorizing this, so she would never forget what it felt like the moment she’d not only stopped being afraid of Niccolo Falco, but stopped feeling guilty about how this had all happened in the first place.
Inevitable, something whispered inside of her. This was all inevitable.
“I never would have married you,” she said then, her voice smooth and strong. “Alessandro only expedited things. You would have shown your true face sooner or later. And I would have left you the moment I saw it.”
“Look at where you are,” Niccolo ground out, his fingers digging into her arm. “This tiny town, all alone. Have you really convinced yourself that a man like Alessandro Corretti, who invited half of Europe to his last wedding, cares about a nobody like you?” He laughed. “Wake up, Elena. The only difference between Alessandro Corretti and me is that he has enough money to be a better liar.”
Elena would have to think about that, she knew. She would have to investigate the damage he’d caused with that hard, low blow. But not now. Not here.
“You don’t need to concern yourself with that land,” she said, ignoring the rest of it. She let him see how little she feared him, let him see she wasn’t shaking or cowering. “It will never be yours. You lost it the moment you thought you could hit me.”
His face flushed even redder, even angrier than before. He yanked her closer to him, shoving his face into hers, trying to intimidate her with his size and strength. He was a petty man, a vicious one. But she still wasn’t afraid.
“I’m not scared of you anymore, Niccolo,” she said very distinctly, tilting her head back to look him full in the face. Not hiding. Not running. Not afraid. “And that means you need to let go of my arm. Now.”
Whatever he saw in her face then made him drop her arm as if she’d turned into a demon right there in front of him. And Elena smiled, a real and genuine smile, because she was free of him.
After all this time, she was finally free of him.
“Step away from my wife, Falco.”
Alessandro’s icily furious voice cracked like a whip, startling Elena. Better, it made Niccolo move back. Alessandro was beside her then, his hand stroking down her back, as if he was reassuring himself that she still stood in one piece.
Or, the cynical part of her whispered, marking his territory.
“Give us a minute.”
It took Elena a moment to realize that Alessandro was speaking to her as he stared at Niccolo, murder in his dark green gaze. She frowned up at him.
But the Alessandro she knew was gone. There was nothing but darkness and vengeance on his fierce face. The promise of violence, of blood. Like a black hole where the man she loved should have been. It made every hair on the back of her neck prickle in warning. It made her pulse pick up speed.
It made her want to cry, as if they’d lost something.
“Alessandro, please,” she said softly. “He’s not worth it.”
Niccolo sneered. Alessandro only seemed to grow bigger, taller. Darker. More terrifying. And she’d never seen his face so cold, those dark green eyes so remote.
“Alessandro,” she said again.
But he still didn’t look at her.
“Get in the car,” he ordered her in a voice she’d never heard before. As if the man she knew was gone and in his place was this frigid and furious stranger, capable of anything. As if Niccolo was right, and she didn’t know him at all. As if she never had. “Do it now.”
And she didn’t know how to reach him, or if she could. She didn’t understand what was happening here, only that she shouldn’t let him do the things she saw promised on his hard face, in those deadly eyes….
But he didn’t love her. She was a temporary wife, at best.
And for all she knew, he’d married her for the land and this was simply another truth she’d been too blind to see. His true face, after all.
It ripped her up inside, but she obeyed him.
Alessandro wanted to kill Niccolo Falco. Very, very slowly.
“My congratulations,” the little pissant sneered, puffing out his chest and stepping suicidally close. “You keep her on a tight leash.”
His father would have simply kicked in one of Niccolo’s kneecaps, the better to drag him off and beat the life out of him in a more private place. Alessandro had seen Carlo do exactly that when he was fourteen.
“Men deal with problems like men, boy,” Carlo had told him, clearly disappointed that Alessandro hadn’t reacted better. “Take that scared look off your face. You’re a Corretti. Act like one.”
And Alessandro had never felt more like a Corretti, with all of the blood and graft and misery that implied, than he did right now.
Retribution. Revenge. Finally, he understood both.
“Be very careful,” Alessandro said through his teeth, trying to push back the red haze that obscured his vision. “You’re talking about my wife.”
Niccolo’s neck was flushed. His black eyes were slits of rage, and his thick hands were in fists. Alessandro knew he’d used one of those meaty hands on Elena, once before and once today, and had to battle back the urge to break the both of them.
He had no doubt at all that he could. He hadn’t fought in over forty days now—but he wasn’t drunk this time.
“I had her first,” Niccolo threw at him, a sly look in his eyes. “In every possible—”
“I won’t warn you again.”
