CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER NINE
Once again, Irinka felt skinless.
Exposed and naked, though she had clothes on.
Not that silly dress with all the padding built in that had made her look like some kind of silver screen goddess. But an old T-shirt and a pair of lounging pants that she’d thrown on in something like a panic, half-convinced that by the time she came out of the bathroom—no longer in any sort of disguise—he would have left.
She wasn’t sure she would blame him if he had done so.
Instead, he had kissed her on the balcony. It should have been swooningly romantic, wildly hot and beautiful, and it had been.
Everything with Zago was all of those things.
But somehow, Irinka wanted to cry. She wanted to dissolve into that sobbing thing that still camped out there in her chest, threatening to spill over at any moment.
She almost wished that it would.
Zago stared down at her, his gorgeous face carved into something stern—but the light in his amber gaze felt like hope. She told herself it was, because it had to be.
Though the truth was, she didn’t have the slightest idea what it was she ought to hope for here. All the possibilities seemed designed to take her breath away, and not necessarily in a good way…
“It is very easy to stop pretending,” Zago told her with that certainty of his that made her bones feel like melting. Like it was an imposition for them to hold her upright. “You simply…stop.”
Irinka actually laughed at that, and the sound of her own laughter reminded her that they were still standing out on the balcony. And more, that Venice was an echo chamber at the best of times, but especially at night. Stiffly, waiting for her bones to betray her, she moved inside.
And felt out of sorts all the while, as if she thought her body might mount its own revolution at any moment. She sat, gingerly, on the end of her hotel bed, not entirely certain that her own limbs would obey her.
Then she found herself gazing up at Zago as he stood in the windowed doorway to the balcony and studied her where she sat, his expression unreadable.
“I don’t know that I’ve ever seen you so uncomfortable,” he said after the moments seemed to expand into separate eternities. “Is it that much of a trial to simply be yourself?”
“You seem to have no trouble with it.” It felt like much-needed action, to throw it back on him and see how he fielded a question that made her whole body ache. “How do you go about it?”
His lips curved, but it didn’t look like a happy sort of smile. “By now you must realize that I was born with a destiny, a set of immovable expectations, and very clear directions on how to achieve all of the above.” Then, as if he was quoting someone, “Baldisseras are not merely born, but carefully and deliberately bred.”
“I never thought your childhood sounded quite so structured.” But Irinka considered that a moment. Had he actually talked to her at any length about his childhood? Or had she made assumptions based on what had happened to his parents later—and then filled it in with what she imagined it must have been like to live in the same place for an entire life? “Then again, it is not as if you speak about it that much.”
“There are two versions of my childhood and the older I get, the more I realize that both are equally true. And equally false.” Zago shook his head, that same bittersweet curve to his lips. “In one, it was a magical time. I explored the palazzo, and this city of myth and memory, as I chose. What is not to like about such a life?” He tipped his head slightly to one side, as if that was a trick question. “And in another, I was tutored from a very young age to think more of a ruined old building on its rickety foundations than any of the people I encountered. To place it above all else, and do whatever was necessary to restore it or revive it, as needed. And in the midst of all of that, of course, there were the usual expectations of a man in my station. The kind of education it was expected I would procure, to be a credit to my name. The kind of people I am expected to know and maintain relationships with throughout my life, because we are all rotting away here together.”
His amber gaze seemed to blaze straight through her. “I have never gotten the impression that your childhood was bucolic and sweet in any regard.”
And maybe she was going to have to get used to the fact that she felt winded in his presence.
“I knew I was a bastard before I knew what it meant,” Irinka told him quietly, and without realizing she’d intended to say such a thing. It was as if it welled up from that same space inside of her where that un-sobbed ache still hurt . “I used to tell my mother’s friends what I was at parties as it always got a big reaction. In some circles, it still does.”
Zago’s expression shifted in a way that made everything inside her list a bit to the side, like she really was melting in on herself. He moved into the room and crossed to the bed, and Irinka thought for a brief, dizzyingly sweet moment that he was simply going to pull her into his arms and kiss her senseless again. Or bear her back down onto the bed and make all of this simply swirl away into all the bright colors they made together, the way he always did.
