Chapter Ten #3
Since that moment they’d all stared at the old man crumpled on the floor—not a monster any longer, not a terror, not a Machiavellian villain. Just a breakable human who had hurt himself and fallen, subject to the rules of gravity and mortality like all the rest of them.
Pau still couldn’t get his head around it, not really—but he ceased caring once he realized he didn’t know where Leontina was.
His first thought was that she’d run again. And even as he thought that, he also wondered how he could blame her if she had. If he was her, he imagined he’d have made it to the border by now without so much as a glance back.
Being in this castle and watching the literal downfall of the wickedest man he’d ever known made his own behavior stand out to him, starkly.
And not with the honor he’d always believed he had on his side.
She had told him she loved him. And what had he done? He had acted no better than her father. Cold. Abrasive.
Could he blame her if she decided that she would be better off on her own?
He looked around the main hall, where there were still staff members rushing around, and whispering to each other.
No doubt feeling a mixture of competing emotions tonight, because it didn’t take much to discern that even Umberto’s staff did not care much for him.
Pau would be deeply surprised if they were even well compensated.
“Have you seen—” he began, when he caught the eye of one of the members of staff who had handled herself particularly well during all of this.
The woman studied him.
Then, “Come with me,” she said, and started off so quickly that Pau didn’t have time to confirm that they were talking about the same thing.
Still, he followed. He kept pace with the woman as she took him, bewilderingly, into what he assumed were the servants’ quarters and then up sets of stairs that wound around behind the walls of the castle.
Several stories up, she led him out into a hallway that spoke to the castle’s age and certainly had none of the questionable grandeur of the more public floors below.
She marched him down to the end of the hallway, stopped, and pointed at the door at the end.
Before he could ask her where the hell he was, and why, she disappeared again.
So Pau pushed open the door, not certain why his heart was pounding so hard in his chest, and stepped inside.
It was a bedchamber, though it looked to him like something out of medieval times.
Everything was stone. The floors, the walls, the small, slitted windows.
There was a canopied bed in the middle, a trunk at the end of the bed, a tapestry too faded to make out what might once have been on it and, more importantly to his eye, there was a large armchair in front of the fireplace.
Where, though no fire was lit, Leontina was sitting. With a pile of what looked like particularly weathered books in her lap.
He felt a deep sense of relief go through him, because she was here. She hadn’t run. And on the heels of that, he felt something else. It was like a blow, but it lingered, making his heart ache.
So much he found he needed to press his palm there against his chest.
Pau didn’t think she’d looked up when he walked in, but when Leontina spoke, it was clear that she knew exactly who had come in.
“I thought that if I read the books in your house, I would get to know you,” she said quietly. “That I’d be able to figure you out based on who you read, and how well read the pages were. That the clues to who you are would be pressed between the pages, waiting to be uncovered.”
She did turn then, and he couldn’t place the expression on her face. It seemed remote. Possibly even something like sad.
He felt his heart kick in again, harder.
But Leontina kept going.
“I finally realized why.” She picked up one of the books in her lap and he realized it was a journal.
“My mother left me these when she died. Her whole collection.” She shook her head.
“I was quite young. I never really knew her. My father liked to tell me that she did not wish to know me, so as you can imagine, I found these journals something of a lifeline. And I excavated them for signs of her.”
She looked down at the journal in her hand.
“But words on a page, even if they are direct thoughts, can only be part of the story. And with you, I only had the books you read, not your thoughts on them. I read as many of them as I could since I arrived in Spain. I treated it like a job, with a deadline.” Now, finally, she looked at him, her jade green eyes grave.
“But what do I really know about you, in the end?”
Pau didn’t like where this was going. “Leontina. This has been a very emotional day.”
“So you can only have emotions when they’re negative, is that it?” she asked.
She smiled when she said it, but it wasn’t her real smile, and in any case he felt her words like a wallop across the face. He was surprised he remained standing.
“That’s neither true nor fair,” he managed to get out, though he wasn’t at all sure he wasn’t lying himself.
