A Shadow of Guilt

chapter TEN



‘I …’ THE WORDS FROZE in Valentina’s throat as Gio stood up and turned around. He looked wild. Unshaven, bleary eyed. His hair was mussed up. He looked as if he hadn’t been to bed since she’d last seen him.

She swallowed. ‘I was concerned. I wanted to know how Misfit was doing.’

Gio wiped his hands with a towel and threw it down on the ground, then he stepped back and gestured with a hand. ‘See for yourself, he’s dying. The vet is coming back in an hour to administer the final shot to put him out of his misery.’

Valentina could feel the blood draining from her face. She moved closer to see the huge majestic horse lying on his side with his eyes closed. His whole body was sheened with sweat and his breaths were impossibly shallow.

Eyes huge, she looked at Gio and whispered, ‘What happened?’

Gio’s voice was sterile, clipped. ‘A virus, a very rare virus. It gets into a horse’s brain and induces paralysis among other things. The horse sinks into a coma and dies within a couple of days. There’s no cure.’

‘Gio … I’m so sorry.’

‘Why? It’s not your fault.’

Valentina winced when she was hurtled back in time to the graveyard when she’d told Gio it was his fault that Mario had died. Never more than at this moment did she have a full understanding of the pain she’d caused with her grief and anger. Guilt, bitter and acrid, rose upwards.

‘Gio …’ Her throat ached. ‘I’m so sorry … about everything.’

Gio looked at her, his eyes burning in his face. With that uncanny prescience that he seemed to have around her, he knew exactly what she meant. His grim smile did little to raise Valentina’s spirits.

‘Once … I wanted nothing more than to hear you say that. To know that you possibly didn’t despise the very air I breathed.’

The ache in her throat got worse. Valentina shook her head. ‘I don’t despise … you, the air you breathe.’

‘It’s too late, Valentina.’ He gestured towards his horse. ‘Don’t you see? It’s all too late. Everything turns to dust in the end—it’s all completely futile.’

Tears pricked Valentina’s eyes now to see the bleak despair on Gio’s face. ‘No, Gio, it’s not all futile, it’s not. It’s terrible that Misfit is dying and I wish he wasn’t but he’s had a wonderful life with you.’

Gio laughed curtly. ‘Just like Mario had a wonderful life until it was snatched out of his hands.’

Valentina reached out a hand but Gio backed away, rigid with tension. He put his hands up as if to ward her off.

Slowly he lowered his hands back down. ‘Do you know that I’ve slowly begun to believe that what happened that night wasn’t all my fault? That it was just a tragic accident.’

He shook his head. ‘We’d finished with the horses and were calling it a night. I still had plenty of time to get Mario home … but then he saw Black Star, loose in the paddock. Mario started to plead again, just for one attempt to ride him, to see if he could possibly have the magic touch….’

Valentina’s heart was breaking in two in her chest. ‘Gio …’

But he wasn’t listening to her, or was ignoring her. ‘I wasn’t going to let him. I said no and walked to the stables with Misfit. When I got back outside, Mario was putting a saddle on Black Star … I could see the stallion was already edgy. I told Mario to leave it alone … but he wouldn’t listen. He’d swung up onto his back before I could stop him, and Black Star went berserk. He jumped the paddock fence but his back leg got caught. Mario went down and Black Star landed on him, crushing him before I could get to him. The damned horse just got up and walked away, dragging Mario behind him until I could get to him and free him … but it was too late.’

Tears were streaming down Valentina’s face now, silent sobs making her chest heave. She struggled for control. When she could speak she said thickly, ‘You’re right, it wasn’t your fault … and I should never have—’

Gio put up a hand to stop her speaking. ‘No. You had every right to be angry with me. I won’t let you take that back now. Nothing can change the fact that it was my fault I had that horse here in the first place when it should have been put down months before….’

Valentina felt exposed and raw. More than anything she wanted to touch Gio … to comfort him. It was like an ache in her whole body. She remembered how cold he’d been when he’d told her it was over. No wonder he never wanted to see her again.

‘You won’t …’ She took in a shuddering breath. ‘You won’t see me again if you don’t want to. I’ll stay out of your way.’

Gio just looked at her and Valentina wiped at a tear on her cheek. And then quietly he said, ‘You don’t get it, do you?’

‘Get what?’ She frowned slightly.

Gio took a step closer and something about his intensity made Valentina take a step back. ‘See, even now, you show how you really feel.’

‘What are you talking about?’

Gio laughed curtly and looked up at the ceiling before looking back down again at Valentina. ‘I’m in love with you. I love you so much and it’s tearing me to pieces. What was purely physical for you was … is soul deep for me. I think I’ve loved you forever. When you were seventeen I had to pretend to like other girls to stop Mario suspecting that I was only interested in one girl—his sister.’

Gio ran a hand through his hair impatiently. ‘Dio, he would have killed me. I would have killed me if I’d been Mario.

‘And you?’ Gio posed a rhetorical question. ‘I know you had a crush on me. I always felt your gaze on me. I noticed the way you’d blush whenever I looked at you.’

Shock was rendering Valentina mute. Her head was spinning. She felt weak and light-headed, like she wanted to sit down on something solid. She couldn’t possibly believe Gio had just said he loved her. It was too fantastical, unbelievable.

Gio’s mouth firmed; unmistakable pride lit his eyes, turning them green in the soft light. ‘I know you don’t feel anything for me—I never expected it. Anger and grief fuelled this madness between us.’

