A Scandal in the Headlines(36)

Because one thing in his life had to be. Just one thing.

“‘Real,’” she repeated in a flat tone. “You. That’s almost funny. What do you know about real?” Her face heated as she spoke, her temper flooding in like a rising tide and as beautiful to him, however perverse that was. “You almost married a woman for what? A business expense?”

“Duty,” Alessandro corrected her, and she laughed. She laughed.

“The reality, Alessandro, is that you are not a good man,” she said with an awful, deliberate finality, staring straight at him, deliberate and pointed. “How could you be? You’re a Corretti.”

Condemnation and curse, all wrapped up in his name. His damned name. She said it as if it was the vilest word imaginable. As if the very saying of it blackened her tongue. He felt something crack open inside of him.

Because, of course, he wasn’t simply a Corretti. He was the one his family was happy to sacrifice to serve their own ends. He was the one who was expected to do his duty, because he always had. His own parents had used him as a pawn. His grandfather had manipulated him. His “business expense” had walked out on him. Then Elena had crashed into his life like a lightning bolt, illuminating all of his darkest corners in that single, searing, impossible dance, but she hated him—he’d made sure of it. He had never been anything but a dark, ruined thing, masquerading as a man.

“Your conscience will be your undoing, boy,” Carlo had jeered at him more than once. “It makes you weak.”

As long as it didn’t make him Carlo, he thought now, bitterly. Perhaps that was the most he could hope for.

Elena had no clue what she was dealing with. No possible clue what he held in check. “You don’t have the slightest idea who I am.”

“The entire world knows who you are,” she retorted, glaring at him as if he’d never been anything but a monster, and he couldn’t stand it. Not any longer. Not from her. “You’re—”

“I am so tired of paying for the sins of others,” he gritted out. He slashed a hand through the air when she opened her mouth and she shut it again, sinking back against the lounger, her hands in fists at her sides. “I’ve spent my life doing nothing but the right thing, and it still doesn’t matter. Yes, I was going to marry that girl.” He raked a hand through his hair. “Because it was my grandfather’s dying wish and I am many things, Elena, none of them as polluted or as vile as you seem to believe, but I could not defy my own grandfather.”

“Your grandfather—” she began, her eyes flashing, and he knew what she was about to say. The stories she was about to tell. His twisted family history in all its corrupt glory.

“Was no saint,” he interrupted her. “I know. But he was my grandfather, Elena, and whatever else I might think of the way he lived his life, I have him to thank for mine. How do you repay that kind of debt?”

“Selling yourself off to the highest bidder is an interesting answer to that question.”

“You’re one to talk,” he retorted, and she sucked in a breath, her face going white, then flushing deep red.

He hated himself for that, but that was nothing new, so he kept going—as if he could explain himself to her. As if she might understand him, somehow. How sad was that? How delusional? But he couldn’t seem to stop.

“The docklands project that the wedding was supposed to secure would have done what years of struggle on my part couldn’t—assure the Corretti family’s legacy into the future, legitimately. Bring all the warring factions of the family together.” He searched her face. “How could I refuse to do something so important? Why would I? I was prepared to do my duty to my family, and I can’t say I wouldn’t do it again.”

But she was shaking her head, and she even let out another laugh that seemed to pierce him through the chest, leaving only an icy chill in its wake.

“I’ve heard all of this before,” she said, shrugging. “The struggle to be a good man, the weight of the family name, the call to duty. It’s like a song and I know all the words.” Her gaze slammed into his, and he was amazed to find it felt as if she’d used a fist instead. “But when Niccolo said it, I believed him.”





CHAPTER SEVEN



NICCOLO FALCO. AGAIN. Always.

“Your beloved Niccolo is a liar and a crook,” Alessandro said through his teeth. “He wouldn’t know the right thing to do if it attacked him on the streets of Naples, and he certainly wouldn’t do it. Don’t kid yourself.”