CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER TWO
Zago Baldissera had waited a long time for this moment.
Irinka Scott-Day, out of her element. Back here in this palazzo as if there had been no time at all between that fateful summer and now. As if that handful of years—that he could remember living through all too well—had been a blank, after all.
It felt like a victory .
And yet he never would have engineered this moment into being, however, had it not been for his sister.
He reminded himself that Nicolosa was the point of this. That it was Nicolosa, who had been crying for the last month straight, who deserved that revenge be taken in her name.
As her older brother and protector, he would have done what was necessary no matter what. It was simply a stroke of good luck that when he’d gone digging into the individuals who had been involved in his sister’s heartbreak, he’d found Irinka.
Of all people.
He was tempted to consider it fate.
Hers, that was.
“A reckoning?”
Irinka drifted farther into the room, looking utterly unconcerned. This was the Palazzo delle Sospira. Even if it burned, and it had, it did not change. And his role in life was to make certain it never did. To fight as best he could to preserve the history and legacy of his family until the palazzo sank beneath the waters of the lagoon, as they all would, in time.
That eventuality came closer every day, but Zago thought of himself as a man who straddled time. It took, it gave, and he did what he must in between.
And what he needed to do today was this.
“Does the idea of a reckoning frighten you?” he asked when she seemed content enough to do nothing more than drift from a statue some claimed was an unknown Donatello liberated from Florence in the 1400s, to the Murano glass bowls on a side table, to the small figurines his great-grandmother had collected, all made for her by well-regarded artists of the time. “I suppose it should. Where would you even begin to tally up your sins? Do you even know which sin it is that I feel requires your penance, or do they all blend together?”
“I’m sure you have a laundry list.”
She didn’t sound bored , exactly. But, of course, she was too good at what she did for that.
Zago had spent the last month learning everything there was to know about this baffling creature that Irinka had become. There had been nothing but glowing reviews from the otherwise extraordinarily picky and private men that he’d contacted under the guise of seeking the sort of woman who would do the kind of job for him that had been done to his sister.
He had found nothing but rapturous praise and he’d had to read between the lines. She was entirely professional. Cold straight through, one man had said admiringly. All business. Scenarios were discussed, then at least two top picks were selected in the event that circumstances required a change midstream. The date was picked out and agreed upon.
And then Irinka would appear—looking nothing like herself but still very much like a woman the man in question might actually be involved with, a critical detail—and would then do what needed to be done.
And the thing about her is that she’s good at it, another man had confided. A proper actress, in the end. Absolutely sells the scene and never the same scene twice. She is a national treasure.
Zago intended to tarnish this treasure.
Or possibly wreck it entirely. He had yet to decide how this would go. It rather depended on her.
He watched as Irinka found a seat and then sank into it, looking entirely at her ease.
And the trouble was, even though he’d braced himself, he really hadn’t been prepared for that same electric shock that he’d always felt in her presence. He wasn’t prepared to find her even more compelling than he had three years ago.
He would have told himself that was impossible.
She looked as if she inhabited her body more now than she had then. As if every part of her was fully controlled, and he couldn’t help but find that attractive. More than attractive. But then, she had always been beautiful. He had thought it the least interesting thing about her, in the end, but there was no denying it. No pretending that she was not her famously stunning mother’s daughter in every regard.
In every regard, he reminded himself.
Irinka’s thick black hair was clipped back at her nape, the long tail of it flipped over one shoulder. Her eyes were that blue that he’d liked to tell himself, in retrospect, were nothing but icy and cold, but they never had been. Not really. And they weren’t now.
The only blue he had ever seen to compare was the water of Venice at dawn, mysterious and inviting.
He needed to vanquish the part of him that allowed her to haunt him even here, in this place where his ancestors had been traced to the ninth century, in one form or another.
Perhaps what he needed to do was dwell on the person she’d decided to become after leaving him. Because it was difficult not to assume that a woman who was that good at putting on all her different masks had put one on for him, too.
Maybe this squalid thing she did was who she really was. And maybe she had done it to him first.
A truth that sat unpleasantly in his gut.
