She wished she would. But couldn’t. Not before she made sure her employees were safe from Durante’s wrath.
She cared nothing for what he would do to her.
She opened her office door, stepped inside, the plush wall-to-wall carpeting absorbing the sound of her steps, amplifying the feeling that she’d ceased to exist.
But it wasn’t insubstantiality that engulfed her now. It was something else. Something overwhelming and all-encompassing.
Him. Durante. Here.
She dropped the count. She’d been right. Her breath stopped. Time. The second held her in its grasp—and crushed her.
“Gabrielle. Perdonami.”
Forgive him?
The second fractured. Breath tore into her lungs. She spun around. And there he stood.
A god come down to earth, in an immaculate suit the color of the night of his hair, he made the crisp blues and grays of her space—made existence—pale into colorless nothingness.
His scent, his eyes on her. They made her forget everything. Every muscle in her body quivered like a bound bird’s, the blinding urge to fly to him tearing her apart.
Weak, self-destructive moron. She might never truly live again, but it was his doing. He’d crushed her.
What more did he want?
Anguish almost ripped her chest open. “You didn’t cut me into small enough pieces to satisfy your self-righteous rage? You want to see me a bloody mass on the ground before you’re satisfied?”
“Gabrielle, no.”
His urgency exploded into strides that obliterated what remained of the flimsy safety of distance, brought him against her, around her, hard and hungry. Then he was taking of her, taking her into him again, spreading her against him, pressing her between the persistence of his passion and something as un-yielding, drinking in her moans, absorbing her shudders, draining her of will and memory and pain.
He was the air that would make her breathe again. But he was also the poison that would asphyxiate her if she did.
She tore herself away, stumbled against the wall at her back, pressed against its coolness. “So is this it? You…invested too much time and effort in…training me, and even though you despise and abhor me, you want your sex-marathon-on-demand nympho back?”
“No, Gabrielle, don’t…Don’t say anything like that.”
“You mean you don’t want to have sex with me? That wasn’t why you almost took me against the wall just now?”
“No, Gabrielle—yes, I desire you, now and always, but that isn’t why I’m here. I now know the truth, and…”
She cut him off. “So you deigned to talk to your father? Oh, wait, you think his word is as worthless as mine. So you must have done more investigations. And they…what? Cleared me? No, thanks. I’m not doing this again. I’m guilty of not telling you how it all started, when it wasn’t my secret. But you accused me of crimes. You found such comfort in believing the worst without even trying to hear me out.”
He neared her as if approaching a wounded, terrified animal, his voice a hypnotic croon. “I was in shock, in agony, over finding out you’re the daughter of the woman I spent years hating without knowing if she even existed. I went mad thinking you knew all along and had been leading me on. But I didn’t need you to slap sense into me this time, Gabrielle. What we shared, what I feel for you, what I know you feel for me, made me overcome the pain and madness. I did no investigations. And I didn’t talk to my father.” Hesitation entered his beseeching eyes. “What would he have told me?”
His words swirled inside her brain, making no sense. She refused to let them. They’d be lethal if they did. She’d succumb to their influence. Sink. All the way this time. And next time he gutted her and tossed her out to drown, she wouldn’t resurface.
But among all the things she couldn’t hear, there was one thing she could. A question. About his father.
She owed him no answers. Not after he’d judged and executed her. But he wasn’t just the man she’d loved beyond self-preservation, would love against all reason, for the rest of her days. He wasn’t just the one being who held the power of destruction over her, who’d used it again and, she swore, for the last time. He was also the man who held the fate of a kingdom—and that of his father—in his hands. She knew her mother would have wanted her to do anything she could to defend the one man Clarisse LeFevre had lived and died loving. Gabrielle’s answer might exonerate King Benedetto in his all-powerful son’s eyes. Or at least ameliorate his guilt. Durante might not exact his revenge on his father to the full.
She told him everything she knew.
Durante listened to Gabrielle, his heart twisting in his chest. She seemed sentient but not alive, aware but unfeeling, held together with the glue of automations and obligations, which was bound to come undone at any point. Even if it didn’t, and it stuck her together, fractures traversed her psyche and soul, fault lines that would splinter her again at the least pressure.
He’d done that to her. And he had to restore her, at any price. Starting with his own life.
He’d hoped that begging her forgiveness would garner him a hearing. Why had he hoped she’d grant him what he’d denied her?
He knew why. He’d counted on her being more forgiving than he was. But even her mercy had limits. He’d pushed her beyond them.
One hope remained. That something in what she’d said would give him insight into how to repair the devastation he’d wreaked.
He replayed every word, looking for clues. He got only blows, every one battering him with more shame at how he’d lashed out at the two people who’d put their pride and hearts on the line to save him from his bitter loneliness, to help him find contentment and joy, to learn what living truly meant at last. The one thing to redeem him was that his heart had already believed in her without proof, against all damning evidence.
It had all been his father’s orchestration, as he’d thought when he’d been in the throes of suspicion and pain-induced insanity. But not at all as he’d expected. His father did know him far better than he knew himself. He knew Gabrielle as deeply. He’d known it would take Gabrielle to save him, bring back his humanity, that it would take him to heal, cherish and worship her. So his father had sent her to him.
And though it had started out as a mission for her, their magic had taken over from their first glance, fulfilling his father’s prophecy.
But it had been the king’s fault again that she’d kept secrets. He’d made her pledge secrecy, fearing the violence of his son’s unreasonableness, the depth of his bitterness, things that would have made him blind himself to her true worth, costing him the one woman who shared his soul. Even when it had seemed that nothing could tear them apart, his father had still withheld the truth, fearing exactly what Durante had done upon finding it out.