Claimed In The Italian's Castle (Once Upon a Temptation, Book 4)

by Caitlin Crews

  Dorothea glared at Angelina, then turned that glare back on Petronella. “Don’t be silly, Pet. He’s hardly going to choose Angelina. Why would he? She’s a teenager.”

  Petronella made an aggrieved noise. “You know what men are like. The younger the better. Men like him can afford to indulge themselves as they please.”

  “I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,” Angelina said coolly. She did not add, as usual. “But for the sake of argument, I should point out that I am not, in fact, a teenager. I turned twenty a few months ago.”

  “Why would he choose Angelina?” Dorothea asked again, shrilly. Her dirty-blond hair was cut into a sleek bob that shook when she spoke. “It will be me, of course. As eldest daughter, it is my duty to prostrate myself before this threat. For all of us.”

  “Do come off it,” Petronella snapped right back. “You’re gagging for it to be you. He’s slaughtered six wives and will no doubt chop your head off on your wedding night, but by all means. At least you’ll die a rich man’s widow.” She shifted, brushing out her long, silky, golden blond hair. “Besides. It’s obvious he’ll choose me.”

  “Why is that obvious?” Dorothea asked icily.

  Angelina knew where this was going immediately. She settled into her seat, crossing her ankles demurely, because Mother was always watching. Even when she appeared to be concentrating on her needlepoint.

  Petronella cast her eyes down toward her lap, but couldn’t quite keep the smug look off of her face. “I have certain attributes that men find attractive. That’s all I’m saying.”

  “Too many men, Pet,” Dorothea retorted, smirking. “He’s looking for a wife, not used goods.”

  And when they began screeching at each other, Angelina turned toward her mother. “Am I meant to know what they’re talking about?”

  Margrete gazed at her elder two daughters as if she wasn’t entirely certain who they were or where they’d come from. She stabbed her sharp needle into her canvas, repeatedly. Then she shifted her cold gaze to Angelina.

  “Your father has presented us with a marvelous opportunity, dear,” she said.

  The dear was concerning. Angelina found herself sitting a bit straighter. And playing closer attention than she might have otherwise. Margrete was not the sort who tossed out endearments willy-nilly. Or at all. For her to use one now, while Dorothea and Petronella bickered, made a cold premonition prickle at the back of Angelina’s neck.

  “An opportunity?” she asked.

  Angelina thought she’d kept her voice perfectly clear of any inflection, but her mother’s cold glare told her otherwise.

  “I’ll thank you to keep a civil tongue in your head, young lady,” Margrete snipped at her. “Your father’s been at his wit’s end, running himself ragged attempting to care for this family. Are these the thanks he gets?”

  Angelina knew better than to answer that question.

  Margrete carried on in the same tone. “I lie awake at night, asking myself how a man as pure of intention as your poor father could be cursed with three daughters so ungrateful that all they do is complain about the bounty before them.”

  Angelina rather thought her mother lay awake at night wondering how it was she’d come to marry so far beneath her station, which seemed remarkably unlike the woman Angelina knew. Margrete, as she liked to tell anyone who would listen, and especially when she’d had too much wine, had had her choice of young men. Angelina couldn’t understand how she’d settled on Anthony Charteris, the last in a long line once littered with titles, all of which they’d lost in this or that revolution. Not to mention a robust hereditary fortune, very little of which remained. And almost all of which, if Angelina had overheard the right conversations correctly, her father had gambled and lost in one of his numerous ill-considered business deals.

  She didn’t say any of that either.

  “He’s marrying us off,” Petronella announced. She cultivated a sulky look, preferring to pout prettily in pictures, but tonight it looked real. That was alarming enough. But worse was Dorothea’s sage nod from beside her, as if the two of them hadn’t been at each other’s throats moments before. And as if Dorothea, who liked to claim she was a bastion of rational thought despite all evidence to the contrary, actually agreed with Petronella’s theatrical take.

