CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER THREE
All he had done was put his hand on her face.
It was nothing. Nothing.
She kept telling herself that, in the hope that might help her dial it back a bit. That it might counter the outsize reaction she was having to all of this. When it was nothing but a random touch on her chin. Basically like seeing a dentist.
But there’d been his thumb.
And the way he’d moved it across her lips, ragged and searing, igniting old memories she never normally let out in the light of day.
Irinka knew she couldn’t let him see her react like this. He was right about one thing—she really had been playing games her whole life. He seemed to think she did that out of some Machiavellian need to manipulate people, which only went to show how little he knew her.
That’s a good thing, she chided herself when thinking that made her ache.
She had let him know her well once and look how that had turned out. He had taught her to avoid that kind of intimacy like the plague. Because it hurt.
And in the end, familiarity really did breed contempt. She had watched that play out in real time between her mother and father. She knew better than to make that same mistake—only here, with Zago, had she ever tried to do the opposite and look how that had turned out.
But she did not intend to defend herself to him. He could make all the remarks he wanted about her character, and it wouldn’t make any difference.
She knew what had happened here, between them that summer. She knew that he had not been one who’d been left broken. Or not the only one. And she also knew that she’d been right to leave while she could, before there was nothing left between them but contempt.
Something she might have told him under different circumstances, secure in the safety of all these years’ distance.
Now she would say nothing. Holding his gaze, she made a small spectacle of bending over, reaching into her boot, and pulling out her phone. One of his dark brows rose, suggesting to her that Ms. Thug would be getting a talking-to.
She couldn’t really say she minded that.
Irinka glared at him as she straightened. “Some privacy please?”
“There will be very little of that,” he assured her.
She sighed and rolled her eyes again, because she’d seen him react the last time she’d done it. Then she simply opened up the group chat.
Her friends were not entertained by her absence. There were mounting cries for various dramatic responses from some quarters and rather more measured approaches from others, as always.
It’s fine, she texted. I’m fine.
And she didn’t wait for them to respond, which she knew they would, and likely rapidly . I’m in Venice. It’s lovely this time of year.
Is this a cry for help? Maude asked.
Maybe it’s code, Lynna added. It doesn’t surprise me that Irinka would have various codes, but she never shared any of them with me.
Blink twice if this is really you, Irinka, Auggie added.
Really, I’m fine, Irinka texted back. There’s a small matter that needs some attention, that’s all. I’ll cancel my appointments.
The mobile was snatched out of her hand. She glared up at Zago, outraged. “I beg your pardon.”
He scrolled through the chat and slid a dark look her way. “How did three days become teatime?”
“Because it’s felt like three years, actually. Give me my mobile back, please?”
He did not. “Work wives?” he asked, that cultured voice of his dripping with disdain.
It should not have dripped through her in turn, slow and sweet, like honey.
“That is what my friends and I call ourselves, yes,” she told him, not quite matching his level of disdain, but she let her smile pick up the slack. “Do you have friends, Zago? If you did, you might also have funny nicknames that you use, shared histories, your own private language made up of anecdotes and memories. Alas.”
“I’m fascinated that this is your approach.” He apparently satisfied himself with her mobile and handed it back to her, looking as if she’d fallen short in some way. She assured herself that she didn’t need him to validate her. It didn’t matter what he thought about her friends, her group chat with said friends, or indeed any of her life choices.
What did matter was the fact that when she told herself that, it felt a bit hollow.
But she was in no mood to think about why that might be. “And by ‘my approach’ do you mean the part where I’m not wailing and lamenting at your feet, begging you to forgive me?” She laughed at that. “The thing is, Zago, I’m not ashamed of what I do. I prefer that you not broadcast it to the world only because that would make it very difficult to keep what I do under the radar, and it might also negatively affect my friends.”
Predictably, he looked unmoved.
“If you think that you can lock me away in your little palace—” she began, maybe a little less calmly than she might have liked.
“It is not little, Irinka. I think you know that.”
She stared at him. Because it almost sounded as if he meant—
But she refused to go there. “You could keep me locked up here for the rest of my life,” she said, saying each word very deliberately. “It still won’t make me believe that I’m not providing a necessary service. You might not like it. It might be something more like a mercy killing, if I’m being completely transparent. But every single one of those women who were encouraged to leave the men in question is one less daughter like me, who has had to sit in the presence of His Grace, the perpetually outraged Duke, and listen to him blame me for his inability to wear a condom.”
“Seriously hurting innocent people is some kind of crusade, is that it?”
Irinka threw up her hands in the universal sign of exasperation and used that as an opportunity to retreat. She moved away from him, but didn’t sit down again. That felt too risky. Instead, she moved almost restlessly toward that balcony, and went outside.