“You have no questions, then.” Zago watched her, telling himself he did not know why his chest was too tight, a sensation that did not make his gut feel any better about this woman and her masks and lies. Unless it was the righteous fury of a brother avenging his sister, that was. And what else could it be? “I suppose it is an everyday occurrence for you, is it?”
“To be kidnapped?” Irinka shook her head, and he could remember the silk of her hair against his skin. Like a taunt. “This is my first time. I’ll be certain to review the experience later with the authorities, but I don’t really know that I could possibly predict what you might do, Zago.” When her blue gaze met his, then, it was direct. Not the least bit airy . “I was certain that after the last time we saw each other, you would never wish to lay eyes on me again.”
That was an alarmingly reductive take on what had happened between them, but he supposed that was the point. He had no intention of wading into her take on that mess of a summer. Zago doubted very much that he would be impressed with the spin she’d put on it.
Particularly because she had snuck out in the night like some kind of thief and had never looked back.
He refused to give her the satisfaction of bringing any of that up.
It would give the impression that he had held on to all of it, and he had not.
He had not .
“Indeed, I did not wish to see you again,” he agreed. “Or even think of you, Irinka. You cannot imagine how little I wish these measures were necessary.”
She smiled again, as if he had said something droll and amusing at the sort of cocktail parties that wearied him. Then she waved her hand, taking in the room all around them. The frescoed walls, antiques dating back to any number of fallen empires, and the Grand Canal beyond, whispering its silken threats and seductive invitations as it went. That it had taken so many, that it would take them all, that this was no more than the price of beauty in so small a life.
He normally found this comforting.
Or, at the very least, a commentary on the sort of pressure a Baldissera heir must be prepared to withstand as long as he—and the family legacy, embodied in this palazzo—stayed above the waterline. His life’s work was to make certain he did.
There was less solace in it today, he found. He blamed Irinka for that, too.
“I assume you are meandering about in the direction of telling me why I am here?” she asked, though she did not sound as worried about that as he’d expected. As, perhaps, he’d wanted. If anything, she sounded like all that blue blood in her veins had finally taken hold and frozen her as solid as the country she came from. “The palazzo is looking lovely. You’re maintaining it beautifully. I’m sure that your father would be proud.”
And he was glad she’d said that. Fiercely glad.
Because she was reminding him, in the most subtle way possible—another hallmark of the way she did her dirty business, he’d been given to understand—that she was not afraid to use the weapons she had. So there was no need for him to hold back, either.
His father had been absolutely certain that no one, living or dead, could care more for the palazzo and the Baldissera name than himself. He had died of heart failure when Zago was twenty-eight. And Zago had still been reeling from that loss, and from the mess it had been to excavate all of his father’s secrets and plans and mistakes, a year later when he’d met Irinka.
He had shared too much with her and he had regretted it ever since.
But today it was a gift.
Because she was reminding him that there was no need to play nicely.
“You have a very interesting line of business, do you not?” Zago moved farther into the room and seated himself opposite her. He could have called for his staff to bring refreshments, but this wasn’t a social visit and there was no need to worry about her comfort.
This was business. Family business.
“I do,” she agreed, in that same pleasant tone with a whole dukedom of not-quite-expressed disdain beneath.
Zago could see why so many of her clients, who worked for their money—or at least had, once—and were easily bewitched by crumbling old ruins and the odd castle, were enamored of her. She was likely the only woman they ever encountered who quietly asserted the fact that she was better than them. Then refused to sleep with them, by all accounts.
They loved her for it.
He, personally, did not care to speculate about who she did or did not sleep with.
“I’m sure you remember me talking about my friends from university,” she was saying, another dangerous nod toward their past. Because remembering anything could mean remembering everything, and he doubted she wanted that.
It occurred to him, then, that she was trying to minimize it—and there would be no need to do that if it wasn’t as large and unwieldy a memory for her as it was for him, would there?
He told himself what he felt at that thought was mere interest, nothing more. It was interesting , that was all.
And she was still talking, chattering as if they were acquaintances at a brunch, the sort of event Zago would never attend. “We started a specialty sort of agency. My friends go off into the world and provide services for wealthy individuals who require them. One is a world-class chef. Another can pretty much fix any reputation, no matter what. Another one can take any family pile and transform it into a garden oasis. These are all very specialized skills. Meanwhile, I hold down the fort in our office.”