  “We are but chattel,” Dorothea intoned. “Bartered away like a cow or a handful of seeds.”

  “He will not be marrying off all three of you to the same man,” Mother said reprovingly. “Such imaginations! If only this level of commitment to storytelling could be applied to helping dig the family out of the hole we find ourselves in. Perhaps then your father would not have to lower himself to this grubby bartering. Your ancestors would spin their graves if they knew.”

  “Bartering would be one thing,” Dorothea retorted in a huff. “This is not bartering, Mother. This is nothing less than a guillotine.”

  Angelina waited for her mother to sigh and recommend her daughters take to the stage, as she did with regularity—something that would have caused instant, shame-induced cardiac arrest should they ever have followed her advice. But when Mother only stared back at her older daughters, stone-faced, that prickle at the back of Angelina’s neck started to intensify. She sat straighter.

  “Surely we all knew that the expectation was that we would find rich husbands, someday,” Angelina said, carefully. Because that was one of the topics she avoided, having always assumed that long before she did as expected and married well enough to suit her mother’s aspirations, if not her father’s wallet, she would make her escape. “Assuming any such men exist who wished to take on charity cases such as ours.”

  “Charity cases!” Margrete looked affronted. “I hope your father never hears you utter such a phrase, Angelina. Such an ungrateful, vicious thing to say. That the Charteris name should be treated with such contempt by one who bears it! If I had not been present at your birth I would doubt you were my daughter.”

  Given that Margrete expressed such doubts in a near constant refrain, Angelina did not find that notion as hurtful she might have otherwise.

  “This isn’t about marrying,” Petronella said, the hint of tears in her voice, though there was no trace of moisture in her eyes. “I’ve always wanted to marry, personally.”

  Dorothea sniffed. “Just last week you claimed it was positively medieval to expect you to pay attention to men simply because they met Father’s requirements.”

  Petronella waved an impatient hand. The fact she didn’t snap at Dorothea for saying such a thing—or attempting to say such a thing—made the prickle at Angelina’s nape bloom into something far colder. And sharper, as it began to slide down her spine.

  “This isn’t about men or marriage. It’s about murder.” Petronella actually sat up straight to say that part, a surprise indeed, given that her spine better resembled melted candle wax most of the time. “We’re talking about the Butcher of Castello Nero.”

  Invoking one of the most infamous villains in Europe—maybe in the whole of the world—took Angelina’s breath away. “Is someone going to tell me what we’re talking about?”

  “I invite you to call our guest that vile nickname to his face, Petronella,” Margrete suggested, her voice a quiet fury as she glared at the larger settee. “If he really is what you say he is, how do you imagine he will react?”

  And to Angelina’s astonishment, her selfish, spoiled rotten sister—who very rarely bothered to lift her face from a contemplation of the many self-portraits she took with her mobile phone—paled.

  “Benedetto Franceschi,” Dorothea intoned. “The richest man in all of Europe.” She was in such a state that her bob actually trembled against her jawline. “And the most murderous.”

  “Stop this right now.” Margrete cast her needlepoint aside and rose in an outraged rustle of skirts and fury. Then she gazed down at all of them over her magnifi
cent, affronted bosom. “I will tolerate this self-centered spitefulness no longer.”

  “I still don’t know what’s going on,” Angelina pointed out.

  “Because you prefer to live in your little world of piano playing and secret excursions up and down the servants’ stairs, Angelina,” Margrete snapped. “This is reality, I’m afraid.”

  And that, at last, made Angelina feel real fear.

  It was not that she thought she’d actually managed to pull something over on her mother. It was that she’d lived in this pleasant fiction they’d all created for the whole of her life. That they were not on the brink of destitution. That her father would turn it all around tomorrow. That they were ladies of leisure, lounging about the ruined old house because they chose it, not because there were no funds to do much of anything else.