The way she desperately wished he would.
Instead, he came and stood before her for a moment, then squatted down so he was almost at her eye level. She had to look down at him, just slightly.
“You are not pretending now,” he pointed out in that measured way that she wanted to rail against, even as it felt like some kind of caress. “How does it feel?”
“It feels silly that we both have our clothes on,” she replied.
She expected to see that heat in his gaze. Was banking on it, in fact.
And so there was nothing in her that was prepared for the way that sad smile took over the whole of his beautiful face, making her worry that once that ache inside of her let go, there would be nothing left of her. Not one shred or scrap or shattered little piece. That it would all swirl away into the mess of those tears she was afraid to cry.
Her heart was pounding so hard that she was shocked she couldn’t hear it echo back at her from across the canal. “Whatever you might think of the costumes and all the rest, you know as well as I do that at least that has always been real between you and me, Zago. You know that it is.”
He didn’t dispute that, but it was no comfort. “You have been hiding since the day I met you,” he said, very distinctly.
She felt something in her shaking, like her body was trying to tear itself apart from the inside. “I met you at an opera. I was in the stalls like everyone else. You were the one in the box, hiding.”
“I met you at the café in the interval,” he corrected her. “And if I had to guess, I would say it was your first time at an Italian opera, that you didn’t understand a word, but you happily assumed the role of an opera patron anyway. And the thing is, Irinka, you’re very, very good at it.”
“And what…you think I was pretending that whole summer?” Her throat was on fire. Irinka was tempted to imagine that she was coming down with some terrible fever, but she suspected she only wished that she was.
Because, unfortunately, she was not feverish at all. She was frozen solid, incapable of movement, and yet hanging on his every word even while she wished that he would stop.
“I think that at first, you were overwhelmed,” he told her, and there was something inevitable about this. As if she had known that he would say these things and had avoided any circumstance in which he might. “And then, as best as you could, I think you were pretending that you could really do it. That you could stay with me. Marry me. Live with me ever after, even though it all happened so quickly. So unexpectedly.”
Her lips felt chapped. Her throat was aflame. “It was a love affair. Affairs end.”
“How would you know?” And that dark amber gaze of his was like fire. “You have only had the one, spread out over the course of all these years. And last I checked, tesoro mio , you couldn’t let go of it yourself. You settled in, changed your appearance, and held on tight. So what do we call a thing that does not end?”
She moved then, as if to reach out for him—
But he caught her wrist and held it there, between them.
“No,” he said, and that he sounded almost kind did not help. It made that feverish thing all over her seem to burn all the brighter. “I meant what I told you on the steps of the palazzo. It is all or nothing.”
“Yet you accuse me of playing games,” she managed to say, while everything in her seemed to be going haywire. She couldn’t breathe . Her heart actually hurt where it beat inside of her. And she simultaneously wanted to melt into the grip he had on her wrist and tear it away from him, because if he wouldn’t give her what she wanted—
But it was too tempting to get angry when it wouldn’t solve anything, only delay it. And she doubted it would help her, anyway.
“I have had a lot of time to think about you,” he told her, with that same disarming, disquieting intensity. “That summer. The three years after. The month I spent fuming over my sister’s disappointment. And all the time since I brought you back here, up to and including the little haunting you have treated me to these past weeks. When I take myself out of the equation, it all seems obvious.” There was something like laughter in his eyes, when she had never felt less like laughing in all her days. “I know you like to think of yourself as deeply mysterious, Irinka. But in the end, you’re not.”
She tried to swallow past the fire in her throat. “I suppose I can comfort myself with the knowledge that you can apparently read me like a book, yet keep reading.”
“I think your childhood was not kind to you,” he said in that darkly quiet way, as if she hadn’t spoken at all. “I don’t think there were any different versions of it to confuse the issue or pretty it up. Your mother, for all her beauty and success, is a harsh woman. Famously so. Your father was prepared to put you and the rest of his family through hell to keep from owning up to the reality of the fact that you were his. How could these things not take a toll?”