Zago studied her lovely face for a long moment, but she seemed prepared to gaze back at him like that forever. Guileless. At her ease.
Deceitful to her core.
“That will be the last lie you tell me, Irinka,” he said, with enough quiet fury that he saw her sit a little bit straighter. “Do you understand me? I know perfectly well you are not a receptionist.”
“I’m an excellent receptionist.”
“I’m more interested in your other pursuits.” He settled back in his seat and told himself his heart beat faster only with the thrill of this chase reaching its end. There could be no other reason. “For example, I believe you are familiar with a certain Peruvian financier. Felipe De Osma.”
She looked wholly unbothered by this line of questioning, but he didn’t believe that, either. Surely it was her job to look unconcerned, and she was clearly an excellent actress. “Of course. He has contracted the services of our agency many times.”
“And what services does he require of you?”
Her smile never wavered. “I’m afraid that the one thing we promise our clientele above all else is privacy. I can’t tell you what it is we do for him or anyone else we may or may not do work for. Just as, if you were our client, I wouldn’t tell anyone what we did for you, either.”
Zago studied her. “I already know what you do.”
She shrugged, and it made her hair move while another memory scraped over him. “How marvelous. Then I don’t need to feel all cloak and dagger that I’m not telling you.”
“Tell me about the events of about a month ago,” he invited her. Though it was more of an order. “You walked into the luxury flat of Felipe De Osma despite the security measures in place, found him in a compromising position with a woman, and threw a glass of wine in his face.” He thought he saw a trace of amusement in her blue eyes, but it was gone in a flash. “While he was mopping himself up, you launched into a spate of blistering, outraged Spanish, claiming that you were his lover. Are you?”
“What an indelicate question.” But her eyes gleamed. “Even if it was remotely your concern, which it isn’t, I can’t imagine why I would answer you.”
It was his turn to very obliquely look around the room, as if measuring the thickness of the walls and therefore the parameters of her cell here. “I’m certain I can convince you that it’s in your best interest.”
“I’m sure you think you can,” Irinka said, which was not quite agreement. “What I’m more interested in is how you know what was said in the middle of an altercation in someone else’s flat. Are you stalking Felipe? Whatever for?”
“I am not stalking anyone.”
“Oh.” And her expression was innocent enough, though Zago could see that gleam in her gaze intensify. “Do you outsource that the way you do kidnappers?”
And it didn’t help to see that spark in her. To remember how he had ignited it and where it had taken them. Just as it did not help anything to find that he was not nearly as immune to her as he had expected he would be.
After all, he had offered her the world, and she had turned him down flat.
What was there to be susceptible to after that?
Especially when her behavior since proved that really, she had done him a favor.
Irinka kept her gaze trained on him, as if she could read him too easily. There was a part of him that was very much worried that she could.
But he told himself that was unlikely. “Speaking of outsourcing, how often do you go about interfering in other people’s relationships and making women you don’t even know cry?” he asked instead.
The strangest expression moved over her face then, and he told himself that it was an improvement, anyway, from her attempts at innocence. Whatever it was, it was more real . He was sure of it—even though it disappeared almost as quickly as it came.
“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”
“What I mean, Irinka, is that you are widely known as the breakup artist that every man of a certain sort needs on speed dial. If a man doesn’t have the stomach to handle his own mess, you come and do it for him. Are you pretending that you don’t? What other reason would you have for storming into Felipe De Osma’s flat and disrupting the intimate evening he was having with another woman?”
“I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I wonder what would happen to your business if I were to have a frank and far-reaching discussion with, say, a selection of tabloids about what it is you actually do at that agency of yours.” He settled back against the ancient settee and gazed at the frescoed ceiling. “I can’t help but notice that you’ve taken a great deal of trouble to make yourself seem toothless. Unremarkable. Everyone thinks of you as little more than a dilettante, wafting around Europe and pretending that you’re some kind of party girl, when everyone knows that your father— His Grace —wants nothing to do with you. That must be painful.” He watched her lift her chin a bit at that, as if it was a blow that landed. And he told himself that the searing sensation that moved through him then was a triumph. “Perhaps it is unsurprising that you choose to translate that kind of pain into preying on others. That is the sort of thing that rolls downhill, does it not?”
