The Italian's Final Redemption - Jackie Ashenden Page 0,26

with them. The facts were his own and he gave them to no one.

No one else, for example, needed to know how his mother had seduced his father into the de Santi family ‘business’. Or how she’d manipulated Vincenzo himself into doing the same thing, using his love for her against him.

He’d been her creature through and through. Her perfect boy, her heir. Her tool. There was a war, she’d told him, and their family had enemies that they had to defend themselves against. All lies. Lies he’d been too busy basking in her attention to see. Too busy being the chosen de Santi prince to care.

You knew. Deep down, somewhere inside, you always knew.

Some nights he lay awake in the dark, going over and over the things she’d told him to do, searching for signs he’d somehow missed. Signs he perhaps should have noticed—a cruel glint in her eye or a betraying curl to her lip. Something that would have told him that what she’d said about wars and soldiers and fighting were lies.

But there had been nothing. His mother had spent years perfecting her lies and he’d been sucked in completely. It was an evil he could never be free of and so all he could do was mitigate the damage by pursuing justice relentlessly.

No, he couldn’t tell her that.

‘I do let the police deal with it.’ He kept his voice level and without emphasis. ‘I give them the evidence they need, and they do the rest.’

‘But isn’t gathering the evidence their job?’

Annoyance gripped him. He didn’t want her questioning him. ‘They miss things. And they do not have the resources or the knowledge that I do. In some instances the police are corrupted by the very people they’re trying to bring to justice.’

‘You don’t trust them, then?’

‘No one can be trusted.’

‘No one except you?’

Vincenzo realised he was holding his glass far too tightly and that if he held it any tighter the slender stem would snap. With a conscious effort he relaxed his fingers, staring across the table at the woman opposite.

There was nothing sly or knowing in her gaze, only curiosity. She wasn’t goading him, it seemed; she genuinely wanted to know and obviously hadn’t picked up on his irritation.

‘You’re not very polite, are you?’ he observed casually, turning the conversation back on her.

Her eyes widened as if the statement had surprised her. ‘Aren’t I? Is asking questions wrong?’

‘You are my prisoner, civetta. And a prisoner does not interrogate her captor.’

Colour tinged her cheekbones, giving her face a rosy flush. She really was quite pretty, now he thought about it. Which was not at all helpful.

‘No, I suppose not.’ She took another piece of bread. ‘I just don’t get to talk to people very often.’

‘Why not?’ he asked, since what was clearly sauce for the gander could also be sauce for the goose.

She looked down at the piece of bread in her hands, tearing it once again into tiny pieces. And stayed silent. Her shoulders had hunched, her glossy hair a curtain over her face. The chestnut colour gleamed almost auburn in the fading twilight.

He was trespassing on painful subjects, it was clear, and no wonder. If her father had locked her in a dark basement, then what else had he done? But then, Vincenzo knew already. There were rumours about her, as there were about him; her father kept her well-guarded, deep in the English countryside. No, not just well-guarded. Her father had kept her prisoner.

The strange sensation in his chest that he’d felt earlier when he’d held her trembling body in his arms shifted again. A constriction.

He didn’t like it and he knew he should let the subject alone, move on, even get up from the table and leave her here to finish her meal alone. Yet he didn’t. Something compelled him to remain in his chair and to look at her all wrapped up in red silk, with her dark hair everywhere. Small and vulnerable and very, very alone.

‘He kept you prisoner,’ Vincenzo said, voicing his thoughts aloud to see her reaction. ‘Didn’t he?’

Her fingers shredded the bread to crumbs. ‘I was too valuable to be let out, or at least that was what he told me. It was for my own protection. There were a lot of people who wanted to use me or kill me, and so I was safer in the house with the guards.’

The sensation shifted again, getting tighter.

‘So you had no one at all you talked to? No