Chapter 23 #2
Marie. Her best friend and constant companion at luncheons, fittings, charity meetings, gallery openings, and private holidays I politely declined.
Marie, with the soft voice and the cut-glass manners and the way she always looked at Arabella just a shade too long when she thought no one else was paying attention.
Marie, whom I vaguely liked because she never tried too hard with me and always seemed relieved when I disappeared into my office after dinner.
“Does Marie know?” I ask.
Arabella’s mouth trembles. “Of course she knows. We were together before this. Before you.”
That rewrites years of social memory in one ugly sweep. The lunches. The glances. The way Arabella’s mood always lifted after visits from Marie, but not from any of the other women in her circle. Marie never married despite an endless parade of suitable offers.
I look at her and, for the first time in years, see her more clearly, and more than as a function, ornament, or ally by marriage.
She looks miserable. Not embarrassed or alone, not simply caught, but genuinely miserable in the deep, private way of a woman who has spent years performing the wrong life and is finally too exhausted to keep smiling through the mismatch.
Whatever else she is, Arabella is not built for furtive scraps of affection in bedrooms that belong to other contracts. Neither, apparently, am I.
So, I do the only thing that makes sense in a marriage like ours—I solve it.
“What if Marie moved in?”
Arabella stares at me as if I’ve lost my mind, but I go on before she can talk herself into disbelief.
“The east guest wing is half-empty all year. If she took rooms there, no one would question it. People already think she’s practically part of the household.
We could put a philanthropic angle on it, some joint initiative, women’s advocacy, foundation work, whatever nonsense the press swallows this season.
She’d be here, and you’d be together. Publicly enough to breathe, privately enough to survive it. ”
Arabella’s mouth opens and closes with no sound.
“And,” I add, because if I’m going to build the whole structure, I may as well finish the architecture, “if we do move forward with surrogacy, we could speak to her about being the surrogate.”
That shocks a sound out of her. Half laugh, half sob, all disbelief. “Vincenzo… wh-what?”
I shrug. “It solves several problems at once.”
She stares at me like I’ve either lost my mind or finally found it. “Why would you do that?”
“Because this marriage has been a slow, elegant misery for both of us, and I’m tired.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
“Fine.” I look at her directly. “Because you deserve to be with the person you actually love, and because if the world insists we all perform respectable lies, we may as well at least arrange them in ways that hurt less.”
Tears spill down her cheeks again, but now they’re different. Not frantic, more stunned. “You’d… let me?”
I almost smile at the phrasing. “Arabella, I have no interest in imprisoning you in a role I barely perform myself.”
“Why?” The word tears out of her. “Why would you do that? Why wouldn’t you be disgusted? Or furious? Or insulted?”
I look at her for a long moment. “Why would I feel disgusted?”
She laughs once in disbelief, tears rising again. “Because your wife has been sleeping with someone else. Because I’ve made a mockery of our marriage. Because I wanted another woman more than I’ve ever wanted the life I have with you.”
There is no bitterness in it, only despair, and that makes it easier to answer honestly.
Before I can decide against it, I reach up and tug the collar of my shirt aside just enough to show her the marks at my throat.
Half-moons there from Nikolaj’s teeth, a bruised kiss low along the side of my neck.
Proof enough for a smart woman, and Arabella is far smarter than most people give her credit for.
Understanding moves through her face in real time. “Oh,” she says.
For one long second, we simply look at each other—husband and wife at last standing in the same miserable kind of truth.
“I have the same problem,” I say quietly.
“The difference is that Marie can live here. You two can have a life together under this roof if we structure it properly. Mine…” I let the sentence fade because she doesn’t need the name to understand the shape.
“Mine will never be that simple. I could never be with him like this.”
Arabella’s face crumples again, this time not with anger but with something far worse: recognition and compassion. God help me.
“You poor bastard,” she whispers.
That almost makes me laugh. I cross the bedroom and sit down next to her, taking her hand in mine.
“You can think of me as a friend in this,” I say.
“Or a co-conspirator. God knows we’ve done a terrible job of being husband and wife in any real sense.
But if you want Marie, and she wants you, the three of us can structure this house in a way that keeps everyone protected.
We should do that instead of playing at misery until we all rot. ”
Arabella’s eyes fill again, but this time the tears look different. Less jagged and more exhausted.
“I’m sorry,” I tell her. “For the last few years. For the shape this marriage became and the pain of it. You didn’t deserve the emptiness.”