“That’s a bit rich coming from the hereditary heir to an ancient Venetian fortune that was not exactly built on good vibes and sunshine, as I recall.”
That was also a blow that landed. Zago didn’t like it.
The truth, as far as he knew, was that no family that could trace itself into antiquity and yet still hold on tight to some of its spoils—like the palazzo they sat in now—could do so without what his father had always referred to as uno brutto momento . A bad moment.
In a family like theirs, there had been many. Some matched up with the wars that had made and destroyed and remade Europe. Some were of their own, personal making. Zago could remember his father’s rants all throughout his childhood, increasing in intensity as the years went by, as if he could reach back through time and lecture his ancestors on the duties and legacies they had periodically neglected.
We must be the paragons our bloodline needs in the future to make up for the past, his father had liked to say in his later years, usually when Zago had dared interrupt him in his study. The place he liked to go to hide away from the world in general and his children in particular, leaving them to their own devices.
Sometimes Zago thought that he had been raised as a ghost, left to haunt the halls of the palazzo with all the rest.
He deeply regretted telling Irinka these things over the course of that summer.
And he could not forgive himself for trusting her with the stories—good and bad—of those who had come before him, not to mention with his father’s obsessions.
He abandoned you, she had said once. Without committing to actually leaving. That’s quite a feat.
And then she had abandoned him, too. But she had also made sure to leave, just to make sure that knife was stuck in deep. Zago thought he could feel it still, buried deep between his shoulder blades.
“The choice is yours,” he told her now, and absolutely did not shift his position to relieve the bite of a knife that wasn’t there.
He had long since decided that the burdens his father had bequeathed to him—like the weight of this palazzo and its history and the legacy that he was expected to tend and nurture into a future that expanded far beyond him, to say nothing of his family’s ancient reputation all the social expectations that went with that in certain quarters of this country—were a gift.
No one ever said a gift had to feel good all the time.
A distinction he intended to make clear to Irinka this time around.
“A choice?” Irinka said that with mock delight and no little astonishment. “Am I truly being offered a choice? That’s the first time all day.”
He opted to ignore that. “The choice is very simple. Answer my questions or lose your little agency. It will take two phone calls, at most. Is that what you want?”
She sat across from him, as impossibly perfect as ever. Impenetrable, unknowable. It was difficult for him to imagine, now, how desperate he had been to hurl himself against those walls she put up around her and find his way inside.
Just as it was difficult to accept that he had failed.
“I’m not saying that I know what you’re talking about,” she said after a moment. “But it would seem to me that if a man was such a coward that he required a service to end a relationship, that any woman he chose to do that to was better off for it.”
“That’s a remarkable take, and interestingly enough, absolves you of any culpability.” He smiled. “How curious.”
“I wouldn’t know,” she replied, carefully. “But I have to think that if such a service existed, it would profit off the men involved while providing a kind of rescue to the women. Because what decent, honorable man would do such a thing in the first place?”
“Do you think that this argument will work?” He found himself leaning forward, thinking of fragile, sweet Nicolosa’s inability to get out of bed. Of that look on her face, as if she’d been kicked. Repeatedly. It was unbearable. “Do you suppose that if you were to go out there and locate all the women you did this to that they would applaud you?”
“Do you think that they wouldn’t, in the fullness of time, understand that they dodged a bullet?” she shot back. Then smiled. “Not that I know anything about it, but even hearing about such a service, I have to ask—is wine thrown in their faces? Who is shouted at—the presumably cheating man or the woman he’s with?”
And Zago had done his research. He had been on a mission to root out the perpetrators and bring them to some kind of justice since the night his sister had called him in hysterics. And once he’d found the identity of the woman who had come into the apartment that night—and had sat with that a minute—he had gone and found his way to other examples of her work.
For research purposes, naturally.
And it was true. All the drama was focused on the man. The woman he was with usually ran off, often in tears. But if anything was thrown or broken, it was either at the man or belonged to the man.
He hadn’t noticed that. It seemed interesting, now, that he hadn’t. But he told himself it didn’t matter. It couldn’t.