  Angelina hadn’t had the slightest notion that her mother paid such close attention to her movements. She preferred to imagine herself the ignored daughter.

  Here, now, what could she do but lower her gaze?

  “And you two.” Margrete turned her cold glare to the other settee. “Petronella, forever whoring about as if giving away for free what we might have sold does anything but make you undesirable and useless. Wealthy heiresses can do as they like, because the money makes up for it. What is it you intend to bring to the table?”

  When Petronella said nothing, Mother’s frosty gaze moved to her oldest daughter. “And you, Dorothea. You turned up your nose at a perfectly acceptable marriage offer, and for what? To traipse about the Continent, trailing after the heirs to lesser houses as if half of France doesn’t claim they’re related to some other dauphin?”

  Dorothea gasped. “He was Papa’s age! He made my skin crawl!”

  “The more practical woman he made his wife is younger than you and can afford to buy herself a new skin.” Margrete adjusted her dress, though it was perfect already. Even fabric dared not challenge her. “The three of you have done nothing to help this family. All you do is take. That ends tonight.”

  Angelina found herself sitting straighter. She was used to drama, but this was on a different level. For one thing, she had never seen her sisters ashen-faced before tonight.

  “Your sisters know this already, but let me repeat it for everyone’s edification.” Margrete looked at each of them in turn, but then settled her cold glare on Angelina. “Benedetto Franceschi will be at dinner tonight. He is looking for a new wife and your father has told him that he can choose amongst the three of you. I am not interested in your thoughts or feelings on this matter. If he chooses you, you will say yes. Do you understand me?”

  “He has had six wives so far,” Petronella hissed. “All have died or disappeared under mysterious circumstances. All, Mother!”

  Angelina felt cold on the outside. Her hands, normally quick and nimble, were like blocks of ice.

  But deep inside her, a dark thing pulsed.

  Because she knew about Benedetto Franceschi. “The Butcher of Castello Nero,” Petronella had said. Everyone alive knew of the man so wealthy he lived in his own castle on his own private island—when the tide was high. When the tide was low, it was possible to reach the castello over a road that was little more than a sandbar, but, they whispered, those who made that trek did not always come back.

  He had married six times. All of his wives had died or disappeared without a trace, declared dead in absentia. And despite public outcry, there had never been so much as an inquest.

  All of those things were true.

  What was also true was that when Angelina had been younger and there had still been money enough for things like tuition, she and her friends had sighed over pictures of Benedetto Franceschi in the press. That dark hair, like ink. Those flashing dark eyes that were like fire. And that mouth of his that made girls in convent schools like the one Angelina had attended feel the need to make a detailed confession. Or three.

  If he chooses you, came a voice inside her, as clear as a bell, you can leave this place forever.

  “He will choose one of us,” Petronella said, still pale, but not backing down from her mother’s ferocious glare. “He will pick one of us, carry her off, and then kill her. That is what our father has agreed to. Because he thinks that the loss of a daughter is worth it if he gets to keep this house and cancel out his debts. Which man is worse? The one who butchers women or the man who supplies him?”

  Angelina bit back a gasp. Her mother only glared.

  Out in the cavernous hallways, empty of so much of their former splendor, the clock rang out the half hour.

  Margrete stiffened. “It is time. Come now, girls. We must not keep destiny waiting, no matter how you feel about it.”

  And there was no mutiny. No revolt.

  They all lived in what remained of this sad place, after all. This pile of stone and regret.

  Angelina rose obediently, falling into place behind her sisters as they headed out.

  “To the death,” Petronella kept whispering to Dorothea, who was uncharacteristically silent.

  But it would be worth the risk, Angelina couldn’t help but think—a sense of giddy defiance sweeping over her—if it meant she got to live, even briefly.

  Somewhere other than here.

  CHAPTER TWO

  WHEN A MAN was a known monster, there was no need for posturing.

  Benedetto Franceschi did not hide his reputation.