It would be so easy. To simply end this man, as he richly deserved. He was nothing but a parasite, a lowlife. Alessandro didn’t even have to get his hands dirty, the way his father had so enjoyed. He knew which former associates of his father’s he could call to “handle” this. It was part and parcel of his blackened family legacy. It would take a single phone call.
This was who he was. Just as his mother had told him. Just as Elena had accused him. Just as he had always feared.
But this would be justice, that seductive darkness whispered. Simple. Earned.
Alessandro had to force air into his lungs. All the choices his father and uncle and grandfather had made, all the blood that stained their hands as they’d built this family up from nothing and punished whoever dared stand in their way—he’d always looked down on them for it.
He’d never understood how easy it might be to step across that line. He’d never understood the temptation. Or that it could seem not only right to exterminate a cockroach like Niccolo Falco, but inarguably just.
Necessary.
That darkness in him didn’t even seem particularly dark to him today as he stared at the bastard who’d terrorized Elena. It seemed like a choice. The right choice.
But.
But Elena had cried in his arms, and then she’d trusted him when he didn’t deserve it at all. When he’d given her no reason to trust him. She’d married him. He couldn’t understand why she’d done it. He wasn’t sure he ever would.
But it burned in him. It lived in him, bright like hope.
“Be the man who does the right thing,” she’d said once. And her eyes were the perfect blue of all his favorite summers, and she’d looked at him as if he could never be a man like his father.
As if she had some kind of faith in him, after all.
“Why take her at all?” Niccolo demanded, stepping even closer, tempting fate. “Because she was mine?”
Alessandro smiled at him, cold and vicious. “Because I can.”
Niccolo snorted. “You’re nothing but a thug in fancy clothes, aren’t you?”
Alessandro was done then. With Niccolo, with all of this. With who he’d nearly become. With that dark spiral he’d almost lost himself in today, that he could still feel inside of him.
But Elena was like light, and he wanted her more.
“Don’t let me see you again, Falco. Don’t even cross into my line of sight. You won’t like what happens.” He leaned closer then, pleased in a purely primitive way that he was bigger. Taller. That there was that flicker of fear in the other man’s eyes. “And stay the hell away from my wife. That goes for you and your entire pathetic family. You do not want to go to war with me, I promise you.”
Niccolo recoiled, the angry flush on his face and neck bleeding into something darker. Nastier.
“Don’t worry,” he said, ugly and flat. “Once I’m finished with a whore—”
Alessandro shut him up. With his fist.
He felt the crunch of bone that told him he’d broken Niccolo’s nose, heard the other man’s bellow of pain as he crumpled to the ground. Where he lay in a cowardly heap, clutching at his face.
And Alessandro wasn’t his father, he would never be his father, but he was still Corretti enough to enjoy it.
“Next time,” he promised, “I won’t be so kind.”
And then he walked away and left Niccolo Falco bleeding into the ground.
But alive.
“I’m sorry I let him touch you,” Alessandro said gruffly when he swung into the car. Elena sat there so primly in the passenger seat, looking perfect. Untouchable. Her face smooth and her eyes hidden away behind dark glasses. “It won’t happen again.”
“He didn’t hurt me,” she said. Far too politely. When he only frowned at her, searching her face for some sign, she shifted slightly in her seat. “Don’t you have a meeting?”
He reminded himself that he had her torn panties in his pocket. That if he reached over and touched her, he could have her moaning out his name in moments. But he started the car instead, and pulled out onto the small country road that led away from the village and back toward Palermo.
He’d told her Niccolo wouldn’t come for her, and he had. She had every right to be afraid, even angry. To blame him.
He could handle that. He could handle anything—because she’d married him, and they had nothing now but time. The rest of their lives, rolling out before them. There was nowhere to hide. Not for long.
They drove in silence, the warm summer day rushing all around them, sunshine and wind dancing in and around the car. The hills were green and pretty and off in the distance the sea beckoned. She was his wife, and he wasn’t his father.
It might not be perfect, Alessandro thought. It might take some work yet. But it was good.
“Why did you hit him?” she asked as they started to make their way into the city sprawl, and the wind no longer prohibited conversation.
“I should have killed him,” Alessandro replied shortly. “I wanted to kill him.”
But he hadn’t.
He hadn’t.
“I didn’t say he didn’t deserve it,” she replied in that cool way that he still hated, even now. “I only wondered what horrible thing he might have said to tip you over that edge.”
Alessandro eyed her as he stopped at a traffic light. He considered telling her about real edges, and what lay on the other side of them, but refrained. There would be time enough to introduce her to all the poison and pain that was his birthright, to tell her what had happened back there and what he’d finally rejected once and for all.