This time she did pull her wrist away from him, and then held it in her lap as if it was burned. “I’ve always wanted therapy. I thought it would be so soothing, so lovely and sweet, to sit about on comfortable couches and talk about my troubles. Another notion disabused.”
He did not rise from where he squatted before her, and he did not move that intense gaze of his from her face. “I think you learned how to be whoever you have to be, Irinka. I think you can change the versions of yourself at will and as needed, and you do. That summer, I think you felt deeply vulnerable for the first time in your life and you hated it, so you decided to make a profession out of it. Because no one could accuse you of playing games when it was your job, could they?”
Irinka stood up then, in a blind rush. She moved away from the bed, jerkily, skirting his body and putting space between them until she found herself standing there near the table where she’d arranged all the different disguises that she’d used while wandering around after him. And she couldn’t tell if she felt foolish, indignant, terrified, or all of the above.
And still her heart kept up that calamitous beating. And still, her whole body felt singed to a crisp, inside and out.
“You talk a lot about playing games,” she managed to say, and even managed to keep her own voice even and low. As if this wasn’t wrecking her the way it was. “But I seem to recall that you’re the one who had me picked up off of the street in London, transported across Europe, then dropped down into a choice between sexual favors or domestic labor.”
“Perhaps I was trying to speak to you in a language you understand.”
She looked back at him over her shoulder. “I don’t think you were.”
He stood then, too, and they faced each other with the floor between them, but still not nearly enough air. “You’re right. That’s the thing, Irinka. No one is entirely in control of themselves or entirely aware of the reasons they do things, not every hour of every day. But, to be clear, I never thought you would take either one of those options. I suspected that you would not be too scared—”
“By a kidnapping? That’s quite an expectation.”
“—which is why I sent an entirely female crew to collect you. To help assuage any doubt.”
“You are too kind, Zago. As always.”
Irinka wanted to rage at him. To throw things. To turn this all around and use it like a weapon but she didn’t have the appetite for it. She kept feeling that everything was lost already, and possibly always had been, and the harder she tried to hold on to it the further away it got.
It was a lot like panic, now that she thought about it.
“What I thought,” he said, in that steady way that only seemed to poke at that panic, and make it worse, “was that it would force an honest conversation with you that I felt was three years overdue.”
“I’ve always been honest with you,” she blurted out, because that felt like an attack.
But he didn’t reply. Instead, he looked past her to the table piled high with all the various disguises she’d worn.
Irinka felt herself flush, and worse, felt a wave of something too much like shame wash through her, staining her. Inside and out.
“I’ll tell you once more,” Zago said with that quiet finality. “All or nothing, Irinka. And this time, I do not want to see versions of you out of the corner of my eye every time I turn around.”
“You seem very certain of my response,” she said, and her heart was going so fast and so hard that she was terrified that at any moment it would slam straight into that trapped sob, and then she would be in pieces.
At which point, she thought she might simply collapse, because she couldn’t see past it. She couldn’t see anything behind that pulsing ache in the center of her chest.
And all he did was raise a dark brow, so there was nothing to see but searing amber and calm query.
“Am I incorrect?” And there was a darker current in his voice, then. “I’m delighted to hear it. You wish to gather up your life in London, set it aside, and move here for good? You wish to live with me in the palazzo, marry me and have my babies, and lie beside me every night as long as we both live? What a glorious day. Shall we mark it as our anniversary, do you think?”
She put out her hands, hardly understanding what she was doing. “Stop,” she whispered. “Please, Zago. Stop. I have to think.”
“No,” he corrected her, and though there was a dark fury in him, his voice was quiet. “You do not have to think. You would prefer to think, because that is what you do. You think up barriers, you think up long absences, you think up disguises and subterfuge. You don’t need to think a thing, Irinka. You just hope that if you do, you can get your brain to tell your heart that it’s a liar.”
She felt a great trembling come from deep inside of her. It felt cataclysmic, as if her bones were trying to separate from themselves, and at any moment she might simply—
“If you’re so bloody certain about everything, I don’t understand why you don’t just say so,” she threw at him. “I don’t understand why you didn’t say so from the start.”