She covers her face with both hands and cries in earnest, then. No more elegance left in it, only relief and shame and exhaustion pouring out together. I pull her into my arms.
“I’m sorry too,” she says through it. “For disrespecting our bed by bringing him here. For making a fool of both of us.”
“I understand why you did it,” I say as I rub her back.
She looks up at me, eyes red, nose wet. “Do you?”
“Yes.” I remove the handkerchief from my breast pocket and hand it to her. Then I glance toward Lucien, who is still unconscious on the carpet. “What I do not understand is why my second-in-command thought this was an acceptable risk.”
Arabella wipes her nose and shakes her head. “Lucien didn’t pursue me. He was lonely too,” she says, with the kind of honesty that only comes after the rest of the room is already in ruins. “And drunk enough to be stupid.”
I look at Lucien again. If he wakes before I’m ready to decide whether he gets to keep all his teeth, this will get more irritating than necessary.
“He also knew better,” I say. “That’s the problem. If I can’t trust him with my wife, how can I trust him with my empire?”
Arabella presses her mouth together and gives one small nod.
She understands enough of my world to know this isn’t about moral betrayal alone.
Lucien didn’t just sleep with my wife. He crossed a professional line that exists specifically because men in our circles are not permitted to let private appetites compromise structural loyalty.
Whatever the emotional excuse, whatever the loneliness, whatever convenience or vodka or bad judgment pulled him into this bed, the act itself proves something ugly and useful all at once: he can be reached where I thought he was disciplined.
I don’t yet know what I’m going to do with that.
She watches me with the kind of dazed disbelief usually reserved for miracles or nervous breakdowns. “You would really let Marie move in and be our surrogate?”
“If she agrees.”
“She would,” Arabella says immediately, then has the grace to look embarrassed by the speed of it.
That almost gets a smile out of me. “Good.”
She studies the marks on my throat again. “Does your… person know?”
The phrasing is almost quaint. It makes something old and tired in me soften just slightly. “Yes.”
“Do they love you?”
The answer is so immediate it doesn’t even feel like a thought. “Yes.”
Her face shifts with that, becoming more wistful. “Then maybe there’s hope for both of us.”
I don’t answer because hope has never been a language I trust enough to speak aloud. Not where Nikolaj is concerned, not yet. Maybe not ever. But the thought of him still sits warm under my skin, and I know Arabella sees that too.
Then, with the ghost of her old sharpness returning, she says, “Marie will think this is some kind of elaborate trap.”
I chuckle at that. “She’s not wrong to.”
“And if I tell her you suggested she move in and carry your child, she might actually faint.”
“That would at least simplify the conversation.”
Arabella smiles through the remnants of tears. Small, fragile, and more genuine than anything I’ve seen from her in months.
Maybe years.
“I married a monster,” she says softly. “And somehow that’s the kindest thing anyone’s offered me in a very long time.”
That lands somewhere I don’t intend to inspect too closely.
We sit in the wreckage of our marriage a little longer after that—my wife on the bed, her lover unconscious on the floor, and me somewhere between husband, co-conspirator, and executioner, trying on friendship like an unfamiliar suit.
It should feel absurd. It does. It also feels more honest than most of the lives we’ve been living.
Eventually, I stand and retrieve the gun from the dresser. Arabella stiffens before she realizes I’m only re-holstering it. “I’ll have Lucien moved,” I say.
She blanches. “Please don’t be too cruel.”
I arch a brow. “Arabella. He slept with the Capo dei Capi’s wife. In his marriage bed.”
She opens her mouth, closes it, and then has the grace to look guilty. “Fair.”
I nod once and walk, but at the door, I pause and look back.
She’s still on the bed, sheets gathered around her, makeup ruined, necklace from the gala still at her throat, looking for all the world like a queen who finally told the truth and doesn’t yet know what it will cost or save.
“Get some sleep,” I tell her. “Tomorrow you can decide whether you want Marie here, and if we’ll make it work.”
She presses trembling fingers to her mouth and nods again, unable to say anything for a second. Then, very quietly, “Thank you.”
I incline my head once and leave before she can make me feel any worse about the fact that this marriage, for the first time, might actually contain some mercy.
As I walk out into the hall, I instruct my guards to move Lucien to the cells below. When I’m back in my room, I touch the fading mark on my throat and think, not for the first time, that every single person in this house is living the wrong life under the right name.
Maybe that’s fixable.
Maybe it isn’t.
Either way, tomorrow is going to be very busy.