Valentina just looked at him, barely hearing his words. She could feel her heart expanding in her chest, as if it had already realised what he’d said and believed it. Welcomed it. For a second she saw something like hope in his eyes and her own heart beat faster in response.

She opened her mouth, not even sure what she was going to say, feeling the edges of incredible joy reach out to grab her. The moment hung suspended between them, but then just like that, the spectre of deeply ingrained fear and guilt rose up like a huge shadow to choke her. Memories: the shock of being told Mario was dead, the huge gaping hole left in the family. The excoriating grief and insecurity that had followed. The erosion of belief in anything good, solid, dependable. The awful chasm of loss.

That night in the hospital when for a moment—Valentina shut it down. She couldn’t bear for him to see that in her eyes now. The guilt she still felt.

She was standing on the edge of that chasm of loss and pain all over again and she knew she wasn’t brave enough to take the leap, to lay herself bare. Her heart spasmed once, painfully. She could feel it contracting in her chest, withering.

She closed her mouth and shook her head minutely in answer to some question that Gio hadn’t even asked out loud. The flare of hope died in his eyes, and something died inside her.

Gio turned away from her and picked up the towel from the ground and walked back to the stall. Without turning around he just said, ‘The vet is due here soon. Just go, Valentina. We’re done.’

Valentina couldn’t move though. She was rooted to the spot. She saw Gio’s hands come up to the stall posts and grip them so tight that his knuckles shone white. ‘Valentina, for the love of God, just. go.’

Finally, she could move and Valentina whirled around on the spot before rushing from the stables. Her throat was burning and her eyes were swimming. She almost knocked down the vet, who was just walking away from his car.

When she got into her car it took her an age to start it up because her hands were shaking so much and when she drove out of Gio’s castello she had to pull over into a layby where she doubled over with the grief and pain. As she wept and hugged her belly she told herself that this was better, this had to be better than loving and losing all over again, because if she loved and lost Gio … she’d never recover.

Three weeks later …

Valentina looked at herself in the cracked mirror of her tiny bathroom in Palermo. She was pale and wan, dark shadows under her eyes. And her eyes … they looked dead. Valiantly she pinched her cheeks as if that could restore some colour but it faded again just as quickly.

She felt empty and her body was one big ache of loss. She sighed deeply. This wasn’t meant to be so painful. The choice she’d made when she’d stood in front of Gio three weeks before … Her mouth twisted at herself. It hadn’t been a choice. It had been a deeply ingrained reflex action to protect herself. She was a coward. The worst kind of coward.

Gio. Valentina’s hands tightened on the sink—just his name was causing a physical pain in her belly. She’d been terrified she’d see him yesterday when her parents had been brought to a private clinic in Palermo, so that her father could continue his convalescence closer to home.

But it hadn’t been Gio who’d come to make sure everything was OK; it had been an assistant, the same assistant who had taken over informing Valentina what was happening. When Gio hadn’t shown up, the mixture of relief and pain had been almost crippling.

Her mother had taken one look at her and pulled her aside. ‘Valentina—’

And Valentina had cut her off, afraid that the maternal concern would undo her completely. ‘Mama, please … don’t.’

But her mother had ignored her and said gently, ‘Valentina, talk to him. He deserves that much at least.’

Valentina stood up straight. Did Gio deserve that? Did he deserve to hear what she had to say? To hear the awful shameful secret she’d kept secret for so long? The secret her mother knew because she’d witnessed the moment when—Valentina bit her lip so hard that she tasted blood.

For the first time in weeks, Valentina felt a sense of purpose. She would tell Gio … everything. And then if he still wanted her to leave, she would go and perhaps one day this awful yawning ache in her heart would ease.

A couple of hours later Valentina pulled up in the staff car park of the Corretti racetrack. When she got out she asked someone if they knew where Gio was and they directed her to the training ground.

When she got there she could see Gio in the training enclosure. One or two people were gathered around, watching him at work.

The horse pranced skittishly but Gio held the reins firm and murmured low soothing words. Valentina felt weak, her eyes automatically devouring his tall broad form. He looked thinner, leaner. His hair looked messier, as if he hadn’t cut it. The lines of his face were unbearably stark and she recalled his bleakness when Misfit had been dying. She recalled the flare of hope dying in his eyes.

She stopped a few feet away from the railing and as if sensing her presence he looked right at her and the air flew out of Valentina’s lungs. It was like a punch to the gut and the thought reverberated in her head: How on earth did I think I could live without this?

Gio’s eyes widened and his mouth opened. And then everything seemed to happen in slow motion…. As he mouthed her name—Valentina—she heard the intense yapping of a dog and saw a flurry of movement to her right as someone burst into the enclosure, clearly chasing the small terrier dog who had no business being in this area.

People started shouting as the dog ran between the horse’s feet, barking energetically. Gio’s eyes were still on her though, with a kind of sick fascination, as the horse reared high and his front hoofs caught Gio on the chest, knocking him backwards. There was a sickening crunch as Gio’s head hit off the railing behind him and then he was inert on the ground.

Valentina was unaware of moving; she was only aware of kneeling beside Gio’s supine form and holding his head in her lap, his face deathly pale. She took one hand away from the back of his head and it was covered in blood.

She wondered who was screaming hysterically for an ambulance and only realised it was her when someone put a hand on her shoulder and said, ‘It’s here.’