The afternoon was wearing on and the light was like magic, dancing and moving. The trouble with Venice was that it echoed back too well. The past. Her own longings. The things she’d said to him once that she wanted so desperately to deny, but couldn’t.
She felt him come up behind her. “Irinka,” he began.
But Zago was the most dangerous echo of all.
“Let’s discuss the terms of confinement.” She turned to face him, leaning back against the rail and crossing her arms. And she could remember too well the last time she’d stood here like this, gazing at him. The tragedy for her was that he had not gotten stooped and gnarled in the meantime. He was just as tall as she remembered him. Towering over her when she was five foot ten in her stocking feet. “Is there a dungeon? Will there be beatings? What is it going to look like?”
“It’s the bravado,” he murmured, almost as if he was whispering some kind of sweet nothing. “It just astonishes me. Is there nothing I can say to you to make you accept the gravity of the situation?”
Irinka tilted her head to one side as she gazed at him. “Is that really what you want, Zago? Me writhing about in abject terror that I might have put myself on the wrong side of your good opinion? Is that the kind of thing that excites you when you wake up from a dream in the middle of the night?”
“Even now, you attempt to provoke me.” And there was something about the way he said it. It was calm, yes. That was alarming enough. Yet there was almost something like satisfaction in his voice. Like he had expected this. “But you forget that I know you.”
She sighed at that. “You barely knew a girl that I haven’t been for years.”
What she did not say was that the girl he’d brought to this palazzo was not the girl who had left it only a few months later. He would probably love to hear that he had made her a woman , but not in the way people usually meant it when they said such things. It wasn’t simply because he had taken her virginity. Or, more accurately, because she’d given him her virginity in an explosion of joy and heat and desire.
It was that walking away from him had changed her almost as profoundly as what happened between them had.
Irinka had never been the same.
And she had not had the option to cry for a month, not that she begrudged his sister her wallow. But Irinka hadn’t had a benevolent father figure to look after her. She’d had to figure out a life for herself, one way or another.
And unless she wanted to tell her friends what had happened, she’d had to pretend that nothing had.
She’d gone for door number two. And only occasionally felt guilty about it.
But her experience here had made it clear to her that no one could handle all of her, not even her friends. They benefited as much as anyone else from the way Irinka flitted in and out, never quite pinned down, allowing them to enjoy her without ever having to deal with the too much part.
She had learned that here.
There was no possible way that Zago could know the woman she’d become because of him.
“My sister has been wretched for an entire month,” he told her now, that gleaming menace in his gaze that, sadly, only made him that much hotter. It was desperately unfair. “Thirty-some days is a long time. Why don’t you and I start with a month.”
It wasn’t really a question. Much less an invitation.
“A month of what?” she asked, as if it really was some kind of invitation and she was mulling it over. “Why don’t you lay out the parameters? Depending on what you say, I’ll decide if I need to attempt to jump off this balcony right now.”
Maybe Zago really did know her, because he took a moment to look over the side and then back at her, one dark eyebrow raised. “I wouldn’t recommend it. It’s steeper than it looks and it won’t be a soft landing.”
Irinka let her chin jut upward. “Don’t threaten me with a good time.” And then she made herself smile. “I mean it. Thirty days of what?”
“You can pick your labor.” He said this as if he was granting her a great favor. “I’ve always fancied a personal housemaid. Perhaps you can cook and clean and wow me with your domestic prowess.” That brow stayed lifted. “Or you could work it out in trade.”
He said that lightly enough, but she couldn’t be certain that he was kidding. Not with that look on his face, that dark promise that she knew he was fully capable of answering.
Too well did she know it.
She blew out a breath through pursed lips, then shook her head. “That does sound like labor. Housemaiding, that is.”
“Irinka. Please. What do you know about cooking or cleaning?”
“I love that you really imagine that you’re somehow the better choice. It must be truly spectacular to be a man.” She waved her hand at him, taking in his whole…dark gold magnificence. She made herself look something like scornful. Taken aback. “I can get that anywhere, Zago. It gets thrown at me on the street, left and right. What do you think would compel me to sleep with a man who thinks as little of me as you do? What could be the possible benefit?”
“Very well, then,” he said, not rising to debate the way she wanted him to do. “A new addition to the household staff. I will notify the maggiordomo .”
What bothered Irinka was that he could be talking about servitude and she could still want him to so much. She had to question what exactly she was doing, and why it irked her that he was so calm . Did she want him to crack? Did she want him to boil over so that anything that happened after could be blamed on him? His temper, his overreach, his problem?
She was afraid she already knew the answer and it didn’t exactly cover her in glory.