“He called you a whore.”
“Ah,” she said. She sat there so elegantly. So calmly. Her hands folded in her lap, her legs neatly crossed. She smiled, and it scraped at him. “So it’s only okay when you do it?”
Alessandro pulled in a breath through his teeth.
“Damn it, Elena,” he began, but she turned to face the front again, and nodded toward the road with every appearance of serenity.
“The light’s changed.”
He swore in Sicilian as well as Italian, and then he drove with more fury than skill through the city, screeching to a halt at the valet in front of the Corretti Media tower.
Elena let herself out of the car before he had the chance to come around and get her, starting toward the building’s entrance as if she didn’t care one way or the other if he followed her. Gritting his teeth, he did.
She said nothing as they walked through the marble lobby. She only slid her dark glasses onto the top of her head and let him guide her into the elevator when it arrived.
“Is there anything else you plan to throw at me today?” he asked, tamping down on his temper as the doors slid shut. “Do we need to have another discussion like the one we had about divorce?”
Elena stared straight ahead, her gaze fixed on the far wall and the flashing numbers that announced each floor, though a faint flush spread across her cheeks.
“There’s nothing else,” she said. He didn’t recognize that voice she used, the way she held herself. But he knew she was lying. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said that.”
“Are you sure he didn’t hurt you?” he asked quietly.
She looked at him then, and her blue eyes were shadowed. Dark.
“No.” There was something there then. Something making her voice catch, her mouth take on that hint of vulnerability that killed him. “I told you.”
“Elena,” he said. “You have to know—”
But his mobile beeped. She blinked, then looked away, and when she glanced at him again her face was that smooth mask. He couldn’t stand it.
“Tell me what’s wrong,” he urged her. “Tell me what happened.”
“You should answer that,” she said, much too calmly, when his phone kept beeping. “I’m sure it’s important.”
He pulled out the phone to look at the screen, and wasn’t surprised at the number he saw flashing there.
“It’s my family,” he started, not knowing how to compress the history of the Corretti feuds into something coherent. Not knowing how he felt about any of it, now that he’d pulled himself back from the abyss that had stalked him all these years. “There are all these divisions, these petty little wars—”
“I read the papers, Alessandro,” she said gently. “I know about your family.” She nodded at his mobile. “You should take the call.”
“I always take the call,” he gritted out. “And it never helps. Whenever there’s a possibility of ending this nonsense, we make sure to destroy it.” He shook his head. “I’m beginning to believe we always will.”
She looked at him for a long moment, and he had the sense she was weighing something behind those stormy eyes he couldn’t read. She reached over and hit one of the elevator buttons, making his main office floor light up.
“Then you should fix it,” she said. She even smiled, and it was almost real. He almost believed she meant it. “Isn’t that what you do?”
“No,” he said shortly, his gaze searching hers. “Obviously not.”
Her eyes were much too dark, and it ate at him. Something flared between them in the small space, a different kind of fire, and he had the awful sense that he’d already lost her. That she had already disappeared.
But she was right here, he reminded himself sternly. She had married him slightly more than an hour ago. She was his.
“What’s the right thing?” she asked, her voice too quiet. “Do that, even if it hurts. Your family deserves it.”
“And if they don’t?”
After all these bitter years. After all the pain, the blood.
He thought he saw compassion in her gaze, or maybe he only wanted that. Maybe he was simply desperate for something he recognized, something to ease the gnawing sensation inside of him.
The elevator doors slid open, and she looked away, out toward the hushed executive level of Corretti Media.
His phone beeped again. Insistent. Annoying. He heard Giovanni’s voice from the office floor, the valet no doubt having informed him that Alessandro had returned.
“Your family might not deserve it, Alessandro. But you do.”
“Me?” He hardly made a sound. He hardly breathed. “I fear I deserve it least of all.”
The moment stretched between them, taut and shimmering with all the things he did not, could not, feel, except for her. He said her name again. His favorite incantation. His only remaining prayer.
“Go,” she whispered.
And it wasn’t until the elevator door had closed on her, and he was striding toward his responsibilities the way he always did, that he realized what he’d seen flash in her eyes then was a deep, dark sadness.
Elena took an early-afternoon flight out of Palermo’s Falcone Borcellino Airport, headed for Naples and the car she’d hired for the drive back to her village. She settled into the economy-class seat she’d bought with the money she’d earned waitressing and on Alessandro’s yacht, not the money he—or, more likely, his staff—had left for her in the penthouse in a folder with her name on the front and a selection of credit cards and cash within.