“Because you can’t handle it,” he bit out at her, that dark fury more obvious now, and that did not feel like the victory she’d expected. “I was foolish enough to think that we both understood what was happening that first time and that even when you left Venice that summer, you would be back. I was wrong. And you’re right that the way I brought you back into my orbit was its own kind of game. But now I am forced to think that if I hadn’t done it, it would never have happened. I would never have seen you again.”
Her breath hurt . “I would be glad of that.”
That, too, did not have the effect she expected. All Zago did was shake his head.
A great deal as if he despaired of her, and that made her feel bruised all over.
“Irinka.” Her name sounded like a curse. “You maddening, impossible woman. You are the love of my life. ”
And he did not wait for her to absorb that. He seemed to know it was a blow, or maybe he didn’t care, because he laughed in that way he did when he didn’t find anything funny at all.
“Do you think that pleases me?” he demanded. “Do you think that three years ago, when you were moments out of university, heedless and reckless, I was looking for this kind of mess? Do you think you were what I had in mind as the next Baldissera wife? The mother of the heirs to my family legacy, who must shepherd it long into the future? But there you were. Standing there in La Fenice and it was over the moment our eyes met.”
Irinka remembered that moment with perfect clarity, as if it had only just happened. She had been transported and though she hadn’t been fluent in Italian then—and was only slightly further along now—that hadn’t been required to fall in love with it. The opera was timeless, universal. She had been floating on air when she and her friends spilled out in the interval to join the crowd at the café on the third floor.
She couldn’t remember what she’d ordered or if she’d ever gotten it, but she remembered turning, her head wild with the music as if she was half-drunk on it, and there he was.
It had been like falling off of a great height, and perhaps the real truth was, she was still falling.
“I’ll admit that there was an instant connection—” she began.
“It was love at first sight, and you know it,” he threw at her, and it wasn’t that he was loud, it was that she could feel the intent behind each word, as if he was hammering each one directly into her heart. “You have always known. You know it now, little as you wish to admit it.”
Irinka felt torn asunder. The cataclysm inside of her was ongoing and she could not understand how it was possible that she might survive this moment. There was so much tearing, so much cracking and shattering, that she expected her body to simply implode into ash at any moment.
Yet somehow she was still standing. She couldn’t make sense of it.
“I don’t understand why we can’t go on as we are,” she managed to say. “It doesn’t require all of these wild declarations, surely. There’s no need for them. We don’t have to declare anything, we can just—”
“Tesoro mio,” he said, and that endearment—again—stopped her cold. He came toward her and his gaze was intent, a dark amber blaze. His mouth was a grim line. “Until you believe that you deserve more, you will never, ever have it. And until then, Irinka, you will also never have me.”
He was close then and she thought that when he leaned in it was going to be one of those terrible, glorious kisses—
But instead he traced the line of her cheekbone, that gaze of his stamping into her, leaving impressions behind that she wasn’t certain she would ever get out.
And in the next moment, he was gone.
Irinka heard the door to her hotel room close. Or she thought she did, somewhere over the clamor of her heart.
And inside, still, everything was shifting, changing, hurting .
Without conscious thought, she rushed to her balcony and gripped the rail as she looked down at the canal below.
In a few moments, Zago appeared below and she watched the fine lines of his gorgeous form as he strode up and over the bridge.
She ordered him, silently, to turn around to look up at her. She begged him to look back, but he didn’t.
He didn’t even pause.
Zago swept over the bridge and then disappeared into the dark embrace of the Venetian alleyway on the other side, as if he had never been here at all.
And it struck her hard, like a blow to the back of her head. All deadly force and no quarter given.
Irinka staggered back, his words like a litany inside her head, competing with the rattle and thump of her heart against her ribs.
She looked around at the hotel room. At Venice out her window and the pile of disguises that she had taken so much pride in, because so highly did she rate her ability to disappear.
It was love at first sight, he had said. And you know it.
And it felt like an accusation. It felt like a punishment.
That terrible sob in her chest began to grow, that ache sharpening so much she almost thought it might kill her, and maybe she wished it would—
But then it burst.
And for the first time in as long as she could remember, since she was a very little girl and in all honesty she couldn’t remember it even then, Irinka sank down onto the floor, buried her head in her hands, and cried.