An Inheritance of Shame(17)

Angelo didn’t remember much about the drive back to the hotel. His mind was a blur of memories and thoughts he could not articulate. He kept his gaze focused on the road, but he didn’t even remember driving.

He pulled up to the hotel and tossed the keys to a valet, then strode through the lobby, blind to everyone and everything around him. He rode up the lift up to the penthouse suite and strode through the empty, ornate rooms before ending up in the bathroom, staring at his pale, wild-eyed reflection.

Then he clenched his hand into a fist and punched that reflection as hard as he could. Glass shattered in an explosion of glittering fragments and blood welled up on his knuckles, trickled down his wrist.

Angelo swore and reached for one of the towels—one that Lucia had brought—and pressed it to his bloody fist. What an idiotic, uncontrolled thing to do. Yet even with his hand throbbing he couldn’t regret it. He’d needed some outlet for his rage. His agony.

It was sudden, this grief that overwhelmed him, sudden and utterly unexpected. He’d never felt it before, and yet it was also weirdly familiar. He felt as if he’d been feeling it all his life, suppressing it, hiding it—even from himself.

He hadn’t grieved his mother when she’d left him at six years old, with a careless kiss and a guilty look. He’d seen her again once, when he was thirteen and she’d come home asking for money.

He hadn’t grieved the death of his grandparents, who had taken care of him for his entire childhood and died within a few months of each other when he was eighteen. They hadn’t loved him, he knew that. They’d been ashamed of him, the Corretti bastard nobody had wanted.

He hadn’t even grieved the father he’d never had, the man who had told him, point blank, he’d have preferred for Angelo not to exist at all. And even when Carlo Corretti had died, Angelo had felt…nothing. He’d always felt nothing.

Until now. Now when that surface nothing cracked like the thinnest ice and revealed the depth and darkness of the emotion churning below. Raw, honest, messy grief rose up inside him, threatened to spill out. His eyes stung and his throat thickened with tears and over what? A baby he’d never expected to have? A life he’d never even thought he wanted?

A daughter. A daughter with silky dark hair and his name. Angelo blinked hard.

With the towel still pressed to his hand he crunched across the broken glass and went back out to the living room, stared unseeingly at the city stretched out before him like a glittering chessboard and he was the king.

That’s how he’d seen his life: an arduous journey from pawn to king, strategising and calculating every single move he’d ever made, and all, only to win.

Yet now he felt only loss—unbelievable, unending—flooding through him, filling his emptiness with something far worse. Grief.

Slowly he sank onto a sofa, his hand cradled in his lap. He felt as if he were spinning into a void, with no plans, no thoughts. He had no idea what to do now.

Forge ahead, forget what was behind? Forget this daughter he’d never known, and the woman who had been her mother, who might have been his wife?

Could he forget Lucia?

It was a question he’d never asked himself before. He’d never even thought to ask it; forgetting her had been a given. But now…now he wasn’t so sure.

Now, Angelo thought bleakly, he wasn’t sure of anything.

He closed his eyes, fought against all that emotion surging within him, rising up. Why hadn’t she told him about the baby? And if she had, what would he have done? Could he have changed the awful course of events?

He knew, rationally, that he couldn’t have, and yet still he wondered. Wished even, for a life he’d never thought to have. And as for the future…He knew there was still something between him and Lucia. Whether it was no more than the remnant of a childhood affection that had long since eroded into antipathy or something more, something good he didn’t know. But he intended to find out.

How?

Clearly Lucia wanted him to leave her alone. To forget. And in some ways, it would be easier to forget. To go on as he always had before.

And yet he knew he couldn’t. Wouldn’t. Grimly Angelo stared straight ahead, his bleeding, throbbing hand momentarily forgotten. He wasn’t done here. They weren’t done…no matter what Lucia wanted or thought.

Lucia woke with her eyes feeling gritty and her mouth dry as dust. She’d barely slept, having spent most of the night trying to blank out the memories that kept looping in a relentless reel through her mind. The doctor’s flat voice telling her Angelica was dead. The softness of her daughter’s still-warm skin when she’d held her. The blank look on Angelo’s face last night.