In that moment, she decided she would stay. It was all fun and games up to now—in the sense of not being fun at all and hating that she needed to play games in the first place—but she got the distinct impression that he expected her to…have a meltdown, perhaps? Rage at him that she could obviously not be expected to do either thing?
Irinka wondered what third option he had up his sleeve, and she refused to give him the opportunity to think that he was right about her. Or knew her.
At all.
Besides, as her mother always said, Without hard work there is no getting fish from the pond.
Meaning that the pain of the hard work got the necessary results.
Irinka could scrub a few floors if that would do the trick. Because proving Zago wrong would be its own reward. And if he exploded in the middle of it? Had a full-on temper tantrum and lost all access to this calmness of his? Even better.
Her mother wasn’t the only one who only liked fishing when real fish weren’t involved.
“I’m glad we worked that out,” she said sweetly. “I can’t wait to see what servants’ quarters look like in a whole palazzo.”
The last time she’d stayed here it had been in his vast, glorious bedroom that had made it clear that if this was a palace, he was its king. Today, he only laughed that dark, affecting laugh once more and then turned on his heel, beckoning her to follow him through the palazzo, but this time away from where she knew that bedroom was.
Irinka told herself she was glad .
He climbed the grand stair, then moved toward the back of the grand house, taking her all the way up to the very top where the roof was slanted and the rooms were tiny. The actual servants’ quarters, just as she’d requested.
She supposed that he expected her to start weeping and wailing, begging to be taken down to some fancy part of the palazzo that better suited the daughter of a duke.
The joke was on him. She had been raised by Roksana, who liked to tell dark and disturbing stories about her childhood while simultaneously complaining that everyone in her adopted country was so soft . Squishy, even. Roksana was not a fan of coddling or anything else that might make life easy. She had been at great pains to make certain that her daughter was hardier than most.
Especially once her father had acknowledged her existence. And his paternity.
These are not gifts that he gives you, she would say. These are your birthright. But they will also make you a soft target if you are not careful.
The upshot of that was that Irinka had often slept on a pallet on the floor in their flat, her bed being deemed off-limits to her whenever her mother felt she was losing her edge.
The little room that Zago showed her into was a major upgrade from a pallet. It had a solid bed, a small chest of drawers, and a hanging rack for any clothes Irinka might have had with her if she hadn’t been swiped up off the Portobello Road on a Tuesday morning.
“How homey,” Irinka said brightly. She turned to him and beamed. “When do I report for duty?”
“I believe the kitchen feeds the staff in an hour,” he replied stiffly. “I will inform the maggiordomo that you are to be put straight to work.”
Again he paused, as if expecting pushback.
“Can’t wait,” she replied, smiling widely.
And then Irinka had the pleasure of seeing what she was pretty sure was temper on his face before he left her there, closing the door decisively behind him.
“Worth it,” she murmured into the quiet of the little room.
She stood there a moment, listening to his footsteps retreat. Then she went and sat on the bed, wondering if that heartbeat of hers would ever slow down again. She put her hand on her chest and held it there, as if that could soothe her treacherous heart into behaving.
As if anything was going to be a balm on the wound that was Zago, when nothing ever had been.
Irinka felt that same buried sob in her chest. She felt a telltale kind of itch at the back of her eyes. But she stayed where she was, breathing steadily, until it went away.
Only then did she go to the window on the back side of the palazzo and look out. It wasn’t the Grand Canal there before her. It was red-tiled roofs and church spires, domes and makeshift viewing platforms, narrow canals with gondolas aplenty and wooden walkways that ran alongside them.
She heard bells in the distance. The light changed constantly, dancing into the shadows of the old city, and seemed to come from a different sun that shone down elsewhere.
Maybe it was because everything here was doomed. Venice was sinking, everyone knew that. Maybe it was as magical as it was because it had never been meant to last.
Though thinking such things made the urge to sob come back, and she didn’t want that.
Irinka pulled out her mobile again, canceled all of her pending appointments, and then opened her messages to find her three friends in a flurry of speculation.
Maybe I’m wrong, Auggie had texted, but didn’t Irinka go to Venice the summer after we graduated from uni?
I think you know that she did, Lynna replied. And when she came back, she was oddly brittle.
Irinka took exception to that. Oddly brittle? She had been nothing of the sort. She had been marching around in the new life they were building together like a proper soldier with a broken heart, and none of them had been any the wiser.
She had protected them from her pain.
I gave her flowers of hope and plants of remembrance, Maude chimed in.
The funny thing was that Irinka remembered those flowers. They had been bright, happy peonies that she would never have bought for herself, too afraid of being soft . And the plants—bright, bold, green things she wouldn’t have the slightest idea how to identify—were still in the office, still going strong, in complete defiance of Irinka’s noted black thumb.
