Total pages in book: 30
Estimated words: 28104 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 141(@200wpm)___ 112(@250wpm)___ 94(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 28104 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 141(@200wpm)___ 112(@250wpm)___ 94(@300wpm)
"No." He caught her hands in both of his. "Don't apologize to me, ma belle. I never told you my last name. Never let you see where I lived. I called that keeping you safe, and it was never anything but a mistake. Mine, first."
She was crying harder now, and he gathered her hands in both of his like something breakable.
"It isn't even the only one." His jaw tightened, and whatever came next seemed to cost him more than the last confession had. "Because I made a second mistake, just as bad. When I was told you were dead, I was so far out of my mind with grief that I never once thought to question it. And I never suspected foul play, because no one knew about us. Who would ever have had reason to hurt you?"
Something moved through him, slow and terrible, like a held breath finally let go.
"There's a grave," he said. "Upstate. A small cemetery outside Poughkeepsie. Your name is on the stone."
She stared at him. "That's not possible."
"I was told there was an accident. A car, a bad road, a closed casket, because of the nature of it." His voice had gone very level, which she was already learning meant the opposite of calm. "Someone called me. I don't even remember who anymore, only that the details were exact enough to be true, and I had no reason then to think anyone would build me a lie that specific. I went to the funeral. Small. Quiet. I stood at the back so no one would ask who I was, and I watched them lower a casket I was never allowed to see inside, and then I went home and I grieved you for eight years."
"Valerio—"
"Eleven months ago I was in the area for something unrelated, and I went to see it. The grave. First time in years." He looked at his own hands like they belonged to someone else. "There were fresh flowers on it. Recent. Someone had been tending a stranger's grave for the better part of a decade, and I remember standing there thinking, that's strange, and then doing nothing about it, because grief doesn't ask good questions. It only asks you to keep grieving."
The room had gone very quiet.
"Someone built you a corpse to bury," Aislinn whispered, "and built me a story to run from."
"Yes." Whatever had been simmering under his composure since the word photo finally broke the surface. "Who, Aislinn?"
"I don't—"
"A name." He was already reaching for the phone on the nightstand, his whole body gone taut and ready, the ballroom-emptying stillness back in full. "Whoever did this to us. Whoever took eight years and a—" His jaw worked. "Give me a name." Something low and Italian cracked underneath the English, there and gone, the sound of a man losing a grip he'd held his whole life. "And I promise you, they will never draw another easy breath."
"I don't have one." It came out of her in a rush, both hands closing around his arm. "Valerio, please, I never saw a face, I never heard a name, it was just a voice at a library table and I was so scared I didn't ask, I didn't think to ask—"
"Then we start with the library. The date. The table. Someone remembers a face even if you don't—"
"Please." She was shaking now, and it wasn't fear of him, it had never once been fear of him, it was the sheer velocity of it, eight years of grief becoming a manhunt in under a minute. "Please, calm down. Not tonight. I just got you back."
For a moment he didn't move at all, caught between the phone and her hands on his arm, and she watched the war happen behind his eyes in real time.
A knock sounded on the suite door.
"Sir." A member of hotel staff, muffled and apologetic through the wood. "Ms. Marchetti asked me to let you know, the young master is asking for his mother. It's been rather a lot of new, all at once, for a boy his age."
The taut line of Valerio's shoulders didn't quite release, but it bent, just enough, toward the door and the small insistent person on the other side of it.
"It's fine. It's fine." He caught her chin, and whatever he'd been about to become simply set itself carefully aside, folded and put away for later, the way she'd watched him do with the word photo not five minutes before. "But look at me. I realize I've never told you this. I love you? I've only ever loved you, and now that includes Louis. Never doubt me again, ma belle. Do you understand?"
"I promise."
"And if I ask you to come with me now, no questions asked?"
"How soon do you want me to go?"
Something moved through his face at that, something enormous that he clearly had no intention of letting loose in front of witnesses, and twenty minutes later they stepped out of the elevator looking almost respectable, which Aislinn considered a group achievement.