A Scandal in the Headlines - By Caitlin Crews Page 0,58

door, but he had his back turned to the square. To what was happening. To her.

Elena didn’t know why she’d believed he could save her from this, even for an instant. Hadn’t she always known she would have to handle it herself?

Niccolo looked up at Alessandro, then back at her, and his expression grew uglier.

“You’ve never been anything but a useless little whore, Elena,” he said, his black eyes bright with malevolence. “I took you out of that fishing boat you grew up in. I made something out of you. And this is how you repay me?”

Elena straightened. Pulled in a breath. He was shorter than she remembered. Thicker and more florid. The observation gave her a burst of strength, because it meant things had changed—she had changed.

“You didn’t do any of that for my benefit,” she said, finding steel inside her, somewhere. “You did it because you wanted the land. And then you hit me.”

“You owed me that land,” he snarled at her. “I dressed you up, took the stink of fish out of your skin. And then you let a Corretti steal it.”

“He didn’t steal anything,” she told him, keeping her gaze steady on his. “And he hasn’t hit me, either.”

“Just how long were you sleeping with him?” Niccolo demanded. “I know you lied to me. There’s no way that night was the first time you met him. How long were you stringing me along?”

“You hit me, Niccolo,” she said fiercely. “You threatened me. You lied to my family. You—”

“I let you off easy,” he interrupted her, and the names he called her then, one after the next, were vile. They made her feel sick—and sicker still that she had ever loved this man, that she’d touched him, that she’d failed to see what he really was. “What I want to know is how Corretti feels every time he takes a piece of my leavings.”

His hand flashed out and he grabbed her arm in a painful grip, but she didn’t make a sound. She didn’t even flinch. She refused to give him the satisfaction of thinking he’d hurt her again.

“Does he know, Elena?” he snarled. “Does he know I’ve already been there?” He smirked, smug and mean. “He’s not the kind of man who likes to share.”

Something in her changed then. She felt it shift. Elena didn’t care that his fingers around her arm hurt. She didn’t care that the look on his face would have frightened her once.

She didn’t have to be afraid of him any longer. She didn’t have to run. Alessandro had given her that much. As she looked up at Niccolo now, Elena finally accepted that even if Niccolo had been who he’d pretended to be, it still would have been over between them.

It had been over the moment she’d met Alessandro.

Even if she’d never seen him again after that night in Rome, she would have known the truth: that she’d loved a stranger for the duration of a dance far more than she’d loved her fiancé. It would have ended her engagement one way or another. Maybe, she thought then, she’d actually been lucky that dance had forced Niccolo to reveal himself. It would have been much, much harder to leave the man she’d thought he was.

“But then,” Niccolo was saying, “he doesn’t care about you, does he? He wants the land. Do you think he would trouble himself to marry you otherwise?”

He shook her, and that hurt, too, but she didn’t try to pull away. She didn’t defend Alessandro’s motives or worry that she didn’t know what they were. She didn’t cry or protest. She stared at him, memorizing this, so she would never forget what it felt like the moment she’d not only stopped being afraid of Niccolo Falco, but stopped feeling guilty about how this had all happened in the first place.

Inevitable, something whispered inside of her. This was all inevitable.

“I never would have married you,” she said then, her voice smooth and strong. “Alessandro only expedited things. You would have shown your true face sooner or later. And I would have left you the moment I saw it.”

“Look at where you are,” Niccolo ground out, his fingers digging into her arm. “This tiny town, all alone. Have you really convinced yourself that a man like Alessandro Corretti, who invited half of Europe to his last wedding, cares about a nobody like you?” He laughed. “Wake up, Elena. The only difference between Alessandro Corretti and me is that he has