A Scandal in the Headlines(59)

Elena stared straight ahead, her gaze fixed on the far wall and the flashing numbers that announced each floor, though a faint flush spread across her cheeks.

“There’s nothing else,” she said. He didn’t recognize that voice she used, the way she held herself. But he knew she was lying. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said that.”

“Are you sure he didn’t hurt you?” he asked quietly.

She looked at him then, and her blue eyes were shadowed. Dark.

“No.” There was something there then. Something making her voice catch, her mouth take on that hint of vulnerability that killed him. “I told you.”

“Elena,” he said. “You have to know—”

But his mobile beeped. She blinked, then looked away, and when she glanced at him again her face was that smooth mask. He couldn’t stand it.

“Tell me what’s wrong,” he urged her. “Tell me what happened.”

“You should answer that,” she said, much too calmly, when his phone kept beeping. “I’m sure it’s important.”

He pulled out the phone to look at the screen, and wasn’t surprised at the number he saw flashing there.

“It’s my family,” he started, not knowing how to compress the history of the Corretti feuds into something coherent. Not knowing how he felt about any of it, now that he’d pulled himself back from the abyss that had stalked him all these years. “There are all these divisions, these petty little wars—”

“I read the papers, Alessandro,” she said gently. “I know about your family.” She nodded at his mobile. “You should take the call.”

“I always take the call,” he gritted out. “And it never helps. Whenever there’s a possibility of ending this nonsense, we make sure to destroy it.” He shook his head. “I’m beginning to believe we always will.”

She looked at him for a long moment, and he had the sense she was weighing something behind those stormy eyes he couldn’t read. She reached over and hit one of the elevator buttons, making his main office floor light up.

“Then you should fix it,” she said. She even smiled, and it was almost real. He almost believed she meant it. “Isn’t that what you do?”

“No,” he said shortly, his gaze searching hers. “Obviously not.”

Her eyes were much too dark, and it ate at him. Something flared between them in the small space, a different kind of fire, and he had the awful sense that he’d already lost her. That she had already disappeared.

But she was right here, he reminded himself sternly. She had married him slightly more than an hour ago. She was his.

“What’s the right thing?” she asked, her voice too quiet. “Do that, even if it hurts. Your family deserves it.”

“And if they don’t?”

After all these bitter years. After all the pain, the blood.

He thought he saw compassion in her gaze, or maybe he only wanted that. Maybe he was simply desperate for something he recognized, something to ease the gnawing sensation inside of him.

The elevator doors slid open, and she looked away, out toward the hushed executive level of Corretti Media.

His phone beeped again. Insistent. Annoying. He heard Giovanni’s voice from the office floor, the valet no doubt having informed him that Alessandro had returned.

“Your family might not deserve it, Alessandro. But you do.”

“Me?” He hardly made a sound. He hardly breathed. “I fear I deserve it least of all.”

The moment stretched between them, taut and shimmering with all the things he did not, could not, feel, except for her. He said her name again. His favorite incantation. His only remaining prayer.

“Go,” she whispered.

And it wasn’t until the elevator door had closed on her, and he was striding toward his responsibilities the way he always did, that he realized what he’d seen flash in her eyes then was a deep, dark sadness.


Elena took an early-afternoon flight out of Palermo’s Falcone Borcellino Airport, headed for Naples and the car she’d hired for the drive back to her village. She settled into the economy-class seat she’d bought with the money she’d earned waitressing and on Alessandro’s yacht, not the money he—or, more likely, his staff—had left for her in the penthouse in a folder with her name on the front and a selection of credit cards and cash within.