And when the plane took off and soared into the air above Sicily, she didn’t let herself look back.
“Because I can,” he’d said to Niccolo. That was why he’d danced with her. That was why he’d done all of this. Married her. Just as she’d suspected, it was all a game. Because he could.
She hadn’t thought she’d hear him admit it.
And as she’d sat in his car in the sun-drenched village square, twisting all of those diamonds around and around on her finger, Niccolo’s harsh words circling in her head, she’d had to face the facts she’d been avoiding for far too long.
She’d been so sure that she, Elena Calderon, deserved what Niccolo had represented. That she should be the one chosen from all the girls in the village to swan off into a posh life, dripping in gowns and villas.
Alessandro had been right to accuse her of that, but wrong about why—and around him it was even worse. He was the most powerful man she’d ever met. His ruthlessness was equal parts intimidating and exciting. He was beautiful and lethal, and he’d wanted her as desperately as she’d wanted him.
Some part of her obviously believed that she deserved no less than the CEO of one of the most successful media corporations in Europe. That she deserved rings made of diamonds, private islands and a three-story penthouse perched over Palermo like an opulent aerie.
How remarkably conceited she was.
She remembered then, as the plane winged across the blue sea, one of the last nights they’d spent on the island. They’d sat together on the beach, watching the sunset. He’d been behind her, letting her sprawl between his legs and against his chest.
He’d played with her hair and she’d watched the sun sink toward the horizon. She’d felt so filled with hope. So unreasonably optimistic.
Until she’d recalled the last time she’d felt that way.
It had been the night of that fateful charity ball. She’d finished dressing in the new, beautiful gown Niccolo had chosen for her, and she’d been unable to stop staring at herself in the mirror of their hotel suite. She’d looked so glamorous, so sophisticated. And she’d felt the same sense of well-being, of happiness, roll through her.
This is exactly how my life should be, she’d thought then.
On the beach with Alessandro, she’d shivered.
“What’s the matter?” he’d asked, tugging gently on her hair so she’d look back at him. The reds and golds of the setting sun cast him in bronze, once again like a very old god, perfect and deadly.
“Nothing,” she’d lied, and she’d wanted it to be nothing. Just an odd coincidence. No reason at all for that sudden hollow pit in her stomach.
He’d smiled, and kissed her, then he’d wrapped his arms around her like a man in love and had tucked her under his chin in that way she adored, and she’d known without a shadow of a doubt that it was no coincidence. That it had been a sign, and she’d do well to heed it.
That when the forty days were up she had to leave him. She had to.
And she’d gone ahead and married him, anyway.
But then, she thought now, shifting in her narrow seat, every decision she’d made for more than half a year she’d made out of fear.
Fear of what Niccolo would do to her. Fear of her parents’ disappointment. Fear of losing Alessandro—a man who had insulted her upon their first meeting, thought the very worst of her even as he slept with her, and had even married her in undue, secretive haste in a sleepy little village where no one knew him.
Niccolo was a disgusting creep, but he’d had a point.
And the truth was, though she never would have phrased it the way he had, she would always smell of fish and hard, thankless work like the people she came from. No matter what airs she tried to put on, what gowns or jewels she wore, she was a village girl. She had no place with a man like Alessandro.
More than that, he was a Corretti.
Maybe Alessandro really was the man he claimed he was, a man who strove to do what was right no matter what his family name. She thought of that painful conversation in the elevator and she ached—because she wanted so badly to believe him. To believe that the darkness she’d seen in him today was an aberration, not the true face he’d kept from her the way Niccolo had.
Maybe.
But she had to accept that it was just as likely that he was exactly who Niccolo had told her he was. Exactly who she’d believed he was.
It was time to go home. It was time to stop playing at games she hardly understood. It was past time.
Elena needed to face up to what she’d done. She needed to beg for her parents’ forgiveness—not for calling off one wedding, not for marrying yet another man who might very well ruin everything, but for not trusting them enough. For not staying and fighting the lies Niccolo had told. For not believing that they could love her enough to overcome their disappointment in her. For running away instead.
It had solved nothing. It had been a selfish, scared act. It had hurt the people who loved her. And it had broken her heart.
The land was out of her hands, she thought now, her eyes easing closed as she accepted that bitter reality. As she acknowledged her own failure. In the end, it was only land. Dirt and stones and trees. It wasn’t worth all of this suffering.
Elena had to believe that.
She closed the window shade beside her so she wouldn’t give in to the temptation to look back, shut her eyes tight and prayed she’d make it home in time.