“My mother killed herself,” Leontina told him softly. “I think everyone knows that, but the story is always told to make it seem as if it was an accident. As if maybe she didn’t mean to do it. Or maybe she was too overwrought, too mentally ill, too…something to know better.”
“Your father is stable,” Pau told her. “If you’re worried about losing another parent, however substandard he might be.”
She studied him for a moment. “Today I realized something. I know my brother never read these journals, because if he had, he would know better than to think she simply effected the only escape she could. She did do that, don’t misunderstand me.
But it wasn’t only that she wanted to escape my father.
” She held up one of the journals. “She wanted to cause him pain in the only way she could. Not that it would hurt his feelings, of course, but it would embarrass him. Whether people thought she was weak or thought she hated him that much, either way, it would embarrass him that she took control like that, and so publicly. That consumed her. I think that’s what revenge does. It consumes, then it corrodes.”
“Leontina.”
She set the journal down on the arm of the chair and fixed him with that grave gaze again.
Her hand snuck over her belly, though she didn’t look away.
“But I want you to know that I’ve already made a vow to our son.
No matter what happens, no matter who we hate or how wretched we think our enemies are, he comes first. And I intend to hold this vow, Pau. No matter what.”
It was how calmly she was saying these things, he thought. It felt like an indictment. It felt as if she was stripping him naked and baring parts of him that had never seen the light to her gaze. To his own gaze.
Revenge consumes, then corrodes. That was what she’d said.
He could not help but wonder how he’d convinced himself that keeping his focus steady and never, ever stopping this thing no matter how complicated it got between the two of them was a good thing. How he’d been so certain that his father would applaud this from beyond the grave, if he could.
When the truth, as Pau knew too well, was that his father had been consumed and corroded in equal measure, though it wasn’t revenge that he’d chased. It was land and legacy and the perfect bottle of wine.
Standing here in Umberto’s castle, Pau found himself feeling far from victorious. He was forced to wonder if he—and his father—were more like the man who had dominated both of their lives, and ended Bernat’s, than Pau wanted to admit.
Even thinking it made him feel ill.
“I have only ever had one enemy in my life,” Pau told her, feeling that pounding in his chest again and an accompanying urgency he wasn’t sure he could explain.
“And I’ll be honest with you, Leontina. Watching him effect his own undoing today did not exactly assuage my father’s death the way I thought it would. ”
Saying that out loud made him feel…worse, perhaps. Messier, certainly.
“I hate being back here,” she replied after a moment. “If I’m honest, I wouldn’t mind at all if this place burned to the ground. I’d likely celebrate. Yet coming back here has made things clear to me, at last.”
He wasn’t sure why that made him want to panic. “Leontina.”
She ignored him.
“I will not disappear from my life,” she told him then, her voice strong. Sure. Her gaze intent on his. “If you don’t like the fact that I’m in love with you, that’s your problem. I will not diminish myself for you or anyone else. Ever.”
She stood up then, setting the journals aside, and he saw that she was breathing rapidly, too. He wanted to go and put his mouth on the pulse in her neck. He wanted to get his hands on her any way he could.
He wanted her and that had changed everything.
But she wasn’t finished. “And I’ll tell you something else, Pau.
I’m not going to raise our baby on revenge.
On hatred. On nasty little plots that take decades and end in a sick, twisted old man on the floor with a banged-up head and no one to care about him but staff members he treats terribly.
” Her eyes blazed, a wild, bright green.
“My baby will be raised with hope. Love. And as much joy as he can handle.”
He said her name again, but it came out a whisper. A wish. A kind of prayer.
Leontina did not look away from him. He wasn’t sure she blinked. “If we can’t have that with you, Pau, that will break my heart. But I will leave you too if I have to.”
And he opened his mouth to tell her that none of that would be necessary, but he couldn’t seem to get the words out.
All those pressure points that had been pressing on him caved him in.
Because it was suddenly clear to him that all the structures inside him that held him in place, that made him who he was… crumbled.
Into so much ash and dust, just like that.