Do we suppose the sudden, pressing matter is in fact a boy? Auggie asked.
Irinka would be the absolute last person to share her private life even with her closest friends, Lynna replied. So I couldn’t possibly speculate. By which I mean yes, clearly a boy.
Rose, hawthorn, and lemon balm for heartbreak, Maude added. It makes a lovely tea .
Irinka couldn’t take it. Venice is actually one of the foremost holiday destinations on the planet, she found herself typing. Furiously. A person doesn’t need a reason to go to Venice. Venice exists. That’s reason enough.
Now she’s a travelogue, Auggie observed.
Lynna sent a thumbs-up emoji. And then: This sudden love for Venice is more than I knew about Irinka five minutes ago, anyway.
It turns out that the brother of one of the women that Felipe was toying with took exception to the way his sister’s relationship ended, Irinka wrote, hoping her frosty tone was making it into the text bubbles. We’re discussing the moral ramifications.
…That sounds dangerous, Maude wrote.
It is not dangerous at all, Irinka assured them. It is actually very boring. I’m perfectly capable of handling men, as you might recall, given it is in fact MY JOB.
Is he hot? Auggie asked. Irinka decided that was enough texting for the day.
Also, it was a ridiculous question. Was Zago hot? Was the earth round? Was Venice the most achingly beautiful place she’d ever seen?
None of that was worth answering, because there was only one answer.
She decided to leave her room and take a wander down the hall, where she found a sitting room that looked softly lived in, and a lavatory that was clearly communal. That was fair enough. It reminded her of living in halls at university. Irinka splashed water on her face and wished that she had a toothbrush.
Then she wandered downstairs, even though she knew it wasn’t quite time to present herself in the kitchens yet.
When she made it down to the bottom of the great stair, she stopped and looked toward the great door. She knew that if she raced through it, she’d be out in that courtyard. And if she wanted, she could flag someone down on the Grand Canal, maybe steal a boat if there was one at the dock, even take her chances with a swim—
But instead of doing any of that, she simply stood there.
It was almost as if she didn’t want to leave.
And she didn’t understand. Surely she should be itching at the chance. She should have heaved herself through the door and taken her chances.
But there was nothing in her that wanted to do that. It was like her body was protesting the very notion on a deep, bone level.
Irinka turned back toward the palazzo, away from her bid for freedom, and then went still.
Because Zago stood there at the top of the flight of grand, imposing stairs, watching her.
“Did you think I was going to run away?” she asked.
Though she sounded a good deal throatier than she’d intended.
“I’m wondering why you haven’t,” he replied.
She was too, despite her desire to go fishing earlier. But the moment he said that, she stopped caring about it and made herself shrug with as much nonchalance as she could manage.
“I’ve always wanted the opportunity to play Cinderella,” she told him as if this really was nothing but a jolly lark. “I’m rather disappointed that there aren’t cinders and ash in my little garret room.” She held her arms away from her, indicating the clothes she’d put on for a rainy London morning. It seemed like a lifetime ago now. “I do hope you have some rags for me. That will really set the scene.”
He shook his head, almost sadly, as he came down those wide steps and was once again standing in front of her. And she couldn’t deny the heat between them, as wild as ever. Or that she recognized instantly that the scent that seemed to wind all around her was something she often thought she smelled in her dreams. Something like spice but unidentifiable.
She had never smelled anything like it.
When she dropped her hands back to her sides, she hit herself in the thighs a little harder than necessary, like that might snap her out of this.
“Still playing your games,” he said, almost sorrowfully, but that heat in his gaze was more like temper. “I wonder what will happen when the gameplaying ends. And it is only you and me, the truth of things, lying unvarnished between us.”
“For that to happen, you would have to also stop playing games. And I don’t think you’re in any mood to do that, are you?” He looked as if he might respond, but she shook her head. “Don’t kid yourself, Zago. I wasn’t the only person in that relationship that summer. I was just the one who left before we burned ourselves alive.”
Then she stepped around him, carefully, because the urge to simply melt into him was so strong that she was afraid that she might accidentally succumb to it. And then find herself in his arms without meaning to, and then what would she do?
Because one thing she knew entirely too well was that untangling herself from this man’s touch, from the way he looked at her, not to mention how he made her feel , seemed impossible. Clearly she hadn’t done a great job after the last time.
So she made her way around him almost gingerly—keeping her distance—and then headed off toward the kitchen to start playing her assigned role to perfection.
Because she was pretty sure that if she did, she might drive him mad.
A goal worth aiming for, she thought. So Irinka was smiling as she went.