“You cannot possibly justify your actions,” he told Irinka. “Even if you don’t do what you do to the woman. Is a murder any better if it is painless?”
Her smile sharpened. “Comparing a breakup to murder seems a little over the top, doesn’t it?”
He didn’t think of his sister then. He didn’t think of the way Nicolosa had wailed and told him that there was no possible way that Felipe was seeing anyone else.
I might be a fool, his sister had sobbed. But I’m not that much of a fool. It’s entirely possible that he was seeing other women, but if he was, it would have to have been a night here, a night there. There simply wasn’t time for him to have the kind of in-depth relationship that woman was screaming about. You have to believe me, Zago. You have to.
And he had believed her. But that wasn’t what he thought about now.
It was this woman, of all people, telling him how a breakup ought to feel.
“I was not at all surprised that the woman who would do these things was you, Irinka,” he said after a moment. “Because, as we both know, you have no qualm whatsoever reaching into the chest of another, ripping his heart out, and tossing it to the carrion crows.”
He did nothing to prevent the bitterness from coming out in his voice. He did nothing to bank the fury that he could feel cover his face and no doubt take over his gaze.
For the first time in three years, he didn’t pretend that the way she’d left was okay.
But this time, it wasn’t his own face staring back at him from a mirror while he didn’t think these things. She was right here.
And she was staring right back at him.
“Is that why you really brought me here?” Irinka asked softly. “All these years later, you want to sit here and conduct a postmortem on our breakup?” She laughed, almost ruefully. “I’ll make it simple for you. I was very young. We had nothing in common. I’m no longer quite so young, but the second part still holds. Will I get the private jet back to London or will you be petty and have me find my own way?”
“You’re not leaving,” he gritted out. But when her brow rose, all cool challenge, he remembered that he was not a caveman. “What I meant to say is, you can leave at will. But I’ve already outlined the consequences. I would make very certain that you are ready for that. Because in case you’ve forgotten, I am not a man given to levity. This is not a joke.”
“You don’t say. And here I’ve been giggling to myself the whole time, from being swiped off the Portobello Road to being frog marched into this palazzo. The hilarity never ends with you, Zago.”
“I don’t recall you complaining about my intensity when it mattered.” He was moving before he meant to, but then she was, too.
And suddenly they were both standing there in the space between her chair and his settee, the Venetian light filtering in through the ancient windows, pale gold streaming everywhere.
But if there was any oxygen between them, he couldn’t find it.
“I haven’t complained about anything,” she told him, her eyes blazing. “Then or now. I seem to recall that was you.”
He laughed, and he hadn’t known until that moment that he had sounds like that inside of him. Just as he wasn’t sure he knew the man who reached over and slid his hand to take her jaw in his palm.
He didn’t grip too hard. He didn’t move her about. Zago simply held her there and then, almost fitfully, dragged his thumb over that wicked, tempting, dangerous mouth of hers.
“There you were,” he all but crooned. “Parading around as the daughter of one of the most scandalous women alive and vamping it up in her shadow. And only you and I know the truth, don’t we?” He leaned in, only a little. He lowered his voice. “It was all an act. Little games you played to keep people at a distance when the truth was, you were an untouched virgin. You played your games then. Now you play them on a dangerous stage. But at the end of the day, we both know that I’m the one who brought you alive. Who put my mouth on every inch of your body, and taught you who you are.”
Zago had never said things like that out loud before. But that didn’t make them any less true.
Her gaze glittered. “Your arrogance is breathtaking.”
“It always was,” he agreed. “And even now that I’ve kidnapped you, brought you to Venice, and have showed myself arrogant once more, what do you think I would find if I slid my hand between your legs, Irinka?”
He shifted closer, until his mouth was nearly on hers. He could see the way her eyes dilated. He could see her pulse go wild in her neck. He could feel the heat of her skin, and later, perhaps, he would explore precisely how it felt to know that everything was as it had always been between them.
Because he was hard, ready, and aching for her as if he had only just had her.
As if there had been no time in between but a few scant minutes instead of years.
“Because between you and me,” Zago whispered, “I think we both know that you’re already wet. And ready. And hungry. For me, as always.”