  On the contrary, he indulged it. He leaned into it.

  He knew the truth of it, after all.

  He dressed all in black, the better to highlight the dark, sensual features he’d been told many times were sin personified. Evil, even. He lounged where others sat, waved languid fingers where others offered detailed explanations, and most of the time, allowed his great wealth and the power that came with it—not to mention his fearsome, unsavory reputation—to do his talking for him.

  But here he was again, parading out like l’uomo nero, the boogeyman, in a crumbling old house in France that had once been the seat of its own kind of greatness. He could see the bones of it, everywhere he looked. The house itself was a shambles. And what was left of the grounds were tangled and overgrown, gardeners and landscapers long since let go as the family fortune slipped away thanks to Anthony Charteris’s bad gambles and failed business deals.

  Benedetto had even had what was, for him, an unusual moment of something like shame as he’d faced once more the charade he was reduced to performing, seemingly preying on the desperation of fools—

  But all men were fools, in one form or another. Why not entertain himself while living out what so many called the Franceschi Curse?

  The curse is not supposed to mean you, a voice inside him reminded him. But rather your so-called victims.

  He shrugged that away, as ever, and attempted to focus on the task at hand. He had little to no interest in Anthony Charteris himself, or the portly little man’s near slavering devotion to him tonight. He had suffered through a spate of twittering on that he had only half listened to, and could not therefore swear had been a kind of “business” presentation. Whatever that meant. Benedetto had any number of fortunes and could certainly afford to waste one on a man like this. Such was his lot in life, and Charteris could do with it what he liked. Benedetto already failed to care in the slightest, and maybe this time, Benedetto would get what he wanted out of the bargain.

  Surely number seven will be the charm, he assured himself.

  Darkly.

  His men had already gathered all the necessary background information on the once proud Charteris family and their precipitous slide into dire straits. Anthony’s lack of business acumen did not interest him. Benedetto was focused on the man’s daughters.

  One of them was to be his future wife, whether he liked it or not.

  But what he liked or disliked was one more thing he’d surrendered a long time
ago.

  Benedetto knew that the eldest Charteris daughter had been considered something of a catch for all of five minutes in what must seem to her now like another lifetime. She could have spent the last eight years as the wife of a very wealthy banker whose current life expectancy rivaled that of a fragile flower, meaning she could have looked forward to a very well-upholstered widowhood. Instead, she had refused the offer in the flush of Anthony’s brief success as a hotelier only to watch her father’s fortunes—and her appeal—decline rapidly thereafter.

  The possibilities of further offers from wealthy men were scant indeed, which meant Dorothea would likely jump at the chance to marry him, his reputation notwithstanding.

  Unlike her sister, the middle daughter had shared her favors freely on as many continents as she could access by private jet, as long as one of the far wealthier friends she cozied up to were game to foot the bill for her travels. She had been documenting her lovers and her lifestyle online for years. And Benedetto was no Puritan. What was it to him if a single woman wished to indulge in indiscriminate sex? He had always enjoyed the same himself. Nor was he particularly averse to a woman whose avariciousness trumped her shame.

  Of them all, Petronella seemed the most perfect for him on paper, save the part of her life she insisted on living in public. He could not allow that and he suspected that she would not give it up. Which would not matter if she possessed the sort of curiosity that would lead her to stick her nose into his secrets and make a choice she couldn’t take back—but he doubted very much that she was curious about much outside her mobile.

  The third daughter was ten years younger than the eldest, six years younger than the next, and had proved the hardest to dig into. There were very few pictures of her, as the family had already been neck deep in ruin by the time she might have followed in her sisters’ footsteps and begun to frequent the tiresome charity ball circuit of Europe’s elite families. What photographs existed dated back to her school days, where she had been a rosy-cheeked thing in a plaid skirt and plaits. Since graduating from the convent, Angelina had disappeared into the grim maw of what remained of the family estate, never to be heard from again.