Something that wasn’t as simple as temper, or as complicated as grief, flashed across her face. She lifted a hand to grip his wrist as if she wanted to tear his hand away, but she didn’t.
Instead, she leaned closer. “If you wanted to ask me for a date, Zago, you could have texted. Like a normal person.”
“Speaking of arrogance,” he replied. He let go of her then, though he didn’t step back. But then, she didn’t, either. “This isn’t about you, Irinka, as hard as that might be for you to believe.”
“It is difficult, yes,” she agreed. “Given the kidnap. And the fact that I’m currently being held in your palazzo, subject to attempts at intimidation. You can see how a person might jump to the conclusion that it was about them.”
He ignored that. “This is about my sister. Do you remember her? She was only sixteen back then. And though she is nineteen now, and headed off to university as she should, she is sheltered. Naive.” He shook his head. “Knowing this, I made it clear to her that she was to be careful around men, but all that did was keep her from telling me about him when she met him. She knew I wouldn’t approve. It was only when he made so many declarations that she felt emboldened.” Zago blew out a frustrated breath. “I found what she did tell me sufficiently alarming that I was already planning to go to London, but then instead, you turned up. She was spending the night in his apartment—not for the first time, I am to understand, little as I wish to know these details about my baby sister—and in came this woman making wild accusations and hurling crockery. Nicolosa, bless her, assumed that she and her lover would present a united front, laugh off these accusations, and call the police. But that’s not what happened.”
He didn’t know what he expected her to do. All she did do was gaze back at him with a certain steadiness that suggested to him that she was taking this hard, though he had no evidence to support that. Just a feeling.
And too well did he know how little his feelings ever had to do with reality when it came to Irinka.
“Do you feel good about what you do when you actually know the woman you are paid to destroy?” he asked her. “Because since then, Nicolosa has dropped out of university. She has taken to her bed and refuses to leave her flat in London. She hardly sleeps or eats and if she is awake, she is likely crying.”
And he could not bear it, though he did not say that out loud. Zago might have been a ghost in this house, but he had made certain that Nicolosa had a different sort of childhood. He had taken his role as her older brother seriously. Very seriously.
He had cared for her and played with her. As she grew, he had become her mentor, her protector. When there was nothing in these halls but the echoing silence of their father’s interest in everything but them, he had told her stories about the people in all the paintings to redirect her attention.
That a man like de Osma had come along and crushed her like this had come terribly close to crushing Zago, too.
Though he did not intend to admit such a thing. Not to the woman who had been involved in his sister’s heartbreak.
“I really am sorry for that,” Irinka said quietly, after a moment or two. “I’m sorry that she is so upset. But I cannot be sorry to hear that she was liberated herself from the clutches of a man who has a vibrant reputation for preying upon girls just like her.”
“And you are still convinced you are somehow the hero of this tale, are you not? Amazing.”
“I notice you’re not storming Felipe’s residence to demand that he offer you reparation for your sister’s broken heart,” she retorted. “I’m not surprised that one outrageously wealthy man should find another outrageously wealthy man miraculously without responsibility for his own actions. It must, of course, be my fault.”
He didn’t point out that she’d essentially admitted it was her, at last. Not that he had been in any doubt.
“Once I knew it was you, I understood,” he told her. “For only you, Irinka, are capable of such cruelty. It made all the sense in the world to me that you’ve made this your profession. After all, I was your first project.”
“Is this what you kidnapped me to tell me?” she asked softly, though there was something almost wary in her gaze. “Once again, this really could have been a text.” She actually dared roll her eyes at him then, as if this was little more than an annoyance to her. As if that’s all he was, too. “And while we’re on the subject of kidnaps, I told my friends that if they don’t hear from me by teatime that they were to involve the authorities. So I hope you’re planning on wrapping this up soon.”
“I think you’d better call your friends,” he said with quiet certainty. “And tell them that you’re not coming home. Because we’re going to experiment with a little accountability, you and I.”
He could see the goose bumps rise along her neck, though she otherwise didn’t react. “Are we now?” She dared to look at her watch, another version of a rolled eye. He knew perfectly well it was deliberate. “And how long do you think that will take?”
But when Zago laughed again, it felt more natural this time. “Oh, Irinka. Until we’re finally done.”